by John Price
The three’s only disagreement, right before they walked onto the building’s balcony, was whether they should carry their weapons onto the balcony with them. Mark was concerned, suggesting that they leave their arms inside, since the video already showed that they were carrying arms. Doug disagreed, and disagreed strongly enough, that Mark gave in. They then walked out on the balcony, each carrying his own rifle. Mark carried his Winchester 30-30 lever action rifle vertically, with the barrel lying up against his right shoulder. Doug carried his Marlin Model 3630 with both hands, the barrel pointed straight forward. Doug’s son carried his Smith & Wesson M&P15T rifle pointed straight down, as he had been trained in the military.
After Mark, Doug and his son, all armed, walked onto the parapet, Mark began to speak.
“As we said in our video, we are here today to protest the federal government’s attempt to take away our right to own firearms to protect ourselves. Thomas Jefferson once made a statement….”
Colonel Jimenez interrupted with a barked command on his bullhorn, which echoed off of the limestone building, “Lay down your weapons. Now. Lay down your weapons, or we will be forced to….”
Mark, ignoring the warnings, plunged ahead with his statement, referring to his notes, “As I said, Thomas Jefferson once made a statement about firearms that directly applies to our protest today at the Montana State Capitol. Jefferson said, ‘The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government’.” Our protest at the State House today is truly a last resort, and it’s a protest, in fact, against a tyrannical government that has passed laws to take our firearms away from us, even though our Constitution prohibits the government from doing so.”
Colonel Jimenez, following standard firefight protocol when faced with an armed potential adversary, snapped out on his command com system to his squad, “Weapons up….Acquire targets….Hold….Hold….Hold”
Later video showed that Mark’s rifle fell forward at that point, into a firing position. It was unclear whether it slipped forward and he grabbed it, resulting in it being in a firing position, or he intentionally moved it. No one will ever know, as the moment two of the protestors had soldiers in their firing zone, Colonel Carlos Jimenez gave an order that he felt he had to give, though his guts wrenched as he did so, “Take your shots….Confirmed….Take your shots….Ahw, doggone it.” Mark and Doug entered eternity due to clean mid head shots. As Doug fell, his weapon discharged, whether intentionally or not, also never to be known, sending a bullet through the upper arm of an Army private who was at the farthest edge of their emplacement. Doug’s son dropped his weapon and fell to the balcony floor for cover. As he dived for cover, a bullet shattered part of his lower jaw. Gunning and the others with him, not yet knowing the fate of their three friends, surrendered by holding their arms above their heads and slowly walked out the 6th Avenue Capitol exit doors, on the opposite side of the building. They did not yet know that they would each soon be charged with conspiracy to commit murder of a federal employee, assault on a federal employee and threatening a federal employee with a firearm. What CNBC called ‘The Montana Armed Insurrection’ was over.
SIXTY THREE
INTERNAL MEMO
SIMPSON INTERSTATE, INC.
TO: VALUED EMPLOYEES-SIMPSON INTERSTATE, INC.
FROM: BROCK SIMPSON
SUBJECT: CORPORATE CHANGES – OWNERSHIP & MANAGEMENT
As many of know, we have been visited recently by an agent of the federal government. We didn’t invite him. He just showed up. Why was he here? Not for what you might think. It is well known in the trucking industry that our government, federal, state and local, highly regulates what we do and how we do it. Drivers, vehicles, hours of operation, charges, weights, use of electronic devices, hazardous materials, intermodal equipment, logbooks, visor cards, emissions, etc., etc., etc.
I’m become somewhat accustomed to federal regulations, however, but what I will never get used to is the government telling me what I can paint on my trucks. As long, as it’s not obscene, what right does the government have to tell Brock Simpson what I can place on Simpson Interstate trucks? Well, that’s the unanswered question after we were visited by a “CCC Conservator” a couple-three weeks ago. You know these green-shirted guys and gals, you’ve seen them on the streets and in the malls, I hear they’re even in our churches. Now they even come to private companies’ board meetings.
They think they can enforce that new so-called anti-hate speech and so-called anti-hate weapon bill, by just their word alone. If they don’t like my words, or the words on my company’s trucks, they supposedly can just tell me and I’ve got to do what they say. If they don’t like my words they can fine me and my company a gazillion dollars. If I fight the fines, well, that will cost me another gazillion dollars paid to my lawyers. Great system, hunh?
What if my independent American spirit tells me that I won’t do it? What if I tell them to get lost, I’m not paying their exorbitant fines and I’m not changing my words on my trucks? That’s where it gets really frightening. If I don’t pay, and I fight them, they can file criminal charges and try to imprison me, or my board members (including my dear wife and sons). All just because they don’t like what they call “negative attacks on public officials”. What a load of baloney (my wife cleaned this part of my memo up).
So, why I am I writing you, the employees who have made this company a success through the years? You deserve to know that I just signed a Letter of Intent to sell Simpson Interstate to a Minnesota freight company that’s slightly bigger than we are. I asked for job security, as much as one can expect in today’s market, for those of you who have been with me for five years or more. The final contract will spell it all out, but it looks like that part of the deal will be included. I’m telling you this now because word of this sale will leak, it always does, and I don’t want our best people jumping ship. It looks like most of you will be OK with the new owners, and not too much should change.
One quite obvious change, of course, will be that the Simpson family will no longer be running the store. We’ll miss you all, and we’ll never forget how hard you all worked to put us where we are today. Do I have to sell? No. I could stay and fight. I thought long and hard about doing just that. Most of you know I hate to lose and I don’t give up. Like Churchill said, right? “Never, never, never give up.”
But, Winston, sometimes you gotta decide what’s most important in life. When my attorney told me that my wife, Delilah, who is a company officer and director as you may know, could be charged with crimes for what I put on my trucks, I knew I could never live with myself if I let that happen. So, Mr. President and your fellow bureaucrats, you win. No more words you don’t like on our trucks, which will now belong to a company that fully understands what they won’t be allowed to do, after our experience.
What are we going to do now? I’ve located a medium sized trucking company in New Zealand for sale at a decent price. I understand that they speak a form of the English language there, that the people are great and that the nation believes in free enterprise. I’m looking forward to it. Come visit us and the Kiwis. See ya all down the road! Brock (and Delilah)
SIXTY FOUR
Journal Entry / Letter from Jail
To know Ralph Snyder is to love him. Sort of. I think.
Why the ambivalence you might ask? Good question.
Ralph is now one of my best friends, but it wasn’t always that way. As I mentioned earlier, as you know, journal (they say you’ve been in stir too long when you start conversing with inanimate objects, like diaries and journals), I met Ralph at that Rotary meeting where I met Fred Rose, who wasted no time introducing me to the Lord. Fred invited me to his Bible Study and Ralph asked me to attend an organizing event, the same week, for a new political organization in east Texas. I’d never heard of a tea party, except the obvious ones, like tea and crumpets with the Queen, or with the Mad Hatter
in Alice in Wonderland.
I soon found out at the meeting held at the American Legion Hall that crumpets were not what they had in mind. No, but they were interested in hot water. But not for brewing anything, except exit parties for the politicians who were increasingly getting our country into the soup. How’s that, journal, for a mangled mixed metaphor? (Another sign of slammer fatigue is laughing at your own pitiful jokes.) Well, you get the idea. There were about twenty or so east Texans there and I can quite honestly say these folks were the most serious people I had met in a long time. I don’t mean that in a negative way. They had a sense of humor, they recognized what they were up against, but they were obviously willing to sacrifice, really sacrifice, their own time and treasure to try and rescue the nation before it was destroyed by people without any apparent self-control when it came to sound fiscal public policy. Serious folks.
Ralph, as it turned out, was the main instigator of that organizational meeting. He called the meeting to order and simply stated that America was on an unsustainable path to destruction of its currency, its economy and our way of life. He said that since the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, the price of about everything has shot up. He told us that China owned the U.S., because it was buying billions of dollars of our debt. He said that almost 40% of what Americans spent every year in goods and services is subsidized by other nations or the Fed picking up our debt instruments. He asked what will happen when they open the bond window some day at the U.S. Treasury and no nation wants to buy any American debt?
Others added additional horror stories of excessive federal debt and spending on all manner of wasteful and frivolous projects. One lady said she didn’t think being in debt 16 trillion dollars plus is what any of the founders of America conceivably thought the central government would ever be doing, even adjusted for inflation. Which is another point someone made. He said that since the time that Congress created the Federal Reserve System, which is owned by private banks, and allowed it to issue the official U.S. currency, the value of that currency, due to inflation, has fallen by more than 95%. Not a very good record of accomplishment, we all agreed.
Once we had gotten our concerns off our chests, Ralph asked who was willing to actually do something about it. Everybody there raised their hands and the tea party movement in east Texas was born. I guess I may have mouthed off more than my share, because when it came time to organize formally, I got elected President of our east Texas group. Well, it didn’t take long for other tea party organizations to spring up across the State of Texas. Then, Ralph coordinated a meeting in Austin of the leaders of the various local tea party groups.
By the end of the week end we had a full-fledged state-wide tea party organization. Yup, journal, you guessed it, yours truly running my mouth again, I ended up as Co-Chairman of the State Tea Party group. I wouldn’t be using a stainless steel toilet today if I had managed to miss that Austin organizational meeting, which eventually led to my late October political speech, oops, wrong title evidently, as the President and half of DC call it my Austin Hate Speech.
But that speech was no such thing. I still marvel at how I can be an enemy of the state for engaging in political dialogue about issues of the day. But, of course, almost all political prisoners could say the same thing, whether they are imprisoned in China or Cuba or the Sudan or any number of nations that allow speech suppression. We all got this elevated status by saying what we think, when what we think wasn’t acceptable to the powers that be.
So, how did I get here? Whenever Ralph visits me, which is as often as he is able with his busy schedule, I remind him that I’m here because of him. We both get a good chuckle out of it. We like to spend time trading jail house humor. Ralph told me once he had seen a sign on a bail bond agency on the way to my prison that said, “We’ll Get You Out of Jail, If It Takes Twenty Years”. One of my favorites was about the dad who wrote his inmate son and said he didn’t have anyone to till the garden now that his son was in jail. His son wrote back and said ‘don’t do that dad, that’s where I buried the bodies’. The prison censors read the letter and alerted the local police who dug up the garden trying to find the bodies, which didn’t exist. His son then wrote his dad, and said, ‘that’s the best I could do from here, Dad, enjoy your garden.’
Most prison humor, I’m sorry to say, isn’t that clean. Things can get out of hand in a setting like this, and this is one of the better federal prisons.
So, if you go to a Rotary meeting and meet two guys for the first time, one may lead you to the gates of heaven, but one may lead you to the gates of the slammer. You just never know. Any way, if you get to read this someday, Fred and Ralph, love you both. You’re my buddies, you’re my pals.
SIXTY FIVE
Letter from Prison - Journal Entry
I’ve learned in the slammer that news among inmates travels at warp speed, particularly if it involves criminal acts on the outside. Professional curiosity, perhaps? Thus it didn’t take long after the Montana Standoff, as I preferred to call it, ended in a blaze of gunfire that we all heard about through the prison grapevine. Normally, we didn’t have daytime access to a television in my wing of the federal prison, but for some reason, the word was passed down, and the guards let us go to the rec room to watch the coverage. Once I saw what happened at Helena I figured they were eager to have us watch, particularly me I think, as a political prisoner. They wanted me to see that resistance to the federal government was futile. That the feds would always win, always.
I don’t know Gunning Bedford, Jr., nor any of the other occupiers of the Montana State House. Never met any of them, but I certainly admired their guts for being willing to make a statement. Should they have carried guns with them out on the balcony? Undoubtedly, no. That was a tactical error that cost two of them their lives. The media reports on the recently retired soldier who was shot in the jaw weren’t very good, though he will live, they said. Hindsight is always really good, so we all know that they should have released their video, left their guns on the Colonial flag in the building, and turned themselves in for short stints in the vertical bars Hilton.
My heart sunk when I watched, and re-watched, the video of three brave men paying a very high price to assert their American right to keep and bear arms. The media were apparently prevented from interviewing the soldiers, but the video clip showing a Colonel throwing up behind his transport vehicle told me all I needed to know about his view of what he felt he was ordered to do.
Except for Fox News, I didn’t see any other media question the use of the military in a domestic peacekeeping capacity. Fox’s White House guy, whom I think is smart and also tough, insisted at the White House media briefing that the President’s Press Secretary answer his question on what looked like a violation of the posse comitatus statute. The President’s press guy hemmed and hawed, then, looking at his briefing notes, referred the media to an Order signed by the Secretary of Defense, supposedly several days ago. The Fox guy said, well, that’s nice, but what does it say? Again, he answered with his nose buried in his notes, like he didn’t want to look anybody in the eye. He then mumbled that the SecDef, government-speak for the Secretary of Defense, had withdrawn a prior SecDef Order that had applied the posse comitatus statute, but without explaining what it did.
I almost fell out of my metal prison folding chair. Say what? With the stroke of a pen it’s okay, it’s legal, to use one branch of the military in internal domestic US disturbances? The Fox guy, likewise, was visibly taken aback, and blurted out something like, “Are you serious, Mike? Are you saying that the Act of Congress in the 1800’s has now been withdrawn by the Pentagon? What a crock of”…..or he said something like that. The President’s Press guy, nodded his head, mumbled something else we couldn’t quite hear, and said the news conference was over, and walked out.
Normally, that kind of performance would have guaranteed massive media reaction. But, as I wrote above, only Fox ran in a big way with the story. The lame st
ream media, that is the main stream media, almost totally spiked the story. Totally. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. If the peasants and the hay shakers out in the boondocks figure out that this White House is abusing its power, they might pick up their pitch forks (they don’t have any guns anymore, right?) and march on Washington. Take the place over. Can’t have that, so they try to make it “legal” (I write the word in this letter/journal in quotes) for the military to be used against American citizens.
Who will oppose it, even if they know about it? The military won’t object, they are under command and control from the Commander In Chief. The Department of Justice won’t object, same basic reason, it’s what the boss wants. Any private citizen would have his law suit tossed by the federal district court judge who would rule that the citizen lacks what the lawyers call ‘standing’, that is, no basis to be in court. Congress could expand the statute, but that’s not going to happen, with control of both Houses by the President’s party. So, my fellow American citizens (I write hoping that some will eventually read these words) you are no longer living in the land of the free. Your duly elected government has decided that if you get out of line (and they decide where the line is) you are looking at the barrel of a military gun that you bought and paid for originally to keep you free from foreign aggressors. Now, it’s “domestic aggressors” or “home grown terrorists”, even though most are peaceful protestors, who are the new target of our military. Americans under siege in their own land. How does this differ from what Soviet citizens faced? What a frightening situation. Sorry, journal, sorry, outside reader, but I’m really, truly upset, and I think for good reason.