No surprise here, but Vox swings and misses again. There was no real explanation at all and, like many issue, any explanation in 3 minutes probably won't do any justice.

Let me preface by saying that the protestors are largely off their rockers and the idiots they are protesting for deserve to go to prison for more than five years, in my opinion.

That being said:

This really has nothing to do with Waco or Ruby Ridge. It is closer to the Montana freemen, although that doesn't really fit either. This does go back decades though, and is really a rancher vs. BLM grazing rights issue. The BLM has land, a lot of land, in the western part of the US that has really been used for nothing for decades other than grazing cattle. This is land that isn't scenic, beautiful land that would be visited by others. Mostly, it isn't land that is full of wetlands or habitat for protected species. In fact, much of it is land that at one time the government tried to give away to homesteaders.

Why is there so much land out west owned by the government but no used, but so little out east? Our forefathers never really intended the government to be large scale landowners. When Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase, suddenly the US became a large scale landowner. So, they tried to give the land away as a way to populate the west and generate revenue. What's left is largely land that nobody really wanted for free. The government doesn't really have the resources to manage all this land. They leased this land to industry, in this case ranchers, for a nominal fee. The leases increase revenue through lease fees and higher income tax. It also reduces expenditures because the ranchers take care of the land.

At some point, the government started pulling back on leases, increasing regulations, or generally becoming a pain in the ass to the ranchers who took care of the land and whose families came to rely on the land for their livelihood. With the adversarial relationship came extremists. Extremists on the left were, in some cases, interfering with the land leases. Calls for eliminating all leases increased regulations. Extremists on the right called for the government to sell off all land, something the Constitutional Party believes in.

Extremists, strawmans, political pussies, concessions to extremists, and a general lack of leadership at the BLM and White House have occasionally caused the fight that is normally not covered by the press to boil over into a standoff. The trouble is that the standoffs are the only thing that gets the press and, because of the asshats usually involved, the legitimate beefs of the ranchers get marginalized because suddenly there is an idiot in a cowboy hat with guns protesting the fact that another idiot arsonist who endangered the lives of BLM firefighters is going to prison.