"...........CNN REPORTER: But aren't those offensive comments to you
BULLOCK: Not at all.
CNN REPORTER: Not offensive?
BULLOCK: Because Mr. Bundy is not a racist. Ever since I've been here he's treated me with nothing but hospitality. He's pretty much treated me like his own family.
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BULLOCK: I would take a bullet for that man, if need be. I look up to him just like I do my own grandfather.
CNN REPORTER: Why?............."
The 67-year-old Bundy, battling the U.S. government after federal agents stormed his ranch to confiscate his cattle in a dispute over grazing fees, said far more than what appeared in the New York Times and most other news accounts. While his grammar is pretty bad -- and his use of "negro" and "colored" considered politically incorrect (although they were both once preferred terms chosen by blacks) -- he actually was making a larger point, not simply deriding blacks.
In a YouTube video, he is filmed already in mid-sentence.
... and so what I've testified to you -- I was in the Watts riot, I seen the beginning fire and I seen that last fire. What I seen is civil disturbance. People are not happy, people are thinking they don't have their freedoms, they didn't have these things, and they didn't have them.
We've progressed quite a bit from that day until now, and we sure don't want to go back. We sure don't want the colored people to go back to that point. We sure don't want these Mexican people to go back to that point. And we can make a difference right now by taking care of some of these bureaucracies, and do it in a peaceful way.
Those comments appear to change the context of the next section, which was quoted in the New York Times. One clear point the rancher made: America has progressed since the 1965 race riots and "we sure don't want to go back."
Here are the heavily quoted comments from Bundy that followed the above section edited out by most news organizations...................."
If the CNN reporter does not know the “why” of the willingness of the body guard to take a bullet for Cliven Bundy, then no amount of logic or persuasion is going to change the perception.
Critical thinking has two elements - Question the premise, and pursue the inquiry to its logical conclusion, using pragmatic integration of all the known facts of the matter. Each of the known facts is in turn put to the question, before accepting as part of the construct, and no more importance is assigned to each acceptable fact than its face value.