Ammon Bundy launches Uber, but for armed paramilitary protests

[Update 2-19-2021: the sentence about a "shoot-out" with the Bureau of Land Management has been corrected. There was no shoot-out. There was an armed stand-off]

From the Los Angeles Times:

They had descended on Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center in Vancouver, Wash., the evening of Jan. 29 to protest the quarantine of Gayle Meyer, a 74-year-old patient who had refused to take a test for the coronavirus.

Police in riot gear guarded entrances as the activists — who authorities said were armed — insisted that Meyer was being held against her will, a claim the hospital denied.

Meyer's 49-year-old daughter, Satin, an anti-mask activist licensed as her caregiver, had summoned the demonstrators, foot soldiers in a rapidly expanding network called People's Rights. With the tap of a thumb on a smartphone, members can call a militia like they'd call an Uber and stage a protest within minutes.

Behind the organization is a familiar name: Ammon Bundy.

Ammon Bundy is the radical Mormon leader of such separatist movements as the Malheur Wildlife Refuge Takeover, which was inspired by what Bundy and his followers saw as unfair charges in an arson case (the actual arsonist disagreed with the occupation). He's also the son of rancher Cliven Bundy, whose 21-year-long dispute over unpaid federal cattle gazing fees climaxed in 2014 in a tense standoff with the Bureau of Land Management.

In other words: Bundy's "People's Rights" app, which he describes as "neighborhood watch on steroids," was really the next logical step for him.

Ammon Bundy is leading an on-demand, anti-mask militia. Some members have ties to far-right organizations [Richard Reed / LA Times]

Ammon's Army: Inside the Far Right "People's Rights" Network [Institution on Research & Education on Human Rights and the Montana Human Rights Network]

Image: Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC 2.0)