Dave Bundy was working at his home in Delta, Utah, when a caravan of at least 20 federal vehicles invaded his property last March. The vehicles decanted a platoon of FBI personnel, some of them clad in a battle dress and carrying assault weapons. In what must have been a disappointment to them, Bundy – who wasn’t armed – surrendered without offering the Feds a pretext to dispose of him as they had LaVoy Finicum a few weeks earlier.
Bundy had been indicted on federal conspiracy charges for his role in de-escalating the standoff between his family and the BLM in Bunkerville, Nevada in April 2014. At that time, too, Bundy had not been carrying a gun. He was armed only with his determination to prevent bloodshed as he conducted shuttle diplomacy between the Bundys and their supporters, on the one hand, and the Feds who had stolen the Bundy family’s cattle. His conduct earned the appreciation of then-Clark County Undersheriff Joseph Lombardo, who negotiated with him.
Several days earlier, Bundy had been beaten bloody by the BLM’s khaki-clad chekists while he was standing at the side of a road video-recording their confiscation of his father’s cattle. After suffering that criminal assault he was abducted by the BLM and detained for a night on a spurious charge of obstruction, which was dismissed the following day.
Dave Bundy’s role at Bunkerville was that of a peacemaker. He is now in jail awaiting trial on charges that could result in an 80-year prison term. Where Bundy is a peacemaker, Mike Love, the BLM Special Agent in Charge of the Bunkerville operation, is a bloody-handed psychopath whose appetite for escalation has made him notorious even among his comrades. His operation in Bunkerville was a humiliating failure – which is why the Regime, in utterly predictable fashion, has placed Love in charge of the BLM’s newly minted, nation-wide Security and Intelligence division.
This promotion is an unambiguous display of arrogant hostility toward residents of rural lands in the west – and toward sheriffs and other local officials in Utah and Nevada who have dealt with Love in recent years. Love’s Brownshirts have routinely ignored jurisdictional limits in southern Utah, detaining – which is to say, abducting – local citizens without probable cause, intimidating tourists, and harassing ranchers.
In 2012 the Utah state legislature enacted a measure forbidding BLM cadres from pretending to enforce state and local laws – a tactic often used to justify the agency’s abusive behavior – and imposing criminal penalties for “impersonating an officer” when BLM personnel exceeded their roles as defined in federal statutes. Love retaliated by cancelling BLM contracts with five counties that pay sheriffs for the privilege of patrolling land claimed by the Feds. This was a gratuitous gesture of unfiltered contempt: By the time the contracts were annulled, a federal judge had issued an injunction against the bill, prompting the legislature to repeal it.
Love’s federal supremacy uber alles mindset nearly precipitated a slaughter at Bunkerville, an outcome that would not have surprised former BLM official, Steve Martin. In late 2012, Martin was present at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, New Mexico when Love giddily outlined the rustling operation planned for Bunkerville. Martin later told the High Country News that Love’s plan was “missing a key ingredient: cooperation with the county sheriff.”
Then-Sheriff Doug Gillespie didn’t intervene in the matter until well into the standoff. Love’s mismanagement of the affair and misreading of the tactical situation – at one point, he placed the armored mouth-breathers under his command in a “kill zone” – would have resulted in avoidable deaths were it not, in large measure, for the diplomatic efforts of Dave Bundy.
So, naturally, Bundy is now behind bars awaiting a trial at which Love will be a star prosecution witness. Love’s promotion will be used to fortify whatever credibility he might possess in the eyes of the jury. The Feds will be very careful to foreclose inquiries into Love’s background and employment history.
Energy & Environment Daily, a publication very sympathetic to the Regime’s regulatory agencies, notes that the BLM refused to “answer basic questions about Love’s professional resume – when he was hired, his age, where he has previously worked and his law enforcement qualifications.” It is known that for four years prior to being hired by the BLM, Love was employed as a federal air marshal. He received his indoctrination at the TSA’s air marshal training center, which proudly displays the motto: “Dominate. Intimidate. Control.”
By combining a clown car with the proverbial short bus, we would create an ideal departmental vehicle for the Air Marshals Service. Love’s blend of arrogance and violence is typical of the personnel who have been hired as BLM enforcement officers since 9/11.
“We brought in people who told their buddies in Border Patrol or wherever else, `Hey, come to the BLM, there’s a lot of kick-ass stuff going on here,’” laments Martin, who joined the agency before it became militarized. At the time, he recalls, “we weren’t marshals, we weren’t the FBI, ATF, or DEA. The public looked at us as rangers.”
After being deposited by Leviathan’s cloaca in Salt Lake City, Love immediately set out to distinguish himself by orchestrating a covert operation called Operation Cerberus Action that supposedly targeted illegal trade in archeological artifacts. He enlisted a suspected petty offender and alcoholic named Ted Gardiner as an informant/provocateur and gave him roughly one-third of a million dollars stolen from taxpayers to buy artifacts from southern Utah residents. This led to a pre-dawn paramilitary raid in Blanding, Utah, involving hundreds of battle armed personnel from the BLM and other agencies.
James Redd, a well-respected 60-year-old physician, was detained by BLM and FBI agents at his home and interrogated for five hours. After being told that he faced felony charges, Dr. Redd committed suicide the following day. Ted Gardiner – most likely out of insurmountable shame from defiling himself by associating with Love and his ilk – did likewise. The only tangible evidence of a “crime” on Redd’s part was his possession of a “bird effigy” – a single bead roughly a centimeter long – that was dishonestly appraised by the Feds as worth $1,000. This over-valuation was necessary in order to charge Redd with a felony. The bauble’s actual value was roughly $75.
“He had nothing to do with artifacts or trading,” points out Jay Redd, the son of the accomplished physician whom Love drove to suicide. “He was walking along and picks up this dinky bead off the ground [in a video-recorded conversation with Love’s informant]. They are laughing about it because it’s so insignificant…. He never tries to sell or trade anything. He wasn’t arrested for trafficking; it was for possessing. Dr. Redd is dead for possessing a tiny little bead. My dad is dead for a false felony charge.”
The “conspiracy” charges that could be used to steal the rest of Dave Bundy’s life are just as spurious as the one that drove Dr. Redd to suicide. Even if he prevails in the show trial planned for early next year, Bundy will suffer several months of pre-trial confinement as punishment for expressing opinions that a federal judge found offensive.
A few weeks ago, U.S. Magistrate Judge Cam Ferenbach has denied Bundy’s motion requesting pre-trial release. The uncontested facts cited in his motion demonstrate that he has no criminal record, that he neither committed violence nor incited it at Bunkerville, and that on many occasions he has cooperated with the BLM in efforts to battle range fires (including an incident just a few months before the standoff in Nevada).
Judge Ferenbach stipulated to all of these facts – and yet ruled that Bundy must be kept in a cage as a “danger to the community” because of his attitude toward the federal government, as displayed by an instance in which he referred to it as a “foreign entity.”Bundy’s description is an unacceptably mild critique of a depraved regime that imprisons peacemakers and promotes psychopaths.
