Can we make sense of the Malheur mess?

Hal Herring ESSAY Feb. 12, 2016

... I was one of the hundreds of journalists who went to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge during the Ammon Bundy occupation ... I went there looking for kindred spirits ...

... Blaine Cooper, whose real name would be revealed as Stanley Blaine Hicks (with felonious history) of Humboldt, Arizona, was sitting in the pickup ... perfectly trimmed and moussed black hair, pale blue eyes, and, oddly, given the place and the weather – 4,100 foot elevation, sagebrush steppe, severe ice fog – a lightweight black Calvin Klein jacket. As I approached the open window of the truck, Cooper said something to me about how the government had to be opposed. I was holding my legal pad and trying to make notes, but then he said something to the effect that “the left” had killed and enslaved people and blown up buildings to create this refuge, and I smiled, nodded, and kept walking ...

I asked <Wampler> if he knew the history of this place - the range wars, the overgrazing, the plume hunters that led to the establishment of the refuge in 1908. He admitted that he did not ... Wampler was not conspicuously armed, perhaps because, as other reporters would uncover, he has a 38-year-old conviction for second degree murder (of his father) in California, a crime for which he long ago served his time but which precludes him from legally owning firearms ...

I went to Malheur to ask questions and to listen, to learn and report. But what can be reported when your source is convinced of plots and powers that do not exist? When I asked whether they were endangering the Second Amendment by brandishing AR-15s, the answer was that an occupation like this was the entire purpose of the Second Amendment. When I asked whether, since the county was the highest level of government recognized, the occupiers would stand down if the sheriff asked them to (Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward, of course, already had), they said no, because Sheriff Ward was a tool of the oppressors ...

http://ddd.hcn.org/articles/malheur-occupation-oregon-ammon-bundy-public-lands-essay