Mike Vanderboegh, the militia group leader who warned in a speech at the Bundy Ranch last month that the United States is on the verge of “civil war on a vast scale” that will involve Sen. Harry Reid having his “balls ripped off,” joined Alan Colmes on Wednesday to defend his now-infamous comments.
“It’s funny, I’ve been warning about the possibility of civil war caused by government bad conduct for the past 20 years, but it wasn’t until I started mentioning the collectivist senators who were putting their own testicles at risk that people started paying attention,” Vanderboegh told Colmes. “I think I must have accidentally put my finger on where you fellows worship.”
He added that the “balls ripped off” expression was just a rhetorical flourish, and that he could just as easily have said “put a bullet in your head”: “I’m saying that if you push ordinary people enough, they will react. And whether they rip your testicles off or put a bullet in your head is sort of immaterial, assuming that you initiate the violence.”
When Colmes asked Vanderboegh if he really thinks Reid wants to “initiate violence,” Vanderboegh responded, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that he would like to do it.”
Completing the civil war picture, Vanderboegh told Colmes that there’s not “much of a difference” between Cliven Bundy’s stand against federal law and Dred Scott’s.
Later in the interview, Colmes asked Vanderboegh about his call for his followers to throw bricks into windows of Democratic offices in protest of the passage of the health care reform law in 2010.
Vanderboegh doubled down on the comment, saying “you bet your ass” he called for window-breaking and claiming that the move was modeled on the “carefully calibrated violence” of the American Revolution (Vanderboegh’s organization, the Three Percenters, is named after the number of colonists he believes participated in the revolt against the Crown).
“Sons of Liberty tactics, fellow,” he said. “Read your history. Do you think that this republic of ours was born in anything other than very carefully calibrated violence that was counter to government violence at the time? How do you think we got here? Sons of Liberty tactics. We have not tarred and feathered yet, have we? Sons of Liberty did.”
“All I have been arguing is that people should understand that government violence will be responded to by counter-violence on the part of the people,” he continued. “That’s been exactly what I’ve been saying for the past 20 years. I’ve been warning that a civil war is coming. And you know why? It’s because idiots do not understand it’s possible.”
When Colmes asked how the health care bill represented “government violence,” Vanderboegh responded that “The violence was in the threat of the bill” because “you will do what this bill says or things will happen to you,” which he speculated would include an IRS “raid party.”
Here's Vanderboegh's original Bundy Ranch speech:
