Not to put too fine a point on it but, one day, Sean Hannity, or someone very much like him, is going to help get somebody killed. Back in 2005, Hannity, and a lot of someones very much like him, ginned up a mob during the Terri Schiavo situation in Florida. Ultimately, this resulted in bomb scares that closed an elementary school down the block from the hospice in which Ms. Schiavo was being cared for, death threats against judges that were serious enough that they had federal marshals sleeping in their living rooms, and a bounty on the head of Michael Schiavo that one guy got arrested for trying to collect. (I visited the hospice a couple of years after the craziness had ended and the one name that was the unanimous subject of utter loathing was Sean Hannity's.) Over the weekend, Hannity, and a lot of someones just like him, were at it again.

This time, it concerneda Minutemannish crank in Nevada named Cliven Bundy, who had been grazing his cattle on federal land, and who had declined to pay the grazing fees for more than 20 years. A year ago, a federal judge told Bundy to stop grazing his cattle on the federal land. He ignored the judge as thoroughly as he had ignored the grazing fees. So the Bureau of Land Management started seizing his cattle. Which is about when everybody went crazy. In the interest of balance,here's the case for the other side; Ms. Loesch has been promoting the Bundy cause with conspicuous enthusiasm. Here's a less temperate view,in which Cliven Bundy is Crazy Horse.

As the invaluable Dave Neiwert points out, Bundy apparently has marinated himself in the various "Patriot" and Posse Comitatus ideologies -- the appeal to the local sheriff is the giveaway on the latter -- that have been blowing through the west since the Sagebrush Rebellion days of the late 1970's and early 1980's. (Basically, the philosophy is that these people can do pretty much anything they want on land that we all own in common. Life, or at least the rest of us, owe them a living.) Bundy claims that the federal government has no jurisdiction over the land, and he tried to pay his grazing fees to his county instead. Neiwert caught an interesting exchange between the Bundy family, and Greta van Susteren on her Fox News program, FNC having apparently looked at Cliven Bundy and seen William Prescott or someone.

VAN SUSTEREN: There's a court order that says that the federal government can do this. So what's your response to that.

CLIVEN BUNDY: My response is it's the wrong court. I've never had my due process in a Nevada state court, a court of competent jurisdiction.

AMMON BUNDY: Hey, uh - I like my Dad's little story he uses to explain the situation. If someone came in and busted into my house and abused my children, and I call the cops, they don't respond. And then I take them to court, I show up in the courtroom, look on the stand, and it's the very person that abused my children looking down at me in a black robe. How in the world are we going to get justice in that court?

(Ammon Bundy, by the way, got himself tased. I'm with Digby on this. I don't think anyone should get tased. I'm sure all the people who saw Bundy's ranch as Concord Bridge will be with me the next time a black kid gets shot full of electricity because a cop doesn't like his face.)

Pretty soon, there was an armed standoff as men with guns assembled around the ranch. The BLM people wisely backed off, and there was a great cock-a-doodle-do'ing all over the right, because Cliven Bundy's inalienable right to get something for nothing from the rest of us had been upheld with Second Amendment enthusiasm. Bear in mind that Bundy's entire position is that he can not pay his bills, and that he can ignore a federal judge, because he feels the federal government is illegitimate. (Poor Fred Hampton should have thought of this.) This is conservatism -- and, therefore, Republicanism -- playing footsie with sedition. This is not the first time, either.

Republican politicians, especially in the west, have slow-danced with the militia movement for quite some time. A Republican congresswoman named Helen Chenoweth was so close to the movement that, after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, she pronounced herself upset that the government had failed truly to understand the militia movement.

In the mid-1990s, when three Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service offices in the West were firebombed and federal wildlife managers were threatened with death, she introduced a bill that would have required federal agents to get permission from local sheriffs before they could make an arrest or conduct a search on public land.

That certainly does sound familiar.

In the states, the Republican party has embraced the traditional historical basis for this movement, having actively discussed -- and, in some cases, tried to implement -- the doctrine of nullification. This, of course, was the fundamental theoretical basis for the greatest act of sedition of all time, and one for which too many people seem overly nostalgic these days. The difference between the present moment, and the days when Helen Chenoweth was riding the range, of course, is the fact that there is a powerful and loud right-wing media infrastructure at the disposal of the people peddling this constitutional poison. Americans For Prosperity jumped right on the Bundy case. Of course, AFP -- and the Koch brothers who fund it -- isn't in this for airy philosophical debates on the role of government. They're in it to break the control of the federal government over the lands that they want to exploit for their own profit, and they are willing to help engage the single most destructive political theory in the country's history to help them do it. It is reckless and dangerous, and anybody who gets used by these people is a sap. And useful idiots, like Sean Hannity and all the someones like him, are going to get somebody killed behind this stuff.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.