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About The Bulletin. (Bend, OR) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 15, 2021)
THE BULLETIN • MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2021 A3 TODAY Today is Monday, Feb. 15, the 46th day of 2021. There are 319 days left in the year. This is Presi- dents Day. Today’s Highlight in History: On Feb. 15, 1989, the Soviet Union announced that the last of its troops had left Afghani- stan, after more than nine years of military intervention. In 1564, Italian astronomer Gali- leo Galilei was born in Pisa. In 1764, the site of present-day St. Louis was established by Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau. In 1798, a feud between two members of the U.S. House of Representatives (meeting in Philadelphia) boiled over as Roger Griswold of Connecticut used a cane to attack Vermont’s Matthew Lyon, who defended himself with a set of tongs. In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes signed a bill allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the Supreme Court. In 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine mysteriously blew up in Havana Harbor, killing more than 260 crew members and bringing the United States closer to war with Spain. In 1933, President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt escaped an assas- sination attempt in Miami that mortally wounded Chicago Mayor Anton J. Cermak. In 1944, Allied bombers de- stroyed the monastery atop Monte Cassino in Italy. In 1961, 73 people, including an 18-member U.S. figure skating team en route to the World Cham- pionships in Czechoslovakia, were killed in the crash of a Sabena Air- lines Boeing 707 in Belgium. In 1992, a Milwaukee jury found that Jeffrey Dahmer was sane when he killed and mutilated 15 men and boys. In 2004, Dale Earnhardt Jr. won the Daytona 500 on the same track where his father was killed three years earlier. In 2005, defrocked priest Paul Shanley was sentenced in Bos- ton to 12 to 15 years in prison on child rape charges. In 2018, the last of the bodies of the 17 victims of a school shoot- ing in Florida were removed from the building after author- ities analyzed the crime scene; 13 wounded survivors were still hospitalized. Ten years ago: Protesters swarmed Wisconsin’s capitol af- ter Gov. Scott Walker proposed cutbacks in benefits and abol- ishing bargaining rights for most public employees. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was ordered to stand trial on charges he’d paid a 17-year-old Moroc- can girl for sex and then used his influence to cover it up. Five years ago: President Barack Obama opened a meet- ing in Rancho Mirage, California, of leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, calling the landmark gathering on U.S. soil a reflection of his personal commitment to an enduring partnership with the diverse group of countries. One year ago: The U.S. govern- ment said Americans who were on board a cruise ship under quarantine in Japan because of the coronavirus would be flown back home on a chartered flight, but that they would face anoth- er two-week quarantine; about 380 Americans were aboard the Diamond Princess. Today’s Birthdays: Actor Claire Bloom is 90. Author Susan Brownmiller is 86. Songwriter Brian Holland is 80. Rock musician Mick Avory (The Kinks) is 77. Jazz musician Henry Threadgill is 77. Actor-model Marisa Berenson is 74. Actor Jane Seymour is 70. Singer Melissa Manchester is 70. Actor Lynn Whitfield is 68. “Simp- sons” creator Matt Groening is 67. Model Janice Dickinson is 66. Actor Christopher McDonald is 66. Reggae singer Ali Campbell is 62. Actor Joseph R. Gannascoli is 62. Musician Mikey Craig (Culture Club) is 61. College and Pro Foot- ball Hall of Famer Darrell Green is 61. Actor-comedian Steven Michael Quezada is 58. Actor Michael Easton is 54. Latin singer Gloria Trevi is 53. Rock musician Stevie Benton (Drowning Pool) is 50. Actor Alex Borstein is 50. Actor Renee O’Connor is 50. Actor Sarah Wynter is 48. Olympic gold medal swimmer Amy Van Dyken-Rouen is 48. Actor-director Miranda July is 47. Rock singer Brandon Boyd (Incubus) is 45. Rock musician Ronnie Vannucci (The Killers) is 45. Rock singer/guitarist Adam Granduciel (The War on Drugs) is 42. Singer-songwriter-musician Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes) is 41. Actor Ashley Lyn Cafagna is 38. Blues-rock musician Gary Clark Jr. is 37. Actor Natalie Morales is 36. Actor Amber Riley is 35. Rapper Megan Thee Stallion is 26. Actor Zach Gordon is 23. — Associated Press LOCAL, STATE & REGION Ammon Bundy, veteran of armed standoffs, builds militia network on pandemic backlash BY RICHARD READ Los Angeles Times EMMETT, Idaho — The two dozen demonstrators pressed against the emergency room doors, screaming to be let in. “Show us the law!” they chanted. “Let Grandma out!” one shouted. They had descended on Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center in Vancouver, Washing- ton, the evening of Jan. 29 to protest the quarantine of Gayle Meyer, a 74-year-old patient who had refused to take a test for the coronavirus. Police in riot gear guarded entrances as the activists — who authorities said were armed — insisted that Meyer was being held against her will, a claim the hospital denied. Meyer’s 49-year-old daugh- ter, Satin, an anti-mask activist licensed as her caregiver, had summoned the demonstra- tors, foot soldiers in a rapidly expanding network called People’s Rights. With the tap of a thumb on a smartphone, members can call a militia like they’d call an Uber and stage a protest within minutes. Behind the organization is a familiar name: Ammon Bundy. He is best known as the leader of the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wild- life Refuge south of Burns — a deadly 41-day standoff be- tween federal agents and mil- itants who rejected the federal government’s authority over public lands across the West. Now Bundy has seized on the backlash against coronavi- rus restrictions as an opportu- nity to start a new movement. Since March, when he launched People’s Rights — which he describes as “neigh- borhood watch on steroids” — the organization has attracted tens of thousands of members and sponsored more than 50 demonstrations across the country, dispatching gun-tot- ing activists to the homes of politicians, health agency man- agers and even a police officer who had arrested a protester. Experts who track extrem- ists say that the network has significant overlap with white supremacist groups and other far-right organizations and that it has whipped up paranoia and rage, risking lives of hos- pital workers, health officers, politicians and others in the crosshairs. “We have the potential for multiple Malheurs in multiple states, in that at any moment they could bring hardened far-right activists, often heav- ily armed, into any one event,” said Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Re- search & Education on Human Rights. In October, the Seattle-based organization and the Mon- tana Human Rights Network published an investigation that found that Bundy had rap- idly expanded People’s Rights by fusing his core of far-right paramilitary supporters with “a mass base of new activists radi- calized in protest” of coronavi- rus restrictions. Group leaders envision a form of “neighborhood nation- alism,” in which the “righteous” stand against the “wicked,” the report said. Investigators found that the network had 20,000 members in 16 states. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times Richard Read/Los Angeles Times Ammon Bundy, who led the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, stands in front of a restaurant Jan. 27 in Em- mett, Idaho. late last month near his home in Idaho, Bundy claimed it had grown to almost 50,000 people in 35 states. Last fall, Facebook removed an undisclosed number of People’s Rights pages from its platform after deeming the network a militarized social movement. Bundy said his sole cause was defending the freedoms guaranteed under the Con- stitution — even for LGBTQ people and Black Lives Matter activists whose views he may oppose. He said he never supported President Donald Trump and didn’t vote in the last two pres- idential elections. In 2016, he was in prison awaiting trial, and this past November he didn’t see a point. Contend- ing that the COVID-19 death toll is massively exaggerated, he said that Trump should have worked harder to keep churches and businesses open. Nonetheless, he encouraged his followers to go to Washing- ton for the now-infamous Jan. 6 rally to distribute leaflets and display People’s Rights banners to recruit more members. He said he condemned the siege on the Capitol. Bundy, 45, is carrying on a family tradition. The fourth of 14 children in a Mormon family, he grew up on a Nevada ranch. His 74-year-old father, Cliven, be- came a hero to extreme liber- tarians in the West when he stopped paying grazing fees in 1993, claiming that his family had ancestral rights to run its cattle on public land and that the government’s ownership claims violated the Constitu- tion. Ammon Bundy left the ranch as a young man, first for Minnesota for two years of Mormon mission service and then to Southern Utah Univer- sity. Later he moved to Phoe- nix, where he ran a truck repair business for 14 years. In 2014, he stood with mili- tias that rallied behind his fa- ther’s cause when FBI agents arrived at the Nevada ranch with a court order to confiscate the family’s cattle. The govern- ment backed down to avoid bloodshed, raising the family’s stature in far-right circles. The next year, Bundy, his wife and their six children moved to Emmett, Idaho, a farming town turned bedroom community outside Boise. But he said that God soon called him to support Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Ste- ven — Oregon ranchers sen- tenced to prison for setting fires on federal lands. In Janu- ary 2016, Bundy led an armed group that seized the head- quarters of the Malheur refuge, demanding that the govern- ment relinquish ownership and free the Hammonds. Bundy was arrested during a traffic stop outside the refuge and eventually tried on weap- ons and conspiracy charges. A militant who fled the stop was shot and killed. In a startling verdict in Oc- tober of 2016, Bundy and other defendants were acquitted by jurors who found that federal prosecutors had failed to make their case. The family’s aura of invinci- bility only grew when a judge declared a mistrial in a crim- inal conspiracy case against Bundy, his brother Ryan and their father for the 2014 Ne- vada ranch standoff, saying government lawyers had sup- pressed evidence. The cattle outside Bunker- ville, Nevada, continue to graze on public land despite more than $1 million in unpaid fees. Bundy kept a low profile back in Idaho, where he man- aged rental properties and re- stored vintage vehicles with his children. But the pandemic — and resistance to the govern- ment telling people what to do — set the stage for his return to activism. In March, he gathered sev- eral dozen supporters in a warehouse he owns in Emmett. In its first public act, the group defied Republican Gov. Brad Little’s stay-at-home di- rective and held an Easter ser- vice for about 60 people. The same month, police arrested Sara Brady, an an- ti-vaccine activist, for allegedly trespassing during an an- ti-lockdown protest at a Boi- se-area playground closed due to coronavirus restrictions. Bundy publicized the ad- dress of the officer who ar- rested her and led about 40 people to protest outside his home, a tactic that the gover- nor called “disgusting.” But People’s Rights con- tinued to expand, establish- ing hundreds of chapters that Bundy organized with the aim of being able to dispatch 10 protesters to a scene in 10 min- utes, 100 in 100 minutes and 1,000 in 1,000 minutes. He in- structed each chapter to launch teams to train in secret for paramilitary operations to de- fend members from criminals or government agents. In July, he led demonstrators to a public building in Cald- well, Idaho, where they tried to barge into a meeting of officials who were discussing whether to impose a local mask man- date. “This is not your building,” Bundy shouted as he shoved a man guarding the doorway, video of the protest shows. The meeting was canceled, though the health board even- tually decided to recommend wearing masks in public. The next month, Bundy and some supporters forced their way past state troopers into an Idaho Statehouse gallery that had been closed because of the pandemic. Police arrested Bundy twice in two days, fi- nally wheeling him out of the building in an office chair. Charged with trespassing and obstructing officers, he was banned from the Capitol for a year. Last month at the hospital protest in Vancouver, Washing- ton, Kelli Stewart, the People’s Rights coordinator for the area, narrated a livestream video on Bundy’s YouTube account that ultimately attracted more than 70,000 views. The video shows a protester trying to pry open locked dou- ble doors, and a deputy spray- ing chemical irritant in his face. The protesters cheered when the hospital released Meyer, whose tearful daughter wheeled her out and helped her into a van. “Freedom!” a man yelled. Stewart, a longtime Bundy compatriot, berated law en- forcement for siding with the hospital instead of the protest- ers. She said that right-wing activists who joined “back the blue” rallies last summer and waved American flags with blue lines had been duped. “We’re starting to learn that you’re actually the standing army our founders warned us against,” she said. “They’re just dangerous tyrants. We’re hav- ing a blue-line flag-burning party tonight.” ENTER TO WIN THE MOUNTAINFILM GIVEAWAY! Win two tickets to the MOUNTAINFILM ON TOUR plus a $50 Old Mill District gift card! You can enter online, by email, or by mailing the form below. 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