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Ex-Sheriff Compares Rancher To Rosa Parks

by Chris Tognotti

With the standoff between the federal government and Nevada's Bundy Ranch on hold, at least for now, conservative ex-sheriff Richard Mack has compared Cliven Bundy to Rosa Parks... and the federal government to Nazis. On Saturday, the standoff between the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Nevada's Bundy Ranch came to a halt as the presence of an armed anti-government militia, which Mack helped organize, presented safety concerns for the federal authorities.

But fear not — according to Mack, those authorities are kinda like the Third Reich, so there's no need to be bothered by it.

So what's going on? Well, the BLM maintains that Bundy has been illegally grazing his cattle on federal land for decades, and hasn't paid the resultant fines for the land use in over twenty years. Bundy counters that his claim to the land predates the government's — his family homesteaded their ranch in 1877, and it was only in 1993, in a conservation effort to protect the endangered desert tortoise, that the BLM designated thousands of acres as off-limits for grazing. In March, the BLM finally gave Bundy notice that they were planning to impound his "trespass cattle."

Mack, for his part, helped organize the sprawling, heavily-armed protest, and made his ideological and historical leanings pretty transparent in speaking to conservative radio host Steve Deace on his show Monday. As recorded by Right Wing Watch:

Well, this particular peasant said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I’m not rolling over for this one. You guys are out of line, you don’t own the land, you don’t own our ranch, you don’t own us, and we will stand firm in the principles of freedom that we were blessed with as Americans.’ And that’s exactly what this was. This was Rosa Parks refusing to get to the back of the bus.

Prompted by Deace to comment on the "just following orders" federal authorities, Mack too the cue, gleefully dispatching with Godwin's Law to rant about the Nuremberg trials.

Well, in fact that’s a quote, and I know you know this, but it’s a quote from the Nuremberg trials regarding the Holocaust. And the soldiers that were put on trial at Nuremberg used that as a defense, and it was disallowed. They said anybody should know you don’t get to just kill people and then claim that you were just following orders.

So there you have it, folks. The malevolent spiritual ancestors of the Nazi regime are upon us, villainously trying to force Rosa Parks to turn in her cows. Or something like that? We got lost somewhere in all the inane, ahistorical analogizing.

Where the Bundy Ranch dispute moves from here isn't yet entirely clear. As the issue has become something of a cause célèbre in conservative circles, it's unlikely that the opposition is going to fade away any time soon.