Dan Snow's History Hit - Anti-government Violence in America

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

Leah Sottile joins me today to talk all about domestic terrorism and anti-government groups in the USA. In particular, we talk about the armed standoff between law enforcement and a group of ranchers led by Cliven Bundy in 2014 over the issue of grazing rights on public land. We examine what happened, why this case matters, how it is directly linked to the stoming of the Capitol and what it is about the history of the USA that motivates these groups.Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist and writer based in Oregon and the host of the podcast Two Minutes Past Nine, produced with BBC Radio 4, and the series "Bundyville," made in collaboration with Longreads and Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I was very pleased in this episode to interview Leah Sotili. She is a freelance journalist in Oregon, and her stories, her investigations, essays have now been featured

all over the world. And she's become famous for her podcasts, Two Minutes Past Nine and Bundyville, about domestic terrorism in the US from anti-government groups. She's witnessed this, as you'll hear, firsthand as a group of ranchers try to take over public land in pursuit of their version of the American dream. It's so fascinating. She's been talking about this stuff for years, telling us about it, and as a result, the events of January the 6th at the Capitol came as no surprise at all to her. It's wonderful to talk to Leah at this time about what is it about the history of the U.S. that motivates these groups. If you wish to find out more about U.S. history, there are a lot of podcasts about U.S. history, many of them only available exclusively on

historyhit.tv. If you want to go back into the archives, the distant archives of this podcast, you've got to go and subscribe at historyhit.tv. You also get amazing history documentaries while you're there, so please go and check those out as well. If you're interested in 18th, 19th, 20th century US history, we've got it all covered. 21st, yes, actually 17th. Plenty of 17th century history in there. Mayflower last year, totally. So head over to historyhit.tv. And if you want to come and watch a live recording of this show with actual live historians with us in the room, not Leah Sotili, sadly, because she's on the other side of the world, but British-based historians, please come and do so. And in the autumn tour, it's going to be so fun.

Historyhit.com slash tour. You're going to love it. In the meantime, everyone, here is Leah Sotili. Enjoy. Leah, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. You're talking to me from Portland, Oregon, so we're on a very different time zone. So thank you very much for getting up so early this morning. Yeah, no problem. You've got national awareness now with what you've been working on there. Tell me how this story begins. It began for me in January of 2016, when a group of armed men took over a wildlife refuge in Oregon, where I live. And I'm a freelance journalist. I didn't

have an assignment to work on that story. But reporters from all over the world were coming to Oregon, coming to this very, very remote part of Oregon that I had never even been to, and were reporting on what was going on there. And what it was, was that some people with some pretty radical ideas about what the federal government can and can't do had come to Oregon to stage what they called a protest, other people would call it an armed takeover, of a federal wildlife refuge. In the American West, most of the land is actually owned and managed by the federal government. And this group in particular had a set of grievances that goes back pretty far in American history about whether or not the federal government should run that land, should dictate

how that land is used and what could be done with it. So that's when it began for me. And it's pretty much taken over my life for the past five years. Yeah, well, that's what I want to talk to you about the history of this, because it just feels like we need to understand exactly what's motivating this movement, I guess you'd call it. And as you say, a lot of the land in the West is administered by the federal government. That's a product of history, I guess. So tell me how that process happened. Why is there less private ownership than there would be, say, on the East Coast? Well, so a lot of the West is unsettled. I should say that when white people came over here,

they decided to use it for their own uses. And you have things like the Homestead Act that allotted people land that previously was under the longtime ownership and management of Indigenous tribal people. The federal government comes in in a big way in the early 1900s and starts managing that land for a lot of reasons that I'm not sure I'm the most expert person to talk about. But the thing of it is, is that in the 1970s, there's this kind of real inflection point when they come in and they start managing the land, but also you have the Wilderness Act passes.

So this is when environmentalists start having a little bit more of a seat at the table for how land is used, what it's used for. And then you also start to get outdoor recreationists involved so whereas previously this was like white ranchers were saying the land in the west is ours we can do whatever we want with it we can mine it we can ranch it we can farm it in the 1970s you start to have a little bit more of a diverse conversation about well you know that's maybe not the best thing for the land and it's not the only use for the land. So that is where the people who took over the wildlife refuge in 2016, they've still got that

kind of stuck in their craw a little bit. Like we didn't want that to happen. We still don't want it to happen. And that some ranchers believe that they are the ultimate use of the land, that if the land is there, it should be used to make money by them. That's not all ranchers. In this case, the people in 2016 had pretty extreme ideas. And a lot of ranchers would say the federal government actually helps us. They help pay for our land and they help pay us to ranch. But this group of individuals had had longstanding grievances about their ability to access the land, their ability to access the government, their ability to access the government and have a conversation about it. It's being pretty generous. I mean,

this particular group in 2016 was led by a couple of brothers who had participated two years prior in an armed standoff with federal officials on their ranch lands in Nevada. It's a long story, but that's kind of how it got started. And so were these guys provocateurs? They want to like be homesteaders and ranchers or are they just looking for a fight? I think it's they're looking for a fight. Very few ranchers came out in 2016 to here in Oregon to support them. They called ranchers from around the West, come here to Oregon, let's all tear up our grazing contracts with the federal government and go rogue. Very, very few people, less than probably six came and did that. I mean, it was also January. It was very cold. And

so I think a lot of people weren't really excited to come out to rural Oregon and make this stand against the federal government. Who you did see show up in vast numbers were people who'd been protesting outside of mosques for many years. What do they have to do with ranching? Nothing. You saw militiamen from around the country, as far as New Hampshire, on the East Coast, drive 3,000 miles to come to this very odd place in America. thousand miles to come to this very odd place in America. So I think for me and for other Western reporters who covered that standoff in the aftermath, the trial, which was a whole thing, we saw that this had actually very little to do with ranching and 100% to do with anti-government ideologies. Ostensibly, what is the kind of history of that movement? I mean,

what were they trying to achieve? Were they literally saying we should just be allowed to graze our animals wherever the hell we want? This is the American dream, this Western land bequeathed to us by God, we can do what we like with it. Exactly. That's a great distillation of what they would say. I think in a way you can answer that question by looking at the 2014 standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, where Cliven Bundy, for more than 20 years, he'd been grazing his cattle on public land that truly belongs to all Americans to use and recreate and hike and camp and enjoy and preserve. For 20 plus years, he'd been allowing

his cattle to just roam freely through these public lands, And he refused to pay his grazing fees to allow them to do that and had really bucked every opportunity to pay those fees. And in 2014, when the federal government came to round up his cattle, he said, I need militias from all over the country to come here and help me defend my rights or else we're going to have another Waco or Ruby Ridge on our hands, which if you know anything about the anti-government movement in America, those are key points to make when you want to get a bunch of people very angry and upset and to rally at your side. And sure enough, people came from around the country to help him do that. So I answered your question with that example, because in that case, it wasn't about finding a solution that worked for everyone. It was about getting one man's own way and sort of

force feeding this way of life that he believed that he was entitled to. You have indigenous people in that same area saying, what is it about you that makes you be able to abuse and destroy this land? When in reality, the man only owns a very small square of land, but believes that he should be able to graze and do anything he wants in that area. A lot of people, including myself, are saying, if you look at what happened in 2016, if you look at what happened in 2014 in both of those incidents, then what happened on January 6th would make a lot more sense. Well, let's draw a line from one to the other in a second. But how did the January 2016 standoff end? It's a very interesting story. It went on for 41 days. There were a pretty large

group of people that was there during that time, led by the Bundy brothers to stay there and seize this property. And they tried to set up shop there and tried to take it over. They changed the signs and said this was a new place. It was a new thing representing state management of land and ranchers, you know, taking over again and things like that. A little over 25 days into the standoff, a group of the leaders tried to leave the wildlife refuge to go to another county. In this part of Oregon, another county is several hours away. They tried to leave in a caravan to go to another county and were basically surrounded by the FBI and police and pulled over and they were caught. But they didn't give up that easy. There was one man who basically blew away from police and tried to run through a roadblock set up by the FBI and

jumped out of his truck as it's kind of crashing into a snowbank and tried to pull a gun on police and they shot and killed him. That man, his name is LaVie Finicum, has become a martyr for the anti-government movement. People believe that he was executed, that this was one more example of a government taking over America in this tyrannical fashion. And his name is now listed up there with Waco and Ruby Ridge, and now you've got Lavoie Finicum. So it ended shortly thereafter with tons of arrests. All of those people went to trial and the vast majority of them, including the Bundy brothers who led the standoff, were acquitted of all charges by a jury. So they did serve time while they were awaiting trial, but they were ultimately found not guilty of all of their

charges. So this went on to really embolden the movement that what they did was right. And it was supported by their own American peers. You're listening to Leah Sotili talking to me about anti-government terrorists in the USA. More after this. of history, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought

to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. I don't want to make a clumsy parallel here, but it is interesting in the context of the anti-government violence, the intimidation that we've seen over the last year. I'm thinking of

armed groups entering state houses to intimidate lawmakers. Seemingly, they get less of a penalty than, say, a person of colour stopped for possession of marijuana or a bus taillight. Why do you think these men were let off? Well, I think there's a couple of things. I mean, I reported on the whole trial. It was a fascinating six-week trial. And on one hand, the charges that they were facing was conspiracy to impede federal employees from doing their job. So conspiracy charges are notoriously difficult to prove. And attorneys on the case would say the government failed to prove that there was a conspiracy. What the folks involved said was that they got a notion

and they just went and took over this refuge one day. And that was that. And it was a protest and that's all it was. And the jury bought that. On the other hand, as somebody who watched the trial and watched jury selection, the people who were selected as jurors were typically people who did not know for 41 days that there was a armed takeover of a federal property happening in their state. So there were people who maybe weren't very engaged with the news, who were kind of rejected politics. And when you got there, you had the government's attorneys being very by the book, you know, as they are. But you had incredibly charismatic defense attorneys defending these people, telling a story about what was happening there was a takeover that spoke to the soul of the American West. And they told this sort of romantic story about ranching and farming and intergenerational working of the

land and this lifestyle attached to the land. And the jurors really bought that. And I think that that says a lot about Oregon. I think it says also a lot about the West, that those are still very, very powerful narratives, this idea of the cowboy, John Wayne, and that kind of thing. So I think it's a couple of things. I mean, I don't think that the jurors themselves were anti-government people, likely, but I think that they were willing to listen to this very charismatic story being told by the defendant's attorneys.

It sounds to me like these guys, Christian Bale, eking it out in the old 310 to Yuma. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because, I mean, at the end of the day, the key defendants in that case were not ranchers. They were cowboy hats. They looked like ranchers, but they were not ranchers. What is it about Oregon? What is it about your state that's, I guess, making it a bit of a bellwether for the rest of the nation? I think Oregon is a very interesting place among the 50 states. It has a very unique identity in that it's a very large state with one very, very liberal, progressive city with a very big culture of activism and protesting.

You've got a lot of land with very few people in it in the rest of the state. So we talk a lot in the West about this thing called the rural-urban divide. And that is felt very, very strongly here in Oregon. And I think especially after 2016, after that trial went off the way it did and those folks walked, it really amped up people who are upset about progressive politics in Oregon to take to the streets. And when liberals were going to have a protest over Donald Trump in Portland, all of a sudden you'd see these groups of people who maybe weren't at the refuge standoff, but kind of agreed with the sentiment of it, or who saw Lavoie Finnegan in retrospect as a martyr. Those people started showing up in the city and physically clashing with thousands of progressive protesters upset about what was going on in the country. You'd have these groups of people coming out and saying, we are patriots and we want America to go back to the way it was. And we love Donald Trump.

And that in itself, the protests that have happened since then, they weren't directly associated with the refuge. But I think that they were sort of a them while unleashing tear gas, rubber bullets, things like that on the vast majority of progressive protesters. And this has gone on for the entire time Trump was president. So that created this really tense atmosphere in Oregon that when the insurrection happened on January 6th, I think Oregon people, Oregon protesters, Oregon journalists, any Oregonian that was watching the news was like, yeah, this is what we've been seeing here. We're 3,000 miles away from Washington, D.C., thought of as a

fairly inconsequential state on the national stage of politics. But I think people here thought, yeah, you know, if people had been watching what had been going on in Oregon and really paying attention to what was going on from the refuge standoff through the protests into January 6, it wouldn't have been a surprise. So what are the other lessons then from Oregon? If Oregon turns out to be the canary in the mine, what are the other lessons? What is the answer to this? And is it going to get worse? And you're obviously in public service broadcasting there. What role do you have to play? Or are those anti-government folks so far from your information landscape that they're impossible to reach? When I started the Bundyville podcast project a few years back, I think at the heart

of it, I did really think, you know, if I put out this factual information and really dig deep into the history of the anti-government movement and where these ideas come from and things Trump is saying, how that has origins in history and in the West, that undoubtedly people would hear it and it would change their minds. I couldn't have been more wrong about that. Number one, if somebody who is a Trump supporter listens to it, I'd be shocked. And number two, I think that we're living in this alternative facts era. QAnon is something that is extremely hard to believe, yet lots of people believe it. So I think what that has done is has allowed people who have seen folks in their families or friends who have maybe kind

of gone in this Q direction or started spouting anti-government ideas or have become increasingly radicalized by what's going on on social media. It's given them something to understand that and maybe start to have a conversation with those people. Because I think at the end of the day, it's not my job as a journalist to convert people away from different schools of thought. What it is, is to present the facts and present what's happening and how it fits into history. I mean, that's my approach, at least. But where it goes from here, I have no idea. I think that is a big question that I've had. If January 6th was the beginning of something or the end of something. In some ways, I think it probably is the end of a few things, the Trump administration

ending, but could be the beginning of a whole new wing of the Republican Party. What we know is that anti-government extremism and extremist groups thrive under Democratic administrations. So we are at the very beginning of a new democratic administration. So if we look to history for a guide, that would say that we're at the beginning of a new era of extremism. Well, that's a cheerful place to end on. Thank you very much. And it says something about the modern world that

here are you and I talking on the other side of the planet from each other. And the audience you are hoping to reach is probably living 200 meters down the road from you. But instead, this liberal idiot in England sitting surrounded by his books is like obsessed with your podcast and knows more about it than anybody. So yeah, it tells you something about the modern world, doesn't it? It does. But you know, that's the thing. This extremism is not unique to America. It's happening there. It's happening everywhere. So as long as we're all talking about it, I think that's a good thing. That's a very elegant way of putting it. Well, thank you very much, Leah. Thank you very much indeed for coming on. How do people follow your work and listen and read and do all that kind of

stuff? Probably the easiest way is I'm on Twitter. That's where I post a lot of my work. And right now I'm working with the BBC on a podcast called Two Minutes Past Nine, which is about a lot of this same stuff. It looks into the history of the Oklahoma City bombing 25 years ago and how understanding that will help us understand today. So yeah, Twitter is probably the best place to follow my work. Great. Well, please come back on when that new podcast is ready. We'd love to talk to you about that. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much indeed. I want just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small

windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians.

Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.