A white jury determines that the law doesn’t apply to white protestors [View all]
Melissa Batchelor Warnke
Remember that group of militants that staged an armed standoff in Oregon last winter? You know, the one where they occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for six weeks, vowing that if the government were to raid the occupation it would risk a "conflagration so great, it cannot be stopped, leading to a bloody, brutal civil war”? ...
... a group of anti-federalist protestors showed up at Malheur to demonstrate their fury at the Hammonds’ sentencing. They brought dozens of guns, 15,000 rounds of ammunition, and occupied the offices of federal workers for 41 days. Ammond and Ryan Bundy, the group’s leaders, are extremist Mormons with messiah complexes; one refers to himself as Captain Moroni, an anti-government leader associated with the “title of liberty” in the Book of Mormon ...
... I get it: I can’t understand why I, a white person, can’t just go around setting fire to 100 acres of your land, so long as I believe it should actually be my land. And if, for God knows what reason, I received the minimum punishment under the law for burning all your stuff down, I sure as hell hope that dozens of my friends would show up with guns and stage an illegal occupation for five weeks. And if my friends got brought to court for staging that occupation, I sure as hell would hope they get off with no convictions, as the six protestors charged did last night. Freedom, baby. Well, freedom for us. Law and order for “them” ...
In the course of this election season, a number of commentators and analysts have made the point that when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. When the white men who got in trouble for setting government property on fire, it was their oppression. When those white men’s white supporters set their base in the office of one of the refuge’s only female employees, it was their right. And when the white leaders of this illegal armed occupation movement were found “not guilty” by an all-white jury last night, it was our confirmation that privileged treatment in the eyes of the law is white America’s enduring inheritance.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-malheur-bundy-occupation-acquittal-20161028-story.html
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