Sermons that begin with sentences like “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro” generally don’t end well, especially when they’re uttered by white conservative ranchers gleefully breaking federal law. Such was the case on Saturday, when Cliven Bundy, the man whose illegal cattle grazing has won him plaudits from multiple Republican senators and the right to be declared a “domestic terrorist” by Senator Harry Reid, decided to let a reporter and some supporters in on his particularly racist world view.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” Bundy said, according to The New York Times. The rancher shared the story of what he saw when he drove past a housing project in North Las Vegas. “In front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids—and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch—they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.”

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” Bundy asked, before answering his own question in the worst possible way. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And 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? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

The rancher has been illegally grazing his cattle on public land since 1993, and owes the government more than $1 million in back fees His refusal to pay—which creates a de facto “government subsidy” of his own—prompted a court order that sent Bureau of Land Management rangers down to the ranch to confiscate his herd. After Bundy’s case was reported in the press, hundreds of armed militiamen rallied to his side, and he effectively won a standoff with the rangers.

Bundy’s vile comments are bound to complicate life for the big-name politicians who more or less ran to his defense in recent weeks. Kentucky senator Rand Paul, while noting that he is “for obeying the law,” dismissed Reid’s “domestic terrorist” label and said the Nevada senator should “calm the rhetoric a little bit.” In multiple appearances on Fox News, which has taken a predictable liking to Bundy’s narrative of a rancher and armed vigilantes taking on the big, bad federal government, Paul sympathized with Bundy’s position and said much of the land currently owned by the federal government should be transferred to states. In a radio appearance, he went further: “I think there’s an opposite thing to what Harry Reid said, and that’s that the federal government shouldn’t violate the law.”

Nevada Republican senator Dean Heller has also defended Bundy and his gang. “What senator Reid may call domestic terrorists, I call patriots,” Heller said during a joint TV appearance with Reid. “It’s a pretty broad brush... When you have boy scouts there, you have veterans at the event, you have grandparents at the event.”

Heller’s spokesman told the Times that the senator “completely disagrees with Mr. Bundy’s appalling and racist statements, and condemns them in the most strenuous way.” Paul’s camp didn’t immediately offer a comment to the paper, and VF Daily left a message at his Washington office. Texas attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abott, who took on the Bureau of Land Management’s plans to confiscate land, said through a spokeswoman that his statement was unrelated to Bundy’s case.