If any are waiting for the perfect and pure victim of the Feds overreaching before taking his side, we might as well give the hell up right now. Nobody's pure, particularly now that there are so many damn laws, everybody is "guilty" of something.
Furthermore, Ann's got her facts wrong, according to what I read and I put that in writing (about the grazing fees) a couple of posts up.
"the not-the-hill-to-die-on crowd" will get us all enslaved... Enough of that noise!
My problem is I can see about a Dozen other hills better than this one, that are there right now or were there recently... Dozens of illegal checkpoints in Constitution Free Zones, The undeclared Martial Law of Boston, the seizure of Wyoming lands and gifting of it to the Indians, the Welder in Wyoming who the EPA is hassling about a stock pond, the Closure of any of the private homes on leased public land, the closure of the WWII memorial and the mall, The un-constitutional gun laws in CT and Colorado (or California.. but its a lost cause..) and so on.
I agree we aren't going to find the perfect victim of the Fed, but I think most can admit the above list all provide better and more clear cut opportunities than this one. Intellectually this isn't the hill to die on. Emotionally, however, at this point I am beyond caring when, where or how it starts, and I suspect a number of others feel the same way. I think there are a lot of folks itching to serve some justice to these thugs, and if it happens here so be it. I understand and agree this is about the Fed land grabbing and deliberately ruining the ranching business there and in consequence the families who did it for their livelihood, and that this is simply the last man standing against that malicious onslaught. I just don't like how much opportunity it gives the government to portray it ( truthfully) as a lone man laying claim to public lands for his own personal use, and not the other way around. The optics here are poor - you don't see multiple families and businesses protesting the imposition of exorbitant fees that will put them out of business, you see one family grazing cattle where everyone else has ceded control and vacated.
What is more disturbing to me is that the government is manipulating the optics and pushing for a conflict here- the things they are doing are only going to piss off people like us and goad us to action. You don't put up "first amendment areas" , and beat up protesters including pregnant women if all you want to do is move some cows. That is being done to deliberately inflame the passions of people like us.
I think TPTB are using this lone rancher's resistance to form another WACO opportunity - as a controllable rebellion false/flag event that will poison the well of public perception , and encourage the low-information drone to dismiss future events that are more clear cut as the work of "lone nuts" and "militia members" - TPTB feel this conflict is a winner for them- that they can win this in the court of public opinion, counting on the brutality they are displaying to be dismissed as what "the guilty, greedy, rancher laying claim to "our lands" deserves"...
It would be far harder to do that if the same thing were happening over a stock pond, built following the rules, on a rancher's own land. You can bet the next conflict will be on those lines, but TPTB are counting on the public assuming its another "Nevada" event and ignoring it. This is exactly the sort of "nuanced" situation these Asshats like to exploit..
