Cliven Bundy is an idiot.

Cliven Bundy is an idiot.

Or at least willing to be a self-serving tool, if not a useful idiot. We’ve all said stuff without thinking about what it might sound like out loud, and wish we could get a pass, but then most of us don’t live at gunpoint with a yardful of reporters either.

I’ll guarantee this post isn’t headed where you think. This is (yet another) lesson about what happens when the so-called “conservative” media decides to create a hero for ratings, how the counterpoint media controls the narrative and effectively destroys truth, and lastly, about what happens when people who are generally right get clobbered because they can’t make a point.

Struggling to keep the spotlight of media attention on his scrap with the Federal Bureau of Land Management, Bundy decided last week to weigh in with his unpolished comments on race, as related to freedom lost. The media parade began, in their painfully predictable manner… because after a couple weeks of general support from the public for taking a stand in the face of overwhelming odds, not to mention the armed militia who came from near and far to defend this guy’s rights to graze cattle where the Feds didn’t want him to… now they finally had him… making comments they could easily frame as racist.

The New York Times reporter was practically salivating on his keyboard, as he was now able to take a swing not only at Bundy, but every hack’s favorite nemesis, FoxNews for even covering this “criminal, racist, bigoted”, rancher.

Cliven Bundy might have made the worst argument for Liberty ever heard, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. Whole generations of black, and white, poor Americans have been enslaved again, not by traders or plantation owners, but by the U.S. Government under the guise of social welfare program after program. The “War on Poverty” begat exponentially more poverty. Don’t take it from Cliven Bundy or this tired, cranky, white guy – ask this lady. She gets it.

Do you see how they did it again? The issue was; an American was defiantly disobeying an unjust law, something we should all get behind. But when the propagandist media saw that message was actually resonating with the public, and gaining support, they had to find another way to take him out. At the first unforced opportunity, they seized on the soft target of racism, assassinsted the man’s character, and changed the subject… most people never noticed. What’s worse, after the fervor dies down the Feds will be back to finish the job. And nobody will remember why this ever happened. They will only remember what the media told them to.

See also Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Lesson over.