Ech.

Like, I do appreciate both the optics and the reality of armed volunteers staring down government agents until they slink off, that’s kind of cool and it’s a good morale-booster to see that thing pay off.

But really this fight was never really about the people vs. the government, it was another in a very long-running series of range wars of ranchers vs. absolutely everyone else.

From the get-go the idea was always that ranchers could use waste land - low quality scrubland, maybe soil quality and/or water availability too low to bother farming, maybe just butt-far from any settlement or mode of transportation - to run livestock even though they didn’t really pay full value for it or put any effort into improving the land ’cause why the hell not, might as well get some use out of it, let them graze and then drive the cattle on up through the Great American Desert to the railheads in Chicago.

And then inevitably development pushed out a bit further and that land got used for something more useful and the ranchers were angry, were like “well crap, if we can’t trample all the hell through your land and fuck up everything living on it, we won’t be able to continue our traditional lifestyle of trampling all the hell through your land and fucking up everything living on it”, and everyone else was like “yeah, guess so, dipshit”, and then since the ranchers were in the habit of dealing with problems by shooting at them on the assumption that no one would mind, they fought.

And people are like “ooh hoo hoo, see they wanted to kick him off so they could build solar plants on the land” and yes, that makes sense, that is in fact a more useful thing to do with the land that this guy never really put serious money or effort towards.

And I mean, hell, rural right-populism is supposed to love energy extraction projects, right? Energy independence, good jobs for earthy people in a masculine, right-leaning hierarchy running from businessmen down to practical scientists and engineers down to skilled technical laborers down to unskilled jobs for folks with the gumption to do hard work in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Maybe if we called it “drilling for sunshine”?

Dipshits.