They implored the last holdout in the armed occupation of a wildlife refuge here to think about the Holy Spirit. They explained that the First Amendment was about freedom of speech and the Second was about the right to bear arms, and said that they were in that order for a reason. They asked him what he thought Jesus would have done in his situation.

He, in turn, asked for pizza and marijuana, criticized a government that condoned abortion and drone strikes, and talked about U.F.O.s and dying rather than going to prison.

…

In the 1980s and early ’90s, in what is now called the Sagebrush Rebellion, ranchers in the West protested higher prices that the federal government wanted to charge to let cattle graze on public lands. That fight, said David J. Hayes, a former deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior — the agency that oversees hundreds of millions of acres of Western lands — was largely over money.

…

“The claim is that the land belongs to private parties, and that public ownership is a foreign concept in our Constitution,” said Mr. Hayes, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, and now teaches law at Stanford University. “That’s a relatively new one,” he added, “and it finds no credible support in the U.S. Constitution.”

Read More