Ten years ago, hundreds of people gathered in a dusty wash underneath a freeway overpass 80 miles east of Las Vegas, near the town of Bunkerville, Nevada. They arrived at the behest of a reedy-voiced 68-year-old man in a cowboy hat — Cliven Bundy, who owned a 160-acre farm there but grazed his cattle illegally on the federal land around it.
In April 2014, Bundy urged people to support him in his fight against the federal government. “Now it’s time to get on our boots and I guess make our stand,” Cliven said on a phone call to a right-wing YouTube show. At the time, Bundy, who owed the Bureau of Land Management more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees, had already defied several court orders demanding he remove his cattle from public land. That spring, the BLM decided to impound them as payment.
Overnight, one man’s private battle erupted into a war of many. People from Idaho, Arizona, Washington — even New Hampshire — brought their horses and flags and long guns to the desert. On April 12, 2014, the federal officers tasked with rounding up the cattle found themselves in the crosshairs of snipers strategically positioned on the overpass. They retreated empty-handed.
“The West has now been won!” declared Bundy’s eldest son, Ryan, to enthusiastic cheers. Court proceedings over the standoff resulted in a mistrial, and a federal judge permanently tossed the case. Today, the status of Cliven Bundy’s unpaid bills remains unclear: BLM officials in southern Nevada declined High Country News’ request for comment and a subsequent Freedom of Information Act request regarding the total amount Bundy owes had not been returned by the time we went to press.
When the Bundys declared victory, it was hailed as a win for their vision of the American West, a place where white ranchers are heroes and yet also an oppressed minority. But their triumph went beyond Bunkerville: It was a victory for the entire far-right antigovernment militia movement and paved the way for ultra-conservative ideas to dominate the Republican Party’s agenda. All this foreshadowed a nationwide political storm — one that would divide lifelong neighbors, polarize the nation and help lay the groundwork for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Ten years after Bunkerville, the people and ideas that shaped the standoff are key to understanding American politics as the country faces its next presidential election.
When the Bundys declared victory, it was hailed as a win for their vision of the American West. It was a victory for the entire far-right antigovernment militia movement and paved the way for ultra-conservative ideas to dominate the Republican Party’s agenda.
IN 2014, Cliven Bundy became the most notorious holdout of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a 1980s movement in which some Western ranchers pushed unsuccessfully for the transfer of land ownership from federal control to state hands. Ironically, Bundy’s own ability to ranch depended on federal lands; the 160 acres he owned wasn’t nearly enough to sustain a herd of livestock, especially in the Nevada desert.
But when Bundy called into the YouTube show, he talked about having to pay the government to use those federal lands, calling it government tyranny. His brewing standoff in Bunkerville, he said, had “the potential to be the next Waco or Ruby Ridge.” The 11-day standoff at Ruby Ridge in 1992 left two civilians and a U.S. marshal dead in a conflict that started over illegal guns, while 86 people died during the 1993 Waco Siege, which also started over guns as well as allegations of child abuse. Experts on far-right extremism in the United States tend to view both tragedies as fueled by anti-government ideologies; the people who hold those ideologies, on the other hand, regard them as harrowing examples of federal tyranny.
Bundy’s mention of these incidents lit a fire under the modern militia movement. Since the early 1990s, this movement, according to the Anti-Defamation League, has particularly focused on gun control and “deadly standoffs between civilians and federal agents,” catalyzed by the belief “that the federal government is collaborating with a shadowy conspiracy (the so-called New World Order) to strip Americans of their rights.”
Militias were not alone in their support for the Bundys: Conservative members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, sovereign citizens, constitutional sheriffs, lawmakers and extremists from across the West all raced toward Bunkerville, where “very odd ideological bedfellows” found common cause in their rage against the government, said Benjamin Park, associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University and author of American Zion: A New History of Mormonism.
Their worldview found a platform when major media outlets like CNN and Fox News broadcast live from the standoff.
“A lot of the rhetoric coming from the Fox News talking heads at the time was, ‘Bundy’s got a lot of good points. Maybe this is government overreach,’” said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor at the University at Albany’s College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity and the author of Oath Keepers. “Mainstream media outlets have enormous powers to set agendas to shape how their audiences think about issues.”
Portrayals of Bundy as a martyr “demonstrated to some of these far-right ultra-libertarian types that there’s a form of their message that can get public support,” Amy Cooter of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said. “Such a public mouthpiece for those ideas definitely normalized them and legitimized them in the public sphere.”
People who saw Bundy as a victim of government overreach began to see merit in some of his other, lesser-known views. For instance, Cliven Bundy — a devout Mormon — interpreted LDS scripture in a way that many Church members consider eccentric. In his writings, Bundy professed a reverence for ultra-conservative LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson and the belief that Mormons will save the U.S. Constitution from ruin.
But Cooter said the Bundys’ unconventional religious views were generally downplayed. “Ten years later, people may forget some of the eccentricities of the Bundys,” she said.
Scholars have long studied the particular flavor of conservatism that has thrived among the Mormon subcultures of the Mountain West — “the Mormon Corridor.” In 2003, John-Charles Duffy, now a professor at Miami University, wrote in Sunstone Magazine that some members of the LDS Church resisted the changes in the 20th century that were aimed at making the faith more palatable to a wide audience: “The older, hardline tradition of constitutionalism, coupled with accusations of government tyranny, has survived in an LDS subculture devoted to ultraconservative politics.” In the 1990s, LDS leadership responded with mass excommunications, hoping to push out the ultra-conservative constitutionalists and survivalists. But the beliefs continued to flourish, if quietly.
As the standoff played out, Park recognized Bundy’s rhetoric. “There’s always been these people who see the government as a threat and represent this vision of ‘we are going to save the Constitution when it’s hanging by a thread, even if that means taking on the recognized government authorities,’” he said.
And in publicly proclaiming their beliefs and tying their ideology to the standoff, the Bundys moved “the boundaries of what’s expected Mormon political discourse,” Park said. He pointed to the Utah Legislature. “You see a lot of far-right Mormon conservative voices,” Park said, “who don’t go fully Bundy, but they’re willing to go half Bundy. They’re willing to take advantage of this anxiety.”
In 2022, the Deseret News — a newspaper owned by the LDS Church — reported on “an emerging pattern” of public protest driven by conspiracy theories that had recently emerged in the Utah Legislature. “A deep distrust in the federal government and also a broad agreement with deep-state conspiracies,” Park said, became the norm.
Beyond the Bundy family, other believers, who initially established themselves as anti-tyranny warriors at Bunkerville, fanned out across America to spread — and enforce — their ideology. In June 2014, a conspiratorial couple who had spoken to cable news reporters at the standoff murdered two Las Vegas police officers and a civilian in what they said were the first shots of a “revolution.” (One of the suspects was killed in an ensuing police shootout, and the other died by suicide.)
Still, lawmakers from around the region declared their support for the Bundys. Several of them remain in office today, including Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott. President Donald Trump unlawfully appointed William Perry Pendley — a vocal Bundy sympathizer — deputy director of the BLM. (He served for over a year, despite never being confirmed by the Senate.) More recently, Pendley authored a 22-page section of Mandate for Leadership, the 922-page manifesto of Project 2025, a vision for the country drawn up by a far-right think tank. Pendley lays out how the Department of the Interior would function during a second Trump administration, seeking “American energy dominance” through oil and gas leases and a complete reinstatement of Trump-era Interior policies.
Former Graham County, Arizona, Sheriff Richard Mack saw his star rise, too. A Mormon, Mack founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) in 2011, espousing the belief that county sheriffs are the nation’s highest law enforcement power. Before Bunkerville, the group drew little notice. But afterward, both CSPOA and Mack were more widely embraced. CSPOA instructs county sheriffs to “protect their citizens from the overreach of an out-of-control federal government” by refusing to enforce any laws they deemed unconstitutional or “unjust.”
“What I think the Bundy standoff allowed Richard Mack to do was to start to cast the constitutional sheriff movement as sort of in the grand tradition of civil rights,” said journalist Jessica Pishko, author of The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy. Mack pushed the idea that white American Westerners are “losing status that needs to be protected.” A series published by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting found that, by 2023, the constitutional sheriff ideology had spread to at least 30 states, having surged during COVID-19 as people pushed back on lockdown orders.
The Oath Keepers paramilitary organization, which supported the Bunkerville standoff, “weaponized patriotism in an effort to subvert American democracy,” Jackson told NPR in 2022. And they didn’t stop at Bundy Ranch: Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, played an instrumental role in the storming of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He is currently serving 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy.
Ultimately, Bundy Ranch was “a really powerful and important example of domestic extremism, and how circumstances can align in ways that lead to broad support,” Jackson told High Country News. There weren’t thousands of people at the Bunkerville standoff. But seven years later, on Jan. 6, thousands arrived in Washington, D.C.
Portrayals of Bundy as a martyr “demonstrated to some of these far-right ultra-libertarian types that there’s a form of their message that can get public support.”
THE ANTI-GOVERNMENT and ultra-conservative Mormon beliefs that were so key to the Bundy standoff are deeply rooted in Western identity. The Bundy story appealed to a shared “‘rural mentality,” Cooter said, that is prized by militia groups.
“Even if they live in cities, even if they live in suburbs, this idea of rurality means a lot to them, in no small part because it’s sort of an extension of our imagining of the frontier (and) what real men and real Americans are supposed to be,” she said. “It’s almost like they’re trying to make up for the fact that they’re not living in that rural environment where they have to prove themselves in a very stereotypically masculine way.”
An old white man in a cowboy hat complaining about government overreach was, essentially, an ideal story for them — a narrative that reinforced “that frontier piece of masculinity,” Cooter said.
“That’s an aspiration for a lot of Americans,” Sam Jackson said. “They want to also see themselves as being these independent, self-sufficient folks who are pushing back against tyrannical government.”
Days after the standoff, Cliven Bundy famously made racist comments about Black Americans: “I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?”
The comments revealed the underlying false sense of oppression and victimhood held by Bundy and his supporters: “They see themselves as an imperiled minority,” said Pishko.
After the standoff, local Indigenous leaders pushed back on Bundy’s claims of ownership. The land around his ranch doesn’t belong to him, they said: “If anybody’s got a right, it would be the Moapa Band of Paiutes,” Vernon Lee, a former tribal councilman, told NPR in 2016.
Park, the historian, saw the Bundys’ refusal to acknowledge Indigenous land rights when they talked about Western land ownership as another nod to that conservative brand of Mormonism. “That Manifest Destiny ideology, of course, is widespread in America,” he said. “But it had a particularly Mormon flavor, because they believed this is a land that God has prepared for us.”
Political leaders like former President Trump have advanced a worldview in which white rural Americans are an oppressed class. But Cooter said that this idea gets at something much, much deeper in the American psyche.
“That starting line realistically goes back to the founding of our country,” Cooter said. 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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This article appeared in the October 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The legacy of Bunkerville.”
