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Ten years ago, federal agents tried to impound cattle belonging to Cliven Bundy, a public lands rancher who owed more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees. The ensuing standoff near the town of Bunkerville, Nevada became an inflection point for antigovernment extremists in the West and across the country.
Writing in High Country News, Leah Sottille, who previously created the Bundyville podcast, looks at what the 2014 standoff foreshadowed. With militia snipers taking aim at federal law enforcement, agents retreated and the Bundy family declared victory. That moment was amplified across Fox News, which largely ignored the ultraconservative religious underpinnings of Bundy's philosophy.
History professor Benjamin Park told HCN that the Bundys moved “the boundaries of what’s expected Mormon political discourse,” pointing to the Utah legislature where far-right members “don’t go fully Bundy, but they’re willing to go half Bundy. They’re willing to take advantage of this anxiety.”
Bunkerville also validated a worldview in which rural white landowners saw themselves as the victims of oppression, even while the Bundy family denied Indigenous rights to land in Nevada.
“That starting line realistically goes back to the founding of our country,” said Amy Cooter, an expert on extremism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. It “is really baked into this idea of the American mythology that’s going to be very difficult for us to ever move away from.”
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I understand you want to honor your ancestors and your grandfather told you that you should hate the federal land. But it’s time to think about your children, not your grandfather.”
