EXPOSED: The Source Of Cliven Bundy's Crackpot Constitutionalism

[mfcorey1]

Bundy has resisted paying to graze his cattle on federal land because he doesn't recognize the authority of the government to assess those fees. His argument has lost repeatedly in court, but he continues to ignore his responsibility and to defy the law. His malfeasance amounts to the theft of over a million dollars from the American people. Ironically, if his argument prevailed he would be subject to paying the state of Nevada for grazing rights at $15.50 per head of cattle, rather than the federal rate of $1.35. But simple math, like simple logic, is too complicated for these cretins. So instead, they take up arms against their fellow Americans and pretend to defend their twisted misinterpretation of the Constitution.

Now we have evidence of where Bundy may have picked up his constitutional delusions. In a recent media appearance, Bundy was proudly displaying a copy of the Constitution in his shirt pocket.



After searching for the distinctive cover of the document in Bundy's pocket, the publisher turned out to be the innocuously named National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS). However, the NCCS is not the commendable educational organization it purports to be. It began life as the Freemen Institute, a vehicle for the far-right, Mormon, anti-commie, history revisionist, W. Cleon Skousen. Skousen taught that the Constitution was inspired by a God who intended America to be a Christian nation. He also professed the canon of white supremicism that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a lost tribe of Israel. The Southern Poverty Law Center chronicled the NCCS curriculum based on Skousen's philosophy saying that he...

"...demonized the federal regulatory agencies, arguing for the abolition of everything from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency. He wanted to repeal the minimum wage, smash unions, nullify anti-discrimination laws, sell off public lands and national parks, end the direct election of senators, kill the income tax and the estate tax, knock down state-level walls separating church and state, and, of course, raze the Federal Reserve System."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/20/1293342/-EXPOSED-The-Source-Of-Cliven-Bundy-s-Crackpot-Constitutionalism?

[Thinkingabout]

1. Any dumb reason will do for his type, Welfare Cowboy wants a constitution for his needs

Needs to locate himself to the country which agrees with his constitution. It is not the USA.

[KT2000]

2. A local dentist took up with

the anti-tax crowd. By the time IRS caught up with him, he lost his money and his house. I wonder how all the other tax evaders who got caught and paid are feeling about this guy.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

3. Right wingers are a sick bunch of a-hs. nt

[demigoddess]

4. personally, I think they are just

looking for a reason to roll back the result of the Civil War. If the Federal government is invalid, then it cannot enforce things such as Civil rights and the ban against a national religion. Next thing you know they will roll all that back to pre-civil war. I once sat in a classroom in the south and they were talking about how the bible says that black people are supposed to be slaves. If you roll back the Civil War and get rid of the federal government that gives people of a state to take the rights away from black people and perhaps even make them slaves again, all based on their interpretation of the bible.

[EC]

5. It's been pissing me off that the defenders on tv

including that nutty girl on Chris Haye's show who was supposed to be a Congresswoman,scream about the agents coming in with arms to move the cattle. Well part of the uniforms of the agents of the Land Management Bureau are guns. They did not go and gather up arms to go and round up the cattle, they always wear them. Then another argument I heard that Comcast guy on Alex Witt's show say "Well, we don't want government agents coming on our property ..." it's not Bundy's property and these guys know it and still give this bogus argument.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

6. Acknowledge

[ColesCountyDem]

7. +1000! n/t

[truebluegreen]

14. Their Precious--the 2nd Amendment--goes away too.

Heh.

[starroute]

8. Glenn Beck is a big Skousen fan

http://www.salon.com/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/

Sep 16, 2009

Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite “death panel” wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing “socialism.” In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck’s favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, “The 5,000 Year Leap.” A once-famous anti-communist “historian,” Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience. . . .

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? “Leap,” first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. “Leap” argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs — based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith — that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. . . .

W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen’s own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of “The 5,000 Year Leap.”

As Beck knows, to focus solely on “The 5,000 Year Leap” is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck’s bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.

[Blue Idaho]

9. Mormon leaders have always viewed the US government as a nuisance...

That's how they ended up in the independent state of Deseret in the first place. They still see themselves as "apart" from rather than a part of the US. Not surprising all sorts of kooks and nuts find their way to that theology...

[allan01]

10. re: EXPOSED: The Source Of Cliven Bundy's Crackpot Constitutionalism

to get rid of the wall between states and religion, hed have to shoot down the constition that he so dearly loves . humbug

[chknltl]

11. Can't our government label these guys 'terrorists', spirit 'em all off to Gitmo......

.....then 'enhanced interrogate' them into telling us which planet their leader is hiding out on? I am absolutely confident we can get to the bottom of this matter that way because it has worked so well in the past.

I'd bet dollars to donuts that every one of these guys fully blessed our government doing exactly this to other 'terrorists' back when we had the Bush Administration in charge.

(yeah yeah I know, not very progressive of me to be thinkin up such stuff but I can daydream can't I?)

[Enthusiast]

12. They're a bunch of nuts!

[Spitfire of ATJ]

13. These people want America to be 50 monarchies run from lavish governor's mansions.