Occupy Oregon: How Liberal Bigotry is Threatening Democracy
Liberals have chosen to oppose the ranchers who are fighting
for their land rights in Oregon, and they are using every shaming tactic in the
book. Their language is as bigoted and hateful as they claim the Bundy's are.
But what they don't understand is that their totalitarian ideology is being
uplifted by the feds to push a deeply leftist agenda where all land belongs to
the government and property rights do not exist.
The truth is that this is a conflict over land rights that
have gone on for over a century. The Harney Basin valley where the Hammond's
ranch exists was settled by ranchers in the late 1870s. More than 300,000 head of
cattle was shared by this cowboy collective of homesteading families. Together,
these families developed a state-of-the-art irrigation system to water the land and develop it for grazing. This also made
the territory a favorite place for migrating birds to stop and take their rest
on their long journeys north.
In 1908, Roosevelt created an Indian Reservation on the same
property which surrounded the Malheur, Harney, and Mud lakes. He declared it a preserve
and breeding ground for migrating birds. It became the Malheur National
Wildlife Refuge.
In 1964, the Hammond's were forced to purchase 6000 acres of
the land that their ancestors had settled three-quarters of a century before. They
paid for grazing rights, water rights, and a ranch house which stands, for now,
53 miles south of the town of Burns.
By 1970, most of the nearby ranches were purchased by the
federal government and added to the Malheur Refuge. The Hammonds had been approached
by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) many times with offers to purchase
their land, but they refused to sell.
Later that decade, the FWS and the Bureau of Land Management
(BLM) took a different tack with the families of the Malheur Refuge. The
ranchers were told that grazing was harmful to the wildlife and must be curtailed. The two agencies revoked 32 of 53 existing
grazing permits and most of the ranchers, now impoverished, were forced to
leave. Grazing rights fees were raised for the remaining families, and more soon
began to leave. After this exodus, the FWS took over the irrigation system that had existed for generations and claimed it for
their own.
By the 1980s, the FWS had become even more aggressive. They
began to cut off water rights to the remaining families, intentionally
diverting water away from the ranch lands. They flooded 31 ranches on the
Silvies plains washing away homes, topsoil, barns, and corrals. By the late
80s, the lakes had doubled in size, drastically reducing the available grazing
land. Most of the remaining ranchers had nothing left to hold onto. Totally
destitute, they could no longer fight the FWS. They left and the feds swiftly
moved in.
In 1990, the Hammonds were one of the very few remaining
ranching families. They began to investigate independently and discovered that the
FWS has a No Use policy regarding the lands the Hammonds and their neighbors
lived on. It was the beginning of the end of their faith in the system that had
long since been waging war against them. Susie Hammond found a federal study
which showed that migratory birds were more attracted to privately owned lands
than they were to federally owned reserve territory.
Since then, the aggression, legal action and outright
cruelty toward these struggling families has gone on unabated, and totally
under the radar of public awareness. The media has rarely spoken of the plights
of these hard working Americans until a group of them staged a peaceful takeover
of an FWS building.
What the media does not tell you is that fewer than half of
the protesters are actually armed. The few photos we've seen of armed cowboys at
the federal building were a poor sample of a group of people who almost always
have hunting rifles with them in order to defend cattle from predators.
But the liberal spasm that has childishly labeled this group
"Yall Quaeda” is almost begging to have its ignorance enshrined in law. Reactionary Twitter users have made headlines calling for
the extermination of these people who are laying claim only to the rights of their
friends and neighbors to use the land that they rightfully own- and to make
their livings in the only way they know how.
The national tone is a sad testimony to the ignorance of the
public to the history and origins of the westernmost states. Worst of all, the totalitarian
shrieks which have received the most applause scoff at the Oregon occupiers and
portray them as the historical oppressors of the Native Americans. The fact is
that it was the federal government who starved and slaughtered the Natives, and
they are now doing the same thing to these ranchers.
The real lesson of this story won't come from those who mock
the protesters by comparing them to characters from Cold Mountain. The real lesson
here is that it isn't about skin color versus skin color, it's about the needs
of the weak versus the greed of the strong- and the strong are winning again-
this time with the approval of political Left.
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