Street roots., October 07, 2016, Page 9, Image 9

Street Roots • Oct. 7-13, 2016
News
timber payments coming in to support rural
communities, the infrastructure and rural schools. It
means a whole heck of a lot of counties have had to
problem-solve about how to maintain as much of
their infrastructure as possible. Places like
Josephine County, where they haven’t been able to
pass any new taxes for public safety. They’ve had to
figure out how to make do with very, very little. And
it got to the point where they didn’t have any
sheriff’s deputies, so if you would call the police for
any kind of intervention, it was really not
guaranteed. It got to the point where women’s crisis
workers were telling us stories about taking clients
to court in order to get restraining orders against
abusive exes and judges actually telling these
battered women they should get a gun because
there is actually no way of guaranteeing that their
police are going to enforce these restraining orders.
J.Z.: Sounds like the Wild West.
J.C.: It’s the Wild West! So a lot of this real
insecurity people are feeling, the Patriot movement
is stepping in, saying, “Well, we could form our own
infrastructure. We could do community watches and
community preparedness teams.” Which is smart
organizing and is definitely meeting people where
they’re insecure. But it’s really an entry point into
So they’re helping engineer the crisis, or to
deeper, thinly veiled white nationalist ideology, and
maintain
the crisis, so they have a pretty vulnerable
we have heard from other communities across the
base from which to recruit. It’s pretty sophisticated.
state that they have been coached by these
paramilitary groups first to form a community
J.Z.: So out-of-state influences, much like the
watch. Then you get an armed community watch
Bundys, are bringing bigger agendas to these small
that does active patrols. And then you patrol the
towns.
national forest around you for undocumented folks
cooking meth. And that’s where a lot of folks go
J.C.: Absolutely. What we’re
“Whoa! What’s going on here?
seeing
is they’re attempting to
I thought this was community
run multiple candidates for all
"We've had some
infrastructure. I thought this
sorts of local offices, many of
was about meeting the needs
communities reach out to us
which
are running unopposed,
of our neighbors.”
about candidates, because it
which is a brilliant strategy,
seems like the candidates .are and we’re seeing a lot of these
J.Z.: Just to be a devil’s
more accountable to people
candidates get out-of-state
advocate, while you might not
money, which is dedicated for
agree with those views, what’s the in Utah and these various
Patriots who are going to
real harm in this? Where does it Patriot organizations then
advance the notion of a
become a serious problem?
they are to the constituency
constitutional government that
they hope to have vote for
refuses to engage in any kind
J.C.: We are seeing
them."
of restriction of any Second
paramilitary groups say they
Amendment
rights, but First
know who belongs and who
Amendment rights only matter
doesn’t in rural communities. I
for whom they like the best.
think it’s a problem when
groups that believe in and perpetuate xenophobic
and Islamophobic conspiracy theories are acting as
local police forces in communities without any kind
of accountability. We’ve also seen these different
forces that are formed and paramilitaries that are
formed that say they knew who belonged and who
didn’t in their communities. And we have worked
with communities where people of color are leaving
because their children are being threatened, and
when their parents try intervening, they’re also
threatened. They’ve been told that their kind aren’t
welcome. And this is an area where the Klan has
strongholds. So there are some potential overlap
there, and we really dig into that in the toolkit.
In terms of historical trends. I think the other
thing that’s really worth naming about this
movement - and why it’s a threat in Josephine
County in particular, but we’re seeing in other
counties as well - is the Patriot leadership is
actually advocating for and providing the key
leadership for all of the “no new taxes” campaigns.
So they are actually taking out-of-state money, in
some cases, to advance a pretty regressive agenda
that keeps their communities defunded, and they’re
doing it while they are pointing out that the county
infrastructure that’s being built there is failing the
people and what are you supposed to do about that.
J.Z.: What are the stories you hear from people in
communities? What are they asking you for?
J.C.: It’s been a variety. We’re really hearing the
outcry from across the state. In Josephine County,
there was a very similar standoff to what happened
with the Bundys that didn’t get any kind of play,
really, or any national media back in April 2015.
What had happened was they had a local
organization and they had some folks who were
pretty savvy media spokespeople, but most of the
energy and most of the people that were taking part
in their so-called operation were from out of state.
And in fact, they were admitting to each other that
there were more people from east of the Mississippi
than west, at a certain point
J.Z.: The mine incident?
J.C.: The Sugar Pine Mine. It was out in
unincorporated Josephine County in Galice. They
also had a big armed encampment off of 1-5 off the
Merlin exit. They had this whole other theater
going on, and part of what the community’s
outreach to us was the fact that there were all these
social media posts with people posting photos of
themselves decked out with their assault rifles and
Page 9
they were writing goodbye letters to their children
about daddy going to go die for liberty. And that
really scared people.
Sure, Josephine County has its share of
characters, but when they are your neighbors,
they’re accountable to you - no one wants to be a
bad neighbor. But these so-called Patriots were
coming in from out of state, and there were multiple
vets coming in saying that they were ready to go to
war, all taking orders from people no one knew.
That really frightened people.
That’s why we started digging into all of this to
begin with. What’s going on, who are these people,
what do they believe, what’s the vision of their
community, and what do they hope to accomplish-by
doing all this?
And since we’ve started doing that, there was
Malheur, and multiple other actions happening, and
local organizing happening, and we had a whole
heck of a lot of folks reaching out to us because now
they know we’re unpacking this stuff, and we had
some background information. And people are
seeing that a lot of these groups are actually funded
from out of state.
We’ve had some communities reach out to us
about candidates, because it seems like the
candidates are more accountable to people in Utah
and these various Patriot organizations then they
are to the constituency they hope to have vote for
them.
J.Z.: How much of this is reflecting what’s
happening at the national election with the presidential
election?
J.C.: I think that it’s interesting what we’re
seeing in Oregon. A lot of these folks are responding
to the fact that people are really feeling
disenfranchised and feel like political leadership
doesn’t have a vested interest in making sure that
people’s needs are being met and that people are
going to be taken care of, that they are going to
have some basic guarantees that they are going to
have a quality of life.
We’ve been hearing that for a very long time in
rural Oregon, that while it feels like even though we
might have a blue Legislature, that political
leadership has pretty much abandoned rural Oregon,
and as we talk with other states, they’re hearing the
same thing from their constituencies as well.
J.Z.: What do you hope people take away from this
toolkit?
J.C.: The toolkit includes a whole heck of a lot.
There’s a historical analysis and an economic
analysis of rural Oregon right now, and then there
are case studies and tools and tips for organizing on
the ground.
A lot of people like to make fun of the Bundys
and act like it’s not a real movement. But it is a
movement of people responding to the fact that
people are frustrated and tired of the status quo in
rural communities. People are working multiple
part-time jobs and barely getting by. There are a lot
of veterans who are coming back and have very little
access to services and don’t have access to
meaningful work. And then we’re seeing the suicide
rate spike across the state right now. This
movement is actually really moving people around
their anger and frustration. I think that as
progressives, there are lot of lessons to be learned
there. ROP exists because the infrastructure - and
it is this way in every state - focuses on urban
centers for building up political leadership and
political bases, and we actually believe that we
should contest for rural areas, for working-class
areas, and not just let them be the uncontested base
of the right.
joanne@streetroots. org
Before the
occupation of the
Malheur National
Wildlife Refuge,
there was a similar
standoff at the
Sugar Pine Mine in
southwestern
Oregon’s
Josephine County.
The owners had a
dispute with the
Bureau of Land
Management, j
which had asked
the miners to file a
plan of operations,
or appeal, if they
wanted to continue
to work the claim.
Instead of replying
to the notice with
their paperwork,
the miners called
in the Patriot
movement
activists, who
flooded in from the
surrounding areas
and from out of
state to establish
armed camps.
Source: “Up in Arms: A
Guide to Oregon’s Pa­
triot Movement. Rural
Organizing Project