So it turns out that Cliven Bundy is a big old racist who believes Blacks were better off enslaved and use too much government assistance.
So to recap: Bundy asserts that he can use government resources and not pay his share of usage fees for two decades because he has a made-up (and poorly researched) ideology allowing him to reject the existence of that government — but something-something-black-people-using-resources?
Yeah that makes a whole lot of sense. “No one could have predicted” that the aging white man (whose religion rejected Black membership as recently as the 1970s) who is a rallying point for all the white supremacist anti-government militias in the country would be a raging racist against Black Americans.
Good thing all those prominent Republicans in office and in the media rallied to his cause without doing their homework, just in time for him to be revealed as a gigantic bigot who misses slavery. Oh wait, they don’t care, because they also did that after the patriarch of “Duck Dynasty” waxed poetic about the good old days before the Civil Rights Movement.
(For our in-depth analysis of Cliven Bundy’s deeply misguided position on the Federal government, listen to Arsenal For Democracy 81 from earlier this week.)
But the real question is this: is it inherently more objectionable that he’s a vicious racist or that he rejects the existence of the Federal government and has brought in heavily armed supporters to resist the government’s attempts to clear his cattle off public lands for refusing to pay a cumulative one million dollars in back fees over two decades?