Kierán Suckling

AZ I See It

Rep. Bob Thorpe sugarcoats Cliven Bundy%27s comments about %22the Negro%22 as %22insensitive%22

Saying %22they abort their young children%22 isn%27t just insensitive. It%27s racist

Thorpe ignores those statements to promote a far-right agenda. And that%27s scary

While every other conservative politician is fleeing from Cliven Bundy in the wake of his racist rants, Arizona state Rep. Bob Thorpe is embracing the Nevada rancher, asking us to look beyond his "racially insensitive statements."

Let's be clear, it is not insensitive to say that "the Negro" is better off in slavery and "they abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton." It is inexcusably, viciously, racist.

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Thorpe's use of "insensitive" is especially galling, as it's the very same term he used to apologize for his own racially charged tweets in August. He quelled that firestorm by deleting the offensive tweets. He won't find it so easy to put the Bundy affair behind him.

Bundy has been running trespass cattle on public land for 20 years. He refuses to pay the ridiculously small monthly grazing fee of $1.35 per cow. He also refuses to obey three federal-court orders to remove the trespass cattle. When the Bureau of Land Management tried to round up the illegal cattle, he violated yet another court order by meeting them with a band of armed militia thugs, several of which pointed semi-automatic assault rifles at federal police officers.

The BLM withdrew to avoid a potential shootout. Now, according Nevada Congressman Steven Horsford, Bundy's militia has set up checkpoints on public roadways to determine if travelers live in the county.

These are some of the Bundy supporters Thorpe calls "very nice, patriotic people."

Bundy refuses to pay his grazing fees because he adheres to the same extreme beliefs of the posse comitatus movement. Started by racists in the 1960s, the movement's rallying cries are "state's rights" and "county supremacy." It does not believe the federal government has the right to own land, it denies the legitimacy of the federal-court system, it asserts that the county sheriff is the highest police power in the nation. As Bundy has done, it demands that county sheriffs disarm federal authorities.

At the extreme end of this extreme movement, Bundy goes so far as to claim that the federal government does not even exist. He brags about refusing to obey federal laws because he is a citizen of Nevada, not the United States.

It is to promote these far right ideas that Thorpe asks us to ignore Bundy's racism.

• County sheriff supremacy? Law enforcement, Thorpe says, "is not the presumed function of the BLM ... this was in fact a local police matter." Check.

• State sovereignty? "Our citizens need to express loud moral outrage whenever federal officials usurp our state sovereignty, our local policing authority ... ." Check.

• No federal public lands? "It is high time that the federal government reduce its presence by relinquishing the vast land holdings it controls within each Western state ... ." Check.

In keeping with the posse comitatus disconnect from from reality, Thorpe claims the saga began with environmentalists suing to eliminate Bundy's cattle in the 1990s. Utterly false, as is his claim that the BLM brought "hundreds of heavily armed federal agents."

The BLM did not "target" Bundy and was not on a debt-collection mission. It was attempting to round up illegal cattle on federal land. It was Bundy and his militia, which, in violation of a federal court order, confronted the federal cowboys.

Thorpe's public embrace of Cliven Bundy in the midst of his racist meltdown is baffling. His promotion of Bundy's extremist political agenda is downright scary.

Kierán Suckling is executive director and founder of the Center for Biological Diversity. With offices in Nevada and Arizona, the center has squared off with Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management over livestock grazing on many occasions.