Did you hear about the Nevada cattle standoff? A man who has twenty years of unpaid fines and tickets owed to the American government rounded up a gun toting militia to confront the feds when they rolled up to finally enforce the law. The federal agents, there to remove the rancher's cattle from legally protected land, backed off once they saw the militia. Right wingers applaud and cheer for what they think was a victory by intimidation, while the rest of us know that the reason the standoff ended is because reasonable people don't shoot each other over cows.
Why is the conservative right so happy about this? Regardless of whether you think the cows should be able to eat this protected grass, (the grazing is directly killing an endangered species of tortoise, hence the law), the Nevada rancher owes the government a lot of money. However, turn on Fox News or bend your ear to an afternoon of Ted Cruz nonsense, and all you hear is aggressive language about America's "moocher class". Why is it that collecting food stamps or relying on your government to help you with affordable health insurance is considered mooching, but allocating two decades of fines and penalties isn't? Oh, yeah, I forgot, the Nevada guy is white. And he wears a cowboy hat.
This is my main obstacle when trying to see eye to eye with the Republican party. A black mother who gets fired and needs to rely on food stamps and an unemployment check to provide for her children is a burden to us, but a cattle rancher who looks at his government debt with apathy needs defending. With guns. Cliven Bundy, the rancher, owes the U.S. government 1,000,000$ in fines and penalties. From now on, I will immediately picture his leathery face every time I hear the term "welfare queen".
It's this racist double standard that saps my usual political sense of humor. White republicans want to keep their guns, pointing at the constitution as a holy thing, but have no problem promoting the destruction of the 16th amendment. Saving American jobs is a major Republican talking point during immigration debates, but furloughing 100,000 government workers during the shutdown was something they strived for. We spent a decade in a Republican initiated, vague domestic hunt for brown terrorists when in fact, since the 9/11 attacks, 21 people have been killed in the name of Islamic extremism in the U.S., whereas the number of people killed by right-wing extremists stands at 34 after the three deaths in Kansas. Shaming minority tax payers who use government assistance, labeling them as lazy, and then grabbing your sniper rifle to defend a Nevada cowboy who refuses to pay the fines for the laws he's broken is a laughable example of right-wing hypocrisy. It's also sedition.
I find it ironic that rich white men complain about the lower class having a false sense of entitlement, when all the policies they approve of tend to support their idea of who America really belongs to. What gets them mad enough to shoot up a shopping center is the fact that most of America doesn't agree with them anymore, and in a matter of a couple decades, the majority of Americans won't even be white. Progress is happening, but in the meantime, don't look over your shoulder for the jihad, but keep your eyes peeled for what has always been, and forever will be, the most dangerous and lethal force the planet Earth has ever known. The American white man.
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