Category Archives: Natural Law

UPDATED: Principled Patriots React To Ranchers Hammonds’ Plight

Ilana Mercer, libertarianism, Natural Law, Private Property, States' Rights

The 3.1K number on my WND column, “Ranchers Hammond & Bundy: The Best of America,” refers to the number of times the column has been shared via any of the methods represented by the logo buttons to the left of the 3.1K. So that’s 3,100, a really big number, if accurate, but who knows?

2016, Hammond, WND Capture

LETTERS:

Writes Tim:

Ms. Mercer,

The show isn’t Hammond or bundy or even the Feds; it’s the transformation of rural America from a once-independent/gutsy psyche to what you saw today – the Burns locals showing up and asking the take-over guys to leave. Who planted fear and gutlessness into a community like Burns? I came back from combat in the Nam (usmc) and worked many jobs in the Oregon high desert; timber felling, loading hay trucks, fighting wild fires. These were once tough people who (then) would have supported the take-over stand, unanimously – seen its higher value as part of their own heritage. You’re smart, Ms Mercer, so tell me how urban fear and self-seeking became homogenized into this country’s entire demographic landscape. Was it media? Was it public education? Was it greed? Bottom line, there ain’t gonna be no more “Alamos.” Yes, the Hammonds are good guys, but even they want Bundy’s bunch outa town. It’s tragic and irreversible. What’s left is a man’s (person’s) responsibility to truth and courage; individual-by-individual, against the storm of darkness. And a lot of grace from God for that act.

Writes HS:

Another good column, Ilana. Do you ever feel like you are a voice crying in the wilderness? Your assessment of the situation of the land grab in Oregon and of those who have commented on it is a welcomed relief amid all the grandstanding from the powers that be and the media. Thank you for the level-headed analysis. You make much sense and we are indebted to you for enlightening us. Keep it up.
Humphrey

UPDATE: “Ranchers Hammond & Bundy: The Best Of America” was discussed on The Bill Meyer Show, January 8, 2016 (LISTEN).

UPDATED: Ranchers Hammnod And Bundy: The Best Of America

Conservatism, Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Government, Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Private Property, Propaganda, Regulation, States' Rights

Friday, at 8:10 AM Pacific Time, I will be chatting to Bill Meyer, Program Director for News Talk FM106.7/AM-1440 KMED, in Medford, Oregon, about the WND column, “Ranchers Hammnod & Bundy: The Best Of America.” An excerpt:

America, as one wag put it, is a “post-constitutional” country. Even worse, a plurality of Americans has now turned, en masse, against the First Principles of its founding. The organizing principle that currently informs American thinking is statism. It’s the state über alles: its laws, and the foot soldiers that enforce hundreds of thousands of arbitrary rules.

This sorry state-of-affairs is abundantly clear from the standoff between farmers and Fédérales, brewing in Burns, Oregon.

To look at rancher Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son, Steven, 46, is to see the salt of the earth; the best of America. Any decent American ought to be able to see that these family ranchers, so different from politically connected agribusiness, are better and braver than all of us city slickers put together.

We slickers consume the rancher’s grass-fed, organic, “local” beef, while we cheer his oppression. Fellini, the Italian film maker who excelled at portraying corruption of the soul, as expressed in the decay of the flesh, could not have set the scene better. The idiom of Greek Tragedy works, too:

Our protagonists are the two ranchers aforementioned—sentenced to five years in jail, due to a double-jeopardy like maneuver by the federal government.

The Antagonists are the federal government, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fish and Wildlife Service, The Courts, who’ve come down upon citizens with limited resources, citizens whom this Federal juggernaut is supposed to serve, not screw.

Other Antagonists in this morality play are the chorus of trash-talking radio, TV mouths and assorted bobbing heads (Republicans and Democrats), who say they care for The Folks but don’t know good folks when they see them.

Cliven Bundy’s son, Ammon, has come to stand in solidarity with Dwight and Steven Hammond. The case of the Bundys of Bunkerville, Nevada, is instructive in understating the First Principles involved in the Oregon standoff.

In 2014, the BLM had come to steal Cliven Bundy’s cattle, in lieu of back taxes the BLM claims the rancher has owed it since 1993, when Bundy stopped paying grazing fees. The Bundys had homesteaded the disputed land, southwest of Mesquite, in 1877. Bundy’s forefathers had lived off the land well before the Bureau of Land Grabs came into being. The Feds subsequently passed laws usurping Bundy’s natural right to graze his cattle. The elderly rancher offered the following rejoinder: “I have raised cattle on that land, which is public land for the people of Clark County, all my life. … I can raise cattle there because I have preemptive rights,’ among them the right to forage.”

Also edifying, via The Conservative Tree House, is that “the Hammonds were forced to grant the BLM first right of refusal.” In other words, were “the Hammonds ever to sell their ranch, they would have to sell it to the BLM.” The BLM may get its way, for how are the Hammond women to pay the shakedown fines levied by the Fédérales? These amount to hundreds and thousands of dollars. How will the wives continue the Sisyphean struggle against the federal occupier, and, simultaneously, run the ranches sans the men?

Here we arrive at the “Catastrophe,” also an element in Greek tragedy. …

… Tune into to patriot Bill Meyer’s show. And, of course, read the rest on WND. The complete column is “Ranchers Hammnod & Bundy: The Best Of America.”

UPDATE: “Ranchers Hammond & Bundy: The Best Of America” was discussed on The Bill Meyer Show, January 8, 2016 (LISTEN).

UPDATE III: Heroic Homesteader Ammon Bundy Stands With Rancher Hammond, Against Feds

Criminal Injustice, Federalism, Government, Media, Natural Law, Private Property

The Fox News Channel, dishing out statism for Republicans, has finally caught up with last year’s news, forever a defining issue for freedom lovers: The standoff between Feds and farmers brewing in Burns, Oregon, and reported in this space on 12.30.15.

In a seminal column, “Why The Land Belongs To Bundy,” you met Ammon Bundy, fighting for his homesteader rights, against the Federales of Nevada, in 2014. Now Rancher Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy, has come to stand in support of Dwight Hammond, rancher under siege in Oregon.

Via State Broadcaster FNC:

Armed protesters occupying a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon—including three sons of a Nevada rancher who battled with the government in 2014—warned Sunday that any use of force by law enforcement agencies would be “putting lives at risk.”

Hours into the occupation by activists and militiamen a spokesman for the group told reporters that there has been no contact with the FBI or other government law enforcement since the occupation began Saturday night.

“They should be constitutional,” said spokesman Ammon Bundy, referring to the government. He is a son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who clashed with the feds two years ago.

Ammon Bundy said if the government did use force to retake the Malheur National Wildlife refuge “they would be putting lives at risk.”

Earlier, the protesters vowed to occupy the refuge for “as long as it takes,” as state and federal officials on Sunday sought to defuse the situation.

The protestors have said they stormed the federal land in a remote area near Burns, some 280 miles east of Portland, to protest the prosecution of a father and son facing jail time on an arson charge for burning 130 acres of land. Prosecutors said the fire was set to hide poaching, but the ranchers, who face five years in prison, and the protesters supporting them say it was set to stop invasive plants. …
… The 73-year-old rancher and his 46-year-old son claim they lit the fires in 2001 and 2006 to reduce the growth of invasive plants and protect their property from wildfires. The two were convicted of the arsons three years ago and served time — the father three months, the son one year. But a judge ruled their terms were too short under federal law and ordered them back to prison for about four years each.

The decision has generated controversy in a remote part of the state.

MUST READ: “Why The Land Belongs To Bundy.”

UPDATED I (1/3/016): In a massive land grab under the Antiquities Act, Barack Obama will be putting hundreds of Oregonian ranchers out of business. Hear it in their own words.

UPDATE II (1/4): Once these farmers, whose homesteader rights are as authentic and naturally valid as those of the Native Americans whose rights (robbed) the Left champions (as do I)—how will the bloody liberals eat their organic grass-fed local meat? I buy it. I support local farmers’ grass-fed grazing. It’s an American frontier, founding profession, noble.

“Left Demands Media Start Calling Bundy Group ‘Terrorists.”

“Statement by Oregon Farm Bureau President Barry Bushue on sentencing of Steve and Dwight Hammond to five years in federal prison.”

UPDATE III: Everything you wanted to know about Ted Cruz and were too bored to ask:

Paris Attacks Bring Some Movement From MS Media GOP Star On Muslim Mass Migration

Europe, IMMIGRATION, Natural Law, Republicans, Terrorism

The Paris Attacks were perpetrated by Muslim murderers within the West, and by Muslims “vetted” by their Western enablers: our political class. In fact, coming to America “in the flow of people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere” are, indubitably, some just such “vetted” refugees.

So finally, a mainstream media GOP star, Mark Steyn, timidly asks about “the end [of] mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe” (but not the US; neocons have a different theory about the Muslim cohort headed for America). What Steyn says in his “The Barbarians Are Inside, And There Are No Gates” is put tentatively and is a little soft. But here the thing is, at the very end of a prolix piece (full of place names and activities cool people do):

… if M Hollande isn’t prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his “pitiless war” isn’t serious. And, if they’re still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel’s mad plan to reverse Germany’s demographic death spiral through fast-track Islamization, then Europeans aren’t serious. In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.

The “One-Man Global Content Provider” wasn’t always as forthright. In fact, Steyn delayed the day of reckoning with a best-selling, bad habit of waxing fat about dooms-day demographics. Meaningless crap, as explained, in this 2010 column:

… Exemplified by Mark Steyn, Wilders’ worthy supporters in the US make sure he knows they love him for standing tall for speech, women, and individual rights—no-brainers all. Like Steyn, they generally steer clear of addressing the perils for their own country of mass, third-world immigration (legal and illegal).

I am told that I don’t understand Mr. Steyn of the dooms-day demographics. So I listened to his “End of Europe” lectures, in which he vividly describes the multitudes of Muslims going forth to North America and Western Europe to be fruitful and multiply and push for Islam. Their Pan-Islamist identity trumps their new assumed identity. Because of numbers, Mark asserts, History is on the march in the Muslim direction. By 2030 much of what we think of as the developed world will be part of the Muslim world.

Here Steyn hits a brick wall. Other than making babies at home and total war abroad, Steyn used to propose nothing much at all. Oh yes, if you’re not already fighting (futilely, in my opinion) in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can show your marbles by publishing offensive cartoons, making rightwing movies, and writing right-wing text.

The “One-Man Global Content Provider” is wrong. Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital — people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy.

Declining birth rates—and their antidote; the mass immigration imperative—are the excuses statists make for persevering with immigration policies that are guaranteed to destroy western civil society and shore up the State.

It would be productive if Steyn were to also demand, asap, as this writer has, the implementation of an immediate, defensive, libertarian, negative-rights, leave-me-alone strategy: don’t let the homie Jiahdis who hold western passports back in. Government-issued papers do not a natural right confer. Citizenship is no natural right; staying alive is.