Some of our greatly valued readers have pointed out to us – in comments on this website and on our Facebook page – that right is not on the side of the Nevada rancher and his allies in their dispute with the Bureau of Land Management (see our post below, It begins?, April 11, 2014).

Cliven Bundy is breaking the law.

We believe in the rule of law. We are not anarchists. So we take their point.

However, it is not a clear-cut issue, as this article from Investor’s Business Daily explains:

It was a tense standoff in rural Nevada with armed protesters closing I-15 for a while and facing off against even more heavily-armed federal agents.

For now, that volatile Bundy Ranch confrontation has been defused. But it’s not over by any means. And we may well experience others that do not pause in non-violence.

These are profound disputes illustrative of abiding suspicions among average Americans and their government headed by a man who promised to bring people together but didn’t. And it comes in an uncertain economic time when so many have given up big dreams to just keep what they have.

The specific Nevada dispute, such as it is, has been simmering for 21 years between a Mormon cattle rancher named Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management, better-known in the West as BLMM, the Bureau of Land Mis-Management.

But the far larger issue, most intense in the West, involves a mounting distrust and suspicion of all things federal — Congress, the bureaucracy and especially an aloof president. His perceived interests are inserting an over-reaching government into the lives of every American for their own good from closing coal mines and rewriting restaurant menus to seizing private property and regulating cow farts. …

Little known in the urban East, BLM is charged with managing nearly 300 million federal acres mostly across the West. That’s an area equivalent to the second and fourth largest states combined, Texas and Montana.

Nevada is the seventh-largest state with 110,567 square miles. That’s 1,626 times larger than all of Washington, D.C., 84% of it still owned by the federal government.

Anyone here ever rented from a landlord located clear across the continent? You get the set-up for conflicting priorities, miscommunication, misinterpretation, misunderstanding and missteps. Bundy’s family has ranched the area since even before Joe Biden was born, back in the 1880’s when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.

Sixty-six years later in 1946 BLM was created, ostensibly to organize a crazy-quilt of laws and regulations governing federal lands. In 1993, BLM notified Bundy that he could not graze his cattle on federal lands anymore because the desert tortoise there was now endangered.

Forget that this same federal government exploded atomic bombs in Nevada for generations with little concern for natural impacts. And it would like to store thousands of tons of nuclear waste there too.

So, for the sake of an endangered wild tortoise the Bundy family ranch became an endangered species. The feds are doing the same to thirsty California farms for the sake of an endangered minnow.

Bundy’s response was very Western. He went ahead anyway. Legally, Bundy hasn’t a leg to stand on. He doesn’t own the land. He hasn’t paid rent. And he’s lost three court battles.

Armed with a court order, BLM decided the time had come for action, eviction of about 1,000 of Bundy’s cattle, even separating newborn calves and mothers.

BLM saw no contradiction sending in dozens of armed federal agents to confront a 67-year-old man behind in his rent while the president of the United States and the nation’s chief law enforcement officer traveled to New York to dine with and speak on behalf of the notorious Al Sharpton, who’s been more than $1 million behind in his income taxes.

That’s the kind of double-standard cronyism and de facto discrimination that gets people’s backs up. …

So, in pickups and on horseback hundreds of angry strangers and militia members, alerted by email and texts, became Bundy supporters. They converged on the ranch. Tensions rose. And the BLM, remembering past deadly government-citizen conflicts named Waco, Ruby Ridge and Wounded Knee, released the seized cattle.

Now, here comes the political part that will seem quite familiar to Chicagoans:

A Chinese company has wanted to build an immense solar-panel farm in Nevada under the name ENN Mojave Energy. It would need additional tortoise habitat to mitigate its complex.

The local lobbyist who’s represented the Chinese-backed firm is a failed Democrat politician named Rory Reid, who got his gully washed in the 2010 race for governor by Republican Brian Sandoval.

Oh, look! Reid also happens to be the son of Harry Reid, the dottering Democrat Senate majority leader for a few more months, who’s somehow managed to become a millionaire on congressional pay.

Now, perhaps you understand why Bundy Ranch supporters smell a cattle-thieving, land-grabbing Washington political conspiracy where, clearly, none exists.

Oh, one other thing. Last week the Senate confirmed a brand-new director of BLM. He’s Neil Kornze, at 35 an unusually inexperienced youngster to be running such a powerful agency with sprawling powers.

However, Nevada native Kornze had something special going for him in the Senate and Obama White House drive to get him the job. He was a senior policy aide to – Wait for it! – Harry Reid, whose son represented the Chinese solar farm.

Now, go wash your hands.

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And this is an editorial from the same IBD website: 

Does the government really need to own 30% of the U.S., with the percentage in Western states much higher? The government’s agenda in this and many other land-confiscation activities is motivated by a desire to comply with a UN “rewilding” program that advocates pushing humans out of rural areas and into densely packed urban zones to promote what the UN calls “sustainable development”:

Land … cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market,” says the U.N.’s Agenda 21 action plan. “Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes.

So the UN and its tool, the Obama administration, are mounting a massive attack on private property. 

But our land can be controlled, apparently, by Harry Reid’s donors and relatives and former staffers as well as assorted globalists and Chinese investors. In their view, this land is not your land, it’s their land.

Bundy, who lives in a country founded by armed Americans resisting a tyrannical government, has objected, reviving the long-simmering Sagebrush Rebellion between residents of the West and a land-grabbing federal government.

In the end, Bundy and the people who rallied to his cause, some of whom carried firearms of their own while demonstrating , proved what the Second Amendment is all about.