Some of these guys never quit. They just can’t stop shooting their mouths off. And now that we have social media, they can shoot their mouths off no matter where they are. Give them a droid or an iPhone and they’ll tell the whole world what they want everyone to hear.
In this case I’m talking about Ammon Bundy, whose father, Cliven ‘let me tell you about your Negro’ is the only guy I know who actually embarrassed Sean Hannity to the point that Hannity had to cut poor Cliven off his show. And if you don’t understand that Bundy was the alt-right image template for Donald Trump, you haven’t been paying attention to politics for the last eight years.
Actually, Bundy wasn’t the first alt-right figure to challenge the so-called extremist and nasty strategy of the Feds by pointing out how the government was screwing the ‘little guy.’ Remember ‘Joe da Plumber?’ Otherwise known as Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, this guy verbally ambushed Barack at a 2008 campaign stop in Ohio with a long harangue about how Barack’s tax policy would hurt small business, even though Barack hadn’t actually out a tax policy.
Wurzelbacher went on to appear at a couple of McCain-Palin rallies and not surprisingly told the crowds that Obama’s policies were moving the country towards socialism. He then got a gig doing infomercials for some right-wing advocacy group and ran but lost for Congress in a campaign which was based on defending 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’
See any similarities between Joe da Plumber’s media messaging in 2008 and how Trump defined MAGA in 2016? That’s a tough one, isn’t it?
In between Joe da Plumber and Trump da President, we had Cliven Bundy whose refusal to pay grazing fees for spreading his herd across federal land resulted in a six-week standoff between federal agents and self-styled militia groups who ‘protected’ Bundy from the Feds for six weeks in 2014. The entrance to Bundy’s ranch looked a lot like what the landscape would have looked like if a flying saucer had come down and landed at Area 51.
But if you think the Bundy family disappeared from the alt-right social media domain – oops! – you’re wrong. Right after New Year’s Day of 2016, Cliven’s son Ammon took a small group into Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to make a ‘hard stand.’ This episode started when Ammon Bundy and a couple of other patriots held a rally in the nearby town of Burns where a small crowd gathered and maybe half a dozen t-shirts were sold.
The ‘hard stand’ in the Malheur range lasted 41 days and would have ended much sooner except the FBI allowed the wives of a couple of the schmucks sitting inside the administrative shack to bring their warriors a pizza every night.
Like the standoff outside of Cliven Bundy’s ranch, the Malheur occupation was also allegedly an attempt to let local folks take over and manage federal land. But what was really going on at Malheur was an attempt by the next Bundy generation to take advantage of the alt-right potential of social media to spread their stupid messaging far and wide.
So, we have three episodes of MAGA-type of political narrative which together gives us the substance and style of Donald Trump – brash, angry, liberals fucking everyone over - which he now broadcasts every, single day.
But wait! Hold on! The Bundy family isn’t done yet. Because just yesterday, Ammon Bundy posted an angry harangue on his X/Twitter page from some undisclosed location where he’s hiding out to avoid paying a $52 million defamation suit brought against him by a hospital system in Idaho after Bundy posted public threats against hospital staff for the alleged mistreatment of the son of Bundy’s friend.
So, we’ve got Bundy in Idaho and Giuliani in Georgia doing exactly the same thing and winding up exactly the same way, i.e., having to come up with a pile of dough because two juries in two states have decided that the digital superhighway only has room for one Donald Trump.
And maybe, just maybe Trump will soon discover that the highway is too narrow for him as well.
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