Crime

Whites Win, Again

Charges dropped against Cliven Bundy and sons because armed white people refusing to pay taxes is okay, or something.

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Person who is allowed to make armed threats against federal agents.

You know, if I rallied hundreds of armed black people to my cause to protest paying a federal tax, intimidating federal agents who had duly come to collect, I wouldn’t be in jail. I’D BE DEAD. They’d send in a robot to blow up my house, even if my children were inside. Then, at my posthumous trial, they’d put my family on the hook for all my debts.

I am, of course, non-white. If I were white, it’d probably go down like this:

A federal judge in Las Vegas dismissed charges against Cliven Bundy and his sons, Ammon and Ryan, on Monday.

Judge Gloria M. Navarro of Federal District Court, in a ruling from the bench, said that the government’s missteps in withholding evidence against the three Bundy family members and a supporter, Ryan W. Payne, were so grave that the indictment against them would be dismissed…

The 2014 standoff, the focus of Monday’s hearing, was set off when the Bureau of Land Management seized cattle from Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Bunkerville, Nev., in an attempt to force him to pay decades of back fees for grazing his cattle on federal land. Mr. Bundy insisted he did not have to pay the charges because, he said, he had inherited water rights on the land. At the height of the standoff, hundreds of antigovernment activists, many of them carrying guns, rallied to the Bundys cause, until the confrontation ended with the withdrawal of federal agents.

Prosecutors withheld the evidence gathered from some witnesses because (wait for it) BUNDY SUPPORTERS ALLEGEDLY THREATENED WITNESSES.

“As a result of threats to witnesses and the speed at which personal information can spread on social media, the government concluded it could not simply turn over its entire database,” prosecutors wrote in a brief before Monday’s hearing. “Failure to disclose the information underlying the court’s mistrial order was due, in a few instances, to simple inadvertence, but in the overwhelming majority of instances to a good-faith,” they said.

This is the part where I’m supposed to say “two wrongs don’t make a right,” or “don’t worry about what other people have, worry about what you have,” or “the operation of laws should always be praised,” or some other child’s platitude made up by white America to explain why white people are able to get away with gun-toting acts of violence that would result in an IMMEDIATE DEATH SENTENCE to any person of color.

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But I don’t have it in me.

Do you know how much the justice system looks like a supremacist JOKE when you let these people take a walk? It is PROOF that there is one set of rules for white people, and a different set of rules for everybody else. These dudes are out here in armed rebellion. Let that happen in East L.A. and Trump would send in a motherjumping DRONE STRIKE.

Whatever. White people win, again. ‘Twas always thus.

But later, in case you are wondering, no officer, I didn’t see anything. See, I’m MENTALLY INCAPABLE of snitching on another black person. The repeated INDIGNITIES of your justice system renders me UNABLE to help you bring a black person to justice when you won’t hold your own people to the same standard. Now, if I’m free to go, I have a long day planned of sitting on my stoop and wishing you bad fortune. Assalamualaikum, snowflake.

Charges Against Bundys in Ranch Standoff Case Are Dismissed [New York Times]

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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