Eco-Leviathan Rangeland Management: Lock It Up, Burn It Down -- Then Blame the Ranchers

When one says of Don Barnhill that a given challenge confronting him is “not his first rodeo,” the expression is not a wearisome cliché. Rodeo championships figure prominently in Barnhill’s life, which is cluttered with enviable achievements. 

As a younger man he was a private firefighter, which means that he actually worked to contain and defeat fires, rather than maximizing expense while minimizing results, which is the government sector approach. He pursued a degree in archeology and is a self-taught historian of the Oregon Trail who helped organize the first reenactment of the Three Island Crossing on the Snake River. He also helped organize a cowboy poetry association, and built roughly a dozen successful businesses. 

For decades, Barnhill has raised cattle on the Silver City Allotment in Owyhee County – which means that he has become intimately acquainted with the BLM and the implacable eco-totalitarian activists who are collaborating with the agency to shut down ranching throughout the western states. Among that unsavory cohort, a cynical extortion syndicate called the Western Watersheds Project (WWP) has distinguished itself by its resourceful dishonesty and its unalloyed malice. 

The WWP has been admirably candid in expressing its intention to abolish all cattle and sheep ranching on “public” lands – meaning the millions of acres unlawfully claimed by the Regime in Washington as federal territory. 

For decades, Barnhill related to me in a voice heavy with weary amusement, the WWP dispatched eager college students to canvass Oywhee County, and other parts of rural Idaho, in search of a suitably charismatic “endangered species” whose welfare could be invoked as a pretext for banishing ranchers from its “habitat.” Various kinds of “threatened” frogs and flora frustrated that design by perversely thriving in the presence of cattle and the humans who manage them. The WWP eventually settled on the sage grouse, and persuaded a complaisant BLM into designating that unremarkable bird as a “sensitive species.”

Which is the real Commie? Winmill, seen here with an ex-Soviet Judge. 

Following a long-established script, the WWP rewarded – I do not use that verb ironically – the BLM by filing a lawsuit in 2008 demanding the revocation of grazing permits across 40 million acres throughout Idaho and Nevada. “Forcing” a federal agency to expand its power is roughly as difficult as trying to prompt Donald Trump to say something nice about himself, but appearances must be maintained. Thus the BLM, in the fashion of Byron’s Julia (“I shall ne’er consent,” she sighed, while consenting to her seducer), went through the motions of resisting the WWP’s demands. In the parlance of pro wrestling, this lawsuit, like all others of its kind, was a “work,” not a “shoot.”

Like other foundation-funded eco-jihadist groups, the WWP has “routinely used the federal Equal Access to Justice Act … to recover their attorney fees from these lawsuits,” explains Chris Brong, a 33-year veteran of the BLM, US Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service who is now a Commissioner in Washington’s Skamania County. “Most of the federal judges hearing these cases, with little or no background [in] federal land management laws or policies, have been very sympathetic to the [eco-radical groups” and entirely hostile toward the people who are making a productive living on lands that should be privately owned, rather than being locked up by the Feds without constitutional authority.

Eventually the WWP’s sage grouse lawsuit wound up before US District Judge Lynn Winmill, whose courtroom is where justice goes to die. Again, that expression is to be treated literally. Fifteen years ago the WWP filed a lawsuit against an elderly Idaho rancher named Verl Jones, claiming that by exercising his water rights to grow hay he had harmed the habitat of the “endangered” bull trout, despite the fact that none were found in the area. Without bothering to ask the WWP to show evidence in support of its claims, Winmill ruled in favor of the WWP, ordered Jones to stop irrigating his fields, and pay the WWP’s legal fees.

Predictably, Jones lost his crop, and his ranch. Stolidly indifferent to the plight of the financially ruined 85-year-old man, Winmill allowed the WWP to raid the victim’s remaining assets, which were sold off to pay the syndicate’s legal expenses. Jones, who had been hardy and healthy despite his years, succumbed to stress and passed away. 

With respect to the WWP’s demand to shut down ranching throughout Idaho and Nevada, Winmill disgorged what he probably considered to be a Solomonic ruling: Rather than cleaving the baby with a sword, he would strangle it incrementally. Thus the BLM was ordered to undertake a series of time-intensive revisions to the management of grazing allotments that had been purchased by private ranchers – which included new restrictions regarding where, and for how long, they could graze their livestock. 

Don Barnhill received notification of these new requirements in the March 8, 2013 letter containing the application for his annual grazing permit. 

Chandler's comrades in action.

“These changes were brought forward to the affected permittees for concurrence and formal agreement,” explained Loretta V. Chandler, the Marsing-based BLM apparatchik – who, it should be noted, received a plunder-derived salary of $106,369 when she was deployed to inflict misery on the productive residents of Owyhee County. That figure is roughly three times the median household income in the county. 

None of the permit holders had been consulted about the changes demanded by the BLM; each of them was expected to tug on his forelock and obey.

Barnhill, like every other affected rancher, knew that he had no alternative to offering “concurrence and formal agreement” to the WWP-dictated terms. He was determined, however, to make a record of his objections to what was being required of him – if only to absolve himself of the inevitable consequences of allowing vegetation that would have been devoured by cattle to become irresistible tinder for a devastating range fire. 

“I agree to follow the grazing management and objectives outlined above,” Barnhill explained in a postscript he inserted into the application. However, he continued, “I sign this document under protest. The terms and conditions imposed by this permit will do nothing to improve the habitat for the Sage Grouse or any other wildlife. These changes … serve only to appease the court and the anti-grazing extremist organization that filed suit. In the long run these changes will greatly increase the potential for a catastrophic fire that would destroy the range AND the habitat for Sage Grouse for many years to come. If such a fire occurs, the responsibility lies solely with the BLM and the Federal court that forced this action” (emphasis added). 

Barnhill presented the revised application, with the check for his annual grazing fee, to Chandler, who rejected it. When Barnhill insisted, pointing out that there were witnesses who had seen him present the application and the required fee, Chandler excused herself and went into her office.

“She was in there for no more than two or three minutes, before coming out and saying, `I just got off the phone with the Solicitor General, and he told me I cannot accept that document,” Barnhill told me, chuckling at the absurdity of the claim. 

Barnhill requested that Chandle append a signed statement on his revised application reflecting her transparently false claim – which, astonishingly, she did. In addition to documenting the casual dishonesty of the BLM’s local commissarina, the application made Barnhill’s predictions about a WWP-engineered, and BLM-abetted, range fire part of the legal record. 

Last summer, the desiccated foliage that the WWP had lovingly cultivated provided the fuel for the Soda Creek Fire, a conflagration that ravaged the better part of 300,000 acres throughout Owyhee County. 

“We have a bunch of people making decisions on wildlife, habitat, grazing and land management, and they have no practical experience,” complained Alan Davis, owner of Graybell Farms – located not that far from the BLM’s Marsing office – after the fire was finally contained. “If you leave this land alone, the Russian thistle is going to take over. When it continues to compound year after year, it stays standing up until something eats it, or [it] burns.” 

“If the Bureau of Land Management is not going to take an active management role … then they need to get the heck out of the way and let ranchers or somebody else take care of the land,” Davis summarized. 

Having been forbidden to abate the fire risk through grazing, Owyhee County ranchers, acting through their private Rangeland Fire Protection Association, helped extinguish the fire they had warned was coming.

Government is the only human enterprise that profits from its own catastrophic incompetence, which is why the BLM moved to expand its regulatory control over the areas of Owyhee County and eastern Oregon that were devastated by the Soda Creek Fire. The WWP, displaying its irrepressible arrogance and reflexive mendacity, insisted that cattle grazing was “a root cause” of the Soda Creek Fire and other wildfires that tore through mismanaged “public” lands in the West last summer. 

“The BLM’s approach to `recovery’ from fires is to require ranchers to `rest’ affected areas for at least five years,” Barnhill explained to me. At the same time, the agency will require ranchers to “suspend” a growing portion of their “animal unit months” – a measurement of the time they are allowed to graze their livestock. This will increase the attrition rate in the industry, remorselessly advancing the WWP’s design of driving ranchers into extinction.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast goes into further detail regarding the BLM, the WWP, and the eco-jihad in the Western States:


I would really appreciate any help you can provide to keep Pro Libertate online. Thank you, and God bless!

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Peacemaker and the Psychopath

The Psycho (Love) is on the left; Peacekeeper Dave Bundy is in the center.

Dave Bundy was working on his home in Delta, Utah, when a caravan of at least 20 federal vehicles invaded his property last March. The vehicles decanted a platoon of FBI personnel, some of them clad in battle dress and carrying assault weapons. In what must have been a disappointment to them, Bundy – who wasn’t armed – surrendered without offering the Feds a pretext to dispose of him as they had LaVoy Finicum a few weeks earlier. 

Bundy had been indicted on federal conspiracy charges for his role in de-escalating the standoff between his family and the BLM in Bunkerville, Nevada in April 2014. At that time, too, Bundy had not been carrying a gun. He was armed only with his determination to prevent bloodshed as he conducted shuttle diplomacy between the Bundys and their supporters, on the one hand, and the Feds who had stolen the Bundy family’s cattle. His conduct earned the appreciation of then-Clark County Undersheriff Joseph Lombardo, who negotiated with him. 

Several days earlier, Bundy had been beaten bloody by the BLM’s khaki-clad chekists while he was standing at the side of a road video-recording their confiscation of his father’s cattle. After suffering that criminal assault he was abducted by the BLM and detained for a night on a spurious charge of obstruction, which was dismissed the following day.

Dave Bundy’s role at Bunkerville was that of a peacemaker. He is now in jail awaiting trial on charges that could result in an 80-year prison term.

Bundy after being assaulted and abducted by the BLM.

Where Bundy is a peacemaker, Dan Love, the BLM Special Agent in Charge of the Bunkerville operation, is a bloody-handed psychopath whose appetite for escalation has made him notorious even among his comrades. His operation in Bunkerville was a humiliating failure – which is why the Regime, in utterly predictable fashion, has placed Love in charge of the BLM’s newly minted, nation-wide Security and Intelligence division.

 

This promotion is an unambiguous display of arrogant hostility toward residents of rural lands in the west – and toward sheriffs and other local officials in Utah and Nevada who have dealt with Love in recent years. Love’s Brownshirts have routinely ignored jurisdictional limits in southern Utah, detaining – which is to say, abducting – local citizens without probable cause, intimidating tourists, and harassing ranchers. 

In 2012 the Utah state legislature enacted a measure forbidding BLM cadres from pretending to enforce state and local laws – a tactic often used to justify the agency’s abusive behavior – and imposing criminal penalties for “impersonating an officer” when BLM personnel exceeded their roles as defined in federal statutes. Love retaliated by cancelling BLM contracts with five counties that pay sheriffs for the privilege of patrolling land claimed by the Feds. This was a gratuitous gesture of unfiltered contempt: By the time the contracts were annulled, a federal judge had issued an injunction against the bill, prompting the legislature to repeal it.

Love’s federal supremacy uber alles mindset nearly precipitated a slaughter at Bunkerville, an outcome that would not have surprised former BLM official Steve Martin. In late 2012, Martin was present at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico when Love giddily outlined the rustling operation planned for Bunkerville. Martin later told the High Country News that Love’s plan was “missing a key ingredient: cooperation with the county sheriff.”

Swaggering doofus Love and his troops.

Then-Sheriff Doug Gillespie didn’t intervene in the matter until well into the standoff.  Love’s mismanagement of the affair and misreading of the tactical situation – at one point, he placed the armored mouth-breathers under his command in a “kill zone” – would have resulted in avoidable deaths were it not, in large measure, for the diplomatic efforts of Dave Bundy. 

So, naturally, Bundy is now behind bars awaiting a trial at which Love will be a star prosecution witness. Love’s promotion will be used to fortify whatever credibility he might possess in the eyes of the jury. The Feds will be very careful to foreclose inquiries into Love’s background and employment history.

Energy & Environment Daily, a publication very sympathetic to the Regime’s regulatory agencies, notes that the BLM refused to “answer basic questions about Love’s professional resume – when he was hired, his age, where he has previously worked and his law enforcement qualifications.” It is known that for four years prior to being hired by the BLM, Love was employed as a federal air marshal. He received his indoctrination at the TSA’s air marshal training center, which proudly displays the motto: “Dominate. Intimidate. Control.”

By combining a clown car with the proverbial short bus, we would create an ideal departmental vehicle for the Air Marshals Service. Love’s blend of arrogance and violence is typical of the personnel who have been hired as BLM enforcement officers since 9/11.

“We brought in people who told their buddies in Border Patrol or wherever else, `Hey, come to the BLM, there’s a lot of kick-ass stuff going on here,’” laments Martin, who joined the agency before it became militarized. At the time, he recalls, “we weren’t marshals, we weren’t the FBI, ATF, or DEA. The public looked at us as rangers.”

After being deposited by Leviathan’s cloaca in Salt Lake City, Love immediately set out to distinguish himself by orchestrating a covert operation called Operation Cerberus Action that supposedly targeted illegal trade in archeological artifacts. He enlisted a suspected petty offender and alcoholic named Ted Gardiner as an informant/provocateur and gave him roughly one-third of a million dollars stolen from taxpayers to buy artifacts from southern Utah residents.  This led to a pre-dawn paramilitary raid in Blanding, Utah, involving hundreds of battle-armed personnel from the BLM and other agencies.

James Redd, a well-respected 60-year-old physician, was detained by BLM and FBI agents at his home and interrogated for five hours. After being told that he faced a felony charge, Dr. Redd committed suicide the following day. Ted Gardiner – most likely out of insurmountable shame from defiling himself by associating with Love and his ilk – did likewise.

Worth a man's life?

The only tangible evidence of a “crime” on Redd’s part was his possession of a “bird effigy” – a single bead roughly a centimeter long – that was dishonestly appraised by the Feds as worth $1,000. This over-valuation was necessary in order to charge Redd with a felony. The bauble’s actual value was roughly $75.

“He had nothing to do with artifacts or trading,” points out Jay Redd, the son of the accomplished physician whom Love drove to suicide. “He was walking along and picks up this dinky bead off the ground [in a video-recorded conversation with Love’s informant]. They are laughing about it because it’s so insignificant…. He never tries to sell or trade anything. He wasn’t arrested for trafficking; it was for possessing. Dr. Redd is dead for possessing a tiny little bead. My dad is dead for a false felony charge.” 

The “conspiracy” charges that could be used to steal the rest of Dave Bundy’s life are just as spurious as the one that drove Dr. Redd to suicide. Even if he prevails in the show trial planned for early next year, Bundy will suffer several months of pre-trial confinement as punishment for expressing opinions that a federal judge found offensive. 

BLM Brownshirts assault Bundy.

A few weeks ago, U.S. Magistrate Judge Cam Ferenbach has denied Bundy’s motion requesting pre-trial release. The uncontested facts cited in his motion  demonstrate that he has no criminal record, that he neither committed violence nor incited it at Bunkerville, and that on many occasions he has cooperated with the BLM in efforts to battle range fires (including an incident just a few months before the standoff in Nevada). 

Judge Ferenbach stipulated to all of these facts – and yet ruled that Bundy must be kept in a cage as  a “danger to the community” because of his attitude toward the federal government, as displayed by an instance in which he referred to it as a "foreign entity."

Bundy’s description is an unacceptably mild critique of a depraved regime that imprisons peacemakers and promotes psychopaths. 


This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast examines the totalitarian absurdities of "hate crimes" enforcement:

Dum spiro, pugno!

The "Hate Crimes" Lure

Shortly before dawn on April 30, Steve Nelson was robbed and fatally beaten by three assailants at near Lake Lowell in Canyon County, Idaho. Nelson had contacted Kelly Bryan Schnieder, who has admitted his role in the attack, through the “male escort” section of the “Backpage” social media site. 

After they met at Gotts Point trail head, Nelson offered to pay Schneider for sex – not knowing that he was about to fall prey to a “trick-rolling” gang led by a charming specimen named Jayson Woods.  An equal opportunity predator, Woods later admitted to police that “he sets people up for sexual acts, then takes all the money that is `donated’ to them, then divides the money at the end of the night.” 

On some evenings Woods had conscripted an unwilling ex-girlfriend to act as the lure. For the gig at Gotts Point, he enlisted Schneider, a convicted burglar who was on probation at the time of the April 30 incident.

Shortly after Schneider made contact with Nelson, he was joined by two others – Daniel Henkel and Kevin Tracy – who helped restrain the victim while Schneider repeatedly slugged him in the face and kicked him with steel-toed boots. Pleading for his life, Nelson surrendered his debit card and gave the assailants his PIN number. After stripping Nelson, they drove off to the nearest ATM, where they vacuumed out his checking account, which gave them a total of $123 to apportion among themselves. 

Naked and bleeding, Nelson staggered to a nearby home, knocked on the door, and asked the owner to call 911. He was able to identify Schneider before dying of cardiac arrest a few hours later. 

Nelson had been an employee at Boise State University and a gay rights activist. Adriane Bang, director of BSU’s Gender Equity Center, insists that the hideous crime committed against him underscores what she describes as “the reality that our community can be a hostile and sometimes very dangerous place for folks who identify as LBGTQIA.” 

It’s important to recognize that Nelson wasn’t randomly attacked in a public street in broad daylight, or victimized in the security of his own home. He placed himself in danger by soliciting sex from a stranger in exchange for money in an isolated location. Activities of this kind shouldn’t be criminalized, but they do involve an assumption of risk. 

Ms. Bang also compared the killing at Gotts Point to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, a parallel that may be apt in ways she most likely had not intended.

Slight of build and entirely helpless, Shepard was robbed and beaten by two opportunistic criminals he had met in a bar. After being fatally pistol-whipped, the mortally wounded victim was tied to a fencepost. 

Shepard was immediately beatified as a “gay martyr” and his name was immortalized in a federal hate-crimes bill. High school students across the nation are catechized in the canonized version of the Matthew Shepard martyrdom by a traveling agit-prop theater troupe called “The Laramie Project” – despite the fact that the crime committed against him had nothing to do with his sexual self-definition. 

“The murder was so vicious, the aftermath so sensational, that the story first told to explain it became gospel before anyone could measure it against reality,” observes JoAnn Wypijewski, one of the few journalists who spent time in Laramie trying to winnow the truth from the sensationalistic chaff. “For different purposes, two sets of friends created what became the hate crime story. Without knowing the circumstances of the crime, Shepard’s friends told reporters, officials and gay groups that the victim’s sexuality was all one needed to know. Meanwhile, [murderer Aaron McKinney’s] friends told police various versions of a gay panic story, in which Matthew made advances and Aaron snapped.”

Police investigators and the District Attorney added their own embellishments by claiming, without evidence, that McKinney and his accomplice Russell Henderson “had pretended they were gay to lure Shepard out of the Fireside bar and into a fatal trap.” 

As gay rights activist turned-investigative author Stephen Jimenez documents in his deeply reported volume The Book of Matt, Shepard was the fourth victim who was beaten by McKinney on the day of the murder. None of those crimes had anything to do with the sexual identity of the victims. All of them – including the killing of Matthew Shepard – were related to McKinney’s drug addiction, a fact grudgingly conceded by prosecutor Cal Rerucha in an interview with ABC’s 20/20 program. 

McKinney himself would probably be characterized today as “gender-fluid.” The owner of a gay bar in Denver recognized him as a regular patron. Several acquaintances of Shepard who had no reason to lie or denigrate his memory told Jimenez that the victim and his eventual killer had been involved in consensual carnal relations prior to the murder. Shepard himself, Jimenez discovered after years of careful research, was both a meth dealer and an addicted user who had dabbled in heroin, and was HIV-positive at the time he was killed. 

Despite his instant and politically convenient beatification, Shepard was not a casualty of an anti-gay “hate crime.” To the extent that public policy played a role in his death the fault was not a lack of punitive strictures for “anti-gay” attitudes, but rather the State’s insistence on criminalizing narcotics use, thereby diverting it into the violent demimonde in which murders of this kind are relatively common. 

The only reason for treating the murder of Matthew Shepard as a “hate crime” was the identity of the victim. This is likewise true of the murder of Steven Nelson.

"Trick-rolling" gang leader: Woods

In an op-ed column for the Idaho Statesman, Jordan Brady, a spokes-something-or-the other (I’ve not received adequate guidance regarding the officially mandated pronoun) for a vaporware- grade special interest group calling itself Better Idaho, characterized the robbery-murder of Nelson as an act of “domestic terrorism” that must be treated as a federal hate crime.

 

“On April 29, Nelson was targeted because he was gay,” contends Brady. This is entirely untrue: He made himself a target by seeking a covert assignation with a stranger who proved to be part of a vicious knot of deranged criminals.

“Unfortunately,” Brady complains, “the suspects in the case are immune from Idaho’s hate crime laws, which currently only protect victims on the basis of race, color, religion, ancestry, or national origin.”

This supposed immunity did not prevent the identification, arrest, and arraignment of the suspects on first-degree murder charges that could result in live imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Laws against murder did not “protect” Nelson from being fatally beaten by criminally minded people who assumed they would elude punishment. Adding another “specially protected class” to the spurious hate crimes law would not have changed either of those outcomes. But this consideration doesn’t matter to collectivists who do not see the purpose of law as protecting individual persons and private property.

Hate crimes laws are important, Brady asserts, because “the victims of hate crimes are entire communities, not just individuals. With the murder of Steven Nelson, it was the LGBTQ community…. [Hate crimes are] acts of terrorism against a community.”

I pause to note that Brady apparently dropped a few letters from the most recent revision of that acronym, which in another context might be construed as a form of “dignitary harm.”

Every violent crime instills terror in a “community” – the family, loved ones, and associates of the victim. A crime of passion, even one inspired by an irrational prejudice, is in some ways less terrifying than one issuing from clinical indifference to the victim.

Like others who pretend that government has a legitimate role in policing individual attitudes, Brady insists that hate crimes laws are necessary because “some people’s minds are still so laced with hate that we [meaning sexual minorities] may not be safe in our own communities.”

No evidence has been produced that the cretins accused of murdering Steven Nelson were animated by anti-gay hatred. If this were prosecuted as a federal hate crime, as “Better Idaho” and similar groups have demanded, any violent crime against any individual identified as a member of a “specially protected class” would qualify for the same treatment. 

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter correctly observed that "Law is concerned with external behavior and not with the inner life of man." The explicit purpose of hate crimes prosecution is to use state coercion, and the threat thereof, to reform the inner life – not of the offender, but of individuals who compose the non-offending public.

“We recognize we cannot outlaw hate,” concedes Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. He immediately proceeded to endorse the idea that law can be used to re-engineer attitudes: “However, laws shape attitudes. And attitudes influence behavior.”

In their book You Can Tell Just By Looking, and 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People, authors Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico present a sensible, if to some people counter-intuitive, condemnation of the hate crimes enforcement regime. Their practical objections begin with the fact that there is no empirical evidence that such laws actual deter crimes against people assigned to “specially protected classes.” Some progressive groups oppose hate crime laws, they point out, because they “are disproportionately used against poor people and people of color,” which illustrates how the “social justice” movement serves the interests of the prison-industrial complex.

The most compelling reason to oppose hate crime laws, however, is the one articulated by Frankfurter decades ago: “[O]ur legal system does not write laws to shape attitudes; it writes them to justly and fairly punish explicit behaviors.” Actually, the system afflicting us does nothing to protect the innocent from criminal violence, or punish crimes against individuals – given that the evil abstraction called the State is listed as the supposed victim in every criminal complaint. What we might call the Frankfurter Objection to hate crime laws underscores the way such laws destroy any remaining connection between the state’s system of prosecution and the worthy pursuit of restitution on behalf of the victim of an actual crime.

Defining motives for the purpose of proving that a defendant committed a crime against persons or property is acceptable as a means of establishing mens rea -- criminal intent. Under the hate crimes model, possession of an alleged motive is itself treated as an actus reus -- or criminal act.

By inquiring into the opinions of the suspect, we are introducing a third element to the offense that is not only extraneous to the American tradition of law and justice, but -- as Frankfurter acknowledged -- incompatible with it. The state arrogates the power to punish the attitude, in addition to the act. This empowers inquisitors and commissars but does nothing to protect the innocent – or vindicate victims of violence.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast examines the dangers of running afoul of the Pronoun Police: 

Dum spiro, pugno!