In a speech to the militia members still gathered at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada this week, Mike Vanderboegh, leader of the militia group Three Percenters, warned that the country is “staring a civil war in its bloody face.”
Vanderboegh’s Three Percenters group, named after the number of American colonists they believe fought back against the British in the revolutionary war, was listed in a recent Oath Keepers press release as a stalwart of the standoff at the Bundy ranch. Vandeboegh, who wrote a novel that allegedly inspired a domestic terrorist plot in 2011, is also known for his role in pushing the “Fast and Furious” scandal.
“All over this country, we are still staring civil war in its bloody face,” Vanderboegh warned the crowd, in a video posted by Tom Lacovara, the host of an anti-government radio show.
He claimed that Sen. Harry Reid, who has criticized the Bundy ranch militias, “is promising us all civil war on a vast scale, because state-sponsored violence is they only way they can win an argument with free people, especially free people who are armed and who are willing to use those arms in defense of liberty.”
Vanderboegh then told the legend of an Alabama woman named Jenny Brooks whose husband and son, in Vanderboegh's telling, were killed by state law enforcement collecting taxes for the Confederate government. According to the tale, Brooks went after the men who had killed her family, killed two of them in return, and turned one of their skulls into a soap dish.
Vanderboegh then pulled out a skull and declared that he would present it to Reid as the “2014 Award for Incitement to Civil War.”
He added: “Don’t poke the wolverine with a sharp stick, Harry, unless you want your balls ripped off.”
