Ideologues look forward to their court dates. A trial is a good place to make a case. When a far-right movement first began to coalesce around the Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy, in 2014, it seemed to be designed as bait for prosecutors, so flagrant and direct were its violations. Bundy had stopped paying the federal government for a grazing lease in 1994, so he had been illegally grazing his cows there for two decades—according to the Feds, he owed a million dollars in back fees, which made him by a vast margin the most delinquent rancher in the country. When the Bureau of Land Management arranged an operation to remove Bundy’s trespassing cattle, the allies who came to his aid, many of them militiamen, set up sniper positions and aimed their rifles down at the Bureau’s officials. An extremist married couple from Indiana who came to town to support Bundy ambushed and killed two Las Vegas police officers, covering the cops’ bodies with the Gadsden flag, a Libertarian symbol, before officers shot the husband and the wife committed suicide.

Two years later, with Bundy and his supporters awaiting trial and attention in their case having ebbed, two of Cliven’s sons, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, decided to stage another armed encounter, a takeover of a nature preserve in rural Oregon. The band occupied the land for nearly a month—they were so heavily armed that the F.B.I. eventually found more than seventeen thousand rounds of ammunition in their encampments—before their leaders were, one by one, detained. Throughout both occupations, the Bundys staged press conferences and carried their weapons openly. They did not hide the fact that they were illegally occupying federal government land; they wanted the evidence of their crime on television. By their acts, they seemed to be offering a trade. Surely they were headed for prison. But they’d take it for the chance to become Libertarian martyrs.

There have now been three trials of members of the Bundy faction. The first, in federal court in Portland, concerned the Oregon occupation, and it ended in mass acquittals—of the Bundys themselves, of the militiamen who helped direct the takeover, and of their hangers-on. Even the defense attorneys could not believe what had happened. “I’m speechless,” Robert Salisbury, a defense attorney for one of the accused Bundy conspirators, said at the time. “It’s a stunning victory.” His client, a man named Jeff Banta, said afterward that the verdicts were a “victory for rural America.”

The shock dissipated, but the acquittals continued. After many delays, the Nevada case began this spring, with the trials of four men accused of driving to Nevada from other states to serve as gunmen and to intimidate federal officers from carrying out their duties. (The trials of the Bundys themselves are expected later this year.) The first trial of the four Bundy supporters (who faced ten charges each, including assaulting and threatening federal agents) ended with a hung jury. The second ended this week, with no convictions. One of the men charged, an Idaho electrician named Eric Parker, had been photographed by reporters lying on an overpass, pointing a long gun through a crack in the concrete, at the law-enforcement officers below. After the verdicts were announced, his wife, Andrea Parker, said, “What we have here is a win.” It is beginning to seem as if these two armed occupations of federal property could end without any significant convictions at all.

The Bundy episodes took place toward the end of the Obama years (the Oregon acquittals came less than two weeks before Donald Trump’s election), as conservative alienation from government escalated. The reactions to the Bundy occupations from conservative politicians were tepid. As Bundy’s allies massed against the federal agents in Nevada, the state’s governor, Brian Sandoval, a Republican but no ideologue, accused the Feds of provoking the standoff. In Oregon, Libertarian state legislators who belonged to a regional states-rights group called the Coalition of Western States (COWS) arrived to defend the rights of the occupiers, and to mediate with the F.B.I. on their behalf. There were disturbing press reports, just as the Nevada case went to trial, that suggested that the House Oversight Committee, then chaired by Representative Jason Chaffetz, of Utah, had opened an investigation into a B.L.M. official named Dan Love, who was a key government witness at the trial. The accusations against Love—that he had used his position to win preferential access for himself to the Burning Man festival, which is held on B.L.M. land—seemed too small to interest Congress. The timing of the leak, which came just before the trial, was especially suspicious. Despite the muted response from conservatives and the leaks to the press, the sweeping acquittals were a surprise. Oregon and Nevada are both blue states. Even there, prosecutors, who have often relied on conspiracy charges, have struggled to persuade jurors that the Bundys have done anything wrong.

The news is full of images of political violence right now—in Barcelona, and in Charlottesville—and so the Bundy acquittals function as a kind of warning, of how difficult it can be for the legal system to untangle crime and belief, of how much depends on context. In the cases of American ISIS sympathizers, jurors have often treated the ideology of the accused as an accelerant, a major part of the case against them. But the beliefs of the Bundys, less foreign figures, seem to have lent them the costume of politics, and their trials have been filled with arguments over the Constitution. In their case, ideology has been a shield.

Armed political insurrectionists don’t generally fare well in criminal trials. There isn’t a great deal of room for a defense of ideology in the guilt or penalty phase; what tends to matter more is tangible acts taken, damage done. Puerto Rican nationalists were given heavy prison sentences after a series of bombings by the militant separatist group F.A.L.N., in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties. (President Bill Clinton later commuted the sentences of sixteen of them, each of whom had served nineteen years and none of whom had been convicted of taking part in a bombing or crime that injured another person.) Eric Rudolph, the anti-abortion and anti-gay bomber who terrorized the South throughout the late nineties, became a folk hero (Appalachian T-shirts bore the slogan “Run Rudolph Run” while he was on the lam) but, for all his fame, when he was caught, Rudolph still accepted four consecutive life sentences rather than face a jury.

The exception is the case that most resembles the Bundys: the August, 1992, federal siege in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, of a cabin belonging to the armed separatist Randy Weaver. U.S. marshals were trying to serve Weaver with an arms-dealing warrant, and approached the situation very aggressively. On August 21st there was a shootout, and both a U.S. marshal and Weaver’s fourteen-year-old son were killed. The next day, government snipers were stationed at the site and Weaver’s wife was shot dead; the separatist himself and a friend were wounded. The law-enforcement operations, the former F.B.I. director Louis Freeh later testified before Congress, were “terribly flawed.” Jurors, weighing Weaver’s culpability in the death of the marshal, had a complicated scene to consider. They voted for acquittal.

During the Oregon and Nevada standoffs, federal agents were cautious, as has been the government policy since Ruby Ridge. At the standoff in Nevada, they pulled back. In Oregon, they established a perimeter and let the occupation flame out. (Though one occupier, LaVoy Finicum, was shot dead when he drove his truck through a government checkpoint and allegedly refused to stop.) During both standoffs, the Bundys seemed particular about their costuming (they dressed as cowboys), and focussed on using the encounter to broadcast their beliefs. In Nevada, Cliven Bundy gave constant media interviews about the excesses of the federal government, while in Oregon, Ammon, bearded and slightly beatific, would do the same, assuring viewers that though they were heavily armed, out-of-state invaders, they meant no harm. Ammon said they were trying to return the land to the people, planned to stay awhile, and wanted recruits to help them set up a community. It all seemed loony at the time, a martyrdom play. The big trial, of the Bundys themselves, and of some of their most important allies, is still to come, likely later this year, in Nevada. But it is starting to seem like the Bundys understood the imagery of the American West better than the national media did. Perhaps what they were chasing all along was a Ruby Ridge of the mind.