It does no good whatsoever to try and discuss with them the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which empowered the Bundy family and many others among the 18,000 or so other public lands grazers to own small holdings, usually around a water source, and graze their livestock on public lands around those holdings for what may arguably be the lowest grazing fee on the planet. Most of the occupiers have never heard of the Taylor Grazing Act, and those who might have, insist that “grazing rights” on public land are a property right attached to the base private land. No amount of arguing will convince them otherwise, although the Bureau of Land Management will plainly state that grazing of BLM lands is not a property right, or a right at all, any more than my neighbor’s home and yard is mine if I rent it, or that my renting a home means the owner cannot sell it or rent it to somebody else, or paint it a different color. When presented with that fact, an occupier like Jason Patrick will merely say that the BLM has no right to exist.

No one seemed interested in the fate of the lands they were claiming in the takeover. None could explain why a mostly Gentile band of militants were now following what is almost entirely a Mormon-led insurrection, with a man named Ammon, named after the leader of the Nephites, at the head, or a man who calls himself Captain Moroni (Alma 59:13 “And it came to pass that Moroni was angry with the government, because of their indifference concerning the freedom of their country”) on guard duty, or a spokesman like Finicum, whose ranch in Cane Beds, Arizona is less than two miles from the FLDS enclave of Colorado City. The Gentile militants seem uninterested in how they might fit in to a renewed State of Deseret, even though the language that the Bundy leaders use is almost identical to the 19th century plans for that kingdom, and the Malheur lies at the very northern expanse of the old State of Deseret claims. They do not see themselves as volunteers in a new version of the Nauvoo Legion from the Utah War of 1857-58 because none of them seem to know, or be interested in, any of that history.

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The Bundys and the militants who follow and support them are the agents of their own destruction.

Should these adherents to the land transfer movement succeed and have the public lands given or sold to the states, some version of the State of Deseret will almost certainly flourish. Such a place already exists, of course: the Desert Ranches, owned by the Church of Latter Day Saints, 235,000 acres in Utah and 678,000 acres in Florida (2 percent of Florida’s landmass). The LDS corporation would certainly be prepared to make some very large purchases of what is now public land, but it is highly unlikely that any of the Bundy family, or any of Finicum’s many children, would be grazing their cows there. Smaller operators cannot own lands that do not put enough pounds on cows to pay property taxes. It is unlikely that any of the current crop of smallholder ranchers anywhere in the West will be able to bid for productive land against the Church; or against families like the Wilks of Texas, who have so far bought over 300,000 acres of austere grazing land north of the Missouri Breaks in Montana; or the Koch family, whose ranch holdings comprise about 460,000 acres (including almost a quarter million acres in Montana); or Ted Turner, who has some 2 million acres across the US; or Stan Kroenke, who two years ago purchased the 165,000-acre Broken O Ranch in Montana and has just bought the 510,000 acre W.T. Waggoner Ranch in Texas.

Buyers, in a world packed and competitive beyond the imaginations of those who set aside these unclaimed and abandoned lands as forest reserves and public grazing lands in the early 1900s, are now everywhere, planet-wide. As Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory, when he was president of the American Lands Council, famously said of privatizing federal lands, “It’s like having your hands on the lever of a modern-day Louisiana Purchase.”

https://www.hcn.org/articles/malheur-occupation-oregon-ammon-bundy-public-lands-essay