Bundy broke the law, but there are bigger issues—like government overreach, militias and racism—at play.

I can imagine how angry I would be if the federal government forced me off land I felt belonged to me. All the more if it was land my father ranched, and his father before him; land I raised my children on; land containing generations of blood, sweat and tears my family had spent maintaining and improving.

Most people would be angry to have that land taken away. And to have it taken away supposedly to protect a tortoise that most city-dwellers will never see or care about once the media cycle has turned; a tortoise that was endangered enough to confiscate my land, but not so endangered that the government allowed construction of a solar power facility nearby; a tortoise for which there is no scientific proof that cattle ranching is incompatible.

For one rancher, it made him angry enough to defy the government—swat team, helicopters, hired guns, snipers and all.

Cliven Bundy doesn’t have to imagine all this; he’s living it. Bundy is the Nevada rancher battling the Federal Bureau of Land Management (blm) to keep his cattle on land his family has grazed since 1877. It is about government overreach and states’ rights—or lack thereof. Is Nevada even really a state if the federal government “owns” 85 percent of the land within Nevada’s border? Bundy asks.

Bundy poses an interesting question: Why should the people of Nevada have less right to their land than those in New York or Illinois? This isn’t about money, he says. It is about who the land belongs to, which in his mind is the state of Nevada, not the feds.

Federal ownership of state land.

Cliven Bundy and his family ranched in Nevada’s Gold Butte for almost 70 years before the blm even existed. The Bundys, like many other ranchers, were induced to settle the area with the promise of free grazing land with no fees or limitations. It was part of the government’s plan to develop the West—and the Bundys did their part. It was a win-win situation.

Then, according to the Bundys, the government changed the terms of the deal.

Bundy says there used to be 51 ranchers in Gold Butte; now he’s wondering, Why am I the last one? His answer: The feds regulated them out of business.

Yet, there are two sides to every story.

The land the Bundys run their cattle on is federally owned. Bundy’s emotional connection to it doesn’t make it his. Two courts rejected Bundy’s claims. The last judge found no merit to his argument that the land in question should really belong to the state and therefore the blm doesn’t have jurisdiction. Bundy reportedly defended himself in court because no lawyer could make that case.

Bundy’s problems started in 1993, after the desert tortoise was put on the endangered species list and the blm ordered Bundy to remove most of his cattle. He refused. The blm responded by levying fines. Bundy then decided to stop paying his grazing permit fees too; saying something to the effect that it didn’t make sense to pay management fees to an agency that was trying to manage him off his land. At that point he gave up his rights, say lawyers, and began stealing from the public. When the federal government later compensated other ranchers in the area for no longer being able to ranch cattle (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases), since Bundy was freeloading and not paying rent like the rest, he got nothing. Serves him right, say critics.

Rancher Cliven Bundy (Getty Images)

But the problem festered. Twenty years of fines added up. The blm says it comes to over $1 million. Bundy hasn’t paid a dime—and says he won’t unless it goes to grazing fees for the state. Meanwhile, his cattle continue to forage on public land for free. Bundy’s detractors say he is nothing but a “welfare king” stealing from the people, no better than any other tax cheat. By the letter of the law, they might be right.

Eventually, environmental groups picked up the Bundy story and forced the blm to take action. A judge ordered Bundy’s cattle rounded up.

And a range war, unlike any other in U.S. history, erupted.

This is when this story changes from one about a stubborn rancher refusing to comply with a law he sees as unjust, to one about an increasingly militarized government, and politicians that selectively enforce the law. It becomes a story about militias and people willing to travel across the country and put their lives on the line to defend a rancher they have never met—and a nation primed to erupt with racial violence.

On March 27, approximately 200 blm employees and contractors swooped into Clark County, Nevada—helicopters, off-road vehicles, fixed-wing aircraft and all. They closed down a whopping 322,000 acres of public land to track down 500 head of trespassing cattle. From then on, these federal bureaucrats were the law in town.

But not everyone agreed that the blm army should be the law in town. People wondered: Why did the blm send an army to confiscate some cows? Why did the rangers need attack dogs? And more importantly, why do unelected, government-appointed bureaucrats have their own private militarized police force that supposedly supersedes the authority of local police? Why didn’t the blm solve this problem through regular law-enforcement channels?

Then the blm began putting up fences delineating “protest zones” and “First Amendment areas” where protesting would be “allowed.” According to the blm, the rest of the 1,200 square miles of public land, including public highways, was now off limits to everyone but government employees and contractors. It even decreed a 30-day no-fly zone, which had the effect of obscuring the cattle roundup, the euthanizing of cattle run to exhaustion, and the destruction of 100-year-old water cisterns and other irrigation infrastructure that would make the land unusable.

That didn’t go over well either.

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval said the corral-like protest zones were “offensive,” and that they trampled upon “Nevadans’ fundamental rights under the U.S. Constitution.”

Protesters hang signs on a fence along U.S. Highway 170 on April 10 in Mesquite, Nevada. (Getty Images)

People ignored the First Amendment corrals anyway. Confrontations resulted. Maybe in some cases the blm acted appropriately, but in the age of camera phones, it definitely didn’t make the bureau look good. YouTube videos show blm officers tasering, physically assaulting, pointing guns at and sicking an attack dog on protesters. One 50-year-old woman was football tackled from behind when she refused to move from in front of a truck. Some of the protesters didn’t act so civilly either.

About that time, militia groups from around the country started arriving. Militia members from the Oath Keepers (the organization made up of military and law-enforcement members who pledge allegiance to the Constitution but not to the government), the iii Percent Patriots (which gets its name from the claim that 3 percent of Americans fought in the American Revolution), the Arizona State Militia and several others were present.

Scott Shaw, co-founder of the Oklahoma Volunteer Militia, which boasts 50,000 members, said they were armed with AK-47s, AR-15s, sniper rifles and other military surplus hardware. He told Breitbart News they were “prepared” to use deadly force if necessary.

It’s up to the feds. The ball’s in their court. You can do this legally or if you want to try to do a land grab violently, you can do that. We’re going to resist you. Scott Shaw, co-founder of the Oklahoma Volunteer Militia

“It’s up to the feds,” said Shaw. “The ball’s in their court. You can do this legally or if you want to try to do a land grab violently, you can do that. We’re going to resist you. …

“If they can do it in Nevada, they can do it in Colorado, Texas. I mean, what’s to stop them from coming to Oklahoma? The only thing to stop them is ‘we the people.’”

As if on cue, stories began popping up about how the blm was also trying to seize 90,000 acres of private land along the Texas-Oklahoma border. And how the blm had once before been found guilty of entering into “a conspiracy, a literal, intentional conspiracy, to deprive [another family] of not only their permit grazing rights, for whatever reason, but also to deprive them of their vested property rights,” as recounted by Chief Judge Robert C. Jones of the Federal District Court of Nevada.

With war set to erupt, finally, the major news outlets were forced to pick up the story. (Up to that point, only alternative media sources like Drudge Report and InfoWars had covered the showdown.) Reuters published pictures of protesters on a bridge overlooking one protest zone. One man in a military-style flak jacket was shown aiming his hunting rifle at what appeared to be blm rangers. Another man was quoted as saying protest organizers were strategizing to put women and children in the front lines in case firing broke out. Huffington Post reported that there were 1,000 militia members on site.

As the number of protesters grew, tension escalated and blm officers eventually threatened to open fire on the demonstrators, many of whom were armed and on horseback, six-shooters and all. It looked like something right out of the Wild West.

“It got down to a point where we were either going to get the cattle, or we were going to be the cattle,” said one protester who video-recorded parts of the protest. “It is time for everybody to take back their freedom.”

Then on April 12, the blm suddenly backed down.

The blm announced that it would give in to Bundy’s demands due to safety concerns. Cliven Bundy would be allowed to let his cattle graze on public land, and his cows would be released.

For Bundy, though, that wasn’t enough.

He gave Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie an ultimatum: Disarm all federal officers on the land within one hour, or we are going to get my cattle. When that didn’t happen, Bundy got on the bullhorn, and his supporters mounted up and headed for the stockades—where federal officers were waiting in riot gear.

With stress levels rising high, federal agents threatened to open fire again.

Luckily, cooler heads prevailed and the federal agents backed down. Violence was averted and Bundy got some of his cattle back.

Bundy supporters called it a huge victory for freedom.

Those people who hold themselves out to be patriots are not. They’re nothing more than domestic terrorists. Nevada Sen. Harry Reid

Not everyone saw it as a victory for America though. Nevada Sen. Harry Reid compared Bundy supporters to home-grown terrorists like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

“Those people who hold themselves out to be patriots are not. They’re nothing more than domestic terrorists,” he said. “I repeat: What went on up there was domestic terrorism.”

Reid’s comments went viral. It became a rallying cry for the right. Protesters mused: So we are domestic terrorists for peacefully protesting a heavy-handed government that is taking away constitutional freedoms—but when Maj. Nidal Hasan actually murdered 13 people on an army base, that was just “workplace violence”? To many protesters, Reid’s comments seemed to confirm their worst suspicions.

Reid continued, “We can’t have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it.”

“It’s not over,” he said.

Ironically, lawlessness is exactly what the Bundy supporters accuse the government of—despite the fact that Bundy himself is clearly breaking the law. As one commentator wrote:

Is he a union that can ask the Obama administration for a waiver for another year? Is he a low-income person who can ask that the mandate (to remove his cows) be delayed another year? Is he from another country and ask not to be deported based on his particular sad story? Because this administration has made a mockery of the law through selective enforcement of it, it’s hard to see why it’s necessary to remove some cows, and destroy this family’s livelihood, but it’s not necessary to do the rest of those things. We are in a dangerous place with this administration’s selective enforcement. It doesn’t take much for people to ask, “Why the law for me, but not for thee?”

Reid himself is accused of stretching the law toward his own ends. Just last year he rammed through changes in senate filibustering rules and decades of precedent so that his party could confirm controversial political appointees without bipartisan support.

America is in a very dangerous and volatile place.

And politicians, safely locked away in their expensive city houses, don’t have a clue what is happening. They don’t see how their action, and the public’s perception of it, is leading people to revolt.

Bundy has repeatedly told supporters to stand up to a federal government that was selectively enforcing laws and violating their constitutional rights.

“I believe this is a sovereign state of Nevada,” Bundy said. “And I abide by all Nevada state laws. But I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing.”

Such radical sentiments are held by more than one militia group. And there are a lot of militia groups—with members totaling 270,000 to 680,000 people, depending on your definition of militia. Probably millions more people sympathize with them.

How many are willing to go to war for their beliefs? Die for them?

Never before in modern times have different militia groups banded together to offer armed resistance against the government like they did at the Bundy ranch, militia experts told Reuters. You have to go back to the Civil War days.

It was a modern first, but you can be sure it won’t be the last.

Few things get people riled up more than property rights, land and who owns it. Throw in a government viewed as intrusive and unjust—one that only selectively enforces laws that benefit the political powers that be—and hundreds of people, militia and non-militia, were willing to travel across the country to defend a little-known rancher they had never met.

Toss in racial tension; heavily armed militias, some with radical views; a distrusted, militarized government; plus a ratings-hungry media—and America faces a future of friction and flame.

The Bundy Ranch episode ended peacefully—but will the next one?

Is chaos in American cities about to become a common sight? How should you prepare? Read the chapter “Terrorism and Race Riots” from Gerald Flurry’s booklet Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet to understand how the Bible says terrorism and race riots are looming—for America.