“I love coming back to America!”
He paused for a moment before delivering the punch line.
“I live in California.”
He paused again to let the laughter and applause subside. He was speaking last April from a stage set up under a bridge near the Bundy ranch. We had gathered to commemorate the first anniversary of the “Battle of Bunkerville” – the standoff between Cliven Bundy and the Federal Bureau of Land Management in the Nevada desert. Well, I wasn’t really there for that, exactly. I was there to observe, stumbling around with my right foot in a big purple cast taking pictures and recording the speeches. I did not blend.
Having warmed up the crowd with his humor, he got down to business. “First off: I'm a proud, angry, white man! I admit it! I am! But we've got a Muslim terrorist in the White House, who also happens to be a black supremacist. We got a Secretary of State who watched four brave Americans die in Benghazi, who's now running for president!”
“Boo!” shouted the audience.
“She's Monica Lewinski's boyfriend's wife!"
That brought the bridge down. Amid the laughter, cheers, and applause he screamed, “You’re damn right I’m angry!”
His name is Bobby Florentz, from Orange County, and he’s the leader of a group called the Guardians of the Oath. He had been a member of the Oath Keepers, but decided they weren’t committed enough, so he split off to form his own, more deeply committed group.
The Oath Keepers, if you don’t know, are a group of current and former soldiers and police who took an oath to defend the US Constitution when inducted into those roles, and they believe they should continue to take seriously the promise they made, which sounds righteous enough, reasonable and patriotic. It sounds like a good commitment to make if you care about liberty and America and stuff.
The Oath Keepers pledge to disobey any order they deem unconstitutional, something that became a serious concern in March 2009 when Barack Obama had been president for a month and it had already become abundantly clear to everyone that he was black. That was the month Oath Keepers was formed to unite people with guns in refusing any orders to “disarm the American people,” or “force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext,” or “to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people,” and other such scenarios which became suddenly plausible when Obama moved into the White House and their world turned upside down.
The disarming of the populace and the concentration camps have so far failed to materialize, and the most high-profile effort the Oath Keepers have undertaken has been to deploy to Ferguson to confront protestors with assault rifles, during the riots last year and again yesterday. How that reflects their mission to defend the people against government tyranny is not clear. Unless, of course, you’re willing to acknowledge what they’re obviously, really about.
Regardless, the Oath Keepers weren’t keeping it real, not real enough for Bobby Florentz, so he went rogue. Not that he opposes the Oath Keepers – the Oath Keepers were a proud presence at the Bundy ranch – he simply feels they need to be augmented with a little extra intensity and more honesty and direct talk.
He had a message for everyone who cared about freedom, even atheists like me, and I was impressed with his inclusiveness, if not his logic:
"Now, something that I think most of us can relate to: Anybody notice that God and Christianity are being attacked?”
Oh my, yes, the crowd definitely did notice that.
“Well, I'm gonna tell you: God must DIE.”
The crowd went silent. He was good. He let it hang for a moment. Then, “For these people to succeed.”
The crowd breathed again.
“Our rights, our unalienable rights, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, come from God. That has been acknowledged and stipulated for two centuries. And upon that basis is our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. The only entity that can take away a right is an entity that is equal or stronger than the one that gave it. So God has to go. Then our rights have to go. Then they're all gone. So, once Christianity is gone, once God is wiped out, everything else is gone. So what I'm saying is, even if you're an atheist, you'd better hope that Christianity stays, and that God stays in the public square, because your rights depend on it. All of our rights depend on it. Because without God, without Christianity, without our faith, it's all gone. We need to fight for our religion. that's what we're here to do, that's what it's going to take!"
The crowd rose to its feet, and the man standing next to me shouted “Fight for God! Fight for God!” while pumping his fist in the air.
Well, God needs all the help he can get, I guess.
But these are the irrelevant rants of crazy people lost in the desert, right? No, you can hear people on FOX News saying the same thing from a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan every day. A few days after I heard Florentz speak, Bill O’Reilly said this on his show while talking about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy:
“…our traditional American values are under siege nearly everywhere. If you’re a Christian or a white man in the USA, it’s open season on you.”
So Bobby Florentz is not a voice crying in the wilderness, not any longer. After decades of being marginalized and shamed by mainstream America, his worldview has been resurrected with new credibility and invited back to the table, and I’m sure he finds that validating and encouraging. And the Australian tabloid magnate who owns FOX News finds it very lucrative.
Since the standoff in 2014, Cliven Bundy is apparently always accompanied in public by a personal security detail. I accidentally sat next to Bundy at some point, only realizing he was seated about four feet from me when one of the speakers called out to him and he responded with a gesture. Once I became aware, I carefully observed him and the contingent protecting him, made up of several thick-necked men and one woman, who you can see as the imposing figure in the middle of the photograph.
They all wore side arms and had a coiled tube looped behind their ears that indicated an earpiece. The earpieces didn’t seem to function, since they communicated by approaching each other and whispering, but they looked cool.
They were constantly scanning the crowd, usually from behind dark or reflective sunglasses, and at one point one of them approached another seated next to me and whispered, “Keep an eye on the guy at two o’clock with the black worker’s cap.” I craned my neck to see who they were talking about and, sure enough, there was a guy standing to our right wearing a black hat much like Vladimir Lenin wears in all those grainy black-and-white photos.
Nothing else about the man’s appearance or behavior seemed noteworthy, and, of course, he didn’t attempt to assassinate Cliven Bundy, so I suspect he aroused suspicion for no reason other than the left-wing implication of his headwear. The bodyguards really wanted to believe they were playing a vital role in protecting the life of their hero, and in the absence of any evidence of a real threat, a funny hat would have to do.
I assumed the security detail was made up of Oath Keepers. When Bundy took the stage to speak, I followed and stood to one side, listening and taking some pictures. The woman was there near me, watching the crowd, so I approached her, wanting to verify who they were.
“I see that you’re part of a kind of security detail that’s guarding Mr. Bundy,” I said, “Are you Oath Keepers, or members of a militia, or..?”
She started at the intrusive question, pivoting to face me squarely. She was inscrutable for a moment behind her giant black insect eyes, and then she snapped, “I’m not going to answer that question.”
Alrighty then. I muttered something like, “Ok. Sorry,” and walked a few paces away. She never took her eyes off of me after that, even when she leaned over to whisper to one of the other bodyguards, who immediately turned his shiny orange alien eyes toward me as well.
From that point, I’m pretty sure I was an FBI agent. I imagine their thought process went something like, “So, you thought the giant purple cast would throw us off. You thought you would camouflage yourself with conspicuousness. HOW CLEVER.”
In the photo above, you see Cliven Bundy to the left, turning to speak to someone, and his lawyer, Joel Hansen, seated next to me on the right of the photo. Hansen is a Las Vegas attorney and a failed candidate for Nevada State Attorney General. He ran in 2010 when the Democrat who held the office refused the Governor’s request to file a lawsuit to stop Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Hansen didn’t win, garnering only 8% of the vote as a candidate for the American Independent Party, but he did file his own class-action lawsuit against Obamacare on behalf of the citizens of Nevada. I’m not able to find anything current on the status of that lawsuit. The Democratic AG who refused the Governor’s request to challenge Obamacare, Catherine Cortez Masto, will be running in 2016 to replace retiring US Senator Harry Reid.