#that rancher over there killed all his cattle and burned his land to the ground to keep the other people from having it

[elegomez]

so imagine you're just minding your own business, living your normal life in your community, judging your neighbors and their churches, etc, when these random fuck-off people who just won the war with the US come to your house and tell you, that because you are "Scottish" (you have lived in appalachia your whole life, sure you have family who moved out here in like, the 1800s but what the fuck are they talking about), you do not ethnically belong HERE, and instead you are going to be moved to the region of SCOTSMERICALAND with all of the other "Scottish" people in your "homeland" of the region normally known as Pennsylvania, and when you get there you find you're next door neighbors with Evangelical Southerners on one side and the most obnoxious rich New Yorker you've ever met on your other side, and also all your shit was taken against your will and you got separated from your in-laws because they got moved to ENGLAMERICALAND and IRELAMERICALAND (and we're all worried about what happened to Granpa Joe who speaks Cherokee and has family on the rez) —

then you can start understanding what the soviets did to the peoples of central asia.

[mrswhozeewhatsis]

The Rest

A/N: This is my first fic for the 2017 Louden Swain SPN Mini Bang, and is actually for one of the Station Breaks songs. God, I love this song. If you haven’t heard the album, GET IT. It’s PHENOMENAL. Anyway, special thanks to the best betas a girl could ask for, both of whom challenge me and make me better, @littlegreenplasticsoldier and @manawhaat. 

Summary: It’s all about what you give away and what you keep for yourself.

Pairing: None.

Warnings: Angst.

Word count: 2740 words

She stared at herself in the mirror, taking in the miles of white beaded satin while sounds of her best girlfriends decorating the sanctuary of the church drifted in through the door. Everything was perfect. The dress complimented her figure and showed just enough skin to not be too much. Every one of her closest friends had been able to come to help her organize the million and one details that had to be nailed down before the big day came tomorrow.

Her fiancé was perfect. He’d gone to every cake tasting, made suggestions about songs for their first dance, and wrangled his groomsmen like he’d been a cattle rancher in a former life. Her mother had completed the seating chart and paid the deposits on everything, and her father had laughed at them both as they debated whether Aunt Elizabeth should sit near Uncle Seamus or if it might spark a food fight. Everything was as she had dreamed it would be the first time she’d wondered what her wedding day might be like.

Except, instead of smiling, she was staring blankly at her reflection, wondering why she wasn’t happy.

She should be crying tears of joy or giggling uncontrollably or just too giddy with happy excitement to speak, but none of that was happening. She wasn’t sad or nervous, not worried, anxious, or even depressed.

She was nothing.

That first day she’d pictured her wedding day, she’d doomed herself to this. After finishing her high school physics final early, she’d made intricate notes about flowers and dresses and attendants. She’d stared out the window at the raindrops landing in puddles in the courtyard and pictured her perfect life. Every detail was planned out on that college-ruled page and it became her roadmap to this very moment.

The plan was drawn up meticulously. She’d meet a nice boy, be married by 25, and have her 2.3 children before she was 30. Her father would walk her down the aisle to a mystery man in a smart blue tux. The music would swell as she smiled at everyone she knew until she reached her soon-to-be husband. They would buy a nice little house with a big back yard for their dog to run around in, and they would invite the neighbors over for barbecues in the summer. This is where it would all start and everything was exactly on track.

So why wasn’t she happy?

Okay, so her future mother-in-law wasn’t exactly thrilled. Instead of 25, they were only 20, and they had decided to put off college in favor of attending the University of Life. She thought they were too young to get married, “Too innocent,” Hmph. Little did she know, the accelerated timeline for their plans had been sparked by a pregnancy scare. So much for innocent. By the time they found out there was no baby, the church was booked and deposits were down on a banquet hall and caterer and florist and string quartet and a million other things you wouldn’t expect to require a deposit but do.

Which led to her standing here, staring at some bizarre version of herself who was wearing a wedding a dress and pretending to be happy.

“Linda, dear, we need your opinion on which pews to decorate with the tulle and which to leave blank. Every pew looks too busy, and no one can agree on whether it should just be every other pew, or every third pew, or just a couple of pews around where the family will be sitting….” Her mother’s voice droned on from the other side of the door, but she tuned her out.

Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. The dress was suffocating her, squeezing her ribcage until she could no longer fill her lungs with air. In a frenzy, she ripped the dress from her body, not caring when the fabric tore at the seams. Even when the dress was lying on the floor, completely ruined, she couldn’t stop trembling and gasping for air. In her panic, she threw on her regular clothes and stuffed the dress haphazardly in the closet, rolling it up so bits wouldn’t stick out the door and give itself away. She searched the room for pen and paper but didn’t find any. Unable to stand being there a minute longer, she decided that she could send a note later and peered carefully out the door before sneaking out where her mother’s footsteps had just echoed.

The hallway was clear, giving her a straight shot to the outside world, to freedom, and she took it at a dead run. Her mad dash was stopped just outside the main doors by none other than her husband-to-be.

“Hey, beautiful! Linda? What’s wrong?” He rubbed her shoulders in that perfect way he had that always calmed her down, but it didn’t work this time. Her words erupted out her mouth almost too fast for him to understand.

“I’m so sorry, David, I just can’t do it. It’s too soon, we’re too young, I’m not ready, I don’t know what I was thinking, really, anyway. Just take all of it, I don’t want any of it, the dress, the decorations, the bridesmaids, the groomsmen, and oh, God, your mother-I-I’m proving her right! She said we were too young and she was right, and oh, God, David, I’m so sorry. I just have to go, I’m so sorry.”

David stood in front of the church where he had thought he was going to get married, his bride’s parting words flowing over him like rushing flood waters, and he watched her, helplessly glued to his spot while she jumped in her car and disappear into the night.

***

The keys in his hand gleamed in the firelight, mocking him and his misery. The moon had already risen, but it wasn’t quite dark enough for stars to come out, just yet. The birds around the lake mourned with him while his heart lay salted and burned on the ground. His unlikely savior, a man by the name of Rufus, stood beside him, silent. It’s not like there was much to say by then, anyway.

It had taken years for David to get over being left at the altar. Okay, so she left him the night before, but it was only a few feet away from the altar. He had lost himself in drinking and gambling for a long time, staying in posh hotels when his luck was high and in his car when it was not. Then he met her. She was an angel. She gave him a reason to stop looking at the world through the bottom of a bottle and start seeing everything with clarity. He sobered up. He got a job. He paid off his debts. When he was finally a man he felt was worthy of her love, he proposed, and they got married. A year later, his son was born.

They had bought this cabin because it was “rustic”. It had seemed like a nice place to get away from it all, whatever it might be that they felt they needed to get away from. It was small, but well-built, with just enough amenities for it to be a step above camping. They had come up here a few days ago to get away from the man now standing next to him; to get away from the crazy stories he spewed and the unpredictable spark in his eyes. For the first time, part of David was glad the outside world had found him here. Another part of him still wished it hadn’t. The rational part of his brain told him he’d be dead if it weren’t for Rufus, though his heart would never understand.

Who could understand when a strange man knocked on your door and warned you that your wife was a monster? That in a few days, when she turned thirty, she would hunger for human flesh and not care whose flesh it was? Rufus claimed he was a hunter of monsters, and had inherited the job of making sure that David’s wife never hurt anyone like her father had. It was so far-fetched, no one could blame him for not believing, for taking his wife and child and running to the safest place he knew.

Rufus had found them, he was a hunter and tracker, after all, but not before his wife had killed their son in her animalistic mania. David escaped the house, and when she followed him, Rufus had done what he’d had to do. David watched his wife die in agony, an inhuman roar bellowing from her throat as she was engulfed in flames. After her final breath was gone, Rufus had spread salt and gasoline over the remains where they lay, burning them again until there was nothing left but ash.

David stood in the driveway next to his car, staring through the last wisps of smoke at the cabin that had been his escape, cheeks wet with quiet tears. He ripped his eyes away from the myriad of memories to tug at the keys on his keyring. When Rufus approached him, the cabin’s keys were no longer attached.

“You know, before my son was born, we once tried to have guests up here. We thought we could have a bonfire and Debra planned all of this fancy schmancy stuff as a kind of counterbalance to the dirt and the backwoods environment. You know, hors d'oeuvres plated on pieces of bark and matched with expensive wines and things like that. It went horribly, of course. Everyone got eaten alive by the mosquitos, two people caught ticks, one of whom ended up with some freaky disease no one’s heard of, and almost everyone got food poisoning because the electric went out and the fridge warmed up without us realizing. That was when we decided that this place was just for us. No one else. This was our respite, and, maybe we’d retire here someday.”

Rufus stood in front of David, head hung low and hands on his hips, letting the quiet linger for another moment before he shook his head and said, “I owe you an apology. I was trying to be, well, nice. I’ve been trying this, you know, kinder, gentler approach to,” he waved a hand in the air, “everything.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest, cleared the lump in his throat away, and continued. “I heard a rumor that they don’t always turn. Like, maybe it’s a recessive gene in some, and I thought- against my better instincts- I thought I should give her a chance.” Rufus heaved a breath and let it out slowly. “I was wrong.” He stared off into the distance to keep from having to look the grieving man in the eye. “They always turn.”

David turned to Rufus, wiping his face. “I’m sorry for not listening. I should have listened.”

Rufus waved off the apology. “I’d do the same in your shoes.”

David held out the keys to the cabin for Rufus to take. “Take ‘em. Take it all. Take the cabin, take the dock, take the boat, take everything. I don’t ever want to see this place again, and you can use it when you’re not hunting. It’s safe here, if you don’t bring the bad stuff with you.”

Rufus took the keys with wide eyes and a slack jaw, but before he could thank David, the man was in his car and backing out of the driveway. The old hunter hoped he’d never hear the man’s name again, but somehow thought he would.

“Kinder and gentler can bite my fabulous black ass.”

***

Sam leaned up against the Impala, arms crossed, waiting for Dean to stop flirting with the waitress in the diner. They’d spent most of the afternoon in an abandoned factory in an industrial park outside of town dealing with a vengeful spirit with an older hunter named David. The ghost had been difficult to track down, and David had called Bobby for help. Bobby called John, who sent Dean and Sam, since he was wrapped up in a ghoul hunt a state over. With the hunt done, they’d all decided to share a meal before splitting town, but Sam suspected he and Dean might be staying over one more night.

David exited the building, shaking his head with a smile, no doubt at Dean’s antics. He approached the car, giving her another appreciative look like the one that had endeared him to Dean. He stood next to Sam and leaned against the car with him, matching his stance with arms crossed.

“So, Sam, you’re what, 17, 18, now?” he asked, looking the boy up and down, like his height could truthfully tell his age.

“Sixteen,” Sam replied, hunching down even further into himself to try and look more his age and less like the man everyone expected him to be.

David nodded. “My son woulda been about your age by now.”

Sam glanced at the old hunter, knowing better to push at old wounds, no matter how curious he was. Every hunter has a story, and none of them are fairy tales.

“It’s a good age. Got the world on a string and the energy and optimism to do something about it.” Sam could hear the nostalgia in his sigh. “So, what’s your plan for taking on the world in a couple of years?”

Sam shrugged. “Family business, I guess?” He could feel David’s sudden and intense attention, but he tried to ignore it.

“Sam, you are the smartest kid I’ve ever seen. You figured out who the ghost was in half the time I took to even try and fail, and you figured out what he was tethered to, even though he could have been attached to anything in that factory. Are you really going to waste that hunting?”

Sam shrugged and stared at the ground. “Pretty sure that’s what my Dad wants me to do.”

David heaved a heavy sigh. “It’s bad enough that old folks like me get roped into this life, but you’re a kid. You should be going to college, getting drunk at all-night keggers and weekend craft beer fests, pledging frats, and sleeping through your first class of the day. And you’re a smart kid, Sam. You’re way too smart to be caught up in this hell of a life.”

Sam shrugged again, not sure what to say in the face of someone so vehemently stating what he’d always wanted to hear, but could never allow himself to even admit to wanting. He kicked a stone that had the unfortunate luck to be sitting on the ground in front of him, and watched it bounce across the parking lot towards the diner door where Dean was finally emerging, triumphant, with a napkin in his hand.

“You remember what I said, Sam. You get out. Get out and don’t look back. Go be a doctor or a lawyer, and help hunters out that way, but don’t be this when you can be so much more,” David spoke only loud enough for Sam to hear, with his face an indifferent mask as Dean approached. “You got the girl’s number, Dean? Good for you, kid!” The older hunter gave Dean a high-five and a slap on the back as congratulations.

An hour later, after they’d said their goodbyes to David, and Dean had run off to his date with the waitress, Sam sat in the motel room looking out the window. For a crappy motel, it had a pretty good view of the setting sun as it sunk below the horizon. He considered David’s words seriously. It was only the second time in his life someone had told him he could, and should, be more than just a hunter. He could never tell Dad or Dean, but it all suddenly seemed possible. He could go to college, maybe Stanford, become a doctor or a lawyer, and help hunters that way. He could have a normal life, but still save lives like Dad had always wanted.

When Sam was done examining the idea from all sides, polishing it until it shone, he tucked it deep into his heart where no one could find it. He was going to keep this for himself, do this for himself, and Dean could have the salt, the silver bullets, and all the rest.

Lyrics for The Rest by The Station Breaks

It was the eve of the day Dreamt up in the summer rain Scrawled in italics On her old physics page Now it's finally here And the flowers in place And she found herself wondering Why she wasn't feeling anything 

She said, "you take the rest The tuxes and vests The groomsmen like knights Unaware of their quest Take the ribbons and bows And your mother, god knows She never approved Of our innocence Yeah, you take the rest." 

The cabin was safe Secluded in shade The water was still The loons echoed refrains But he would not return Memories still burned The moon was like fire Set to take him alive 

He said, "You can have the rest Take the moss-covered fence Take the dock and the boats And those pesky insects And take the angry dinner guests Ooo all burned and tasteless The barbs by the fire That never made any sense Yeah, you can have the rest." 

It was a family truck Inherited by luck In the industrial park He worked through the closing bell And this old man said "Boy, get a college ed You're way too smart To be lost in this hell." 

But he said, "You can have the rest The diplomas and tests The all-night keggers And the weekend beer fests Take fraternity row All too drunk to know The being late to class Aimless and dense" 

I watched the sun set Deep in the west And I'm saving my best For the light in my chest And you can take the rest

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[thisdaynews]

Future Of Nigerians Can No Longer Be Entrusted With APC-Wike

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/future-of-nigerians-can-no-longer-be-entrusted-with-apc-wike/

Future Of Nigerians Can No Longer Be Entrusted With APC-Wike

Nigeria – Delta State lead representative, Sen. Ifeanyi Okowa, has upbraided pundits of southern lead representatives on the boycott of opening nibbling of cows and the call for public exchange to rebuild Nigeria.

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These were essential for the choices taken when he facilitated his 16 associates on 11 May, 2021 in Asaba where they likewise called for state police and devolution of forces from the Federal Government to the States.

“We owe no conciliatory sentiments, since we talked reality and we imagined that reality we talked was to the greatest advantage of this country.

Okowa communicated shock that a few components in the Presidency are as yet pushing for the maintenance of open munching of cows.

“Will we really right now be advancing open touching? Say thanks to God that the President was distorted, on the grounds that I have seen news features that the President isn’t against the prohibition on open touching.

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We need to start to investigate what is best for us. Where we were 50 years prior ought not be the place where we ought to be today and tomorrow.”

He recognized that it probably won’t be a one-day issue. He said: “It may not be nevertheless the cycle needs to begin and there mustWorried that uncertainty is spiraling wild, Governor of Rivers State, Chief Nyesom Wike has advised Nigerians to dismiss the All Progressives Congress (APC) that just has stories of killings and kidnappings come 2023.

The lead representative gave the charge at the banner off function for the development of Etche Campus of Rivers State University in Abara Town of Etche Local Government Area, yesterday.

Wike said with the complete breakdown of safety in pieces of the country, clearly the APC Federal Government can’t be trusted with the fate of the country.

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“Try not to tune in to those individuals who lie to you. The individuals who can’t give security to Nigeria. Is it true that you are seeing the killings ordinary at this point? Are you not stressed over this country. Is there any expectation that they can offer to this nation once more?”

Lead representative Wike flaunted that not at all like APC, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) makes guarantees and focus on satisfying them without giving reasons.

As per him, his organization is on the main period of a 45 days of venture banner off and authorizing that is extraordinary throughout the entire existence of the country.

“You know the distinction among us and them, is that you can see us regular, moving starting with one nearby government then onto the next. It is it is possible that we are hailing off or charging projects.

“They are not doing so on the grounds that there’s nothing for them to do. They don’t have anything to show as well. We began the 27th of May, 2021 and we will end the main stage on tenth of July, 2021.

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That is over a month of hailing off or dispatching projects. Who has at any point done as such in this country? Have we not gotten a spot effectively in Guinness Book of Records?”

Talking further, Wike encouraged Etche individuals not be hesitant in their purpose to set up shelter with PDP and convey more votes to the gathering that carried improvement to them.

“Presently, we will commission Odofur street, however with what number of votes, simple 7,000 votes? You need something yet you will not come out and give the votes.

At the point when we make guarantee, we satisfy it. You as well, satisfy your own guarantee. It ought to be two different ways, the gathering, PDP and you.”

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Wike demanded that the Rivers State University should deliver more assets to, and furthermore direct the project workers taking care of the development work at the Etche intently.

He said his organization won’t bargain quality work and proclaimed that 40 plots of land will be gained inverse the grounds for the sitting of police headquarters.

“We need quality occupation since we are known for quality tasks. From this point until May 2022, economy exercises will increment here, thus, please, Etche individuals, attempt and backing the project workers to ensure they finish this work.”

Playing out the banner off, previous Vice Chancellor of the University of Port Harcourt, Prof. Wear Baridam thought that lead representative Wike is spreading improvement utilizing sitting of grounds of the state college in other nearby government regions.

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Such move, he noted, settles the standard gripes of congestion of homerooms, builds the conveying limit of the organization and takes care of the issues of deficient lodgings for understudies.

“Anyone watching Governor Wike’s rankling formative speed, particularly lately, will be enticed to accept that the man is simply expecting office. However, we as a whole realize that Governor Wike is setting out on more formative activities even as he denotes his 6th year in office as our Chief Servant. As opposed to what his unyielding pundits may say, Governor Wike’s strong mark is in plain view in each edge of Rivers State for even the heedless to see. The great individuals of Etche can vouch for this certain reality today.”

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In his comments, the Commissioner for Education, Prof Kaniye Ebeku noticed that when Governor Wike initially made the profession and followed by the arrival of N16billion to guarantee that the three grounds are set up, the vast majority excused it as simple governmental issues.

As per him, cynics will currently have no motivation to question the genuineness of Wike any longer in light of the fact that up until this point, two grounds have been hailed off for real development work to begin.

Likewise speaking, Vice Chancellor of the Rivers State University, Prof. Nlerum Okogbule, said the Senate and Council of the University have supported that that the Faculty of Agriculture which has the accompanying divisions; Agricultural Extension and Rural Development, Crop/Soil Science, Forestry and Environment, Food Science Technology, and Fisheries and Aquatic Environment, will be situated in the Etche grounds.

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He clarified that the choice was taken perception of the recognized agrarian economy of Etche as the acclaimed food crate of the state. be a program that should become apparent, a program in which we will start to see moves being made.”

He cautioned that Nigeria’s developing food frailty may before long twisting to a tipping point by virtue of the danger presented by open nibbling of dairy cattle.

“Today, a great deal of cash is being spent by the Central Bank of Nigeria to urge ranchers to guarantee that we are food adequate however a ton of these endeavors are lost, as a result of frailty. Ranchers can’t go to cultivate, their harvests are obliterated, they are disfigured and assaulted and some are even murdered. We can’t proceed with this way, since, in such a case that you have a program you are burning through billions on, we should get it and we should guarantee the food security of this country.”

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“It is significant and it will assist with improving the harmony and reproduce trust among our kin that genuinely we are in an organization that is joined to the greatest advantage of the combining units. I don’t perceive any reason why individuals should scrutinize that”

On state police, Okowa said the manner in which the government police is organized “is to such an extent that they will not have the option to police this country, it’s incomprehensible. We are not saying that they are uncouth.

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“Be that as it may, when the police chain of importance is calling for vigilantes, they are calling for state police. So the state police can be coordinated in such a way that it helps the government police, on the grounds that the degree of frailty in this nation presently is excessively high and we need to take care of business.”

[lodelss]

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (7,518 words)

Part 3 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. 

I.

I have seen LaVoy Finicum die and die and die. 

Log onto YouTube and watch Finicum’s end, spliced, paused, and dissected by people who never knew him but who, too, have again and again watched it happen.

When Finicum was killed, law enforcement officers were acting on an opportunity to arrest the leaders of the weeks-long Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in Oregon. Finicum was one of just a few actual ranchers who joined the Bundys’ occupation. Ranching was Finicum’s dream — something he’d only started doing once he turned 50. He didn’t grow up a rancher, but he intended to die one.

In the final seconds of his life — on the very last day of his 54th year — Finicum proved to be even more of a true believer in the purpose of the occupation than the Bundys themselves. 

That frigid late January day, an informant tipped the feds off that cars carrying the Bundys and other leaders would be traveling to Grant County, Oregon for a meeting with citizens and the area’s sheriff, who was allegedly sympathetic to the cause. 

But the group never got to the meeting. Before they could arrive, members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and Oregon State Police SWAT team stopped the cars on a remote bend. Ammon Bundy followed law enforcement orders to get out of the car with his hands up, kneel on the ground, and crawl towards the officers. But Finicum refused to surrender.

Suddenly Finicum, who some viewed as a grandfatherly voice of reason back at the refuge, was yelling at the officers from his driver’s seat. He told them: “Back down or you kill me now.”

“Boys, you better realize we got people on the way,” Finicum yelled. “You want a bloodbath? It’s gonna be on your hands.”

In his back seat, the other occupants of the car — Ryan Bundy, a grandmother named Shawna Cox, and 18-year-old gospel singer Victoria Sharp — frantically tried to call people back at the refuge, but realized they’d been pulled over in an area with no cell service.

“I’m going to be laying down here on the ground with my blood on the street, or I’m going to see the sheriff,” Finicum yelled out the window. Finicum told the occupants of the car he would leave, try to get help. “You ready?” he asked. 

“Well, where’s those guns?” Ryan Bundy responded, telling the other passengers to duck down. 

“Gun it!” Cox said. “Gun it!” 

Finicum slammed the accelerator. Driving at over 70 miles per hour, careening around a bend, the sound of bullets pecked at his truck. Up ahead, the FBI and Oregon State Police had blocked the road. 

Finicum jerked the wheel — either to avoid hitting the road block, or to speed around it altogether. “Hang on!” he said. The truck crashed into deep banks of snow, sending up a white wave that made it look as if he’d plowed over an FBI agent. Finicum leaped from the truck, hands raised. All around him, officers yelled, “Get on the ground!”

This is all on the internet: Cox’s cell phone captured the conversation and fear in the truck, drone footage shot from above shows the lone white Dodge Ram pickup. 

You can see the crash, see the driver’s door fly open. You can see Finicum hop out as he taunts at the police that they’re “gonna have to shoot me.” You can hear the three bullets — bang, bang, bang. Dead. 

Every time I watch the video I think I’ll hear some new intonation, some missed revelation, and yet Finicum always dies the same. Three pops. He doesn’t jump or yelp. He simply crumples: a body tense and alive one second, a heavy sack of bones dropped to the ground for eternity the next. A puppet without a hand. Gravity stronger than spirit.

As Finicum stumbled in the snow, he yelled to the officers to shoot him before reaching multiple times toward his jacket. The overhead video captures that. Later, official reports said Finicum had a loaded 9 mm handgun in his inside jacket pocket. The shooting was ruled justified.

And yet now, three years later, a movement of people across America see his death another way entirely: As an assassination. An execution. A carefully-calculated hit on a lifelong member of the LDS church and short-time associate of the notorious Bundy family. Finicum is seen as a friend to men whose favorite part of the U.S. Constitution is the line about well-armed militias. The snowy road where he died is Finicum’s own Golgotha. The FBI roadblock is referred to, in some corners of the internet, as “the killstop.”

***

Three years after Finicum’s death, inside a VFW hall on a puddled side street in Salem, Oregon, a specific brand of nostalgic, stars-and-stripes patriotism is unmistakably on display. 

A Betsy Ross flag hangs in one corner; a flag poster is tacked to the far wall. A bulletin board is bordered by stars-and-stripes rickrack. Red, white, and blue practically seep from the walls as if it were sap pushed from the very planks that hold up the roof. 

On the breast of every person who has paid $50 to be here is a round pin that reads Justice for LaVoy, set on a border of American flag ribbon.

When the day’s program begins, some 100 people push themselves up from folding chairs the best they can, placing palms over hearts. A curly-haired cowboy in tight jeans leads the room in a twangy rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

The room turns its collective body — overwhelmingly white and over 50 — toward a  yellow-fringed flag. They sing low and soft with the cowboy, like it’s church. 

As this day unfolds, it will become evident that this is, in a way, a kind of church. These people are believers in an American religion with its own martyr, its own symbols. They have their own prayers, moral teachings, and deadly sins. The name Robert LaVoy Finicum  — or just LaVoy — is a hallowed one in the collective mind of the Patriot movement.

The people have gathered here to remember the death of Finicum. They are angry, mourning. 

And the Passion of Finicum is bolstered by another belief held here: The federal government is so corrupt that it will kill its own citizens if they live too freely.

That message, to one degree or another, has always been on the wind in the West. Since the federal government sent troops in to exterminate Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest; since it declared the polygamous Mormons in Utah in rebellion; since it put a sniper on a mountaintop in rural Idaho and shot a bullet through Vicki Weaver, standing inside her cabin at Ruby Ridge in 1992, holding her infant daughter. But it’s the primary teaching of the Patriot movement — a movement that was around long before the Bundys — that will remain long after Cliven has faded into a folk herodom. 

There’s a key difference between Cliven Bundy and LaVoy Finicum. As I’ve written about the Patriot movement, I’ve come to understand that Bundy might be the godfather of a movement that has bedeviled feds across the West. But to a lot of ranchers, he’s a joke — an affront to everything so many public lands ranchers have worked for. Those people see Bundy’s ideas about the federal government as outlandish and a distraction from the real issues in rural America: jobs, water, development, health care.

But Finicum’s death resonated in the Bundys’ world and far beyond it. He believed in the same disproven, unsupported claims as the family, but the difference was that he believed in those things enough to die for them. Death seems to have softened more people to the idea that the government is the aggressor. With his death, Patriots could point to another marker on its timeline arguing that the government can and will come after people. 

But who Finicum really was before 2016, what he really believed, has never been clear to me. He’s no ancient prophet with a story lost to time. His life story can be told. The government said that Bill Keebler, after bombing the BLM building, claimed his actions weren’t for LaVoy, but for “what he stood for.” So what did he stand for?

Finicum in January 2016 at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge during the armed takeover led by the Bundys. Finicum described himself as wanting “to be like the guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square.” (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

Glenn Jones wrote something in his journal about Finicum, and Keebler said his bomb was for whatever Finicum stood for. Both craved eye-for-an-eye acts of revenge, payback: virtues the Patriot movement has always prized. The movement is fueled by a burning for comeuppance, and at its worst, that’s gotten a lot of people killed. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City — an apparent act of revenge for Ruby Ridge and Waco. 

Since Finicum’s death, the message of his martyrdom has been amplified by a very powerful voice: a woman sitting at the back of the VFW behind a table of belt buckles, T-shirts, stickers, and hats bearing Finicum’s distinctive cattle brand. Miniature American flags decorate the tablecloth. 

Dorethea Jeanette Finicum, who goes by Jeannette, is a pretty 59-year-old woman with blue eyes that sparkle and a bright smile with a perfect gap between her two front teeth. She wears a denim shirt embroidered with blue flowers, ashy-blond hair that suggests she’s from a different era, a different world where hairstylists still feather and shag. She is the Patriot movement’s Lady of Sorrows, and people here love to touch her: placing hands on her back, offering handshakes. One man holds her in a tight embrace: “Jeanette, I will never, ever forget you,” he says. Behind her, someone has displayed an Old Glory afghan for the room to see.

She’s a “chuck wagon mom” who, the moment three state-issued bullets ended her husband’s life, turned into a full-blown political activist. Today, she is indisputably one of the stars of the modern Patriot movement. 

She sells stacks of Only By Blood and Suffering, the novel her late husband wrote about an overbearing government that attacks a cowboy rancher, shooting and killing him. Sitting next to her behind that table of goods is her new husband — a plain man in a plaid shirt who scurries away at the sight of a reporter. 

Since the summer of 2018, the widow Finicum has taken a film about her husband called LaVoy: Dead Man Talking on the road — a film she and its producer, a 49-year-old Washington state man named Mark Herr, describe as a documentary made up mostly of footage from Finicum’s free YouTube channel. 

Before queuing up the first hour of the documentary, Herr takes the microphone. All eyes turn his way. “All right let’s get started,” he says. “If you oppose white supremacy, if you oppose — you’re against — white supremacy, would you please stand?” 

The room rises. 

“You don’t agree with white supremacy? OK,” Herr says. “If you’re pro–responsible government — you’re pro-government. You’re pro–responsible government, would you please clap?”

The room claps.

“Wow!” Herr exclaims. “Very interesting!” 

This goes on: Sit if you want the federal and state governments to combine (no one sits). Sit if you want the legislative, judicial, and executive branches to combine into one big entity (no one sits for that either, including producer Ryan Haas and I, who felt it was the sporting thing to do).

“Oh that’s so interesting!” he says, forcing surprise into his words.

“Guess who you’re standing with,” he says, as the room settles back onto the folding chairs. “You stood with LaVoy Finicum.”

Just before Herr hits play, a woman who organized this event reminds the room that there is security here. Anyone caught recording will be removed. A huddle of men and women in sweatshirts bearing the logo of the Idaho Three Percenters militia settles into seats. A man with a handgun on his hip — nestled in a leather holster embossed with the words “We, the People”  — leans against the wall near the only two reporters in this room, me and Haas. 

Dead Man Talking is Finicum’s story told through the eyes of the Patriot movement — so it’s mostly about his life after he went to the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014. The movie doesn’t answer questions about how Finicum came to believe what he did, or how that belief compelled him to die.

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

The film is concerned, primarily, with the man’s death. Dying, after all, is what he’s known best for; Finicum’s public life was only a blip: 21 months out of 54 years. From the time Finicum arrived, alone, at Bundy Ranch in 2014, to the time he died a leader at the Malheur occupation in 2016, only 650-some days passed. He was a martyr made at the speed of the internet.

Finicum’s videos — posted to his YouTube channel — say pretty much nothing anyone in the Patriot movement wouldn’t have heard before. He was like a low-calorie Cliven Bundy delivering a droll, monotonous soliloquy about the Constitution, the founding fathers, freedom, liberty. 

But the videos are a window into everything Finicum wanted to be seen as. In some videos, he wore a cowboy hat, black suit coat, and a Western bow tie — as if he’d just strolled out of a tintype photograph. Behind him: a woodstove, a kerosene lantern, a painting of a cowboy crouched by his horse, and one of a Mormon temple. 

In other videos, blades of grass wiggled in front of the camera, a bright blue sky behind him. “It doesn’t take too much to see that dark storm clouds are gathering,” he said, crouching in front of the camera. “We need to have our houses in order. We need to have our relationships in order. We never know how many days we have on God’s green earth here, and we need to make the best of each and every one of them.”

His channel shows him stockpiling for the end. And in the Bundys, it is as if he saw proof that the horses of the apocalypse were on the horizon.

But the Bundys were shopping a conspiracy theory that Finicum bought hook, line, and sinker when he arrived at Bundy Ranch, as if he’d been waiting to hear it. Like he’d had his finger on a light switch in a dark room for years, itching for the chance to flip it and light up his whole world. 

  II.

LaVoy Finicum and his cousin Josh Cluff both called the tiny, tiny town of Fredonia, Arizona, home. In the winter, the wide-open lands all around it are an otherworldly picture show of red cliffs dripping with melting ice against blue skies. Snowfields are untouched, stretches of pure white fleece that go all the way to the edge of the earth. 

At a lone gas station near Kanab, Utah, where Haas and I make a pit stop, a large pickup truck is surrounded by women and girls in matching prairie dresses: navy blue, plum, lime green. They’ve formed a chain, passing a truckload of boxes into a FedEx van. Their hair is pinned back in braids and waves, styles unmistakably associated with polygamous sects like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a radical offshoot of Mormonism. 

Seeing them is a reminder that polygamy is still alive and well in this area and around the rural West, despite FLDS leader Warren Jeffs being sentenced to life in prison in 2011. The towns of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, aren’t far from here — and they’ve long been FLDS strongholds. And they were, essentially, in LaVoy Finicum’s backyard.

The homes and rusted trailers of Colorado City spread south along State Route 389, petering out, then swelling again to form the town of Cane Beds. That’s where the Finicums lived. They participated in civic life, which often intersected with the FLDS church. One of Finicum’s post office boxes was in Colorado City. He attended town hall meetings there, too. Today, just off State Route 389, LaVoy Finicum Road leads the way to Cane Beds (one report attributed the naming of the road to Finicum himself, who requested the switch before he died). 

In the days after his death, prominent polygamists joined the anti-government chorus in declaring Finicum a martyr. Ross LeBaron Jr. — whose father created the polygamous sect Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times — gave a written statement to a Salt Lake Tribune reporter: “LaVoy, the Bundy’s [sic] and others are my heroes. They stood for something bigger then [sic] themselves. They are not sellouts like many are today. I thank God for all those that are standing for the greater good.”

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As I’ve reported in desert towns around the West — up north in Panaca, all through the Arizona Strip — I’ve noticed that this type of interaction between mainstream Mormons and FLDS is typical. Sam Brower, a private investigator who wrote a book called Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation Into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, says polygamists are “part of the landscape.”

Cane Beds, he says, is for “FLDS refugees” and people who often “still believe in polygamy,” but it’s also just a really cheap place to live. 

“I know after [Finicum] was killed, there were people — ex-FLDS people I know — that were saying, ‘I knew that guy, he was living down the road from us.’ They knew who he was.” 

I tell him about the women I saw near Fredonia, how it surprised me to see a group I thought was so fringe, living outside the boundaries of the law, out in the open. “There’s a degree of tolerance,” he says. “You just become more callous to having them around all the time.” I’m bothered by this. Finicum, at the end of his life, was so obsessed with freedom and liberty, and yet I never heard him rage on YouTube about the oppression of women and sexual abuse of girls happening in his literal backyard.

Finicum, who was Mormon, lived around and in FLDS strongholds for much of his life — could even have been friendly with them. In talking to Brower, I have to wonder if living so close to people with a radical lifestyle might have made Finicum more open to hearing fringe religious ideas. 

Like when the Bundys talked to him about the White Horse Prophecy — how they believed their quest against the government was prophesied by Joseph Smith himself. If Finicum had been around people who were preaching an alternate gospel all his life, might he have been more open to believing fringe ideas, instead of questioning them?

***

Robert LaVoy Finicum was born January 27, 1961 to David and Nelda Finicum, and was baptised nearly two weeks later in the Fredonia LDS ward by his uncle, elder Merlin Cluff. 

By the 1960s, Finicums and Cluffs had been around the Arizona Strip for generations. LaVoy’s grandparents Dale and Beulah Finicum homesteaded in the area, living in a dug-out house in the ground. LaVoy’s parents, too, embraced the pioneer grit that helped settle this region. When Finicum’s father, David, was a teenager, he made local headlines when he shot himself in the leg. He was riding on a horse when it brushed against a tree branch that  caught the hammer of the revolver in his saddle and shot him. He rode for 20 more miles before getting help, according to one account.

In 1986, Finicum’s parents rode in a horse-drawn covered wagon from Kanab, Utah, to St. George in a reenactment of the Honeymoon Trail — a wagon train that, in the 1870s, helped populate the Arizona Strip along with transporting goods to St. George to help in the construction of the LDS temple there. After the building was complete, the trail continued to be used, carrying couples, instead of supplies, to be married in the temple.

LaVoy, though, was raised in the far northwestern corner of Arizona Navajo territory, where his father took a job with the Arizona Department of Transportation, paving and repairing roads. He attended school in Page, Arizona.

The family home was close to Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, named for Mormon settler John D. Lee. Lee was executed for helping murder 120 pioneers traveling through a Utah canyon on their way west, an event now known as the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. It is considered one of the earliest acts of domestic terrorism. 

Lee’s Ferry, also, is the birthplace of a foundational prophet of the FLDS church, Leroy Johnson, who was also an early leader in Colorado City. 

In February 2019, I traveled to the Fredonia home of Finicum’s younger brother, Guy. He looks, and sounds, eerily like LaVoy: He’s bald, wears wire-rimmed glasses, speaks in a measured-tone. And he laughs when I say I just want to hear more about who his brother really was. “Nobody would have dirt like the little brother,” he says. He’s a licensed mental health counselor who works with substance abuse recovery programs, and his words come across with a measured delivery.

“We were kind of isolated down there. No television, only the friends in the couple houses next to us and then the Navajos that lived on the reservation around us,” he says. It took them 45 minutes to get to school. “We’d be the only white faces on the bus.” He says the family was accepted with open arms by the tribal community.

Guy says his brother, as a child, was “the Batman and Joker rolled into one character. He was my nemesis,” Guy says. “He loved to tease me. But as soon as we left the home he was my hero. … He said, ‘Hey, here’s my brother.’ He included me.”

He tells me that LaVoy always wanted to be a cowboy, but “as a little boy, he didn’t have any cattle. So that was my job. I was his livestock,” he says, letting a laugh loose again. “I got a hog tied and earmarked more than once.” I’m so used to hearing grim recollections of LaVoy’s death, it’s surprising to hear his brother laugh about a memory of him.

In high school, LaVoy turned his attention to basketball. Their father poured asphalt by the house so LaVoy could put up a hoop. 

“Every morning I’d wake up hearing that ball bouncing,” Guy says. 

After graduation, LaVoy served his LDS mission in Rapid City, South Dakota, but held onto his passion for basketball long after it was realistic for him to keep pursuing it. 

Upon returning home, he married a woman named Kelly “after a very short courtship,” according to Guy, and the pair soon had their first child. Kelly was from Oregon, and the newlyweds moved there so LaVoy could take a job managing apartments in a Portland suburb. Finicum also hoped he could walk onto a local college basketball team, but quickly realized he couldn’t spend money on tuition that could be used to feed his family.

“He regretted that decision because he was never able to get a college degree. … He had to go to school to play basketball,” Guy says. “But he felt like he had neglected his wife and his little kid.” 

Kelly and LaVoy had four children, and got a divorce in 1989. “LaVoy’s problem is, he always wanted to be a cowboy,” Guy explains.  

Finicum, from his 20s to 40s, bounced around the West. I found addresses for him in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, near Flagstaff, in St. George, Cedar City, and Provo, Utah. For the most part, he worked as a property manager — something he excelled at, Guy says. But the work never seemed to really interest him. 

“Every time he’d get successful, he’d get sick of living in the city and try to move back home. And when he’d come back home, he just could never get a foothold and find anything that he could support his family on. So they’d come back here and be dirt poor and struggle,” Guy says. Sometimes LaVoy would move to cities before his family, sleeping in his car as he looked for work, brushing his teeth and shaving with a jug of water. 

As we’re talking Guy gets up from his seat in the living room. “I want to show you something,” he says, and disappears into a nearby room. He emerges with a packet of papers in his hands, fixed together with a single strand of suede cord. 

He explains that one year when LaVoy had no money to buy Christmas gifts, he gave him these drawings instead. Guy delicately fingers through the old pages. There’s a drawing of their grandparents’ house, and below it LaVoy wrote about the old wood cookstove inside, the ticking clock on the wall, the smell of percolating coffee — a beverage choice that set them apart from their LDS relatives. 

Guy smiles, but as we look, one page strikes me as particularly haunting. It’s a sketch of the private family cemetery plot in Cane Beds, where LaVoy is now buried.

In LaVoy’s depiction of it, he sketched the place as if there was just one body buried there. In the center of the drawing is a sole gravestone and a mound of fresh dirt. Around it is an old wooden fence, two trees, then vast white nothingness.

***

In July 1990, several months after his divorce, LaVoy married a woman named Rachel, and soon they had two children together. That marriage was short-lived. (I reached out to both Kelly and Rachel on Facebook, but never heard back.)

In 1992, Jeanette Finicum was at a singles dance at her church, and she was line dancing when her future husband walked in. “I can remember being out on the floor and this gorgeous cowboy walked into the room,” she said. “He sat up on the stage and he just sat there watching all of us dance. And I thought to myself, ‘Boy, I want to dance with him.’” 

They danced — a slow song. And when Jeanette asked LaVoy to keep dancing, he said he had no rhythm. She called him chicken. “He says, ‘I’ll tell you what. If you can tell me how many kids I have, I’ll dance this next dance with you.’”

She guessed six. He nodded.

“I went, ‘Oh my gosh, you have six kids?!’ And I’m going, ‘Oh my heck, you are definitely the package deal,’” she recalled. “To make a long story short, two weeks later we were married.” (According to Finicum’s obituary, the couple married in 1994.)

The pair raised 11 children together. LaVoy and Jeanette later moved near Prescott, Arizona, where they became foster parents. Guy explained that being a foster father was perfectly suited to his brother. “He was a very alpha personality. And he just carried presence with him that nobody ever wanted to challenge,” he said. Boys who other foster parents couldn’t control “just would fall in line behind him.” Foster parenting, too, allowed him to earn enough to attain his cowboy dream. 

Records from the Bureau of Land Management show Finicum cosigned a grazing permit in 2009 with his father, but started ranching by himself in 2011 near Mount Trumbull, deep in the Arizona desert, near the Grand Canyon. In 2014, he was in good standing with the BLM. He always paid his bills on time. 

According to Guy, the Finicum boys were raised hearing stories of how the federal government was trying put ranchers out of business. Ranchers who once could run cattle near the Grand Canyon were slowly pushed out, and national monuments like the Grand Canyon-Parashant further reduced grazing areas. 

“That was kind of the culture we grew up with is these guys are here to tell us what to do and take away what we have,”said Guy.

Even when LaVoy was finally able to ranch, something he achieved in his 50th year of life, “he couldn’t make it work very well,” Guy said. Then he went to Bundy Ranch in 2014, met Cliven Bundy and saw yet one more rancher saying the government was no friend to ranchers. 

When he died, Guy said,  ”he was right in the middle of his dream.”

  III.

On June 23, 2015, Finicum wrote a letter to the BLM: 

“I am writing you this letter to express my appreciation for the time we have associated together in connection with my grazing on the Arizona Strip. It has been a pleasant association and without conflict,” he wrote. “I have the greatest respect for you and judge you to be honorable men.” 

He continued: “At this time I feel compelled to stand for [sic] up for the Constitution of our land and in doing so please do not feel that I am attacking your character.” He repeated what Cliven Bundy had been telling people at Bundy Ranch: about the Founding Fathers; about Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17; and the idea of government-owned land being a ruse. Wool pulled over the eyes of hard-working Americans. 

“This is not about cows and grass, access or resources, this is about freedom and defending our Constitution in its original intent.” 

This confused BLM employees. 

On July 13, an employee called Finicum “to discuss what’s going on.” Finicum was cordial but explained he was making a stand. 

“When asked if he was going to turn-out his Livestock + pay his grazing fees, he wouldn’t answer + resorted back to the Constitution and making a stance,” the employee wrote. 

In 2015, Finicum’s permit only allowed for him to graze cattle from October 15 until May 15. But on August 7, a BLM employee called Finicum to let him know he saw 24 of his animals in two pastures, asked him to remove them within a week, and told him he couldn’t put any more cattle out. 

Finicum replied that  he was “not asking for permission.”

Finicum published a video to YouTube that same day, claiming the BLM had drained his water tank to fight a wildfire “without so much as a hidey-ho or a please.” 

“It’s mine. It’s for my cows. I need it,” he said. “Quit stealing.” 

Three days later, the BLM received another letter from Finicum, which stated, “I am severing my association with the BLM.” He took to YouTube again, telling viewers it was time to “do something more than just talk.”  In the video, he’s crouched by the camera in fringed leather chaps with a long scarf tied around his head and a cowboy hat over it. This isn’t the same droll Finicum of the year before, in front of the woodstove and the temple paintings. He’s fired up — and he’s talking directly to the men at the BLM — the people who, two months earlier, he said he had so much respect for. “You gonna come in there like you did with my friend Cliven?” he said. “Well, I’m telling you, leave me alone. Leave me alone, leave Cliven alone.” 

Finicum in the video posted to hisYouTube channel, pAug. 14, 2015.

In the days that followed, the BLM found 32 cows, two bulls, and 24 calves under 6 months old in trespass. All had Finicum’s brands and earmarks. Nearby more were observed near a water trough, but the water was off. 

On August 24, the BLM mailed Finicum a trespass notice. On United States Department of the Interior letterhead, they told him he owed $1,458.52. 

***

Guy Finicum tells me his brother was always a crusader for the little guy. He says that’s why he went to Bundy Ranch: LaVoy saw a little rancher being bullied by the big government.

“There are individuals to this day who consider LaVoy the best friend they ever had. And often these individuals were those who had no friends — the ostracized ones, the ones who were picked on,” he says. “And LaVoy wouldn’t stand for anybody picking on anybody.” Court documents allege that on September 1, 2015, Finicum was meeting with Keebler — the Utah man who would later go on to push the button on a dummy bomb given to him by the FBI, believing it would destroy a BLM building near Finicum’s ranchlands. Finicum, according to the documents, told Keebler he was ready to plan a confrontation similar to the one at Bundy Ranch. In a meeting with Keebler, which was recorded by the FBI, Finicum said he “wants to be like the guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square” and that if he died in a confrontation with the government, “then the cause is the poor rancher’s widow.” 

According to the federal government, that meeting occurred one week after Finicum received notice that he was racking up BLM fines. About a month later Keebler brought the two FBI agents — who he thought were his fellow militiamen —to a meeting at Finicum ranch in Northern Arizona to strategize a standoff. 

By October, his trespass fines had increased to $5,791.72. 

“We as a family were quite concerned when he started drawing a line in sand with the BLM,” Guy says, “because I’m like, ‘LaVoy, I know you don’t like bullies, but you’re picking a fight with the federal government — they don’t lose! They don’t lose’ … And he’s like, ‘Well, they’re wrong.’”

The way his brother explains it, after LaVoy went to Bundy Ranch, all he could see, everywhere he looked, was the federal government “amassing more and more power.” 

“He went from a person flying under the radar to a person who became very vocal in just a matter of a year,” he says. LaVoy believed the country was on the verge of a collapse. It was the entire premise of his novel, Only By Blood and Suffering. 

“He wrote a story with an ending of a cowboy getting into a shoot-out with the federal government and gets killed, and then here that’s exactly what happened to LaVoy,” says Guy. “What do you make of that?” I ask.

He pauses. “It’s no accident.”

LaVoy didn’t do all the things his cowboy protagonist did. But “that was the person he wanted to be,” Guy says. “He wanted to be a person who had the ability to stand up and make a difference and protect what he believed in.”

None of this seems important to the people inside the Patriot movement: the man who struggled to make ends meet; the foster father devoted to helping the kids who needed direction; the rancher who failed time and time again to achieve his dreams, only to finally attain one and only see it for its imperfections. 

Finicum, the Patriot martyr, is a man obsessed with his own end, a man willing to conspire against the government, then die over and over again in an infinite internet loop. 

“It must be so painful to see the video of the shooting,” I say to Guy. 

“What’s harder is hearing the commentary on it, and people saying, ‘Well this is who he is, and this is what he was doing, and this is what happened,” Guy says. I ask for an example. He points to the way the media reported his brother was reaching for a gun in the inside pocket of his jacket. “There is no way my brother would put a gun in his pocket. OK? And how do I know that? I grew up with him,” he says. “We’ve carried guns in a lot of ways, and carrying a gun in a coat pocket doesn’t work. … When you carry it without a holster, it goes in one place. It goes in your waistband, tight against your body.”

The gun in Finicum’s inside pocket is the source of many conspiracies around Fincum’s death — ones that seemed to gain traction during the summer of 2018, as one of the FBI HRT agents, who’d been on the scene, stood trial. Agent W. Joseph Astarita was accused of firing two bullets at Finicum as he leaped out of the truck, then lying about those shots. Video footage does, in fact, show a round piercing the ceiling of the truck as he jumps out with his hands up. Astarita was acquitted of all charges, and the bullets still haven’t been accounted for. To people who saw conspiracy in Finicum’s death, the trial, some felt, gave their version of events credence: If someone was lying about a bullet, wouldn’t they be willing to lie about a gun, too? YouTubers analyzed photos from the scene. Some reason that if Finicum’s weapon was found as police photographs show it inside his jacket pocket, and he tried to reach for it, that gun would have come out upside-down.

It’s not a surprise to me that as even-keeled and even-minded as Guy Finicum seems, that he might not see the reasoning for the shooting in the video of his brother. He theorizes that LaVoy wasn’t reaching for a gun, but was trying to keep his balance in the snow after being shot with a nonlethal projectile. He doesn’t understand why the FBI set up the roadblock where they did, in a place where Finicum might not have been able to brake in time.

He and LaVoy disagreed a lot about liberty — about the best way to convert the hearts and minds of their fellow Americans. LaVoy wanted to fight the government; Guy thought getting individuals to think about liberty — and what it meant to them — was more effective. 

“He’d say, ‘No, we got to make a stand.’ And I’m saying, ‘No, I don’t.’ I don’t think we need to, I think we just need to put our hearts in the right place and become that within ourselves,” he recalls.

So it wasn’t entirely surprising for Guy to watch LaVoy go to Harney County, Oregon, to join the Bundys in the refuge occupation. But with no end in sight to the standoff, Guy was worried. So worried, in fact, that he drove to Oregon. 

“I thought things were kind of crazy, and I thought, ‘What in the world’s my brother doing?’ I went up there to talk sense into him, honestly,” he says. But at the refuge, he listened to what LaVoy and Ammon Bundy had to say. He got to know people. He thought maybe it wasn’t what the media had made it out to be.

“My whole attitude completely shifted, and I left saying to my brother, ‘Stay the course. Stick to what you know you’re doing,’” he says. Guy doesn’t think his brother committed suicide by cop. But he claims that he felt his brother was going to die in Oregon.

“People may say you can’t know things like this, but I knew when I said goodbye to him up there in Oregon he was going to die up there. I knew,” he says. “Don’t ask me how I know. I was just standing there and all of a sudden it hit me that he was going to die there. So when I said goodbye to him up there, I really thought it would be the last time I’d ever seen him.”

Guy shakes his head. Says he can’t believe he just told us that. It’s so personal. 

And I don’t know what to do with it either. Sitting there in his living room, I don’t think I understand a love that is so strong you can simply step aside and watch someone you love get what they want most, even if it will kill them, leaving behind daughters and sons, foster children, a wife, a mother, a brother. A ranch. A hard-fought dream.

It makes me wonder if LaVoy’s dream was never about being a lone horseman in the country, but was a way to further escape reality and dissolve into the fictional, apocalyptic world where he could be a hero. 

He ranched in a place so far-flung, it makes Cliven Bundy look like he is ranching in New York City. Finicum was so alone out there. He had his cows, his old cow dog. It looked perfect. And yet, even then, it wasn’t perfect enough. He believed he was entitled to something more. 

Guy Finicum, like people across this country, has a sticker donning his brother’s name on the back of his truck. I ask if he thinks of LaVoy as a martyr. 

“He is a martyr for his cause. He did far more to push the word out about what he stood for by dying than he ever would have if he was out there speaking on the circuit,” he says.

He’s seen Patriots around the country talking about LaVoy like they knew him. Like they really got him. For a while, Guy argued with people online, tried to edit his brother’s Wikipedia page to correct all the things someone somewhere was saying his brother was based off the final seconds of his life. 

People didn’t really know LaVoy, he says. “I believe the vast majority people don’t even know who LaVoy really was, or what he really was standing for.”

  IV.

Back in Oregon at the VFW, Jeanette Finicum is talking to her flock about Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. During the 41-day Malheur occupation, Wyden told a news station that “the virus was spreading” the longer the armed standoff continued. 

“What was the virus?” Finicum asked the crowd. 

“Freedom and truth,” the only person in this room wearing a red Make America Great Again hat calls back. 

But if the goal of the movie Dead Man Talking is to tell the truth and buck the media’s portrayal of LaVoy Finicum as an extremist, racist, or anti-government radical, the journey it has taken over the past six months has been circuitous. She hasn’t shown it to schools, libraries, mainstream GOP groups, or media. 

In fact, if the film’s hosts across America show anything, it’s that the Patriot movement is everywhere — not just the West. It is alive and thriving, and it adores Jeanette Finicum: the poor rancher’s widow. 

The film debuted at the Red Pill Expo in Spokane, Washington, a conference that featured speakers known for homophobia, climate change denial, and an overall obsession with how the “deep state” is apparently operating behind the scenes of the American government. 

Last September, the Colorado Front Range Militia screened the film; the next day, the Heritage Defenders — a conservative group linked to anti-Muslim legislation — got a preview.

The film made its way to Tucson, hosted by people involved with a group of gun-toting local conspiracy theorists that believed they had found evidence of an immigrant child sex trafficking ring — a wild conspiracy that drew the interest of QAnon and Pizzagate believers nationwide—which actually turned out to be just a pile of junk in the desert.

The path continues like this: Finicum brought it to Utah, hosted by the widow of the bankroller of the Sagebrush Rebellion, Bert Smith. It went to Pennsylvania, hosted by an Agenda 21 conspiracy theorist. It went to Northern Idaho, paid for by an Idaho Three Percenter who floats QAnon theories on Twitter.

Last summer, Finicum and Herr hosted one of Dead Man Talking’s very first showings at a separatist religious community called Marble Community Fellowship in northeastern Washington. She appeared onstage next to Washington state representative Matt Shea. 

In Salem, the crowd doesn’t hear about how, eight months after LaVoy’s death, Jeanette applied for a new grazing permit with the Bureau of Land Management, or how she met with BLM employees in November 2017 to pay all the fees they owed. 

“The meeting went well” in “what could have been an awkward situation,” wrote one of the federal employees in an email afterward. 

It was as if when LaVoy died, his own personal stand against the government died with him. He became an avatar for whatever anyone wanted him to be.

Jeanette, at the microphone at the VFW, talks about how police shot her husband. “That’s murder, people,” she says. 

“That’s right,” someone in the audience calls back. 

“No American citizen deserves that,” she says. “We deserve our right to due process. We deserve our right to a trial. We deserve to have charges. We deserve to be served with a warrant. We deserve that process. Do we not?”

“You hear my husband saying, ‘We’re going to go see the sheriff, you can arrest me there. Follow me and you can arrest me there,’” she recalls. “He was not fleeing law enforcement when he left that first stop. He left to go to law enforcement whom he trusted. That’s what he was doing.” 

The room nods. 

They believe Finicum — after fighting with the government, after occupying a federal property for weeks — was entitled to choose which agency arrested him. To do what he pleased. 

“He had done nothing wrong,” she says.

Before the day is done, the Old Glory afghan that’s been sitting behind Finicum’s table is auctioned off from the stage. 

The singing cowboy leads the room again; this time he’s an auctioneer. Quickly, there’s a bidding war over the blanket. Two hundred. Three hundred. Seven hundred. Finally a couple wins the afghan. They pay $1,500. That money will go to Jeanette. Behind her merchandise table, Jeanette pops up from her seat one more time as people file downstairs for a spaghetti dinner. Someone is making an offering. 

She hands a man a copy of Only By Blood and Suffering. As if collecting tithes, she accepts his offer. He gives her $500 for the book. 

***

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in theWashington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

[wavenetinfo]

Posted June 02, 2017 16:56:13

Photo: A child’s arm being measured with a band that is used to detect child malnutrition. (Supplied: Francis Muana, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)

Aid agencies estimate around 20 million people are on the verge of famine as conflict and natural disasters wreak havoc on parts of the Middle East and north Africa.

But the battle against global food security isn’t just restricted to this region.

Welfare organisations believe more than 100 million people in 48 countries lack reliable access to food each day.

From inter-clan disputes in South Sudan, to civil wars between the Syrian government and rebels to an immigration crackdown in the United States, the factors contributing to food insecurity are complex.

However, one things all aid agencies agree on is that enhancing agriculture is at the heart of the solution.

Photo: Cattle at the White Nile river in Terekeka, South Sudan. (Supplied: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)

Farmers killed as clans raid cattle

Audio: Brett Worthington reports on the role of agriculture in addressing global food security and combatting hunger

(ABC News)

Like fluffy dark clouds sitting on the ground, smoke billows from the Marial Vek cattle camp in central South Sudan.

But it’s not wood that’s burning, it’s cattle dung.

“So you see people are in the dust,” said Peter Dengmalou, a 25-year-old farmer, or ‘cattle keeper’ as he calls himself.

“It is because of other diseases [and] flies. They want to [send] these things away.”

Mr Dengmalou wishes his biggest nuisance was keeping flies and diseases away from his cattle.

Instead, he’s among the many farmers in a battle just to keep their livestock.

“Some people come and raid your cattle – they steal,” he said.

In recent weeks, aid agencies have reported dozens of people being killed in a gun battle near the edge of Rumbek, a town that Mr Dengmalou grazes his cattle near.

In this region, inter-clan fighting and violent cattle raiding is among the biggest issues cattle keepers face.

It’s a battle fellow cattle keeper, 20-year-old Martha Abel Maker, knows all too well.

“If they know you are from that clan, or from that tribe, they come and shoot you,” she said.

“People fear to cultivate [crops] because they want to protect their lives.

“They will kill you. Even if they find you and you’re not in the field and they find you outside, they will kill you later.”

Photo: A cattle keeper in South Sudan stands with his animals at a cattle camp. (Supplied: Tanya Birkbeck)

Aid agencies report tens of thousands of people have been killed, and about 3.5 million people displaced amid the South Sudanese civil war that has raged for four years.

Famine was first declared in parts of the country in February this year, with crop production hitting its lowest levels since the conflict started.

Countries most at risk of famine

Yemen

Somalia

South Sudan

Nigeria

Source: United Nations FAO

The UN estimates almost 5 million people, or about 40 per cent of the country’s population, face unprecedented levels of food insecurity.

Dominique Burgeon, the director of emergencies for the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (UN FAO), said there were 48 countries with 108 million people who they classify as being in ‘severe-acute food insecurity’.

“So it means that these people do not only have to cut on the quantity and the quality of the meals they take but they have to deplete their source of livelihood to have access to this meagre food,” he said.

“This is a situation of very serious concern globally but within that global picture I would say that we are especially concerned by the situation in Yemen, in Somalia, South Sudan and north eastern Nigeria.

“Basically we have about 20 million plus people on the verge of famine in these countries.”

Photo: Farmers participating in a United Nations FAO program harvest peanuts at a community garden in Dolnoon, Aweil South, South Sudan. (Supplied: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)

The UN FAO works alongside other aid agencies throughout the hardest-hit countries.

They supply aid and emergency relief for people in-need. The organisation also works with farmers to help them access crop seeds, and the technology and resources needed to make them grow.

Mr Burgeon has recently returned from a trip to South Sudan and Ethiopia.

A La Nina weather pattern has led to a severe drought that has lingered since late last year, devastating the livestock sector.

Very little to no rain since last October has slashed crop production, leaving livestock without food.

“I was shocked when I was there by a lady I met with,” Mr Burgeon said.

“She had 200 heads of sheep and goats and due to the drought and lack of pasture and lack of access to feed, 190 of [her] sheep and goat had died.

“In despair she therefore decided to move with her 10 kids to a place where she could get a chance to have access to humanitarian assistance.”

Lives and livelihoods lost amid six years of civil war in Syria

World Vision estimates almost 400,000 people have died since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011.

A further 11 million have been displaced, including about 5 million that have fled to other countries as refugees.

Counting the cost of war in Syria

All agriculture US$16 billion Crops US$7.2 billion Livestock US$5.5 billion Fisheries US$80 million

Source: United Nations FAO

The United Nations, in its Counting the Cost report, assessed six years of crisis in Syria.

It found the cost to the agriculture sector through damage and lost production was more than $21 billion (US$16 billion), with crop and livestock sectors the hardest hit.

It estimated it would cost more than $23 billion (US$17 billion) to rebuild the agricultural sector within three years.

Video: Syrian crisis and the impact of climate change

(The World)

The UN FAO expects 7 million Syrians will face food insecurity, with another 2 million at risk this year.

“It’s not like we can say Syria has always been a cot case, it hasn’t,” Dr Denis Blight said.

Dr Blight has more than 30 years of experience working with aid projects and is the chief executive of the Crawford Fund, an Australian non government organisation that seeks to raise awareness about food security and the role research can play in combatting it.

“That conflict has had terrible consequences on the ability of the Syrians to feed themselves,” Dr Blight said.

Even if people don’t have an emotional response, aid agencies say there’s a pragmatic reason why people in developed nations should care.

“We all should care because these crisis’ are of human dimensions of great proportions impacting on our fellow humankind,” Dr Blight said.

“But we should also care because of the consequences of those crisis’, as is evident by conflict and insecurity and [the] massive immigration impact [it has] on all of us to greater or lesser extents.”

Immigration crackdown threatening US farm workforces

Amid accusations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on his citizens, United States President Donald Trump announced missile attacks on the country’s air bases.

Back home, Mr Trump was pursuing an immigration crackdown, that would limit new arrivals of people fleeing their countries.

The crackdown included a spike in arrests of illegal immigrants.

In May, official figures from US Immigration and Custom Enforcement showed there had been an almost 40 per cent jump in arrests compared to the same time a year ago.

Mr Trump and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue have reportedly told farm lobby groups behind closed doors that the immigration raids wouldn’t target their sector.

However, Kristi Boswell from the American Farm Bureau said that had done little to ease farmers’ concerns.

“There’s a lot of anxiety all across the country within our workforce,” she said.

“[They are] unsure about where they will sit, if they’re going to be part of a detainment action or enforcement action. They are concerned.

“Our farmers in turn are concerned because they rely on these workers.

“We have never shied away from the conversation that over half of our workforce is gaining employment by using fraudulent documents.”

Last year, Californian farmers reported up to a quarter of some crops were dying in fields unharvested because farmers couldn’t recruit enough workers.

Famers say US needs an overhaul of its visa programs to allow them access to a stable workforce.

Californian Democratic senators Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein last month proposed legislative reforms to shield farmworkers illegally in the country from deportation and create a path to citizenship.

Democratic senators from Colorado, Vermont and Hawaii have backed the measures but it appears unlikely to gain any traction with Republicans.

It’s this stalemate that infuriates the American Farm Bureau – it wants immediate action so farmers can secure a stable workforce.

“The time is now. It really is a crisis situation for our farmers and ranchers,” Ms Boswell said.

Photo: A cattle keeper in South Sudan stands with his animals at a cattle camp. (Supplied: Tanya Birkbeck)

For US farmers, their issues require a political fix. For farmers in northern Africa and the Middle East, it’ll need a more complicated solution.

Aid agencies hope supporting farmers who remain within conflict zones will offer a solution.

Despite the civil war, agriculture remains one of the major drivers of the Syrian economy, producing around a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product.

Keeping farmers on their land despite turmoil and conflict lies at the heart of a global bid to eliminate global hunger by 2030.

While it’s ambitious, Mr Burgeon of the UN FAO remains hopeful it can be achieved.

He holds onto the fact that while Syria used to produce up to 5 million tonnes of cereal crops, it still produces around 1.5 million tonnes.

“You can see the glass as half full or half empty,” he said.

“If you see it half full you say ‘well after more than five years of conflict it is still producing 1.5 million tonnes of cereals’.

“It is clear that the agricultural sector, within a country that is devastated with conflict, the agricultural sector is therefore still there.

“People still farm, people still depend on agriculture.”

Photo: Young boys head home after fishing for a day in the swamps of Nyal, South Sudan. (Supplied: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)

Helping small-scale farmers prepare for natural disasters

There’s only so much aid agencies can do to support farmers in war-torn countries.

Video: Ensuring regional food security

(The World)

The target of the global effort to eradicate hunger is on the 2.5 billion small-scale farmers, who regularly battle crippling natural disasters like droughts and floods.

The UN says it’s these farmers who need a greater capacity to absorb climate and conflict shocks because without that, it concedes eliminating global hunger by 2030 is unlikely.

In Australia, grain growers continue to overcome droughts.

The skills they have developed to maintain their yields is what Dr Blight says they can teach the world.

“We want to encourage economic growth,” Dr Blight said.

“Economic growth is one of the factors that, overall, has a negative impact on numbers of refugees flowing.

“The countries with strong economic growth tend to have fewer refugees out migrating.

“What is true is that economic growth enhances the prospects of countries importing goods and services from abroad.

“Australia, because we have high-quality products and services to offer, will be able to take advantage of that.”

With a growing population, Dr Blight says maintaining current levels of agricultural production won’t be enough to feed everyone.

He remains adamant that agricultural research is the crucial element to prevent conditions deteriorating.

“Unless we maintain this never-ending increase in agricultural productivity of 1 or 2 or 3 per cent a year, we’re going to face serious consequences globally.”

Photo: A boy with a baby goat stands among a herd of cattle at a cattle camp in South Sudan. (Supplied: Tanya Birkbeck)

Young farmers shaping South Sudan’s future

Martha Abel Maker and Peter Dengmalou have travelled from their homes to be in Juba.

They’ve come to South Sudan’s capital for training with the UN FAO, learning skills to take back to their villages.

They both agree their future relies on education and an end to conflict.

“If the fighting is not stopped, there [will be] no change,” Ms Abel Maker said.

“If fighting is stopped, in this rainy season, we will cultivate crops because [what] stops us from cultivating is the fighting.”

“The gunmen should make disarmament,” Mr Dengmalou adds.

“Just collect the guns and tell the people to go to school [and] to farm in the field.”

Topics:

grain,

agricultural-crops,

livestock,

beef-cattle,

poverty,

famine,

south-sudan,

melbourne-3000,

canberra-2600,

united-states,

syrian-arab-republic

2 June 2017 | 6:56 am

Brett Worthington

Source : ABC News

>>>Click Here To View Original Press Release>>>

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); June 02, 2017 at 01:26PM

[top5highschoolwritingservic-blog]

Loneliness in “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck essay

Essay military issue:\n\nThe interpretationof the theme of l championliness in Of Mice and manpower by fanny Steinbeck.\n\nEssay Questions:\n\n wherefore does rear overthrow Steinbecks Of Mice and Men makes the contri besidesor engage it on fixed feelings?\n\nWhy is basin Steinbecks tonic Of Mice and Men is considered to be unmatched of the most prominent deeds of the cadence of the dandy stamp?\n\nHow does Lennies death potpourri George?\n\nThesis Statement:\n\nThis is a concur round the closing curtain forecast that two bulk birth, the h anile they study typeset sever eachy twenty-four hours of their life in, the unavoidableness that leads to desperation and l atomic number 53liness.\n\n \n b beness in Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck essay\n\n \n\nThe scoop laid schemes o mice and men\n\n crew aft agley [often go wrong]\n\nAnd hold us nought incisively now grief and pain\n\nFor promised comfort!\n\nRobert Burns\n\n1.Introduction\n\nAnalyzing John Steinbecks Of Mice and Men makes the reader experience fixed feelings. As John Steinbeck himself is kn feature to be an bizarre writer the disk Of Mice and Men completely confirms this belief. John Steinbecks overbold Of Mice and Men is maven of the most prominent plant of the time of the coarse Depression, pen in 1937. This myth reveals the reader the life of race of that period, their extensive desire to become happy and the l adeptliness they feel in their sum of moneys. It shows the fantasy of two people that is finished, and as they have vigor except this stargaze laterwards they lose it e reallything is senseless. Destiny forces them to pinch tete-a-tete with themselves and their whole macrocosm is solitude, because no one is able to help each of them after what happened. This bind consisting of one hundred pages is the symbolic explanation of the dream that runs away after having been torn into appends and Lenny Small was the one to destroy this dre am. This is a book about the last hope that two people have, the hope they have perplex each day of their life in, the hope that leads to desperation and loneliness.\n\n2.Dreaming and loneliness erstwhile again\n\nLennie Small, a huge scarcely mentally retarded childly man and George Milton, an average guy, ar friends that have a familiar dream they want to achieve. They feat to find it in the paste of Soledad.Occasionally, Soledad means loneliness in Spanish and this describes the place meliorate than any other description. exactly George and Lennie work hard and be always together, trying to clear up money in cast to achieve their dream to taint a cattle farm of their own in Soledad. Before they reckon the ranch they make a stop at a creek. George says that if Lennie ever gets into any care he should run and traverse in the creek until George comes to fork over him. Everything these guys do in the ranch in the Salinas Valley is they separate out to survive a nd to get the least(prenominal) that is possible to get. They face rejection from the ranchers at first, and then it gets a slight better, except s work on Lennie faces the iniquity from Curly the ranch proprietors son. As Lennie is very strong he once starts touching Curly married womans hair and go throughs her. He has to escape to the creek. George and Lennies dream is ruined and George comes and kills Lennie at the creek, as he understands that there is no hope for them anymore.What happens to George after that? Something that would have happened to any man, when he understands that there is no hope left. Him and Lennie running(a) hard every day in order to fetch their dream was the last hazard to LIVE, and non to exist. Desperation languishand loneliness again.\n\n \n\n3. The message of the book\n\nThe book is very tragic. Steinbeck focuses oft on the ranchers in his novel showing the anger they had for George and Lennie, and the closing off they experienced becaus e of that. They were aliens there, and though till Lennies death they appease together, they are still lonesome(a) and have zippo to life them. Nevertheless it is not the ranchers, however Lennies strength that he cannot hold leads to the consequences of a ruined dream for both of the man.\n\nA big message delivered by dint of the case of glass over and the old dog becomes the key to novel resolution. As soon as the dog got old and became delusive the rancher suggests glass over to separatrix the dog. Candy does it, but later thinks that he should have shot himself, too. Candy shot the dog to define it out of the misery it was facing. The a wish thing George did to Lennie. Georges barely reason for living was the exertion of his dream to have a ranch. Lennie destroys his dream and George realizes that he has to shot him in order to put him out of misery he decides to live out this loneliness and desperation on his own. The book shows the most important the incapabil ity of people to escape their point and thoughts, as people during the Great Depression had nothing but hope and if the hope was gone everything was gone. It became more than lonelinessit was a fatality.\n\nIt is not just a story of Lennie and George and their loneliness in the world but likewise a story about all the people during Great Depression and their lonesome hopes that never came to life and still they got a little difference: Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They preceptort belong no place...With us it aint like that. We got a future. We got person to talk to that gives a damned about us[Steinbeck 13-14]. Steinbeck does not get into a superior general analysis of the characters but he reveals them and their attitudes through and through little things. And this creates a perfect base for grounds that Lennie was just the way he was and there was nothing to do about it. He was just a man, the same with Geor ge. And the law is that he believed that they are opposite: We are contrasting. Tell it how it is, George[Steinbeck, 34]. They were different, lonely but different because they had Georges dream.\n\nLoneliness was a portentous load in the heart of all these people of that time including Lennie and George. Steinbeck reveals the theme of loneliness through Georges words: I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That aint no good. They dont have no fun. After a long time they get mean. They get wantin to fight all the time[Steinbeck, 45]. That is what loneliness make with people back then. Lennie was the only creature that made George different from others and his tragedy is that he has to kill this creature with his own hands. The end of everything in the book is Georges silent soul torments of losing a dream and being lonely again.\n\n4. Conclusion\n\nLennies and Georges dream to have a piece of land was like a dream to be happy, but as Crooks said: nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. Its just in their head. Theyre all the time talkin about it, but its jus in their head [Steinbeck, 81]. What George and Lennie did was they were staying together sharing their loneliness and alienation.If you want to get a complete essay, order it on our website: Custom essay writing service. Free essay/order revisions. Essays of any complexity! Courseworks, term papers, research papers. 100% confidential!Homework live help. Custom Essay Order is available 24/7!

[newstfionline]

Burying Their Cattle, Ranchers Call Wildfires ‘Our Hurricane Katrina’

By Jack Healy, NY Times, March 20, 2017

ASHLAND, Kan.--Death comes with raising cattle: coyotes, blizzards and the inevitable trip to the slaughterhouse and dinner plate. But after 30 years of ranching, Mark and Mary Kaltenbach were not ready for what met them after a wildfire charred their land and more than one million acres of rain-starved range this month.

Dozens of their Angus cows lay dead on the blackened ground, hooves jutting in the air. Others staggered around like broken toys, unable to see or breathe, their black fur and dark eyes burned, plastic identification tags melted to their ears. Young calves lay dying.

Ranching families across this countryside are now facing an existential threat to a way of life that has sustained them since homesteading days: years of cleanup and crippling losses after wind-driven wildfires across Kansas, Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle killed seven people and devoured homes, miles of fences and as much as 80 percent of some families’ cattle herds.

But for many, the first job after the fire passed was loading a rifle.

“We did what had to be done,” Mr. Kaltenbach, 69, said. “They’re gentle. They know us. We know them. You just thought, ‘Wow, I am sorry.’”

“You think you’re done,” he said, “and the next day you got to go shoot more.”

For decades and generations, ranching has defined people’s days. Mr. Kaltenbach would wake up at 4:30 a.m. without an alarm clock. Another family down the road, the Wilsons, checked on the cows between jobs at the hospital and the telephone company. The Wilsons invited their whole family over each spring to round up the calves, vaccinate and tag them.

“It’s our life,” Mrs. Kaltenbach, 57, said. “We lost our routine.”

Beyond the toll of the fire, a frustration also crops up in conversation after conversation. Ranchers said they felt overlooked amid the tumult in Washington, and were underwhelmed by the response of a new president who had won their support in part by promising to champion America’s “forgotten men and women.”

“This is the country that elected Donald Trump,” said Garth Gardiner, driving a pickup across the 48,000-acre Angus beef ranch he runs with his two brothers. They lost about 500 cows in the fires. “I think he’d be doing himself a favor to come out and visit us.”

Mr. Gardiner voted for Mr. Trump, and said he just wanted to hear a presidential mention of the fires amid Mr. Trump’s tweets about the rapper Snoop Dogg, the East Coast blizzard and the rudeness of the press corps.

“Two sentences would go a long way,” Mr. Gardiner said.

Weeks without snow or rain and late-winter temperatures scraping the 80 degrees are threatening to create even more blazes in Western states grappling with the growing fire dangers posed by climate change. On Sunday, about 1,000 homes in Boulder, Colo., were evacuated by a wildfire in the dry hills that was burning out of control across 100 acres.

The Kansas fires--the largest in state history--burned more than 400,000 acres here in Clark County alone. Ten days later, Mr. Gardiner was still burying cows on his family’s ranch. One by one, an orange loader scooped them off the bare sandy soil and trundled them to a pit being dug by a backhoe.

Ranchers said the cattle they had lost were worth more than the $2,000 they could fetch at an auction. Each cow was an engine that drove their farms and finances, giving birth to new calves every year or producing embryos through artificial insemination that could be implanted into other cows.

Emergency programs run by the federal Department of Agriculture--which is facing 21 percent cuts under Mr. Trump’s budget proposal--will help ranchers, up to a point. One provides up to $200,000 per rancher for replacing burned fences. Another offers up to $125,000 for livestock losses.

At about $10,000 per mile, Mr. Gardiner said, new fencing alone may cost his ranch about $2 million. His total losses could reach $5 million to $10 million. Like many ranchers out here, he had insurance on his home and equipment, but said insuring so many livestock and so much fence was impossibly expensive.

“We’re not asking for freebies here,” he said. “We’re going to work our tails off to get this thing rebuilt. We’re going to get the blisters on our hands and roll up our sleeves and do the labor.”

He added, “We could use a little help.”

Aaron Sawyers, an agriculture extension agent with Kansas State University, got so upset with the delays in and strings attached to getting relief, and what he called a lackluster response from Washington, that he wrote a Facebook post on Tuesday urging friends to barrage lawmakers to loosen up government money for ranchers to replace fences and rebuild their devastated herds.

“This is our Hurricane Katrina,” Mr. Sawyers said. The political response to the fires convinced him that Washington, even with an administration supported by 83 percent of Clark County voters in the election, was still “out of touch and didn’t care about us.”

“None of them are worth a damn, Republicans or Democrats,” he said.

The governors of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas have declared emergencies, and members of Congress from the affected states have toured the damaged area and promised help. In Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback’s office said that officials were adding up losses to request a presidential disaster declaration.

But help did arrive. Thousands of donated hay bales, to feed surviving animals bereft of their grasslands, have been rolling into town on the backs of tractor-trailers. Firefighters arrived from Colorado to help contain and extinguish the blaze. Farming and ranching groups from across the Great Plains sent skeins of fence wire and new metal posts to drive three feet into the soil. Members of 4-H clubs and National FFA Organization chapters drove down to help with the cleanup, sleeping in guest bedrooms and on living-room floors around the towns of Ashland, Meade and Protection.

“We don’t like to receive,” said Kendal Kay, the mayor of Ashland and president of a community bank here. “It’s a time we’re realizing we need to receive.”

Mary Kaltenbach, 57, said she was not a hugger, but had been embracing neighbors for much of the past week. “You just do it,” she said.

In all, the Kaltenbachs lost 130 cows and about 70 calves. About a dozen of their heifers--younger females--are now penned in just behind their house, which was spared, near the scorched foundations of two barns that did burn. One evening, the couple grabbed a bucket of feed pellets to check on them. Most romped to eat, but two smaller black cows hung back behind a gate, hobbling forward.

“Feet hurt,” Mrs. Kaltenbach said grimly of one. “She’s not going to work.”

About seven miles east, the house that Matt Wilson’s forebears built when they homesteaded in 1884 had withstood financial panics, droughts, the Dust Bowl and other fires, but it burned to ashes in the wildfires. His family also lost eight cows and calves, part of a small herd of about 100 that the family raises in addition to holding full-time jobs.

The newer house where the Wilsons and their six children lived also was destroyed. But they managed to save 1890s photographs of Mr. Wilson’s great-grandfather: standing in front of the original house, atop a horse on an empty plain, at a county rodeo. They are planning to rebuild and keep ranching.

By way of explanation, Mr. Wilson pointed to the photos: “They didn’t start with much.”

[lodelss]

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Three: The Widow’s Tale

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (7,518 words)

Part 3 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. 

I.

I have seen LaVoy Finicum die and die and die. 

Log onto YouTube and watch Finicum’s end, spliced, paused, and dissected by people who never knew him but who, too, have again and again watched it happen.

When Finicum was killed, law enforcement officers were acting on an opportunity to arrest the leaders of the weeks-long Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in Oregon. Finicum was one of just a few actual ranchers who joined the Bundys’ occupation. Ranching was Finicum’s dream — something he’d only started doing once he turned 50. He didn’t grow up a rancher, but he intended to die one.

In the final seconds of his life — on the very last day of his 54th year — Finicum proved to be even more of a true believer in the purpose of the occupation than the Bundys themselves. 

That frigid late January day, an informant tipped the feds off that cars carrying the Bundys and other leaders would be traveling to Grant County, Oregon for a meeting with citizens and the area’s sheriff, who was allegedly sympathetic to the cause. 

But the group never got to the meeting. Before they could arrive, members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and Oregon State Police SWAT team stopped the cars on a remote bend. Ammon Bundy followed law enforcement orders to get out of the car with his hands up, kneel on the ground, and crawl towards the officers. But Finicum refused to surrender.

Suddenly Finicum, who some viewed as a grandfatherly voice of reason back at the refuge, was yelling at the officers from his driver’s seat. He told them: “Back down or you kill me now.”

“Boys, you better realize we got people on the way,” Finicum yelled. “You want a bloodbath? It’s gonna be on your hands.”

In his back seat, the other occupants of the car — Ryan Bundy, a grandmother named Shawna Cox, and 18-year-old gospel singer Victoria Sharp — frantically tried to call people back at the refuge, but realized they’d been pulled over in an area with no cell service.

“I’m going to be laying down here on the ground with my blood on the street, or I’m going to see the sheriff,” Finicum yelled out the window. Finicum told the occupants of the car he would leave, try to get help. “You ready?” he asked. 

“Well, where’s those guns?” Ryan Bundy responded, telling the other passengers to duck down. 

“Gun it!” Cox said. “Gun it!” 

Finicum slammed the accelerator. Driving at over 70 miles per hour, careening around a bend, the sound of bullets pecked at his truck. Up ahead, the FBI and Oregon State Police had blocked the road. 

Finicum jerked the wheel — either to avoid hitting the road block, or to speed around it altogether. “Hang on!” he said. The truck crashed into deep banks of snow, sending up a white wave that made it look as if he’d plowed over an FBI agent. Finicum leaped from the truck, hands raised. All around him, officers yelled, “Get on the ground!”

This is all on the internet: Cox’s cell phone captured the conversation and fear in the truck, drone footage shot from above shows the lone white Dodge Ram pickup. 

You can see the crash, see the driver’s door fly open. You can see Finicum hop out as he taunts at the police that they’re “gonna have to shoot me.” You can hear the three bullets — bang, bang, bang. Dead. 

Every time I watch the video I think I’ll hear some new intonation, some missed revelation, and yet Finicum always dies the same. Three pops. He doesn’t jump or yelp. He simply crumples: a body tense and alive one second, a heavy sack of bones dropped to the ground for eternity the next. A puppet without a hand. Gravity stronger than spirit.

As Finicum stumbled in the snow, he yelled to the officers to shoot him before reaching multiple times toward his jacket. The overhead video captures that. Later, official reports said Finicum had a loaded 9 mm handgun in his inside jacket pocket. The shooting was ruled justified.

And yet now, three years later, a movement of people across America see his death another way entirely: As an assassination. An execution. A carefully-calculated hit on a lifelong member of the LDS church and short-time associate of the notorious Bundy family. Finicum is seen as a friend to men whose favorite part of the U.S. Constitution is the line about well-armed militias. The snowy road where he died is Finicum’s own Golgotha. The FBI roadblock is referred to, in some corners of the internet, as “the killstop.”

***

Three years after Finicum’s death, inside a VFW hall on a puddled side street in Salem, Oregon, a specific brand of nostalgic, stars-and-stripes patriotism is unmistakably on display. 

A Betsy Ross flag hangs in one corner; a flag poster is tacked to the far wall. A bulletin board is bordered by stars-and-stripes rickrack. Red, white, and blue practically seep from the walls as if it were sap pushed from the very planks that hold up the roof. 

On the breast of every person who has paid $50 to be here is a round pin that reads Justice for LaVoy, set on a border of American flag ribbon.

When the day’s program begins, some 100 people push themselves up from folding chairs the best they can, placing palms over hearts. A curly-haired cowboy in tight jeans leads the room in a twangy rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

The room turns its collective body — overwhelmingly white and over 50 — toward a  yellow-fringed flag. They sing low and soft with the cowboy, like it’s church. 

As this day unfolds, it will become evident that this is, in a way, a kind of church. These people are believers in an American religion with its own martyr, its own symbols. They have their own prayers, moral teachings, and deadly sins. The name Robert LaVoy Finicum  — or just LaVoy — is a hallowed one in the collective mind of the Patriot movement.

The people have gathered here to remember the death of Finicum. They are angry, mourning. 

And the Passion of Finicum is bolstered by another belief held here: The federal government is so corrupt that it will kill its own citizens if they live too freely.

That message, to one degree or another, has always been on the wind in the West. Since the federal government sent troops in to exterminate Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest; since it declared the polygamous Mormons in Utah in rebellion; since it put a sniper on a mountaintop in rural Idaho and shot a bullet through Vicki Weaver, standing inside her cabin at Ruby Ridge in 1992, holding her infant daughter. But it’s the primary teaching of the Patriot movement — a movement that was around long before the Bundys — that will remain long after Cliven has faded into a folk herodom. 

There’s a key difference between Cliven Bundy and LaVoy Finicum. As I’ve written about the Patriot movement, I’ve come to understand that Bundy might be the godfather of a movement that has bedeviled feds across the West. But to a lot of ranchers, he’s a joke — an affront to everything so many public lands ranchers have worked for. Those people see Bundy’s ideas about the federal government as outlandish and a distraction from the real issues in rural America: jobs, water, development, health care.

But Finicum’s death resonated in the Bundys’ world and far beyond it. He believed in the same disproven, unsupported claims as the family, but the difference was that he believed in those things enough to die for them. Death seems to have softened more people to the idea that the government is the aggressor. With his death, Patriots could point to another marker on its timeline arguing that the government can and will come after people. 

But who Finicum really was before 2016, what he really believed, has never been clear to me. He’s no ancient prophet with a story lost to time. His life story can be told. The government said that Bill Keebler, after bombing the BLM building, claimed his actions weren’t for LaVoy, but for “what he stood for.” So what did he stand for?

Finicum in January 2016 at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge during the armed takeover led by the Bundys. Finicum described himself as wanting “to be like the guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square.” (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

Glenn Jones wrote something in his journal about Finicum, and Keebler said his bomb was for whatever Finicum stood for. Both craved eye-for-an-eye acts of revenge, payback: virtues the Patriot movement has always prized. The movement is fueled by a burning for comeuppance, and at its worst, that’s gotten a lot of people killed. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City — an apparent act of revenge for Ruby Ridge and Waco. 

Since Finicum’s death, the message of his martyrdom has been amplified by a very powerful voice: a woman sitting at the back of the VFW behind a table of belt buckles, T-shirts, stickers, and hats bearing Finicum’s distinctive cattle brand. Miniature American flags decorate the tablecloth. 

Dorethea Jeanette Finicum, who goes by Jeannette, is a pretty 59-year-old woman with blue eyes that sparkle and a bright smile with a perfect gap between her two front teeth. She wears a denim shirt embroidered with blue flowers, ashy-blond hair that suggests she’s from a different era, a different world where hairstylists still feather and shag. She is the Patriot movement’s Lady of Sorrows, and people here love to touch her: placing hands on her back, offering handshakes. One man holds her in a tight embrace: “Jeanette, I will never, ever forget you,” he says. Behind her, someone has displayed an Old Glory afghan for the room to see.

She’s a “chuck wagon mom” who, the moment three state-issued bullets ended her husband’s life, turned into a full-blown political activist. Today, she is indisputably one of the stars of the modern Patriot movement. 

She sells stacks of Only By Blood and Suffering, the novel her late husband wrote about an overbearing government that attacks a cowboy rancher, shooting and killing him. Sitting next to her behind that table of goods is her new husband — a plain man in a plaid shirt who scurries away at the sight of a reporter. 

Since the summer of 2018, the widow Finicum has taken a film about her husband called LaVoy: Dead Man Talking on the road — a film she and its producer, a 49-year-old Washington state man named Mark Herr, describe as a documentary made up mostly of footage from Finicum’s free YouTube channel. 

Before queuing up the first hour of the documentary, Herr takes the microphone. All eyes turn his way. “All right let’s get started,” he says. “If you oppose white supremacy, if you oppose — you’re against — white supremacy, would you please stand?” 

The room rises. 

“You don’t agree with white supremacy? OK,” Herr says. “If you’re pro–responsible government — you’re pro-government. You’re pro–responsible government, would you please clap?”

The room claps.

“Wow!” Herr exclaims. “Very interesting!” 

This goes on: Sit if you want the federal and state governments to combine (no one sits). Sit if you want the legislative, judicial, and executive branches to combine into one big entity (no one sits for that either, including producer Ryan Haas and I, who felt it was the sporting thing to do).

“Oh that’s so interesting!” he says, forcing surprise into his words.

“Guess who you’re standing with,” he says, as the room settles back onto the folding chairs. “You stood with LaVoy Finicum.”

Just before Herr hits play, a woman who organized this event reminds the room that there is security here. Anyone caught recording will be removed. A huddle of men and women in sweatshirts bearing the logo of the Idaho Three Percenters militia settles into seats. A man with a handgun on his hip — nestled in a leather holster embossed with the words “We, the People”  — leans against the wall near the only two reporters in this room, me and Haas. 

Dead Man Talking is Finicum’s story told through the eyes of the Patriot movement — so it’s mostly about his life after he went to the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014. The movie doesn’t answer questions about how Finicum came to believe what he did, or how that belief compelled him to die.

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

The film is concerned, primarily, with the man’s death. Dying, after all, is what he’s known best for; Finicum’s public life was only a blip: 21 months out of 54 years. From the time Finicum arrived, alone, at Bundy Ranch in 2014, to the time he died a leader at the Malheur occupation in 2016, only 650-some days passed. He was a martyr made at the speed of the internet.

Finicum’s videos — posted to his YouTube channel — say pretty much nothing anyone in the Patriot movement wouldn’t have heard before. He was like a low-calorie Cliven Bundy delivering a droll, monotonous soliloquy about the Constitution, the founding fathers, freedom, liberty. 

But the videos are a window into everything Finicum wanted to be seen as. In some videos, he wore a cowboy hat, black suit coat, and a Western bow tie — as if he’d just strolled out of a tintype photograph. Behind him: a woodstove, a kerosene lantern, a painting of a cowboy crouched by his horse, and one of a Mormon temple. 

In other videos, blades of grass wiggled in front of the camera, a bright blue sky behind him. “It doesn’t take too much to see that dark storm clouds are gathering,” he said, crouching in front of the camera. “We need to have our houses in order. We need to have our relationships in order. We never know how many days we have on God’s green earth here, and we need to make the best of each and every one of them.”

His channel shows him stockpiling for the end. And in the Bundys, it is as if he saw proof that the horses of the apocalypse were on the horizon.

But the Bundys were shopping a conspiracy theory that Finicum bought hook, line, and sinker when he arrived at Bundy Ranch, as if he’d been waiting to hear it. Like he’d had his finger on a light switch in a dark room for years, itching for the chance to flip it and light up his whole world. 

  II.

LaVoy Finicum and his cousin Josh Cluff both called the tiny, tiny town of Fredonia, Arizona, home. In the winter, the wide-open lands all around it are an otherworldly picture show of red cliffs dripping with melting ice against blue skies. Snowfields are untouched, stretches of pure white fleece that go all the way to the edge of the earth. 

At a lone gas station near Kanab, Utah, where Haas and I make a pit stop, a large pickup truck is surrounded by women and girls in matching prairie dresses: navy blue, plum, lime green. They’ve formed a chain, passing a truckload of boxes into a FedEx van. Their hair is pinned back in braids and waves, styles unmistakably associated with polygamous sects like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a radical offshoot of Mormonism. 

Seeing them is a reminder that polygamy is still alive and well in this area and around the rural West, despite FLDS leader Warren Jeffs being sentenced to life in prison in 2011. The towns of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, aren’t far from here — and they’ve long been FLDS strongholds. And they were, essentially, in LaVoy Finicum’s backyard.

The homes and rusted trailers of Colorado City spread south along State Route 389, petering out, then swelling again to form the town of Cane Beds. That’s where the Finicums lived. They participated in civic life, which often intersected with the FLDS church. One of Finicum’s post office boxes was in Colorado City. He attended town hall meetings there, too. Today, just off State Route 389, LaVoy Finicum Road leads the way to Cane Beds (one report attributed the naming of the road to Finicum himself, who requested the switch before he died). 

In the days after his death, prominent polygamists joined the anti-government chorus in declaring Finicum a martyr. Ross LeBaron Jr. — whose father created the polygamous sect Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times — gave a written statement to a Salt Lake Tribune reporter: “LaVoy, the Bundy’s [sic] and others are my heroes. They stood for something bigger then [sic] themselves. They are not sellouts like many are today. I thank God for all those that are standing for the greater good.”

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As I’ve reported in desert towns around the West — up north in Panaca, all through the Arizona Strip — I’ve noticed that this type of interaction between mainstream Mormons and FLDS is typical. Sam Brower, a private investigator who wrote a book called Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation Into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, says polygamists are “part of the landscape.”

Cane Beds, he says, is for “FLDS refugees” and people who often “still believe in polygamy,” but it’s also just a really cheap place to live. 

“I know after [Finicum] was killed, there were people — ex-FLDS people I know — that were saying, ‘I knew that guy, he was living down the road from us.’ They knew who he was.” 

I tell him about the women I saw near Fredonia, how it surprised me to see a group I thought was so fringe, living outside the boundaries of the law, out in the open. “There’s a degree of tolerance,” he says. “You just become more callous to having them around all the time.” I’m bothered by this. Finicum, at the end of his life, was so obsessed with freedom and liberty, and yet I never heard him rage on YouTube about the oppression of women and sexual abuse of girls happening in his literal backyard.

Finicum, who was Mormon, lived around and in FLDS strongholds for much of his life — could even have been friendly with them. In talking to Brower, I have to wonder if living so close to people with a radical lifestyle might have made Finicum more open to hearing fringe religious ideas. 

Like when the Bundys talked to him about the White Horse Prophecy — how they believed their quest against the government was prophesied by Joseph Smith himself. If Finicum had been around people who were preaching an alternate gospel all his life, might he have been more open to believing fringe ideas, instead of questioning them?

***

Robert LaVoy Finicum was born January 27, 1961 to David and Nelda Finicum, and was baptised nearly two weeks later in the Fredonia LDS ward by his uncle, elder Merlin Cluff. 

By the 1960s, Finicums and Cluffs had been around the Arizona Strip for generations. LaVoy’s grandparents Dale and Beulah Finicum homesteaded in the area, living in a dug-out house in the ground. LaVoy’s parents, too, embraced the pioneer grit that helped settle this region. When Finicum’s father, David, was a teenager, he made local headlines when he shot himself in the leg. He was riding on a horse when it brushed against a tree branch that  caught the hammer of the revolver in his saddle and shot him. He rode for 20 more miles before getting help, according to one account.

In 1986, Finicum’s parents rode in a horse-drawn covered wagon from Kanab, Utah, to St. George in a reenactment of the Honeymoon Trail — a wagon train that, in the 1870s, helped populate the Arizona Strip along with transporting goods to St. George to help in the construction of the LDS temple there. After the building was complete, the trail continued to be used, carrying couples, instead of supplies, to be married in the temple.

LaVoy, though, was raised in the far northwestern corner of Arizona Navajo territory, where his father took a job with the Arizona Department of Transportation, paving and repairing roads. He attended school in Page, Arizona.

The family home was close to Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, named for Mormon settler John D. Lee. Lee was executed for helping murder 120 pioneers traveling through a Utah canyon on their way west, an event now known as the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. It is considered one of the earliest acts of domestic terrorism. 

Lee’s Ferry, also, is the birthplace of a foundational prophet of the FLDS church, Leroy Johnson, who was also an early leader in Colorado City. 

In February 2019, I traveled to the Fredonia home of Finicum’s younger brother, Guy. He looks, and sounds, eerily like LaVoy: He’s bald, wears wire-rimmed glasses, speaks in a measured-tone. And he laughs when I say I just want to hear more about who his brother really was. “Nobody would have dirt like the little brother,” he says. He’s a licensed mental health counselor who works with substance abuse recovery programs, and his words come across with a measured delivery.

“We were kind of isolated down there. No television, only the friends in the couple houses next to us and then the Navajos that lived on the reservation around us,” he says. It took them 45 minutes to get to school. “We’d be the only white faces on the bus.” He says the family was accepted with open arms by the tribal community.

Guy says his brother, as a child, was “the Batman and Joker rolled into one character. He was my nemesis,” Guy says. “He loved to tease me. But as soon as we left the home he was my hero. … He said, ‘Hey, here’s my brother.’ He included me.”

He tells me that LaVoy always wanted to be a cowboy, but “as a little boy, he didn’t have any cattle. So that was my job. I was his livestock,” he says, letting a laugh loose again. “I got a hog tied and earmarked more than once.” I’m so used to hearing grim recollections of LaVoy’s death, it’s surprising to hear his brother laugh about a memory of him.

In high school, LaVoy turned his attention to basketball. Their father poured asphalt by the house so LaVoy could put up a hoop. 

“Every morning I’d wake up hearing that ball bouncing,” Guy says. 

After graduation, LaVoy served his LDS mission in Rapid City, South Dakota, but held onto his passion for basketball long after it was realistic for him to keep pursuing it. 

Upon returning home, he married a woman named Kelly “after a very short courtship,” according to Guy, and the pair soon had their first child. Kelly was from Oregon, and the newlyweds moved there so LaVoy could take a job managing apartments in a Portland suburb. Finicum also hoped he could walk onto a local college basketball team, but quickly realized he couldn’t spend money on tuition that could be used to feed his family.

“He regretted that decision because he was never able to get a college degree. … He had to go to school to play basketball,” Guy says. “But he felt like he had neglected his wife and his little kid.” 

Kelly and LaVoy had four children, and got a divorce in 1989. “LaVoy’s problem is, he always wanted to be a cowboy,” Guy explains.  

Finicum, from his 20s to 40s, bounced around the West. I found addresses for him in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, near Flagstaff, in St. George, Cedar City, and Provo, Utah. For the most part, he worked as a property manager — something he excelled at, Guy says. But the work never seemed to really interest him. 

“Every time he’d get successful, he’d get sick of living in the city and try to move back home. And when he’d come back home, he just could never get a foothold and find anything that he could support his family on. So they’d come back here and be dirt poor and struggle,” Guy says. Sometimes LaVoy would move to cities before his family, sleeping in his car as he looked for work, brushing his teeth and shaving with a jug of water. 

As we’re talking Guy gets up from his seat in the living room. “I want to show you something,” he says, and disappears into a nearby room. He emerges with a packet of papers in his hands, fixed together with a single strand of suede cord. 

He explains that one year when LaVoy had no money to buy Christmas gifts, he gave him these drawings instead. Guy delicately fingers through the old pages. There’s a drawing of their grandparents’ house, and below it LaVoy wrote about the old wood cookstove inside, the ticking clock on the wall, the smell of percolating coffee — a beverage choice that set them apart from their LDS relatives. 

Guy smiles, but as we look, one page strikes me as particularly haunting. It’s a sketch of the private family cemetery plot in Cane Beds, where LaVoy is now buried.

In LaVoy’s depiction of it, he sketched the place as if there was just one body buried there. In the center of the drawing is a sole gravestone and a mound of fresh dirt. Around it is an old wooden fence, two trees, then vast white nothingness.

***

In July 1990, several months after his divorce, LaVoy married a woman named Rachel, and soon they had two children together. That marriage was short-lived. (I reached out to both Kelly and Rachel on Facebook, but never heard back.)

In 1992, Jeanette Finicum was at a singles dance at her church, and she was line dancing when her future husband walked in. “I can remember being out on the floor and this gorgeous cowboy walked into the room,” she said. “He sat up on the stage and he just sat there watching all of us dance. And I thought to myself, ‘Boy, I want to dance with him.’” 

They danced — a slow song. And when Jeanette asked LaVoy to keep dancing, he said he had no rhythm. She called him chicken. “He says, ‘I’ll tell you what. If you can tell me how many kids I have, I’ll dance this next dance with you.’”

She guessed six. He nodded.

“I went, ‘Oh my gosh, you have six kids?!’ And I’m going, ‘Oh my heck, you are definitely the package deal,’” she recalled. “To make a long story short, two weeks later we were married.” (According to Finicum’s obituary, the couple married in 1994.)

The pair raised 11 children together. LaVoy and Jeanette later moved near Prescott, Arizona, where they became foster parents. Guy explained that being a foster father was perfectly suited to his brother. “He was a very alpha personality. And he just carried presence with him that nobody ever wanted to challenge,” he said. Boys who other foster parents couldn’t control “just would fall in line behind him.” Foster parenting, too, allowed him to earn enough to attain his cowboy dream. 

Records from the Bureau of Land Management show Finicum cosigned a grazing permit in 2009 with his father, but started ranching by himself in 2011 near Mount Trumbull, deep in the Arizona desert, near the Grand Canyon. In 2014, he was in good standing with the BLM. He always paid his bills on time. 

According to Guy, the Finicum boys were raised hearing stories of how the federal government was trying put ranchers out of business. Ranchers who once could run cattle near the Grand Canyon were slowly pushed out, and national monuments like the Grand Canyon-Parashant further reduced grazing areas. 

“That was kind of the culture we grew up with is these guys are here to tell us what to do and take away what we have,”said Guy.

Even when LaVoy was finally able to ranch, something he achieved in his 50th year of life, “he couldn’t make it work very well,” Guy said. Then he went to Bundy Ranch in 2014, met Cliven Bundy and saw yet one more rancher saying the government was no friend to ranchers. 

When he died, Guy said,  ”he was right in the middle of his dream.”

  III.

On June 23, 2015, Finicum wrote a letter to the BLM: 

“I am writing you this letter to express my appreciation for the time we have associated together in connection with my grazing on the Arizona Strip. It has been a pleasant association and without conflict,” he wrote. “I have the greatest respect for you and judge you to be honorable men.” 

He continued: “At this time I feel compelled to stand for [sic] up for the Constitution of our land and in doing so please do not feel that I am attacking your character.” He repeated what Cliven Bundy had been telling people at Bundy Ranch: about the Founding Fathers; about Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17; and the idea of government-owned land being a ruse. Wool pulled over the eyes of hard-working Americans. 

“This is not about cows and grass, access or resources, this is about freedom and defending our Constitution in its original intent.” 

This confused BLM employees. 

On July 13, an employee called Finicum “to discuss what’s going on.” Finicum was cordial but explained he was making a stand. 

“When asked if he was going to turn-out his Livestock + pay his grazing fees, he wouldn’t answer + resorted back to the Constitution and making a stance,” the employee wrote. 

In 2015, Finicum’s permit only allowed for him to graze cattle from October 15 until May 15. But on August 7, a BLM employee called Finicum to let him know he saw 24 of his animals in two pastures, asked him to remove them within a week, and told him he couldn’t put any more cattle out. 

Finicum replied that  he was “not asking for permission.”

Finicum published a video to YouTube that same day, claiming the BLM had drained his water tank to fight a wildfire “without so much as a hidey-ho or a please.” 

“It’s mine. It’s for my cows. I need it,” he said. “Quit stealing.” 

Three days later, the BLM received another letter from Finicum, which stated, “I am severing my association with the BLM.” He took to YouTube again, telling viewers it was time to “do something more than just talk.”  In the video, he’s crouched by the camera in fringed leather chaps with a long scarf tied around his head and a cowboy hat over it. This isn’t the same droll Finicum of the year before, in front of the woodstove and the temple paintings. He’s fired up — and he’s talking directly to the men at the BLM — the people who, two months earlier, he said he had so much respect for. “You gonna come in there like you did with my friend Cliven?” he said. “Well, I’m telling you, leave me alone. Leave me alone, leave Cliven alone.” 

Finicum in the video posted to hisYouTube channel, pAug. 14, 2015.

In the days that followed, the BLM found 32 cows, two bulls, and 24 calves under 6 months old in trespass. All had Finicum’s brands and earmarks. Nearby more were observed near a water trough, but the water was off. 

On August 24, the BLM mailed Finicum a trespass notice. On United States Department of the Interior letterhead, they told him he owed $1,458.52. 

***

Guy Finicum tells me his brother was always a crusader for the little guy. He says that’s why he went to Bundy Ranch: LaVoy saw a little rancher being bullied by the big government.

“There are individuals to this day who consider LaVoy the best friend they ever had. And often these individuals were those who had no friends — the ostracized ones, the ones who were picked on,” he says. “And LaVoy wouldn’t stand for anybody picking on anybody.” Court documents allege that on September 1, 2015, Finicum was meeting with Keebler — the Utah man who would later go on to push the button on a dummy bomb given to him by the FBI, believing it would destroy a BLM building near Finicum’s ranchlands. Finicum, according to the documents, told Keebler he was ready to plan a confrontation similar to the one at Bundy Ranch. In a meeting with Keebler, which was recorded by the FBI, Finicum said he “wants to be like the guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square” and that if he died in a confrontation with the government, “then the cause is the poor rancher’s widow.” 

According to the federal government, that meeting occurred one week after Finicum received notice that he was racking up BLM fines. About a month later Keebler brought the two FBI agents — who he thought were his fellow militiamen —to a meeting at Finicum ranch in Northern Arizona to strategize a standoff. 

By October, his trespass fines had increased to $5,791.72. 

“We as a family were quite concerned when he started drawing a line in sand with the BLM,” Guy says, “because I’m like, ‘LaVoy, I know you don’t like bullies, but you’re picking a fight with the federal government — they don’t lose! They don’t lose’ … And he’s like, ‘Well, they’re wrong.’”

The way his brother explains it, after LaVoy went to Bundy Ranch, all he could see, everywhere he looked, was the federal government “amassing more and more power.” 

“He went from a person flying under the radar to a person who became very vocal in just a matter of a year,” he says. LaVoy believed the country was on the verge of a collapse. It was the entire premise of his novel, Only By Blood and Suffering. 

“He wrote a story with an ending of a cowboy getting into a shoot-out with the federal government and gets killed, and then here that’s exactly what happened to LaVoy,” says Guy. “What do you make of that?” I ask.

He pauses. “It’s no accident.”

LaVoy didn’t do all the things his cowboy protagonist did. But “that was the person he wanted to be,” Guy says. “He wanted to be a person who had the ability to stand up and make a difference and protect what he believed in.”

None of this seems important to the people inside the Patriot movement: the man who struggled to make ends meet; the foster father devoted to helping the kids who needed direction; the rancher who failed time and time again to achieve his dreams, only to finally attain one and only see it for its imperfections. 

Finicum, the Patriot martyr, is a man obsessed with his own end, a man willing to conspire against the government, then die over and over again in an infinite internet loop. 

“It must be so painful to see the video of the shooting,” I say to Guy. 

“What’s harder is hearing the commentary on it, and people saying, ‘Well this is who he is, and this is what he was doing, and this is what happened,” Guy says. I ask for an example. He points to the way the media reported his brother was reaching for a gun in the inside pocket of his jacket. “There is no way my brother would put a gun in his pocket. OK? And how do I know that? I grew up with him,” he says. “We’ve carried guns in a lot of ways, and carrying a gun in a coat pocket doesn’t work. … When you carry it without a holster, it goes in one place. It goes in your waistband, tight against your body.”

The gun in Finicum’s inside pocket is the source of many conspiracies around Fincum’s death — ones that seemed to gain traction during the summer of 2018, as one of the FBI HRT agents, who’d been on the scene, stood trial. Agent W. Joseph Astarita was accused of firing two bullets at Finicum as he leaped out of the truck, then lying about those shots. Video footage does, in fact, show a round piercing the ceiling of the truck as he jumps out with his hands up. Astarita was acquitted of all charges, and the bullets still haven’t been accounted for. To people who saw conspiracy in Finicum’s death, the trial, some felt, gave their version of events credence: If someone was lying about a bullet, wouldn’t they be willing to lie about a gun, too? YouTubers analyzed photos from the scene. Some reason that if Finicum’s weapon was found as police photographs show it inside his jacket pocket, and he tried to reach for it, that gun would have come out upside-down.

It’s not a surprise to me that as even-keeled and even-minded as Guy Finicum seems, that he might not see the reasoning for the shooting in the video of his brother. He theorizes that LaVoy wasn’t reaching for a gun, but was trying to keep his balance in the snow after being shot with a nonlethal projectile. He doesn’t understand why the FBI set up the roadblock where they did, in a place where Finicum might not have been able to brake in time.

He and LaVoy disagreed a lot about liberty — about the best way to convert the hearts and minds of their fellow Americans. LaVoy wanted to fight the government; Guy thought getting individuals to think about liberty — and what it meant to them — was more effective. 

“He’d say, ‘No, we got to make a stand.’ And I’m saying, ‘No, I don’t.’ I don’t think we need to, I think we just need to put our hearts in the right place and become that within ourselves,” he recalls.

So it wasn’t entirely surprising for Guy to watch LaVoy go to Harney County, Oregon, to join the Bundys in the refuge occupation. But with no end in sight to the standoff, Guy was worried. So worried, in fact, that he drove to Oregon. 

“I thought things were kind of crazy, and I thought, ‘What in the world’s my brother doing?’ I went up there to talk sense into him, honestly,” he says. But at the refuge, he listened to what LaVoy and Ammon Bundy had to say. He got to know people. He thought maybe it wasn’t what the media had made it out to be.

“My whole attitude completely shifted, and I left saying to my brother, ‘Stay the course. Stick to what you know you’re doing,’” he says. Guy doesn’t think his brother committed suicide by cop. But he claims that he felt his brother was going to die in Oregon.

“People may say you can’t know things like this, but I knew when I said goodbye to him up there in Oregon he was going to die up there. I knew,” he says. “Don’t ask me how I know. I was just standing there and all of a sudden it hit me that he was going to die there. So when I said goodbye to him up there, I really thought it would be the last time I’d ever seen him.”

Guy shakes his head. Says he can’t believe he just told us that. It’s so personal. 

And I don’t know what to do with it either. Sitting there in his living room, I don’t think I understand a love that is so strong you can simply step aside and watch someone you love get what they want most, even if it will kill them, leaving behind daughters and sons, foster children, a wife, a mother, a brother. A ranch. A hard-fought dream.

It makes me wonder if LaVoy’s dream was never about being a lone horseman in the country, but was a way to further escape reality and dissolve into the fictional, apocalyptic world where he could be a hero. 

He ranched in a place so far-flung, it makes Cliven Bundy look like he is ranching in New York City. Finicum was so alone out there. He had his cows, his old cow dog. It looked perfect. And yet, even then, it wasn’t perfect enough. He believed he was entitled to something more. 

Guy Finicum, like people across this country, has a sticker donning his brother’s name on the back of his truck. I ask if he thinks of LaVoy as a martyr. 

“He is a martyr for his cause. He did far more to push the word out about what he stood for by dying than he ever would have if he was out there speaking on the circuit,” he says.

He’s seen Patriots around the country talking about LaVoy like they knew him. Like they really got him. For a while, Guy argued with people online, tried to edit his brother’s Wikipedia page to correct all the things someone somewhere was saying his brother was based off the final seconds of his life. 

People didn’t really know LaVoy, he says. “I believe the vast majority people don’t even know who LaVoy really was, or what he really was standing for.”

  IV.

Back in Oregon at the VFW, Jeanette Finicum is talking to her flock about Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. During the 41-day Malheur occupation, Wyden told a news station that “the virus was spreading” the longer the armed standoff continued. 

“What was the virus?” Finicum asked the crowd. 

“Freedom and truth,” the only person in this room wearing a red Make America Great Again hat calls back. 

But if the goal of the movie Dead Man Talking is to tell the truth and buck the media’s portrayal of LaVoy Finicum as an extremist, racist, or anti-government radical, the journey it has taken over the past six months has been circuitous. She hasn’t shown it to schools, libraries, mainstream GOP groups, or media. 

In fact, if the film’s hosts across America show anything, it’s that the Patriot movement is everywhere — not just the West. It is alive and thriving, and it adores Jeanette Finicum: the poor rancher’s widow. 

The film debuted at the Red Pill Expo in Spokane, Washington, a conference that featured speakers known for homophobia, climate change denial, and an overall obsession with how the “deep state” is apparently operating behind the scenes of the American government. 

Last September, the Colorado Front Range Militia screened the film; the next day, the Heritage Defenders — a conservative group linked to anti-Muslim legislation — got a preview.

The film made its way to Tucson, hosted by people involved with a group of gun-toting local conspiracy theorists that believed they had found evidence of an immigrant child sex trafficking ring — a wild conspiracy that drew the interest of QAnon and Pizzagate believers nationwide—which actually turned out to be just a pile of junk in the desert.

The path continues like this: Finicum brought it to Utah, hosted by the widow of the bankroller of the Sagebrush Rebellion, Bert Smith. It went to Pennsylvania, hosted by an Agenda 21 conspiracy theorist. It went to Northern Idaho, paid for by an Idaho Three Percenter who floats QAnon theories on Twitter.

Last summer, Finicum and Herr hosted one of Dead Man Talking’s very first showings at a separatist religious community called Marble Community Fellowship in northeastern Washington. She appeared onstage next to Washington state representative Matt Shea. 

In Salem, the crowd doesn’t hear about how, eight months after LaVoy’s death, Jeanette applied for a new grazing permit with the Bureau of Land Management, or how she met with BLM employees in November 2017 to pay all the fees they owed. 

“The meeting went well” in “what could have been an awkward situation,” wrote one of the federal employees in an email afterward. 

It was as if when LaVoy died, his own personal stand against the government died with him. He became an avatar for whatever anyone wanted him to be.

Jeanette, at the microphone at the VFW, talks about how police shot her husband. “That’s murder, people,” she says. 

“That’s right,” someone in the audience calls back. 

“No American citizen deserves that,” she says. “We deserve our right to due process. We deserve our right to a trial. We deserve to have charges. We deserve to be served with a warrant. We deserve that process. Do we not?”

“You hear my husband saying, ‘We’re going to go see the sheriff, you can arrest me there. Follow me and you can arrest me there,’” she recalls. “He was not fleeing law enforcement when he left that first stop. He left to go to law enforcement whom he trusted. That’s what he was doing.” 

The room nods. 

They believe Finicum — after fighting with the government, after occupying a federal property for weeks — was entitled to choose which agency arrested him. To do what he pleased. 

“He had done nothing wrong,” she says.

Before the day is done, the Old Glory afghan that’s been sitting behind Finicum’s table is auctioned off from the stage. 

The singing cowboy leads the room again; this time he’s an auctioneer. Quickly, there’s a bidding war over the blanket. Two hundred. Three hundred. Seven hundred. Finally a couple wins the afghan. They pay $1,500. That money will go to Jeanette. Behind her merchandise table, Jeanette pops up from her seat one more time as people file downstairs for a spaghetti dinner. Someone is making an offering. 

She hands a man a copy of Only By Blood and Suffering. As if collecting tithes, she accepts his offer. He gives her $500 for the book. 

***

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in theWashington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

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