The real story behind Trump's pardon of Oregon ranchers

The president is fanning a culture-war fire to help cover up his campaign to hand wilderness to mining companies.

ALAN PYKE JUL 11, 2018, 8:00 AM

President Trump pardoned two Oregon ranchers Tuesday, firing a new salvo in a complicated culture war previously marked by air-mailed sex toys, nuanced disputes over the management of public lands, and a police shootout that killed a would-be leader of a modern crackpot revolution.

Until Tuesday’s announcement, Dwight and Steven Hammond had been serving out five-year terms in federal prison. Those sentences had been widely condemned as overly harsh for the underlying conduct – a series of intentional fires lit by the Hammonds on either side of the line between their Oregon property and lands belonging to the American people.

But the details of Trump’s move indicate he is less interested in reversing an unjust sentence than he is in giving a thinly-veiled “attaboy” to a small group of heavily armed chaos agents who seek to undermine the federal government’s proper role in managing public lands all across the western U.S.

In late 2015, one loosely organized cluster of these same chaos agents trucked into Burns, Oregon without invitation. There, after briefly joining a locally-organized protest march against the harsh sentences issued to the Hammonds, Ammon Bundy — the son of rancher Cliven Bundy — asked the crowd to join his interloper bloc of so-called “sovereign citizens” in taking over federal buildings on the nearby Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The locals weren’t interested, but Bundy and his cadre drove onto the refuge and occupied the vacant buildings anyway, drawing federal officials into another prolonged standoff just a few years after Cliven had called up a militia to menace federal officers in Nevada in similar circumstances.

https://thinkprogress.org/the-real-story-behind-trumps-pardon-of-oregon-ranchers-13de1a8f735f/

Fucking traitors.........................