The man who held two armed stand offs against law enforcement and faced no charges is back in the news again.
This time it's for another attack on law enforcement and his anti-semitism.
Anti-government domestic terrorist and poster child for White privilege Ammon Bundy recently took his protests to the home of a law enforcement officer for arresting a woman for illegal trespass in a closed park after she refused to leave and told the officer to arrest her. After harassing the police officer and his family at his home, Bundy took his followers to the Idaho state capitol.
Saturday from the steps of the state capitol building in Boise, Bundy compared government pandemic containment measures to the Nazis' genocide of Jews during World War II. The militia leader previously staged an armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife refuge in a tantrum against the federal government—which despite being illegal and a danger to federal wildlife officers and the public resulted in no jail time for Bundy while unarmed protestors on the Standing Rock Sioux's own tribal lands were maced, beaten, arrested, charged and incarcerated for protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Bundy's latest pet project are "Idaho Is Open For Business" rallies and staged confrontations with law enforcement by people like the woman at the closed city park. In addition to Bundy, the Idaho rally was also organized by an anti-vaxx conspiracy group called Health Freedom Idaho and the Idaho Freedom Foundation—a far-right libertarian organization with established ties to billionaire Charles Koch.
In his speech Saturday, Bundy compared temporary closures of nonessential businesses to the genocide of millions of Jews, Romani, homosexuals, the disabled and dissidents by the Nazis.
The documented domestic terrorist with two armed sieges under his belt told the gathered crowd:
"Just look at the pictures of the Holocaust. It always amazes me how you see pictures of men and women stripped completely naked, lined up and facing a mass grave, where they are shooting them in the back of the head and falling in the grave."
"Now the answer to that is not easy―but it is this, and I have been there and I know for a fact that this is true. When you have faced so much tyranny in your life, there is a point when you would rather line up naked and get shot in the head."
"And my friends, why we're here today right now is to make sure that never happens!"
Bundy continued:
"They thought that putting their head down and trying to not be noticed was the better way. They thought that compliance would get them through it, and it was just a period of time that they might just pass through and end up better on the other end."
"And that is a decision that we have to make right now. Are we better to just comply?"
People found Bundy's comparison of what prisoners in Nazi concentration camps endured over years of confinement, forced labor, torture and murder to not being able to get a haircut more than a stretch.
Eric Ward of the civil rights organization Western States Center said in an interview with Huffington Post:
"It was egregious. I mean, it was historical revisionism."
"It wasn't a denial of the Holocaust, but it utilized one of the talking points that is often used by Holocaust deniers, which is this idea that Jews were responsible for their own genocide, and that is effectively blaming Jews for their own deaths."
"It is disturbing and it is offensive that a major argument point from Holocaust revisionism would be utilized in this moment."
Ward added:
"These aren't protests, right? These are calls for future violence."
"And I think we should all be very clear about what's happening, and what Ammon Bundy is helping to support in this moment."
Bundy's appearance at the Boise rally is another example of individuals traveling state to state and from rally to rally to incite crowds.
While the White House tried to portray the rallies as populated by local people acting on their own impulses, more and more evidence of known White nationalist, anti-vaxx, White supremacist and other far-right organizations backed with deep pockets like Koch are really behind the reopen America movement.
The book Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump is available here.
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