In the last week we’ve seen the rise of Cliven Bundy in his stand against the federal government’s land ownership, and his fast fall with his racist comments of how black Americans would have been better off as slaves.

It certainly isn’t surprising, as Bundy was a very bad symbol for the conservative media to focus on in the first place. There are lots of ways to make a good case for the government overreaching with land ownership and excessive fines, but spotlighting Bundy was not it. ­It never was.

Bundy is a Nevada rancher who has illegally let his cattle graze on federal land for 20 years. As a result, he’s built up about $1 million in grazing fees, to the point where the government was planning to take his cattle away. However, Bundy has a large group of armed supporters to defend the ranch, and they’ve been at a standstill since.

Jon Stewart, as you’d expect, took some time to poke fun at how conservative media covered the issue. However, he did make a surprisingly good point at the end of his April 21 “Apocalypse Cow” segment that went beyond his usual “ad hominem” based comedy against Sean Hannity’s coverage of the rancher.

Stewart’s basic logic was that while government overreach is bad, being against it to the level of having an armed standoff with the federal government is blowing it out of proportion. If Bundy really wanted to make his case, he should bring it up to the voters and local politicians. But the federal government not letting him graze on land he doesn’t own doesn’t warrant an armed revolt.

This is actually reasonable. This is a “petition the government for a redress of grievances” issue, not a “if you don’t grab your guns and be ready to fire, our freedom will end here” issue. Whether or not you disagree with the government about owning that federal land, they didn’t break any laws in acquiring it, so Bundy should go through the legal channels set by it, instead of creating a mini-cold war in Nevada.

I was looking forward to Hannity’s response the next night, but it was disappointing. He simply tried to paint Stewart as a hypocrite for failing to call out other “domestic terrorists” like Bill Ayers or Yusuf Islam from his Rally to Restore Sanity in 2010. It was a fragile argument, as Stewart never even called Bundy a domestic terrorist in his segment.

There are some solid cases Hannity could’ve instead made for Bundy. He could look at if the benefits of having a ranch produce cattle for the market outweigh the consequences of illegal grazing. Better yet, Hannity could’ve looked at the large conservative supporters for his cause, and show Bundy already has the resources to petition the government to redress their ownership of the land. That would’ve let Hannity have the last word for once.

In the end, Bundy is another major issue of the conservative echo chamber, where events or people get distorted and oversimplified. When the government and ranchers are having an armed standoff on a small issue like cattle grazing, it’s easy to frame the government for using force to take away our liberty.

It’s a simple idea of the government being an enemy that will only use force to take what it wants, which stirs a lot of fear and activism in the conservative base, without a rational argument. Conservatives deserve to be taken more seriously, and one important way to do that is ditch people like Bundy.

Max Antonucci is a junior newspaper and online journalism major. His column appears weekly. You can find him on Twitter @DigitalMaxToday or email him at meantonu@syr.edu.

 

Published on April 28, 2014 at 1:00 am