By the end, the long occupation had become a kind of three-ring circus of right-wing nuttery. In the closing hours, Michele Fiore, a Republican state legislator from Nevada who had been a public supporter of the occupation, talked him down over patched-in radio conversations from Portland while thousands listened for more than an hour on live streaming.
I am absolutely sympathetic to the Hammond case and believe that a radical political provocation around their cause could have been used to good effect. Instead we have a complete train wreck, with one man dead and everyone else now in route to the razor wire slave camp, probably for life. On Monday the locals protesting to demand that the militia occupiers go home outnumbered the militia supporters. Instead of recoiling from such a grievous defeat and soberly reflecting on the obvious causes, the Libertarians will now rush to take up as loudly as possible an argument they have already lost. No thinking will occur at all, because that would interfere with your endless moral posturing competition and your Militia-Action-Playset role playing games.
During a livestream from the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Wednesday morning, an armed occupier dressed in fatigues is seen holding a rifle. He spoke directly into the camera, seemingly addressing authorities in the aftermath of the arrests and the shooting that occurred on a highway close to the refuge on Tuesday night.
“You want some militiamen? Come get some,” the man said, standing in front of what appeared to be a piece of heavy-duty excavating equipment. “It’s what you been training for, preparing for.
“Media’s been waiting for a bloodbath this whole time we’ve been here,” he added. “Now there’s going to be one.”
