The War for the West Rages On
By BETSY GAINES QUAMMEN
JAN. 29, 2016
... From the moment their ancestors’ horses took a sip of water or ate the grass, “a beneficial use of a renewable resource” was created, Cliven Bundy told me.
“That’s how our rights are created,” he explained. “So now we have created them and we use them, make beneficial use of them, and then we protect them. And that’s sort of a natural law, and that’s what the rancher has done. That’s how he has his rights. And that’s what the range war, the Bundy war, is all about right now, it’s really protecting those three things: our life, liberty and our property” ...
Mr. Bundy’s reading of the Constitution has been heavily influenced by the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a Mormon, fervent anti-Communist and right-wing political thinker who believed that most federal landholdings are unconstitutional.
The Los Angeles Times reported that many Bundy followers in Oregon carried with them a copy of the Constitution annotated by Skousen. “That’s where I get most of my information from,” Cliven Bundy told the paper ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/opinion/the-war-for-the-west-rages-on.html
