The Gaspee Affair and The Sagebrush Rebellion - Bundy Ranch Comparrison

The Gaspee Affair and The Sagebrush Rebellion

Reflections on the Gaspee Affair and the Siege of Bundy Ranch

by Elias Alias

Foreword:
 

Let us prep a bit before we get into the meat of the matter below. Let us first recall a passage from a book entitled “Three Rights” by Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr. In his book he notes several things which glare sternly, if subtly, from the dried ink on our founding documents. He is noting the roots of “three rights” which are seen quite clearly when one focuses closely upon the wording in those documents. Here is one specific example:

Quoting from pages 6, 7:

“The assertion” “We The People of the United States * * * do ordain and establish this Constitution” enounces a right, a privilege, and a power to constitute a “government”. It emphasizes that this “government” did not “ordain and establish” itself, and that public officials did not “ordain and establish” either their own offices or the authority of those offices …”

Each time I read that passage I marvel at the meaning on which Dr. Vieira’s observation rests.  In short, it inspires me to recall that “We The People” ordained and established our government. Our Constitution, which sprang from our Declaration of Independence, became the “written word and will” of the American people.  It is that “written word and will” of the American people which is the empowered symbol of the spirit that animates the soul of America.

We, The People, are therefore the originating source of autonomy and the primary sovereignty  which issued forth, outwardly, from our own inborn authority, to create a government. People created their States as sovereign nation-state republics, each with its own Constitution and other national organizing structures. By that direct human action the thirteen Colonies were morphed into thirteen nations in the fiery crucible of the American Revolution.  As thirteen sovereign nation-state republics, each with its own autonomy and conveyance, the people worked through their respective governments to arrive at the compact known now as the Constitution for the united States of America.

An important passage from John C. Calhoun’s 1831 “Fort Hill Address” states an additional observation which is relevant to this introduction to our topic.

“The error is in the assumption that the General Government is a party to the constitutional compact. The States, as has been shown, formed the compact, acting as Sovereign and independent communities. The General Government is but its creature;”

See: https://thementalmilitia.net/2017/02/08/john-c-calhoun-fort-hill-address-1831/

In truth, that is our history. It is our heritage. It is written.  As Thomas Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence, each of us is born with “Unalienable Rights” which are not properly subjugated to any man-made government, because they are given us freely by “Nature, or Nature’s God”. “Nature, or Nature’s God”, is a higher authority than any man-made government or corporate entity. Our “unalienable rights” would include, as I see it, the very things Dr. Vieira notes above – “a right, a privilege, and a power to constitute a ‘government’”.

That’s us. That is as American as it gets. That is the heart of freedom. That is what we as a nation celebrate each year on July 4^th with our Independence Day festivities. But each year, as all fifty States celebrate our Independence, one State, Rhode Island, celebrates yet another revolutionary moment in its Colonial history. As I am grateful to have Dr. Vieira’s books in my library, I also am grateful that he told me on a long phone call some years ago about what Rhode Island celebrates each year on June 9. He told me about a very important part of our history, the event Rhode Island celebrates each year — the Gaspee Affair.

The Gaspee Affair 1772

The British government had been slipping into a conflicted relationship with its American subjects in the Colonies. Here is one of the key events –

“…. on March 5, 1770. A squad of British soldiers, come to support a sentry who was being pressed by a heckling, snowballing crowd, let loose a volley of shots. Three persons were killed immediately and two died later of their wounds; among the victims was Crispus Attucks, a man of black or Indian parentage. The British officer in charge, Capt. Thomas Preston, was arrested for manslaughter, along with eight of his men; all were later acquitted. The Boston Massacre is remembered as a key event in helping to galvanize the colonial public to the Patriot cause.

“The British troops had been billeted in Boston in October 1768 after repeated requests from British customs officials, who had been harassed and intimidated because of their efforts to enforce the Townshend Acts. Numerous clashes between the soldiers and the citizenry resulted. The killings of March 5, promptly termed a “massacre” by Patriot leaders and commemorated in a widely circulated engraving by Paul Revere, aroused intense public protests and threats of violent retaliation. This pressure caused Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson to withdraw the troops to an island in the harbor.”

From History.com  >>>embedded link: 
http://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/boston-massacre
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To control, to govern, to maintain tighter security, the government pushed further restrictions on the Americans. The more the government pushed, the more resentment it created in the minds of the Colonists.  The more the people showed their resentment, the more the government braced to contain it. To quote Leonard Cohen, “That’s how it goes, and everybody knows.”

As with all the other Colonies, the population of 18^th Century Rhode Island enjoyed smuggling imports to evade the good King’s taxes. The King did not like that, so he exerted what any government leader would turn to – the use of force, even military force. In early 1772 King George sent two tax collecting ships to patrol coastlines. One of those ships was the HMS Gaspee, captained by one Lieutenant Dudingston. Like today’s government agencies such as the DEA, ATF, BLM, EPA, parts of the FBI, and others, Lt. Dudingston enjoyed an authoritarian view about his duty to the government, and he became quite the bully as he intercepted the Rhode Island shipping business. He was a forceful bully with the King’s authorization to wield power and authority necessary to force the colonists to comply with “the law”.  His ship was a British Navy military ship.

Since British troops had already shot Americans in Boston two years earlier, tensions were higher than ever at the time in June, 1772 when Dudingston’s HMS Gaspee gave chase to a smuggling ship off Namquid Point on the coast south of Providence, Rhode Island.  The Colonist ship, commanded by Captain Benjamin Lindsey, out-maneuvered the Gaspee and tricked the Gaspee’s captain into grounding on a submerged sandbar. Captain Lindsey then sailed on up to Providence and reported to John Brown that the Gaspee was high-centered at Namquid Point. They raised about a hundred men and put them into nine long boats with muffled oars.

The hundred men rowed down-river to the Gaspee, shot the ship’s captain, Lt. Dudingston, captured his crew, took them off the ship, and then burned that ship to the waterline.  That was the first planned militia assault on a British military officer and ship.

From the Gaspee Info site we read –

It was after midnight on the peaceful night of June 10, 1772.   There was no useful moonlight and dark cloaked the Narragansett Bay, where the Gaspee, an English Navy schooner, had run aground on Namquid Point. Nine large longboats, with about 100 Rhode Island men, had rowed silently almost to the schooner before the sentinel saw them.  As the English crew rushed on deck to fire muskets to prevent the ship being boarded, Joseph Bucklin could see the vessel’s commander leaning over the starboard gunwale, swinging his sword and preventing the Rhode Island attacking force from boarding the Gaspee.

“Ephe,” Bucklin said to his friend Ephraim Bowen, “reach me your gun, and I can kill that fellow.”

Bucklin fired. The English captain fell, with wounds in his left arm and groin, from the one shot that pierced his forearm and then continued to the groin. The colonists swarmed aboard the schooner, overpowered the outnumbered crew, and took its crew prisoner. Joseph Mawney, a doctor among the raiders, together with Bucklin, tended to Dudingston’s spurting femoral artery wound and saved his life. The colonists rowed away with their prisoners, leaving one boat and the leaders of the expedition.  The leaders, prominent men of Providence, set the Gaspee on fire before themselves leaving.  As dawn broke, those on shore saw the Gaspee’s powder magazine explode and the Gaspee sink, utterly destroyed. This was the beginning of a Revolution!

When the Rhode Island colonists supported the Gaspee raiders, and all the other American colonies joined in resisting the English attempt to punish those who attacked the English Navy’s ship, the Gaspee Affair could be nothing other than the beginning of the end of Rhode Island’s colonial status.  At the urging of Thomas Jefferson of the Virginia legislature, committees of correspondence were formed by the legislatures of the other colonies, to coordinate an American response to the English attempt to punish the Gaspee Raiders.  These committees were not only the beginning of a united end to English rule over colonial legislatures — this was the start of a United States.

>>>embedded link — http://www.gaspee.info/raiders/index.htm

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Rhode Island Celebrates “Gaspee Days” Each Year
 

Every year the good people of Rhode Island celebrate the Gaspee Affair in a big way. Rhode Island wants to keep alive the memory of the deliberate attack on a government ship.

The Rhode Island government, instead of condemning that terrorist attack, actually celebates it openly. The official name for their annual  celebration is “Gaspee Days”.  The public can see a June 1, 2016, press release by Rhode Island’s Secretary of State at the official Rhode Island website. >>>embedded link  http://www.ri.gov/press/view/27681

 At Gaspee dot com we see a link for the Gaspee Days Parade, which is a featured event of the annual celebration at Warwick, Rhode Island.  >>>Embedded link —  http://www.gaspee.com/events/parade

On that  page we read in exciting tones the recommendation that Rhode Islanders come out to enjoy that annual parade. Quoting  –

Since 1965, the Gaspee Days Committee has continued its efforts to preserve, promote, and share Rhode Island’s revolutionary history with the community – and what better way to do that than with over 50 years of our Gaspee Days Parade that combines elements of the past with the sparkling community of the present? Each year, folks crowd along a two-mile stretch of Narragansett Parkway anxiously awaiting the march of the parade…

So there you have it. What was a “terrorist” act in 1772 is today celebrated as a proud moment in Americans’ fight for freedom.  It is a part of the history which led our ancestors to “constitute a government”. And what may we make of Lt. Dudingston and his military crew? Well, they don’t look so good in the eyes of history, now do they?


I bring all this up by way of creating a comparison.  The cowboys and militia folks at Bundy Ranch in April 2014 did not attack any government vessel, nor did they shoot a government officer.  They did not destroy anything. They simply stood up for the Bundy family. They demonstrated. They protected the family. Their sheer numbers prompted the Sheriff to ask BLM to cease the operation and, withdraw all the BLM SWAT teams and other enforcement agents and contractors and leave the area. When the BLM was dragging their heels about pulling up stakes, the cowboys and the Sheriff Department went to that famous draw under Interstate 15 and helped BLM do the right thing. The Bundy Ranch enjoyed a tremendous victory while the bullies of the BLM took an embarrassing slap to the face.

What was an act of terrorism, or as Parliament dubbed it, an “Act of War”, against the legitimate government of the day, is today celebrated as an heroic act on behalf of liberty and freedom.  That is because “They Won!”  So let us now look at the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Bundy Ranch victories. It strikes me that April 12 and/or January 8 may end up being celebrated as key pivot points in the People’s ongoing struggle for freedom. The Bundy Ranch story is every bit as big as the Gaspee Affair was back in their day. Why can I say that? Because the Bundy Ranch victories have exposed the unwieldy tentacles of the United Nations’ Agenda 21, and political corruption such as the Clinton Foundation, and the collusion of hundreds of NGOs presently operating in all of our States. Mineral rights; water rights; grazing rights, States’ rights, property rights — all are important parts of the mosaic . It will take more than an article or two to cover the breadth and gravity of the Bundy victory, so this piece will just be the beginning for me.

What The Bundy Prosecution Team Denied  To The Court And  The Jury

From the Valley Forge Network on January 09 2018, view this collage which shows exactly what the government tried to withhold from juries in the trials of Bundy Ranch defendants. The truth did come out finally, and the government’s scowling face grew grotesque and grim.  This video will put on the record the question — 

Did The BLM Send A Militarized Force Upon The American People?

A wide array of opinions erupted when the Bundy Ranch stood up to the bullying of the BLM (Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency) at Bunkerville, Nevada in April of 2014.

Even as the King’s military navy had tormented the Colonists of Rhode Island with over-bearing and authoritarian-style government force, and thus evoked finally a violent reaction from the people of Rhode Island, so had the BLM been stalking Cliven Bundy’s ranch in the desert near Bunkerville in the 1990s and early 2000s. They had run him through their kangaroo courts. The BLM had actually even bought some grazing rights from some of the ranchers, and over-all had put 52 ranching families out of business in Clark County, Nevada, where Bunkerville and Bundy Ranch sit. Bundy Ranch is the last ranch standing in that County.

Once the courts had granted BLM some license to take action, BLM organized a two-hundred man operation to confiscate Bundy’s cattle. They also tore down water systems and trampled the land with heavy equipment used to bury cattle in mass graves.  Next thing the Bundy’s knew, the BLM had snipers stationed “observing” from ridgelines, and had warrantless video surveillance installed on the property.

As local ranchers and neighbors objected, the BLM had the insane audacity to literally mark off “free speech zones” with ropes and insist that if anyone wanted to protest what they were doing they would have to do so within those roped off “free speech zones”.  All in a day’s work for men who worship Gov more than they honor God.

So the Bundys put out the call for help and America responded with hundreds of patriots, including three Sheriffs and several State Representatives.  The news was all over it, and by April 12 2014 everything came to a head. The Sheriff got the BLM to agree to pull out, and then had his deputies ensure that peace prevailed as the cattle were released and the BLM left the scene. But before the BLM left the scene, they were pointing military-styled rifles while sporting military combat gear and were telling the protestors that if they did not leave they would be shot. Yes, the government agents literally told the cowboys  that the agents would shoot them.

The government got a  black eye that day, and BLM’s plans for the Deep State and its behind-the-scenes financial bag boys, such as the NGOs which are implementing Agenda 21 in all 50 States without going through Congress, and private-sector contractors of many sorts who assist BLM in getting the People off the lands in Western States, are upset. The idiot socio-path Harry Reid is livid, and so is the Clinton Foundation. Lots of people who play globalist games at our expense are upset. So what to do?

Well, the government decided that the cowboys had to be made an example of anyone’s fate who may dare oppose authority. The government attacked through the justice system.

American Cowboys

The rancher families are the very people who have for generations sustained and preserved a natural compatibility with harvesting natural resources and sustaining the land — they are a significant part of the American family-based tradition. The advent of incorporated governance is wrecking all that with bureaucratic BS.

Ranch-work is largely outdoors, in the elements on natural ranges, and is directly related to animals both domestic and wild alike.  The American Cowboy almost always carries his gun, as did his father and grandfather. It is an American tradition carried across generations by hard-working honest Americans of every faith, rural people who are just living honorable lives running ranches, with American values and morals governing their daily lives. We know them as the kind of people who built America at the ground  level.

In the rancher communities across the land a Cowboy has his saddle and hat, and he has his boots and gun.

But just as these families are good folks in all of their communities and reveal thereby their trustworthiness as part of We The People, even so, and I’m guessing with strong motive, it appears the Cowboy culture now has an openly acting, publicly funded, agenda driven opposition coming right at it at the behest of the federal agencies who are on a mission to organize and control rural Americans. Leading the assault on our People are the BLM, EPA, ATF, and U.S. Forest Service.

The BLM became active in Clark County, Nevada in the 1990s. The BLM wanted to enforce new systems of land-usage and the Cowboys watched as more than fifty ranches folded, leaving only the Bundy family ranch operating where, before the BLM got pushy, there were more than fifty ranches in that County. But Cliven Bundy decided to fight the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a decision which came to the fore nationally on April 12, 2014, when the Cowboys stood up to defend the Bundy family and the Sheriff backed down the BLM’s SWAT teams and snipers, sending about two hundred BLM workers/contractors packing after a tense confrontation between the Cowboys and Cowgirls on horseback and the combat-geared government troops who were threatening with a government megaphone to shoot the Cowboys. That day was a huge victory for the American people. The Federal government laments that day.

To any government agency, dissent against its “policies” appears as a threat to its “authority”. That is not new in the good ol’ USA.

In the Gaspee Affair we see that Rhode Island colonists, each and all being personally and collectively obligated under British law and obligated to British government, yet having been irritated and aggravated incessantly by British tax collection measures, they conspired literally to make an armed attack on one of the Good King’s military ships. Possible names for that sort of enterprise today would include “terrorism”, “conspiracy”, “treason”, “criminal”, “attempted murder”,  “obstruction of official officers”, and others. Were a hundred armed men to assault a federal office of the Bureau of Land Management, take a shot at the facility’s commanding officer and take the staff hostage, how would contemporary media outlets and the press view such a deed?  Of course it would be immediately denounced as “terrorism” and “treason”.

How would today’s government respond? Answer: Just as the British government did in 1772. The British Parliament pronounced the burning of the Gaspee “an act of war”. Senator Reid denounced the Bundys and their friends as “Terrorists” and vowed that “this is not over.” The British throne took a keen interest in capturing the guilty parties. The Federal government resorted to its illegal lists to pursue all who had been at Bundy Ranch.

But when compared to the Gaspee Affair, the Bundy family and friends can boast that not one of them pointed any weapon at any government agent or employee. Not one shot was fired. No one was hurt except several members of the Bundy family who were victimized by BLM enforcement thugs.

In the Gaspee Affair, although the whole town of Providence knew darn well who participated in the attack, and although the throne was offering handsome rewards, not a soul betrayed any of the raiding party. That, too, is as American as it gets. There was a popular conspiracy to protect the raiders who destroyed one of the King’s ships. In the case of the Bundys and Friends, two juries in a row refused to convict, despite the fact that the government had placed infiltrating paid informants at Bundy Ranch. So the government decided to try the cowboys a third time. That is where this gets to be as enjoyable as the fact that Providence would not snitch on the Gaspee Raiders. In the third trial the government so botched it, in so many ways, that the judge, who had been trying to help the prosecution, had to throw the trial into a “Mistrial”, which led to the justifier “With Prejudice”.

To find out why, I would now like to let Washington State Representative Matt Shea and  Shari Dovale of Redoubt News show one of the most powerful videos we’ll see in a long time.

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Just For The Record

Shari Dovale of Redoubt News Interviews Larry
Klayman of Judicial Watch

Summation:

As a mechanism of control, government dulls its sensitivity to its individual subjects (citizens) as its power is concentrated.  Given any government’s traversal across an arch of time, an arrogance is soon enough visible in the patterns of how government administers itself upon the backs of the governed. The arrogance expands proportionately as further concentration of power occurs, and the pattern is repeated until finally any form of government inevitably becomes authoritarian, which is the extreme objective of total security.

 

All governments see their duty to provide security as their primary purpose for existing, and it follows that in any government’s view, including our own, the security of the government is necessary so that the government is always available to provide security for the governed. The unavoidable objective is total control for total security. Even the United States government has morphed into a National Security State, as noted by Gore Vidal in his book, Dreaming War, and is noticeably authoritarian.

Governments predictably, although we know that soul-less governments, being man-made systems and templates, cannot “think”, governments obviously appear to think that way. That sort of impression registers in the minds of the governed in accordance with how government affects individual citizens’ lives.  For example, if the IRS pushes a small business owner into bankruptcy, that business owner tends to assign an intentional characteristic to the government’s motive – as seen in the fact that so many Americans use the word Gestapo in the same breath as “IRS”.

But therein lies a rub. Indeed, the swamp culprits, beginning with J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, whose works have created and expanded operations called the Continuity Of Government (COG) apparatus have used that very phenomenon of ideation to justify what they were doing in creating a shadowy secondary government which, using underground bunker complexes and command centers during any emergency, while policing the public with a supported police state under martial law, could keep the federal government functioning under any threat, be that threat a nuclear attack, an EMP, or even public rejection. After all, we note that Congress, in 2017, continued to have less than ten percent approval ratings from the American people. The Pax-Americana neo-con empire-building war-hawks in the deep underbelly of our national government are driving a very unpopular global bid to control the world, and the Corporate Dynasty is directing it for corporate gain. The COG people in Washington D.C. understand that the American people are being railroaded for policies which benefit the one-percent, and concerned “players” in WDC and on Wall Street and over at the Pentagon are aware of the need for a police state control mechanism to be in place quickly. (For background on that please read Part Three of my 2011 essay called “An Empire Strikes Home”.)

In light of that consideration, I often speak as if government “thinks”. A fleeting evidence of my supposition is in the papers of Discovery which the court caught the BLM’s prosecuting team withholding (illegally, by the way, under the Brady ruling.) The indicator that thought was present in the government’s plan is shown clearly in the BLM’s planning papers as shown in the video above, which reveal finally what the BLM was lying to the Court about and withholding from the Defense —

“The operation will be under the Incident Command System (ICS).

This system is based directly off a military model.”

That untidy little fact, among the facts about the sniper teams, the illegal surveillance, and other nefarious activies the “military model” prescribed, was part of what the BLM did not want the Court or the Jury to know. When compared to the Gaspee Affair and the King’s reaction, the parallels are undeniable.  And while the King’s reaction to the attack on the Gaspee led to the American Revolution, the Bundy victory of January 08 2018 did not accomplish as much, but did  slow down the inbred propagation of the Swamp Creatures in WDC and their minions scattered throughout our States.

Once any government achieves that degree of self-righteous authority over its tax base, it will manifest the use of armed force routinely to protect its authority. If we little people resist, or dissent, a government will bring out the police. If the police can’t handle the rebelliousness, then it will bring out the troops. All governments will behave that way if and when a government senses defiance by those it feels it must control for their own good, for “the good of society”.

On the topic of the word authority, a couple of thoughts may apply here. There is a view of expertise in a man’s field which we speak of by saying that “he is an authority” in medical science, or he is an authority in engineering principles, etc. That form of authority denotes a conscious reward in our regard of his dedicated devotion to the pursuit of excellence in whatever a man’s field may be.  That is the individual example of authority.

The other form of authority is the collectivist type, which is man-made authority asserted as the expression of force personified within a government or institution.

So this observation begs the question – “Why?”
Why did We The People “constitute a government” when the People had just got out from under a government? Certainly our forefathers had just got rid of a government and were under no governmental authority. They had seen first hand how a government will oppress the very people who sustain it — so why would they so quickly deem it necessary to form yet another government under which to timidly hide their newfound individual sovereignty?

The indelible expression on the face of History smiles in a grand old glory upon the reason why We The People chose then, and continue to choose today, to “constitute a ‘government’”. The reason, in a word, is “Oppression”. They back then, and we today,  generally feared then and fear now the possible falling into oppression by an external government, a foreign government.  If they formed a nation-state, “constituted” a government” with its own sovereignty, autonomy, and authority, the newly formed States could bind in mutual benefit for a structured security in what they called back then a “General Government”.  (Today we call it the Federal Governent.)

That, of course, was a yielding to what I call “Fear’s Thought System”, to be sure; yet while falling back into the trap of government, our Founders somehow managed to create the most liberating union of governments ever devised — so we can forgive them for starting a government on such grounds. Yet we recall ever that the government our forefathers created was and is a “man-made government”, projected by the imagery of dream-wish in the prevailing mental states of the time. There are, after all, three entities which are not signatory on that document called the Constitution — Yours, Mine, and any signature representing the Federal Government.  Neither of the three were consulted, and all who were consulted are long dead.

The governing hierarchy of the British Empire, like any top-down structure which falls from an apex pinnacle to a wider support base below, used that hierarchy for the dispersion of authority downwardly and outwardly to the people. Just as the King in 1772 resorted to force, so too the federal government of today, acting through its Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management, employed various SWAT teams and contractors to mount a 200-man force to ensure the completion of its mission to remove the Bundy cattle.  To enforce such man-made authority, organized force is generally established in the form of police and military strength. But like any corporate creation, that hierarchy at every point in the six directions of space which constitute its reach, government force must maintain a steadily increasing growth and development.  Homeostasis is not an option. The British Empire had gone global and the Colonists were increasingly seen as an embellishment, a source of useful wealth, and an anthropological amusement. Today’s government has also gone global in scope, and in its incidental localized focus, such as public land use in Nevada, reflects closely the attitude displayed by the good British King of yore as the BLM in its zeal to secure the public lands on which the Bundy Ranch cattle graze brought down upon our American cowboys the absurd militarized force of combat-equipped conscience-less gov-bots and the military, technical, and mechanical logistics to back them up in case they decided to assault the cowboys.

Directly springing, psychologically, from that view came the official embrace of authoritarianism as its hierarchical vein of assertion. That, of course, is the root of  oppression from which inevitably grows resistance, rebellion, and revolution — the three “R”s of  the University of History.

In closing this writing I will note that the repercussions of this judgment will reverberate all the way up the hierarchy to those Luciferian souls who dominate the United Nations. The UN’s  Agenda 21 programs have just been compromised, jarred into uncertainty and a desperate scramble to do damage control.  Many of the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are now trembling as their behind-the-scenes financiers like Soros and the Clintons are also coming under the same kind of intense scrutiny as befell the statist prosecutor team. Then there is the successful advancement in the issue of Federal vs State management of public lands, mineral rights, and water rights. Additionally, there is really good ground to be made suddenly regarding the 10th Amendment — States’ Rights!

Let us now return to the writings of Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr.   In his book “Constitutional ‘Homeland Security'”, he quotes Joseph Story —

“[t]he militia is the natural defence of a free country against***domestic usurpation of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses with which they are attended and the facile means which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers to subvert the government or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.” (page 62)

I would like to reverently suggest that the date, January 8, be remembered always, commemorated and  honored each year throughout all time to come, just as Rhode Island’s Gaspee Days are celebrated.  The Bundy Ranch, as an extension of the Sagebrush Rebellion, has proved to be the pivot point on which the tides of tyranny were turned to a serious and noteworthy degree. The corruption inherent in statism and collectivism has been exposed and its actors, the prosecution team of the BLM, are now publicly shamed. The Bundy victory marks authoritarian government arrogance as properly exposed and rejected by a nation which still respects the rule of law more than many of its government agencies do at this point in history.

I also want to make a special note here — Some of our heroes, such as Todd Engel, are still in prison, and we hope that this decision in the Bundy trial will ripple back to relax their situations so that all are finally set free. I also want to send a message of encouragement to Jeanette Finicum and her wonderful family, who yet fight for justice in the wrongful death of LaVoy Finicum in January 2016.  This entire movement will stand with the Finicums, with the Hammonds, and with all Sagebrush Rebels who know what Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution actually says about who we are, and whose lands these are. While we celebrate this most current victory, we seek and strive to obtain a more comprehensive victory for all Americans and for their future freedom.

There are too many blessings to name at one sitting, but right up there with those graces this court decision has bestowed upon America and the States is the joyful grace of seeing a father arrive home after nearly two years in prison.

Enjoy!

https://thementalmilitia.net/2017/07/27/namquid-point-ranch-revolution/