Why the Bundy standoff matters

In 2011, many conservatives tried to portray the Occupy Wall Street movement of the time as nothing more than, as the late right-wing media provocateur Andrew Breitbart put it, a “rat-infested squalor with complaints of vandalism, public urination, sexual harassment and sex in public.”

The movement itself arose from a deep discontent with the state of the country following the Great Recession. And, as was done by generations before us, millenials and those displaced by the financial sector’s recklessness took to the streets to participate in peaceful, civil disobedience that eventually culminated in the police brutality seen in Oakland, Calif., with the now-infamous video of a police officer pepper spraying peaceful protestors directly in the face.

So when college students protest the sad state of the country we’ve inherited, we’re painted as nothing more than whining deviants without real reasons to complain.

Bill O’Reilly even has a name for it.

“The grievance industry,” O’Reilly said, “basically says that America is not a fair nation. That the deck is stacked against minorities, women, the poor, gays, atheists, Muslims, you name it. And the bad guys are white males, the Republican party and anybody who doesn’t buy into the grievance industry.”

Conservatives like O’Reilly are comfortable totally dismissing the concerns of groups that have been historically denied a seat at the table or a real voice.
But as we found out last week, they’re more than willing to defend the rights of “real Americans” like Cliven Bundy, a cattle rancher in Nevada who owed the federal government more than $1 million in grazing fees.

Bundy and his followers conducted an armed standoff, with real, loaded rifles and shotguns, against federal Bureau of Land Management officials with a court order to seize Bundy’s cattle, given his refusal to pay the grazing fees even though local, county, state and federal officials ruled against him.

Despite Bundy being the real embodiment of a welfare queen, conservatives have made Bundy — an old, white land-owning male breaking the law to defend his “right” to break the law — their cause célèbre. He has been championed as a “patriot” and a “real American” by Fox News and the rest of the right wing media.
They’ve painted the episode as a courageous battle for
freedom.

And yet the fact he and his supporters pulled guns against agents of our constitutional government seems to not be an issue for their lauding
supporters.

Frankly, it’s terrifying, and it makes me wonder what would have happened if the Occupy Oakland students were armed, or if the armed ranchers and militiamen supporting Bundy or Bundy himself were black or Latino. Would they still be patriots and real Americans, as Fox News and other conservatives have made them out
to be?

The Bundy standoff speaks volumes about the hypocrisy of celebrating a man who would prefer to fight federal officials instead of follow the law.
But more importantly, it should also speak to how the others, mainly many of the groups Bill O’Reilly and his followers have deemed the grievance industry, are presented on the right.

If we are to follow their narrative, as millions of people do in our country, one group has more legitimate claims than the others. The group who does are the real Americans, the real patriots, while the rest are simply smug thugs, race-baiters, opportunists and people playing victim.  

The news media plays a big role in how it portrays national. It did so in 2011 with Occupy Wall Street, and it will continue to do so in the future. Know that.

edsalsa@indiana.edu