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Comment by anonymars | Hacker News Reader

I imagine they're thinking of the Bundy standoff (which was federal BLM land but not a national park)

To wit:

> The Bundy standoff’s most significant legacy may be the precedent it established: that armed resistance against federal authorities could succeed without serious legal consequences for participants. This outcome has had a profound impact on antigovernment extremist movements, creating what experts describe as “a straight line” connecting Bunkerville to the Capitol riot.

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2025/apr/13/a-decade-of-defianc...

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The Obama administration's decision to do nothing in that case is one of several extremely risk averse decisions that seemed questionable at the time and turned out to be quite bad in hindsight. Shrugging off Russia's invasion of Ukraine being another. It shouldn't have been a surprise that letting armed militias break federal law with little to no consequence would encourage further bad behavior.

Lol the Obama administration did not 'do nothing.'

They offered a plea agreement to the Hammonds (cause d'etre of the whole thing), who were then sentenced for a wildland fire under dubious circumstances.

After the sentencing it was a done deal, it was over. Then Obama's DOJ had to stoke the flames and reneg on it -- IIRC after the sentenced had already been served!

It shouldn't have been a surprise what unfolded after the government reneging, in a way that was so egregious that they (the people that were the cause d'etre for the Malheur occupation) were pardoned with the following remarks during the pardon:

"The evidence at trial regarding the Hammonds’ responsibility for the fire was conflicting, and the jury acquitted them on most (sic) of the charges." According to his spokesperson Sarah Sanders, who read the statement, "The previous administration, however, filed an overzealous appeal that resulted in the Hammonds being sentenced to five years in prison"

So you can see the Malheur occupation was a response to a federal government who engaged in such tyrannical behavior as inducing a plea bargain that gave up right to appeal, then themselves hypocritically appealing the sentence and changing it after the fact to one that was found to violate the 8th amendment by Judge Michael Hogan. The Malheur occupation was a response to this, if Obama had 'done nothing' in the case of the Hammonds or just respected the judge's sentence none of it would have happened. In my estimation Bundy et al was the only thing that brought the Hammonds the visibility to get the justice of a pardon under these circumstances and a restoration of their 8th amendment rights.

I always thought that hesitation was an over-correction after Ruby Ridge and Waco.

The hesitation was likely because something like a dozen of their own guys were in there (which they refused to identify at trial, so we only know the ID of one that was discovered), and the guy leading the live fire exercises, Fabio Minoggio, was a paid FBI informant (now cop) who was "psyops" trained 20 year veteran of the swiss military.

No real need to address the standoff, when the standoff is yourself vs yourself, and your own guy is by his own admission providing a "supervisory" role of the live fire.

Interesting. Malheur was led by the same Amon Bundy.

Amon Bundy was tried on many charges and his case was closed with prejudice.

The media and government tried and tried to paint him as a criminal but ultimately all the kings horses, men, and prosecutors weren't able to persuade a jury.

> The media and government tried and tried to paint him as a criminal but ultimately all the kings horses, men, and prosecutors weren't able to persuade a jury.

This is technically correct but is a misleading characterization of the events according to Wikipedia [1].

> The first criminal case resulting from the standoff, against six Bundy supporters, was declared a mistrial by U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro on April 24, 2017.

> The mistrial was declared hours after the jury convicted two men of some of the 10 counts in the indictment.

The case was declared a mistrial with prejudice due to prosecutorial "misjudgement" that prevented a fair trial of the Bundys.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff#Prosecutions_of...

The Bunkerville trial of Ammon was declared a mistrial with prejudice.

For Malheur he was found 'not guilty' on all charges 'according to wikipedia',

>On October 27, 2016, Ammon Bundy was found not guilty on all counts.[87][88]

Unless you are thinking of another trial of Amon, I think you are mixing up someone else (6 others?) or another event. I admit it is easy to mix it up with Ammon, because the government tried to pin felony charges on him so many time and always hopelessly failed just in multiple ways.

Of course sometimes a criminal just gets away with it, but when the government tries so many felony charges and fails each time, that is when I decided to investigate 'the other side of the coin' and quickly found the portrait portrayed by the media of Ammon is in my estimation highly distorted.

While it will do nothing to convince one way or another of his guilt, I highly recommend listening to some of his interviews and videos and actually trying to understand him, and I think you will be surprised. His ideas and speech were not at all what I expected based on the media portrayal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammon_Bundy

Are we reading the same Wikipedia page? Maybe I’ll save a full perusal of his statements for another day, but based on Wikipedia… yes, he has said some surprisingly liberal things about Trump, immigration policy, the Republican party, and Black Lives Matter. On the other hand, he put some hospitals through lockdown, threats of violence, accusations of pedophilia conspiracy, and protesting outside of hospital workers’ homes, all because the hospital put his buddy’s infant grandson into protective care because it was about to die of malnourishment. That’s about what I expect based on his portrayal.

I don’t know exactly how he’s escaped consequences, but I don’t think it’s because he’s actually reasonable and correct.

Take a look at the bodycam regarding the baby taken away:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Du-jbE022I

"Not medically necessary." The baby was not about to die, in fact the doctor admits in the bodycam to manufacturing a story to take Cyrus away via a transfer for cover for removal to foster care. The baby was stable. The hospital then defamed Mr Bundy by lying about the circumstances.

>about to die of malnourishment

Why would a child be discharged straight to CPS foster care with a transfer only to obfuscate that, if the child were about to die? The child is stable, ready for foster care but simultaneously about to die? These are not simultaneously compatible in this context, someone is lying. And I think the end result thankfully bears this out, as the CPS case was ultimately cleared and charges dropped against the mother.

Bundy misleadingly edited that video to support his claims. "Thomas’ conversations with police and the emergency medical service (EMS) report [Bundy] references both centered on whether the child was healthy enough to be transported, not whether the 10-month-old was healthy overall." https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/ar...

The doctor was saying the baby was stable enough to transport to another hospital, which doesn't contradict the assessment that the baby needed prompt medical care that his caretakers were unjustifiably fighting against. (The baby may have received some immediate treatment that made him safe enough to transport, but not ready to leave hospital care.)

I believe the references to CPS foster parents by the doctor were about the transportation and stay in the hospital, not to immediately discharging from the hospital into a foster home. So the child was stable enough for transportation, under the watch of CPS and also medical professionals, and there was reasonable concern that the child would not get the treatment it needed if discharged to the parents right away. I don't believe there's any contradiction here, in the actual statements, rather than the distorted versions from Bundy.

The baby was returned to its family after approximately a week. That doesn't prove it was totally healthy all along and the parents did nothing wrong. It suggests CPS didn't have a strong case the parents would endanger the baby in the future. Maybe the employees didn't want Bundy followers stalking them at their house, like they did to hospital workers.

>Bundy misleadingly edited that video to support his claims. "Thomas’ conversations with police and the emergency medical service (EMS) report [Bundy] references both centered on whether the child was healthy enough to be transported, not whether the 10-month-old was healthy overall."

No this is the defamatory statement the hospital misleadingly made against Bundy, but in the video she clearly states the baby is being transferred to another hospital to release to the foster family and that the transport wasn't even medically necessary but rather was cover. The whole point of the conversation was removing the child from the hospital into foster care but under a fraudulent premise of medical necessity while distracting the family.

>https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/ar...

Lol you have the video cam right in front of you that contradicts the materially false and malicious defamatory statements against Bundy in this newspaper. I choose to believe the direct recordings of what happened over what an editor says happened, or the testimony the doctor said after the fact when she had months to rehearse with hospital lawyers.

> she clearly states the baby is being transferred to another hospital to release to the foster family

She mentioned a foster mom, not that the purpose of the transfer was to get the baby to the foster mom. And why would it be anyway? You think the state couldn't have released the baby from the first hospital directly to a foster parent? The only thing stopping them was the protesters' presence and knowledge of which locked doors the baby was behind? The baby was already forcibly taken by the state at this point, right? So why does it matter whether it's police, social workers, or foster parents that currently have the baby? The deception made a safe transfer easier perhaps, but it didn't directly enable the transfer.

> The whole point of the conversation was removing the child from the hospital into foster care but under a fraudulent premise of medical necessity while distracting the family.

Sure, she did say the transfer wasn't medically necessary. She said it was to get away from the protesters. Sneaky, probably not illegal. I believe she later said it was a higher standard of care too, but I'll admit that may been said to better justify it as you allude to.

Other things she said in the Idaho Statesman video: "Failure to thrive", lost 0.75lbs since last checkup. Not signs of a baby that was perfectly healthy at home, not something that surprises parents in a matter of hours, completely at odds with Bundy's attempts to say it was healthy. The state was going to move the baby from a hospital to foster care on the diagnosis and data alone, regardless of sneaky hospital transfers to try to defuse the protesters.

She said verbatim in the bodycam "some time tomorrow, when they don't know, get the baby out with CPS to the foster parents."

There are lots of reasons a baby might lose weight, many of which are not abuse or neglect. Losing a lot of weight does not mean abuse or neglect is involved, it can be some sort of disease or illness unrelated to parental malfeasance. In fact, the baby was initially brought to doctors voluntarily.

This kind of behavior doesn't help kids. It just makes people stop seeking health care and then they avoid any 'mandatory reporter' so their children won't be taken away. Doctors have also recently lead to many children being removed due to unexplained broken bones when really the child had 'broken bone disease'.

>The state was going to move the baby from a hospital to foster care on the diagnosis and data alone, regardless of sneaky hospital transfers to try to defuse the protesters.

That a 'diagnosis and data (of losing weight) alone' (plus, IIRC the baby was having checkups but missed one on a day when the mother was sick) would result in this kind of trickery by a doctor and collusion to take away the child is exactly why Bundy has this kind of support. We're seeing this at scale with other diseases and Bundy is a case of someone actually doing something for justice for the kids to take them back out of a cash-for-kids foster system that has incredibly high rates of abuse, neglect, and loss of children.

Several of your points are general critiques of the system, which is fine, but not very interesting for now. I would accept some of these points without justifying what happened in this case.

> She said verbatim in the bodycam "some time tomorrow, when they don't know, get the baby out with CPS to the foster parents."

I've already said, CPS didn't need her to say that in order to put the baby into foster care, so this isn't evidence she was colluding with them for that purpose. But okay, I'll grant you it made it easier, and it's understandable it feels like collusion even if I don't think it altered the case much. I won't call it fraud because she was transparent to the temporary guardians of the baby.

> Losing a lot of weight does not mean abuse or neglect is involved, it can be some sort of disease or illness unrelated to parental malfeasance

Yeah, finding that illness is why the baby had doctor appointments... which the family missed one or more of, after already having been in and out of the hospital a few times, then resisting the police's attempts to check on the child. The state stepped in to ensure the baby could return to health and stay healthy. I get that these things can be controversial in general, but I don't think there's anything uniquely damning to the state in this case.

> Bundy is a case of someone actually doing something for justice for the kids

So it's okay to threaten and harass doctors, hospital security guards, police officers, social workers, judges, at their place of work and at their homes; cause hospitals to lockdown and divert ambulances; and claim the state and hospital are a pedophile child-trafficking network, as long as it gets a kid home early? Society can't function like that. If this kind of thing were done at scale, more people would be harmed than would be saved.

Maybe there are CPS cases where some of these extreme tactics would be justified in my mind, but it isn't this one, a malnourished infant who's been in and out of hospital and misses appointments with parents resisting police checkups. The baby probably would have been back home in a similar timeframe without threatening a bunch of professionals just trying to do a job so they can take care of their own children.

How much resistance do you think it is OK to use when someone violently attempts to take your non-neglected and non-abused child away from you, particularly in this case where the extractor is placing them in with their co-conspirators with remarkably high feeder rates into sex trafficking, abuse, and neglect?

The level of restraint Ammon showed was shockingly high. I think the opposite of you, a society cannot exist where such activity by the state, hospitals, doctors is tolerated the way it is with such passivity. A big part of the problem is that not enough people have yet discovered Bundy, and the state has done their best to prevent his ideology from spreading because they have seen first hand it is both effective and persuasive.

But I admit I am speaking from a bit of a bias, as I was forced into a hospital in handcuffs, abused by doctors and the state, and then footed the bill when a fraudulent search warrant was executed accusing me of being a drug smuggler. Doctors, nurses, etc just went along with it and believed the cops, willing to run the Milgram experiment like the loyal dogs they were. And then I was sent the bill, despite no drugs being found they put in my medical record they suspected me of being a 'drug packer' despite finding absolutely nothing. I think what Bundy did for Cyrus is one of the most valiant events I've read about, because I know the truth of how they violently operate intertwined with each other while extorting their involuntary subjects for the bill, and I felt for one of the first times in my life somebody stood up to the kind of abuse I experienced.

Close! The 2014 standoff was led by Clive Bundy, Ammon's father

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