Disappearance Of Armed Apocalyptic Militia Kook Ammon Bundy Probably Nothing To Worry About, We Hope
Where's Ammon? Is another armed standoff on the way? Who could know!
Ammon Bundy has sort of disappeared, according to a report in The Atlantic (gift link) by Jacob Stern. Bundy is best known as the anti-government loon who led the Dildo Militia that took over a federal wildlife preserve in Oregon in 2016, and as the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who in 2014 briefly became a darling of the far right because he refused to pay grazing fees but then turned out to be racist as fuck. (Who could have guessed?) Then when the 2020 pandemic came along he became a leader of anti-mask and anti-vaccine craziness, and in 2022 he led a mob of QAnon dipshits protesting outside a Boise hospital that was treating the malnourished grandson of one of Bundy’s top supporters, Diego Rodriguez, leading to a lockdown of the hospital due to concerns that the crazies would attack staff and try to “liberate” the baby, who was taken into temporary state custody until the poor thing put on some weight.
St. Luke’s later sued Bundy and Rodriguez for defamation because they’d accused the hospital and its doctors of participating in “child trafficking,” resulting in harassment and death threats, like this nice message from an anonymous caller:
“The parents of a child have all the rights,” one caller said. “I need you to remind everybody who works there before we come and lop off your fucking head, bitch. We will fucking kill you.” Rodriguez, Marissa’s father, began holding regular rallies at the hospital and at one of them called on God to “crush the necks of those that are evil.”
Bundy and Rodriguez didn’t bother showing up for the trial, because it was illegitimate under God’s Law or something, and in August of this year a jury ordered them to pay $52 million in damages, which neither of them is ever going to be worth, but at least their assets can be seized and sold.
Yes, America is so fucking crazy in 2023 that we needed over 325 words just to give you the background leading up to the news in Stern’s story today. He covers the hospital protests, and the resulting threat campaign in further detail, having interviewed two of the doctors who were smeared by Bundy; one of them, ER doctor Rachel Thomas, was so traumatized by the doxxing and abuse that she has moved to New Zealand — and her little kid is still worried that “that Bundy guy” might find them.
Shortly after the judgment against him, Bundy uploaded misleadingly edited police bodycam video that, shorn of context, made it appear that Thomas had said the baby was in fine shape in March 2022, when in reality she simply told police that the baby was stable enough to transport, and wouldn’t need an IV during the trip from St Luke’s in Meridian to St. Luke’s in Boise.
Dr. Natasha Erickson, the other pediatrician who saw the baby and determined he was undernourished, was the focus of threats and abuse that haven’t let up since the March 2022 incident.
Diego Rodriguez posted her photo and hospital bio on his website under the heading “Child Trafficker Profile.” “It is obvious she has a ‘god complex,’” he wrote, “and loves to threaten families using CPS as a weapon.” Bundy posted a video of his own calling Erickson “a wicked person for instigating this.” […]
Erickson was less worried that large numbers of people would end up believing these claims than that a delusional person would take it upon himself to exact justice. She attached an emergency whistle to her purse, and her husband started carrying his handgun around whenever they were in public. She forbade her kids from playing in the front yard or answering the door, no matter who they thought was on the other side. The locks stayed bolted at all times.
Stern also managed, after some difficulty, to meet with Ammon Bundy at his home in Emmett, Idaho, back in August, and stayed in touch with him afterward by phone. It’s not cheerful stuff:
“I feel like I’m not supposed to yield,” he told me at one point. If he were killed, he said, his friends and followers would avenge him: “They’ll go take the life of the judge and the sheriff and St. Luke’s CEO and the head attorney and all the most culpable people.” He delivered these words with an unnerving lack of menace—less like a threat than like a weather forecast.
Bundy believes his enemies are out to control everything and everyone, and he’s only the fall guy, because just like every other anti-government militia freak, he’s the only person brave enough to stand up against tyranny. He mentioned to Stern in September that he had recently been ready to pack it all in and just go into hiding, let the hospital’s lawyers seize his home, but then the “voice of God” told him to stay and fight.
God apparently put a fairly short time limit on the staying part, though, because “a few weeks ago” local Bundy ally Scott Malone dropped by the Bundy home and found it completely empty. Nobody Stern talked to said they know where he’s gone.
[Ammon’s brother Ryan Bundy] told me that his brother had tried to muster a group to fight with him, “but when it come down to it, only about half of ’em are willing to stand.” And so now, Ryan said, Ammon was a “refugee.”
Malone says he has no idea where Bundy is. Lawyers for St. Luke’s have heard that the family is in southern Utah, hardly an hour’s drive from where Cliven lives, and from where the family staged its first standoff nearly a decade ago. But Bundy seems to have kept his plan a secret, even from his father. “I don’t know why he quit,” Cliven told me a few days later. “My way of thinking is you can’t give up on something like this. You got a battle going, and it’s a terrible one, and you know”—he trailed off, seemingly at a loss—“I don’t know.”
It’s sad when your children disappoint you, huh?
There are still contempt of court charges against Bundy, and earlier this month a judge in Ada County issued a new arrest warrant for him, with a $250,000 bond, but Bundy emailed the court to explain he wouldn’t be coming to court Monday “or any other day.”
“I have much more important matters to attend to, such as providing for my family’s needs,” Bundy wrote. “My entire life has been consumed by political prosecutions and I must now do what is necessary to sustain my family.”
So far, there don’t even seem to be any extremists out there who want to show up for another armed standoff with law enforcement. So hold off on your plans to send Ammon any more dildos, because this time he appears to be all alone with his pocket Constitution, his ammo, and his delusions.
OPEN THREAD, EVERYBODY!
[Atlantic (gift link) / Idaho Statesman]
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Maybe he realized the error of his ways and has gone into the wilderness to live simply and repent? If we could all be so lucky.
Sadly, my friend of 50+ years, Jim, has joined the Choir Eternal.
Let me tell you a few things about him.
He was from Skokie, Illinois, which, at the time, had more Jews than Tel Aviv. It may still. Why is that important?
Well, like most good Chillun of the '70s, we did road trips. We both went to a small land college in a town which rhymes with Weeder Vapids. It was literally 300 miles from anywhere.
In his indigo blue Olds 442 V8 Hurst-shiftered cruiser we rode. To Kansas City, 300 miles, to pick up a trunk- and back seat-load of Coors Beer to resell at a heinous profit. (In case you don't know, in most of the US at the time you couldn't GET Coors, which added to its cachet -- and pricetag.)
To Minneapolis, also 300 miles, for a reliable herb connection which, again, we would resell at a heinous profit. Don't judge! The alternative was to smoke the locally available ditchweed, Iowana. While cheap, Iowana had mutated itself from years of generations of genetic horror from insecticides, pesticides, fertilizers, vermicides, asbestos from brake linings, and particulates from diesel engines into a throat-burning barely-high-inducing... thing.
We could only smoke Iowana in a humongous water pipe, to try and filter out some of the yuck. Of course, we named this 3-ft-tall, 1/2 gallon water capacity, 1/2 oz bowl-size pipe Phillip. Full name, Phillip D. Pipe.
But I digress.
Why was Jim's Jewishness important? Skokie Bakery is why. I would not have known of it otherwise.
Mmmm. Skokie Bakery. Also 300 miles away. (Yes, it was if someone had detonated a bomb over Weeder Vapids that created a 300-mile-wide circle of destruction which pushed everything interesting away that far.)
We would time our departure from Weeder Vapids to leave around 11 so we could arrive at the Skokie Bakery around dawn, just as the first racks of bagels and bialys were coming out of the ovens.
Mind you, this was Serious Bidness. Completely Orthodox. Everyone had the aprons, the white shirts with rolled-up sleeves, the kippas, the beards, the pais, the tzitzits -- this was like an operating room for creating kosher deliciousness.
We would get four dozen bagels, still warm, throw 'em in the back seat, and eat a dozen between us on the 5 1/2 hour trip back. And they were NOT FOR RESALE, let me stress that. They were SO GOOD we didn't even need butter or sour cream with 'em, we just inhaled them on the way back.
*pauses to wipe drool off of keyboard*
I may tell more tales of Jim and I at another time, including the time I rolled my Datsun 2000R convertible not only without killing us both, but recovered the two ounces of weed in the glovebox from QUITE LITERALLY underneath the noses of seven Pennsyltucky State Troopers.
But the Jim story I will end on is about his audiophility. This man could hear high- and low-end frequencies that only bats and whales could hear in nature, swear to Crom.
So naturally, he demanded only the finest in audio equipment to scratch this itch. Don't remember the brand names, other than the fact that the speakers were not Lesley Rotating Midhorns -- I heard one playing from the tenth floor of a U of I dorm and EVERYBODY looked up at it -- but I know he spent THOUSANDS on his setup. And this was in the early '70s, so multiply that by three? Five? Something like that.
The thing he was proudest of was his tonearm cartridge. I should say cartridge*s*. Let me tell you why it's plural.
Now while we unlettered yahoos were happy to put a penny on the tonearm to allegedly "get more sound" out of our LPs if we had to, cartridge be damned... not audiophiles like Jim.
I think the cartridge was manufactured under the name Decca. It cost about $1400 in 1972 dollars. What made it unique was that the needle itself -- which was made out of adamantium or unobtanium or some damn thing -- was connected by a thread made of platinum or lawrencium or something, at a precisely calibrated tension.
After about 1200 hours of play, the entire cartridge had to be sent back to the factory in England to have the cartridge get re-tensioned.
This entire process took about twelve to sixteen weeks to ship, fix, and ship back -- meaning, if you were a dedicated audiophile like Jim, you needed to buy *two* of them -- since one would always be in transition.
Now, what was Jim's day jerb? I'm glad you asked!
Jim worked at an audio store, which had a record store on the side.
Jim was tasked with selling audio equipment. This usually required cranking shit up to Spinal Tap Level 11 in order to make the sale. All day. Every day. Day after day.
So when Jim came home after a ear-clanging day at work, what do you think he most desired to hear on his multi-thousand dollar top-of-the-line audio utopia?
Was it the Beatles? The Stones? CCR? Perhaps Mozart as a change of pace?
Nope.
What Jim most desired after a hard day's work was... silence.
Silence.
Dear Jim, we had great times together and I'm glad you passed without much pain. I'll see you soon, man.