Devon Pena - Part 2 of 3 Land race and environmental politics in Costilla County.pdf

8/20/2019 Devon Pena - Part 2 of 3 Land race and environmental politics in Costilla County.pdf

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Devon Peña

[email protected]

Dear colleagues,

Part 2 of 3 focuses on answering the Q: Who are the new white settler colonists?The answer will trouble you since many are part of a white male sovereign citizens'

mobilization and they are threatening another "Bundy Ranch" situation.

Please share widely. Here is the link: http://bit.ly/1VQu0Zc.

Or scroll down; please repost and share widely; we are under siege and need wide

support.

Devon G. Peña, Ph.D.

"Memory is a moral obligation, all the time."

-J. Derrida

Costilla County | Land, water, race, and local governance | Part 2 of 3

This Three Percenter image was posted to the FaceBook page

of a resident of Alamosa advising the Costilla County colonists

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Great Recession refugees, ‘off -the-

griders’, & sovereign citizens

IS THE POLITICAL RECOMPOSITION OFCOSTILLA COUNTY AT STAKE?

Devon G. Peña | Las Colonias de San Pablo, CO | October 13, 2015

We are residents who have come to live off the grid. It’s all our

land…These are harsh economic times. We have nowhere to

go.

— Paul Skinner. Colorado Public Radio interview cited in The Free Thought Project .

[We are]…modern day pioneers and Pilgrims. [A]merican[s]

once did this. [L]oad up the wagons and head west. [I]t’s justmodern with the rvs [RVs]. [E]veryone is leaveing [sic] the

“left coast” and “sleaze coast” to find new independent land…Ilived in CA, UT, TX. lost my job in TX and came back to UT

but I want to go back to TX and live independently. [J]ust needa bit of money. [Brackets added]

— Scott Allen, Comments. Michael Morris interview.YouTube clip posted by Alex Ansary .

I have 18 years of service, in the U.S. Army. I am an ex-

Ranger. I am here to fight for your rights. That’s kinda what wedo. Alright? We can’t do it without YOU doing it. Now

nobody wants to see this place turn into a Bundy Ranch, am Icorrect?

— Unidentified Ex-Army Ranger. YouTube clip posted by A. Ansary.

I’ve got 10 acres. I’m a 3 Percenter. I’m a patriot. They will not

run you off my property without me being dead first.

— Unidentified ‘3 Percenter.’ YouTube clip posted by A. Ansary.

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White patriots and the never-ending war for ‘freedom’ on

‘independent land’

Sora Han (2006), a respected criminologist and legal scholar at the University of

California-Irvine, recently observed that “the United States is not at war; theUnited States is war.” Han is referring to the thesis that, from the beginning of its

founding as a white settler colonial state, the U.S. has waged constant war againstIndigenous and other marginalized people of color communities like

the acequia and merced villages of Costilla County.

The use of “war” is more than a culture code for the unending cycles of violence

and conflict that undergird the colonization and settlement of the Americas. We arealso familiar with the use of the term as a central meme of other racialized and

class conflicts, as in the “War on Drugs”, “War on Terrorism”, “War on Illegal

[sic] Immigrants”, and so on.

Everything gets coded as war in the language of the extremist subcultures of theTea Party, including the Sovereign Citizen, Patriot, 3 Percenter, and Free State

movements comprised of ill-fitting libertarian, white supremacist, and armedmilitia memberships. In Costilla County we now face the “War on Private Property

Rights”.

Another version of the war meme — one that is apparently ascendant in certainclass and racial quarters of the detritus of three decades of neoliberal policies of

privatization and disinvestment in the social sector —is the “War on Government’.From an Indigenous vantage point, this is filled with deep irony since Native

peoples have been resisting the governmental forms of structural violence andgenocide unleashed by the white settler colonial state for hundreds of years.

This image was posted to the same Facebook page with the quote:

“Vengence is mine sayeth the lord, and I shall repay.”

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The threat of violence being articulated by Sovereign Citizen activists against the

people of Costilla County — on display in the YouTube clips embedded below — compels me to ask for public acknowledgement of the fact that the constant state of

war against local government is today part of the nationwide white nationalist

psyche and it is tied to well-funded and organized political projects for thereassertion of white racial and class domination. More importantly, this occurs at a

time when historically disenfranchised people are finally on the verge of takingresponsibility for the constituent power required for equitable and just local self-

governance.

The various Patriot, Militia, 3 Percenter, and Sovereign Citizen projects areconsciously targeting “under - populated” states and regions where new wave

pioneers and Pilgrims [sic] can “find new independent land” to colonize. On theefforts by Libertarians, Sovereign Citizens, and Patriot militias to take control of

under-populated states and regions see, for e.g., Maryland Reporter; MotherJones; Telegraph.

The Sovereign Citizen movement is imbued with extremist Christian identity

overtones, resulting in the subtext of such popular refrains as, “We need to take ourcountry back”— presumably in order and restore it to some imagined original

pristine state as a white Christian nation forged by rugged individualists who killedfirst and eliminated the number of questions afterwards.

This is, by the way, part of the deeply embedded racist mythology of white popular

working-class cultur e that makes Trump’s hate-filled vitriol against immigrantsand people of color so appealing to the average Tea Party mentality. This

represents for me the latest version of a very old white Christian patriot identity

formation that is xenophobic, nationalistic, misogynist, and dominionist.

http://marylandreporter.com/2013/09/22/the-51st-state-western-maryland-how-to-succeed-without-seceding/http://marylandreporter.com/2013/09/22/the-51st-state-western-maryland-how-to-succeed-without-seceding/http://marylandreporter.com/2013/09/22/the-51st-state-western-maryland-how-to-succeed-without-seceding/http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/new-hampshire-libertarian-movementhttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/new-hampshire-libertarian-movementhttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/new-hampshire-libertarian-movementhttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/new-hampshire-libertarian-movementhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11241203/The-Libertarians-planning-to-take-over-New-Hampshire.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11241203/The-Libertarians-planning-to-take-over-New-Hampshire.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11241203/The-Libertarians-planning-to-take-over-New-Hampshire.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11241203/The-Libertarians-planning-to-take-over-New-Hampshire.htmlhttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/new-hampshire-libertarian-movementhttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/new-hampshire-libertarian-movementhttp://marylandreporter.com/2013/09/22/the-51st-state-western-maryland-how-to-succeed-without-seceding/


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Image from a Facebook page of a supporter of the

Costilla County Sovereugn Citizens. These racist memes

are a common feature of these pages, and they claim not to be racists.

As Native peoples we understand how the colonizer’s art of warfare is not always

waged by official military forces and is instead often deployed through violentdirect actions by volunteer militias, self-anointed patriots, and what are essentially

private death squads. The notorious Pinkerton Detective Agency comes to mind.Of course, the Ku Klux Klan is historically among the most recognizable of these

unofficial forces aligned with and enacting white settler colonial violence againstBlack, Indigenous, and other people of color. This is the actual threat posed to the

Native Indo-Hispano inhabitants of Costilla County that is overlooked by currentmainstream media accounts and that many of the newcomers naively fail to

understand.

Beyond the old KKK, there are today literally hundreds of new mostly white male partisan organizations that are unleashing an ideology of violence in order to

‘purify’ the nation through organized politico-paramilitary practices againstspecified targets.

We can observe that these practices are still resulting in the displacement, murder,and grave injury of Native Americans, African Americans, Chicana/os, other

Latina/os and other people of color across the nation including the uncounted,

usually unarmed, Black people murdered by white police, some with proven ties tothese same sovereign citizen groups.

According to a report in Public Eye, white supremacists and Sovereign Citizengroups are actively recruiting police and active military to their cause. One specific

case involved the work of a former cop, the late Jack McLamb, who was the

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founder and director of the Arizona-based, Police Against The New World Order

(PATNWO), and published Aid and Abet, a newsletter directed towards recruiting police and active duty military personnel to the Patriot movement.

Confederate flag imagery is another common meme on

Costilla County sovereign citizen’s Facebook pages

This is the material and historical backdrop required to understand the proceeding

analysis of the new white settler colonists of Costilla County and of the real publichealth, cultural, social, and environmental issues posed, ultimately, by the legacy

of ruthless subdivision of the open spaces of Colorado and other Southwesternstates.

New Wave settler colonists: ¿Quienes son, y por que les falta

querencia?

Querencia is “love of place” and it is acquired through multiple generations ofliving and working in a heritage landscape like the acequia and merced

communities of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Love of place ishard earned in an environment with the ecological and political conditions that

characterize Costilla County. Love of place requires respect for ecological limits

and awareness and respect for local knowledge. I believe the newcomer white

settlers of Costilla County lack both of these qualities, at this point.

Who are the new wave white settler colonists of Costilla County? The newcomersare a diverse group of people. Their regional origins are quite varied and include

people with roots in well-known cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Diego,Portland, and Colorado Springs while others left homes in smaller towns and citieslike Logan (Utah) and Meeker (CO) or fled low-waged jobs in places like

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Montrose (CO). Still others hail from the Deep South including rural and small

town locales in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. A few aremilitary veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A scant few of the newcomers claim to be “natural born” Colorado “natives”, as if

this somehow provides legitimacy for arrogant behavior that the locals cannot help but qualify as disrespectful interloping.

The newcomers have two ‘token’ African American men who seem willing andable to be paraded by Internet trolls and right-wing pundits as evidence that the

newly arrived, mostly white Patriots and off-the-grid advocates are not racist andthat the county is the guilty party attacking innocent people whose only crime is an

honest search for ‘intentional’ community.

The contradictions abound: In another interview posted to YouTube, we are toldthat the Hispanics [sic] of Costilla County do not want growth (which us true) and

yet the same people making these statements are proponents of sustainable living.

My question: What could be more sustainable than to recognize the ecologicallimits of a place, leading to the anti-growth posture of the Native citizens? Only

this is not quite right: The Chicana/o community wants economic vitality but itmust abide by the cultural and ecological qualities of Costilla County, and this

reflects a view shared by counties across the State of Colorado. It only becomes a problem when this view is articulated by people that white settlers find

threateningly Other.

There are young, middle-aged, and older adults; single persons; partnered; married;some have arrived with families and have children who are attending local district

public schools.

Research over the past two weeks has led me to the following understanding of the

newcomer colonists, who fall into four distinct groupings; how’s this for reversing‘the Gaze’?

(1) Refugees of the ‘Great Recession’ – These are mostly

white working-class and Christian families and persons whohave lost their homes, jobs, and income security, or who have

tired of urban life and seek solace in more open spaces; theyhave fled to Costilla County to restart their lives as a result of

the unscrupulous marketing of ‘dirt cheap’ land with hugehidden costs that may are ill-prepared to shoulder.

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(2) Off-the-grid, alternative lifestyle advocates – Mostly

young and white, they are apparent true believers insustainability but are afflicted by a naiveté born of near

complete ignorance of the history, culture, and ecology of

place; they have also shown a lack of judgment in aligningthemselves with elements of the third group, the ‘Patriots’ and‘Sovereign Citizens’.

(3) Patriots and Sovereign Citizens – These are the vocalminority within the Costilla County settler colonists and are

mostly comprised of former military servicemen; all whitemales; many with active ties to organizations and groups that

are the partisans of anti-government social movements

spawned, most recently, by Tea Party hatred of the Obama

Presidency. They are well armed; arrogant; delusional in their

political and legal beliefs; and therefore highly dangerous.

There is a fourth subset, (4) the ‘professional’ Internet trolls,pundits, and social media activists that make a living from

creating social media flash points seeking to justify the actionsof the third group.


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RV prairie dweller north of San Luis. Outhouse and

storage shed have been built over past two years. Photo by D. Peña.

(1) The economic refugees

One thing is certain: Many, perhaps most, of the prairie dwellers are largelyapolitical persons and families facing great economic and social distress. They

offer largely untold stories of people like one displaced family that moved from

Arkadelphia, Arkansas to the Costilla County desert prairie in 2007 after a

catastrophic illness left the family bankrupt and in deep material poverty. I metand befriended them in Ft. Garland well before the latest wave of newcomers

arrived. They sought refuge from a world they rightly view as cruel, chaotic, and punitive.

The Arkadelphia family acquired a 5-acre sagebrush lot in northeastern CostillaCounty during ‘good times’ (2005); their homestead was in the vicinity of thesouthern approach from San Luis to the Sangre de Cristo Ranches subdivision at

the turn on Road X, off the highway to Ft. Garland, by the so-called “A” House.

After a series of catastrophic illnesses among family members, this 5-acre lot wastheir only asset and the sole place left for them to go. On arrival, they lacked

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resources to build an adequately insulated home or to even install indoor plumbing

or a septic tank, required under state health regulations, which are now delegated tocounties for enforcement.

They could not afford the cost of installing the badly needed domestic water well

and bought what water they could from local businesses or occasionally took itdirectly from the creeks and agricultural canals (ditches in the parlance of the north

county), against my advice. Access to vital health care was always difficult and

involved long and costly travel to the public health clinic in San Luis or the evenmore distant regional hospital in Alamosa.

After a particularly hard winter, the family suddenly left in the early spring of

2010, perhaps heading back to warmer climes in the South? I never found out. Thisfamily was not the target of over-zealous land use code enforcement officers. They

left, like most people who share their abject circumstances, after challengingenvironmental conditions became more than they could weather or adapt to.

Illegal dump north of San Luis. All of the garbage

at this site is from the family that left Arkansas

in 2007 and then left Costilla County in 2010.

Photo by D. Peña.

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The only imprint the Arkadelphia family left — strewn across an illegal garbage

dump not far from their abandoned lot — is the broken shards of a harshly disruptedattempt at domesticity and the discarded yellowing paperwork of lives wrecked by

neoliberal economic and social policies. This pattern happens more often than not.

Living off-grid does not come so easily in our high altitude cold desertenvironment; with or without land use code enforcement officers.

This seems especially true for those who do not choose to pursue an off-the-grid

lifestyle but are instead simply suffering from the effects of the poverty ofdeprivation, which is a consequence of a capitalist society’s incessant structural

violence. Blaming county administrators for this tragedy is a demagogicideological ruse by second-rate Internet trolls and pundits, the not so masterful

prevaricators of right-wing social media.

In other words: An unknown number of the newcomers are people whose lives areas crushed and difficult as it was for the medical debt refugees of the Great

Recession that arrived from Arkansas in 2007 and left by 2010. These are not off-

the-grid advocates but rather people desperate to do everything they can to just

survive, which makes them vulnerable as ideological fodder for the right-wingextremists.

This is the factually dominant pattern in Costilla County, and has been for decades:People buy land here; usually sight unseen; they harbor dreams of a home in the

Rocky Mountains amidst antelope and elk herds that seldom appear and elusive

mountains that are typically some 10 to 20 miles away and largely inaccessible dueto private enclosures and our own locally-managed common lands. They are lured

here by the devilishly misleading and perfectly legal advertisements for the sale of

‘dirt cheap’ land by speculators and unscrupulous realtors. In my estimation, that’s

who ultimately holds blame for this chaos and suffering since land gets deceptivelysold to people unaware of the very substantial hidden costs to the owners, theirneighbors, and our environment.

The newly ‘landed’ arrive and find there is no water to be had – unless they have

the$10-20,000 average required to pay a private company to drill a well into the

San Luis Valley unconfined aquifer (depending on location); they may also have tosecure a well permit from the State Water Conservation Board. In the meantime,the right-wing Internet trolls blame the county for the eviction that resulted after a

more established white middle-class property owner filed suit alleging violationsof the local land use code.

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This has nothing to do with the county land use code and everything to do with the

facts of the region’s extreme aridity and over-appropriated water rights regime.Combined with the limited resources of many newcomers and you get further

displacement and conflict. None of the mainstream media reporting so far notes

this essential set of facts beyond an occasional quote from County AdministratorBen Doon who correctly observes that all the water in the ditches, creeks, and

rivers is already appropriated, and in the case of the Rio Grande is part of thedeliveries Colorado must make under an interstate compact with downstream water

users in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico.

Beyond falling victims to the land speculators’ lust for easy profits, the refugeessettling in Costilla County are also casualties of the neoliberal dismantling of the

welfare state. According to Costilla County records and officials, the newcomersrepresent 80 percent of all new cases for food stamp and family support assistance.

This is definitely not the way to build an off-the-grid community.

Dirtcheap.com is an example of the type of misleading

marketing that lures people to purchase “cheap land”

with huge hidden costs to the owners, neighbors and the environment.

The Sheriff’s Department also reports that for the first time in the history of the

County, people from outside the Town of San Luis and the surrounding acequia

villages comprise the majority of the county jail inmate population. This has got to be a first: A predominantly Chicana/o county with a mostly white male populace of

jailhouse inmates; unprecedented and troubling as a barometer of the chaotic socialchange occurring in the county.

There are also reports from concerned parents in the school district that the

children of some of the newcomers are getting bullied at school because they are

unwashed and local students find the odor offensive and disruptive to courseworkand social interaction. Some concerned parents are now pressuring the

superintendent and school board to expand the number of showers available to

these children so they can attend more regularly to their personal hygiene and perhaps end this harassment.

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This illustrates another painful fact: Costilla County is already an economically

distressed area and is often cited as the “poorest county” in Colorado. Most localsreject this characterization by noting how the area is rich in land, history, and

culture even if it is “cash poor”.

Regardless, the failures of neoliberal capitalism have produced the largest mass of poor working-class families since the era of the Great Depression. Many of these

poor white working-class people are moving to an area that is already

economically impoverished.

Indeed, the bullying of newcomer children is exactly the kind of hidden cost that

we all need to start acknowledging and addressing. It would ne nice to see

Colorado Public Radio and the Denver Post acknowledge this underlying reality insomething other than the shallow reporting thus far done that has actually

exacerbated the situation by painting a misleading picture of our county as a wildwest free of land regulations.

Chloe Everhart and Hyrum Jenson. Photo courtesy of Dylan Minor | Colorado Public Radio

(2) The off-the-grid alternative lifestyle advocates

The second principal group of newcomers consists of mostly white young adultswho envisioned an opportunity to build a community that seeks a sustainable

lifestyle by living off-the-grid. It is a noble ambition but one that is obviouslylimited in this case by naiveté and a lack of sufficient knowledge, skill, or

resources to establish a viable version of this alternative lifestyle in an arid

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befriending us by sitting down to a serious and respectful discussion of local

knowledge about building a home in this environment.

This is precisely the root of the problem facing Chloe and her colleagues: To live

off-the-grid in a manner that embraces social justice and not just ecological

sustainability, the newcomers must respect and learn place-based ecology, culture,and history. Otherwise, this can quickly become another exercise in complicity

with the arrogant dispossession of a Native peoples’ sense of place by white settler

colonists, which is exactly the agenda of the third group.

Screenshot of Ex-Ranger active in the Costilla County Sovereign Citizens mobilization.

(3) The ‘Sovereign Citizens’

I am going to start with the smallest subset of the newcomers simply because theyare also the most vocal and most ‘networked’. They are using an active social

media campaign to escalate this into a confrontation with local, state, and federalauthorities as a test case for sovereign citizenry.

These activist newcomers, who claim to be struggling to live among others in the

hardscrabble terrain of Costilla County’s colonias, embrace a distinctly resurgent

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thread of white settler colonial ideology that legitimizes itself by invoking the need

for volunteer militia mobilization and the possible use of violence.

For example, in the video clip below, a former Army Ranger who claims to own

acreage in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, discusses the idea that sometimes the

going gets rough in negotiations with governmental authorities. In the event thatthe clip is removed from the YouTube channel created by one of the Internet

pundits and trolls that is behind this mobilization, I have transcribed the statements

made by this unidentified ‘Patriot’ and the others present during an impromptumeeting that took place last Tuesday after the Costilla County Commissioners

monthly public meeting.

EX-ARMY RANGER: I have 18 years of service, in the US

Army. I am an ex-Ranger. I am here to fight for your rights.

That's kinda what we do. Alright? We can’t do it without YOUdoing it. Now nobody wants to see this place turn into a Bundy

Ranch, am I correct? [Groans of agreement, nervouslaughter]… All right. Now, solutions need to become to in

order for this to happen. The solutions are not gonna be

reached unless the people stick together and stand up for what

they believe in. Now here’s what I want to know from each andevery person standing here, Is: Do you believe in your

Constitutional right to do what you want with your own land?[Yes! wide agreement]

What we would like to do, is stay on top of the situation. and we

would like your help, each and every person, here, we wouldlike your help in remedying the solution to this problem.

Now sometimes those solutions come easy through negotiation, sometimes they come a little rough…Everybody I am sure

knows about Bundy Ranch and the stuff that happened there.

Ah, we need to try and avoid those kinds of situations but at the

same time you got to stand up for your Constitutional rights.

What are your Constitutional rights? Does anyone know what your Constitutional Rights are? [Two different men displaytheir knowledge of the Bill of Rights].

A lot of people don't understand that ‘code’ is not ‘law’. Codeis code; law is law.

Woman: Then how does it get combined?


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It is illegal for an officer of the law to enforce code on your

property, okay? And those are the issues that we’re here, that’sthe reason I am here, is to deal with it.

I have a personal involvement and a personal interest. I own 7

acres of land up here in the mountains. So, everything that you’re dealing with I’m going to have to deal with. So it is in

my best interest that I take care of you. So, we’re looking for

your support; we’re looking for your help, and if you guys arewilling and ready, Operation Patriot Rally Point is willing and

ready and we’re going to step, but we’re going to need eachand every person’s help; okay it’s not simple.

Now last night I received a message, an urgent message, on Facebook, from one of my ninjas. Ninjas, that’s what we call

ourselves, cause we work in the background, and I was advisedto contact a United States Supreme Court judge, who wanted to

speak to me, on this issue. Immediately, as soon as I got themessage, I picked up the phone; I introduced myself; he

introduced himself to me, and we talked; he’s up in Denverright now. Apparently Costillo [sic] County hasgrown the

attention of the U.S. superior court and he notified me that USmarshals are going to be brought in on this. For some reason, I

can’t tell you who they are, I don’t know the details.

WOMAN (Beale): I do. This started with me and my husband.

We own 10 acres over on the plat by the A house, and our

neighbor from Texas had a vacation home here, he came up four times a year; we were there about 9 months and he

decided to sue us, he didn’t like how we were living but weended up, a district judge told us we could stay on our land and

build; and we went to court and they wouldn’t give us our

permits again and the county judge ruled....the district judge said that Matt Valdez [County Land Use Administrator] was

not authorized to give permits. I have this in writing and its

underneath the court oath. Now, Martin Gonzalez was thedistrict court judge. Now we are under Jim Woods, who is the

county judge, who ruled over Martin’s ruling and kicked us offand made us take down our house.

EX-RANGER: The judge has asked me to speak to you guysand, ah, see if we can organize a meeting with the judge, and

some assistant of his, and a couple of US Marshals I think, I


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can’t give thee full details cause my mind is a little foggy, but

he would like to organize a meeting with the citizens that’sinvolved here. Ah, he’s requested Thursday or Friday….I don'tknow if that’s possible for you all….

This is not going to be easy, any time you try to take on local government or federal government, anything like that and any

kind of issue, it’s not going to be easy. You have to be ready for

a hard fight. You got to ruck up, balls up, get er done…that’show it rolls…

ANOTHER MAN: Yea but there’s a problem here. A lot of these people are being kicked off of their property and they havenowhere to go and the winters here are extremely difficult….

SECOND MAN: I’ve got 10 acres. I’m a 3 Percenter; I’m a

Patriot. They will not run you off my property without me beingdead first.

THIRD MAN: That’s the thing about it, we all gotta stick

together, because eventually its gonna come down to the point,where its going to be the people who are at our doors, we got tohelp or neighbors out so its not going to be us next time….

This is one clip among many posted to a YouTube channel created and

administered by Alex Ansary. One recurring theme in the video clips is a set ofvariants of private property rights concepts that are central to Sovereign Citizen

ideology. This includes the idea that ‘fee simple’ ownership conveys a divine rightto do as one pleases with the land that is older than the U.S. Constitution and most

certainly antecedent to local governmental authority at the county level.

The most notorious recent example of this was the Bundy Ranch last year in Nevada, which is frequently invoked by the Patriots and Sovereign Citizens in

Costilla County. Commonly decreed among advocates of this ideology is the ideathat individual sovereignty constitutes liberty from taxation or regulation of private

property rights when vested in fee simple ownership.

(4) Internet Pundits and Trolls

Who is Alex Ansary? He fits the mold of the freelance writer and videodocumentarian trying to make it as another Internet sensation. He’s not having

much luck with that. Ansary started his blogging as an irregular contributor to


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online conspiracy theory zines and unfiltered information clearinghouses like

Rense.com, an agglomeration and self-promotion site spanning the whole spectrumof political thought including “conspiracy theory” reporting on topics such as

UFOs, Chemtrails, and Mind Control. Among Ansary’s gems posted to Rense.com

is a blog post about “Mind Control Through TV”. Ansary is actually the onedoing ‘mind control’ because by allowing advertising on his many websites,

including YouTube, he gets to make a penny or whatever every time you or I visit

to take a peek.

His specialty for many years, before becoming a champion of private property

rights in Costilla County, was a penchant for conspiracy theories related to the New World Order, the police state, and mass media indoctrination of the masses.

Ansary must have missed the indoctrinated masses of #blacklivesmatter and#NotOneMore.

He has now taken his conspiracy theorizing from the realm of mind control to the

complexities of a set of deeply rooted historical conflicts over land and waterrights — including previous failed white settler enclosures that he has no knowledge

of. Instead, he merely seeks to apply his conspiracy theories to the case of CostillaCounty by asserting without a shred of evidence that land use administrators

secretly and maliciously engineered a nefarious attack on the private propertyrights of the newcomers.

This not a new tactic but its application in our context is novel. Breitbart and his

minions invented the ring wing’s notorious use of fabricated documentaryevidence to serve libertarian, neoconservative, and anti-democratic agendas by

deploying social media to systematically and incessantly present deception and prevarication masquerading as journalism. It’s not working very well in Ansary’s

case as indicated by the abysmal number of hits on his YouTube channel.

One of the advocates of the Sovereign Citizen ideology in Costilla County is

another newcomer by the name of Vince Edwards, a white male in his 30s who isfeatured in another Ansary YouTube post. Edwards’ particular narrative, clothedin awkward legalese, revolves around the familiar and delusional Sovereign

Citizen misunderstanding of the concept of ‘fee simple’ in property rights:

The problem that we’re facing in t his country and in this county

is that most of the people just don’t now their rights and the factof the matter is that our rights preexist the Constitution, eh, eh,

preexist the forming of this county, ah, preexisted theregulations that they are trying to put together now. Every

http://rense.com/general69/mass.htmhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8upfoij_jIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8upfoij_jIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8upfoij_jIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8upfoij_jIhttp://rense.com/general69/mass.htm


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single warranty deed that I’ve ever looked at has the words ‘fee

simple; on it. Fee simple means absolute unconditional use of your property hat means I don’t have to pay taxes on it, I don’thave to get permission to do anything, I just exercise my rights.

This is much more than a misunderstanding of the legal concept of fee simple orthe status of English or Anglo common law in the U.S. It reveals a great deal of

ignorance about the Constitutional nature of this Republic of Property. More

importantly, it also reveals a colonialist’s narrow self -centered and individualisticconcept of rights, which is common among the Sovereign Citizen crowd who

express little sense of community obligations or respect for Indigenous peoples’established ways of being, knowing, and doing that are more resilient and just than

settlers’ selfish norms and arrogant orientations.

These so-called Sovereign Citizens are considered a domestic terrorist threat; see

the reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Federal Bureau ofInvestigation (FBI). That may very well be. But they are also a different kind of

threat – that of the everyday lived experience of a colonizer’s heavy, selfish,overbearing presence and complete lack of humility in the face of Indigenous

cultures and the limits imposed by ecological realities in our cherished watersheddemocracy of the acequia communities of the San Luis Valley.

Posted 35 minutes ago by Devon G. Peña

Labels: acequias colonias Colorado Costilla County land use regulations Patriots Sangre de CristoLand GrantSovereign Citizens Three Percenters water rights

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Devon Pena - Part 2 of 3 Land race and environmental politics in Costilla County.pdf

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