

The man at the heart of the confrontation in Nevada carried a pocket copy of the Constitution wherever he went. But the Constitution says nothing that excuses Cliven Bundy’s refusal to abide by the laws of the land.

BUNKERVILLE, Nev. — Rancher Cliven Bundy has long been at odds with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). For 20 years he has taken an increasingly defiant stance toward the agency, refusing to pay what is now more than $1 million in grazing fees and fines to a federal government he does not recognize.

With a copy of the Constitution ever present in the front pocket of his shirt, Bundy, 68, insists he has rights to public lands that trump federal control. Employing the fringe ideas of the rabidly antigovernment “sovereign citizens” movement to support his bogus constitutional theories, Bundy insists that his Mormon ancestors ran cattle long before Washington, D.C., encroached on the liberty of westerners by, as he claims, stealing their property.

Bundy put it like this on April 8 on “The Blaze,” Glenn Beck’s online network: “I have raised cattle on that land, which is public land for the people of Clark County, all my life. Why I raise cattle there and why I can raise cattle there is because I have preemptive rights. Who is the trespasser here? Who is the trespasser on this land? Is the United States trespassing on Clark County, Nev., land? Or is it Cliven Bundy who is trespassing on Clark County, Nevada, land?”

Federal courts have an answer to Bundy’s questions. Bundy’s opposition to federal jurisdiction in Nevada, a U.S. District Court ruled last year, has no legal basis as “the public lands in Nevada are property of the United States because the United States has held title to those lands since 1848, when Mexico ceded the land to the United States.” In early April, responding to that ruling, the BLM hired cowboys from across the West to begin a roundup of the Bundy herd in lieu of payment for what Bundy rightly owes his fellow Americans for using their land — a bill that had been mounting since 1992, when he stopped paying.

Within four days of his defiant comments on Beck’s network, hundreds of heavily armed militia members had swarmed by the truckload to Bundy’s corner of the desert, angry, armed and ready to take on the federal government. They were drawn from an antigovernment “Patriot” movement that has swelled from around 150 groups when Barack Obama came into office in 2009 to more than 1,000 today.



As the climax of the confrontation approached, militiamen and other Bundy supporters trained their weapons on federal and Las Vegas law enforcement officers.

On April 12, a tense, armed standoff with BLM agents — an event the militias have dubbed “the Battle of Bunkerville” — developed. Bundy ordered a mob of angry antigovernment zealots fueled by conspiracy theories to take back about 900 cattle from the federal government, ignoring pleas from Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie to keep the peace and entertain a discussion with federal authorities. Talk was not what Bundy wanted. His remedy — a remedy his allies gave him at the point of their guns — was, in effect, the suspension of the rule of law. And he got it, at least temporarily. The BLM wisely withdrew, clearly unprepared for a confrontation.

Writing on his blog hours after the standoff, Mike Vanderboegh, an aging government-hating propagandist from Alabama who heads the III Percent Patriots, characterized the standoff in grandiose terms. “It is impossible to overstate the importance of the victory won in the desert today,” he gushed. “The feds were routed — routed. There is no word that applies. Courage is contagious, defiance is contagious, victory is contagious. Yet the war is not over.”



Jerad and Amanda Miller, who had a certain fondness for dressing up as comic villains, murdered three people, including two police officers, after briefly joining Bundy supporters during their standoff with authorities.

Within weeks, that rhetoric appeared predictive as two people who had spent time on the Bundy ranch before reportedly being asked to leave went on a shooting spree in Las Vegas. On June 8, Jerad Miller and his wife Amanda entered a restaurant and killed two Las Vegas police officers before running into a nearby Wal-Mart and killing an armed civilian who tried to stop them. Witnesses say the couple shouted, “This is a revolution!” and draped one of the slain officer’s bodies with a Gadsden flag, a militia favorite that reads, “Don’t tread on me”

Jerad Miller had been at the Bundy ranch, telling a Las Vegas TV station, “I feel sorry for any federal agents that want to come in here and try to push us around, or anything like that.” He added, “I really don’t want violence toward them, but if they’re gonna come bring violence to us, well, if that’s the language they want to speak, we’ll learn it.”

The Millers’ violence was extreme, but tense standoffs between the BLM and antigovernment activists have taken place across the West — in Utah, Texas, New Mexico and Idaho — in the wake of the ranch standoff. Also, a handful of right-wing politicians and commentators have given cover to Bundy, openly supporting the efforts of a man who is refusing to pay the same grazing fees that every other rancher does and who has invited armed extremists to make sure the federal government can’t enforce the law.

The battle lines have now been drawn. The antigovernment movement has come to believe, due to the failed tactics of the BLM, that their guns trump the authority of federal law enforcement — a flat contradiction of the notion of a nation of laws. In the late 1990s, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, increased prosecutions of weapons violations and related crimes tamped down the virulency of the antigovernment movement. The militiamen and others who pointed their weapons at BLM and other law enforcement officers need to face criminal prosecution because if the rule of law is not enforced, it surely will be challenged again.

Preparing for a Standoff

The Millers were only two of the hundreds of militia members, conspiracy theorists and other angry antigovernment extremists who responded to Bundy’s call for a “range war” — a call that first came when the BLM arrested Bundy’s oldest son, David Bundy, who was filming the BLM. He was charged with failing to disperse.

In a request for help on his family’s blog, Cliven Bundy claimed federal “thieves” had turned on his family, and he vowed retribution. “They have my cattle and now they have one of my boys. …Range War begins tomorrow at Bundy ranch.”

There was also a video posted on YouTube that showed an altercation between Bundy’s sons and BLM agents. Ammon Bundy, another of Cliven Bundy’s sons, is seen in a heated exchange that ends with BLM agents using a Taser to subdue him. According to BLM statements, Bundy’s son had attempted to kick a police dog before the agents responded.

Almost overnight, thanks largely to the Bundy’s video going viral on antigovernment websites, the family’s fight with the federal government became a touchstone for various Tea Party Republicans, libertarians, antigovernment Oath Keepers and militia members, many of whom saw in the footage the beginnings of a war.

After watching the video from his home in Anaconda, Mont., 650 miles away, Ryan Payne, 30, an electrician and former soldier who had deployed twice to the Iraq war, became enraged.

Payne is part of a small militia unit, the West Mountain Rangers, but he also sits atop a little-known militia organization called Operation Mutual Aid, a group that he hoped could coordinate militias across the country to respond to federal aggressions.



The Gadsden flag, beloved of colonial-era rebels, has become a key symbol of the militia movement. It was also tossed on a murdered police officer’s body by two radical-right cop-killers a month after the Bundy standoff came to an end.

That night, he called Bundy and asked if he needed the militia’s help, Payne told the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) during a nearly two-hour interview at the Bundy ranch weeks after the standoff.

“I said the type of help that I’m going to be bringing is militia units and Patriots from all over the country,” Payne said, recalling the conversation. Payne added that Bundy told him, “I’m not going to tell you what to bring, I’m not going to tell you to bring guns or any of that type of stuff. All I’m going to say is we need help, and you use your own discernment and decide what needs to be brought.”

Payne left that day with another member of his militia, Jim Lardy, and drove through the night, a few sleeping bags in tow, burning up cell phones hoping to bring every militia member they could. On April 9, he sent out an urgent call for the militias to mobilize.

“At this time we have approximately 150 responding, but that number is growing by the hour,” he wrote, offering directions to the Bundy ranch. “May God grant each and every one of you safety, wisdom and foresight, and courage to accomplish the mission we have strived for so long to bring to fruition. All men are mortal, most pass simply because it is their time, a few however are blessed with the opportunity to choose their time in performance of duty.”

It was an audacious call for a movement that had been itching for a fight with the federal government for some time, especially in the West where more than half of all land is federally owned. Payne’s message caught the eye of other militia leaders and antigovernment folk heroes — people like Alex Jones of Infowars; Richard Mack and his Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association; and Stewart Rhodes’ Oath Keepers. Militia units came from Montana, Arizona, Arkansas, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia and California and elsewhere — all promising to bring all they could muster.

By Saturday, April 12, a steady stream of antigovernment fanatics had been arriving in Bunkerville for weeks. There was support, too, from some local ranchers who had given Bundy a certain amount of respect as the last rancher who had not left Clark County due to increased federal strictures on the use of public land.

Their anger grew by the day, with the roadsides surrounding the Bundy compound growing crowded with Gadsden flags, like the one the Millers would later leave at the scene of their cop killings. Signs condemning the BLM as a communist agent proliferated. The BLM, fearing that a wrong move could spark chaos and even a bloodbath in the tense atmosphere of the standoff, proceeded cautiously.

Freeloading on the Range

The Bundy family had been at odds with the BLM for almost half of the 20th century, dating back to 1953, when Cliven Bundy’s father, David Bundy, applied for his first permit to graze 95 cattle on the BLM’s Gold Butte allotment, about 600,000 acres of low-lying desert.

According to a detailed timeline prepared by High Country News, David Bundy immediately went into arrears on payments for his permit. Years later, when Cliven Bundy tried to transfer his father’s permit to his own name so that he, too, could run cattle, the BLM delayed the transfer.

In 1990, the BLM offered Bundy a 10-year grazing permit on public lands that mandated the protection of the desert tortoise, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had listed as a threatened species in 1989. Bundy refused. To Bundy and other ranchers, that mandate to protect the tortoise was a federally contrived plan to steal land from American citizens. The tortoise, they argued, was introduced into the area and thus was not indigenous. Bundy continued to graze his herd.

In 1994, the BLM took Bundy to federal court in order to force him to pay what then amounted to about $25,000 in grazing fees. Even then, Bundy disavowed the federal government. He attempted to pay his fees to Clark County, a government body he recognized, but was turned away. On his own accord, as he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he “fired the BLM.”



The highway near the Bundy ranch became a major gathering point for both Bundy supporters and their antagonists in law enforcement.

“[T]hey’ve never proven to me they own that land, and I’m willing to do whatever’s necessary to defend my land,” Bundy told the Rocky Mountain News.

Bundy’s defiance came against a convenient backdrop, where conspiracy theories about federal tyranny had ignited explosive growth in the militia movement. A year earlier, the federal siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, had inspired thousands who would later join militias to believe that a revolution against the federal government was coming.

As Bundy told the Washington Times in 1994: “I’ve got friends who are really worried that this is going to come down to a Waco situation. … The thing is, we’ve got the feds in a corner, and I don’t know how rabid they’re going to be when they’re forced to act.” It would take two more decades for Bundy’s personal Waco to take shape.

For the next four years, Bundy continued to graze cattle on the federal allotment, as his case took a slow and winding course through federal courts. It was during that time that Bundy began filing sovereign citizen-like filings with the court, acknowledging only a “sovereign state of Nevada,” not the federal government. In 1998, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department also received information suggesting armed ranchers and Bundy supporters planned to resist any attempts to close public lands.

Bundy, too, had become increasingly extreme in his public response to federal court orders to remove cattle from public lands. In documents obtained by the SPLC, the seeds of the defiance that would ultimately come were readily apparent.



Cliven Bundy addresses his troops in the moments before delivering an ultimatum to Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie.

In one letter to the authorities, dated Nov. 27, 1998, Bundy lectured state and federal officials about how they had no authority to restrict these lands. “Nevada officials are hereby given constructive notice that an unconstitutional jurisdiction without limitations is being imposed upon me and my family’s life, liberty and property. … I have been a rancher and steward of the range in this area for many more years than there has been a BLM. … I hereby give notice to all above named persons and entities that this order is coming from a foreign court,” he wrote.

In another letter, as the federal government moved to take action against Bundy again in 2012, Bundy wrote, “I will stand and protect my rights, whatever it takes, to defend this valid ranch, the access for the public, and the policing power of the Clark County Sheriff.”

The irony, of course, is that not even Nevada’s Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie could quell the rising fury surrounding Bundy earlier this year, nor stop the events that were to come.

The Moment of No Return

To the invigorated antigovernment movement of the Obama era, Bundy was a kindred soul. What they saw was not a rancher who had operated outside of the regulations regarding public lands, a man who had stolen from the American people by refusing to pay for their use, but rather one of their own, a defiant Patriot with truth on his side.

On the morning of April 12, tensions between BLM agents and Bundy’s militia-backed supporters reached a climax. Gillespie, in an effort to dissolve those tensions, agreed to meet Bundy in front of an angry mob of heavily armed protesters.

For antigovernment zealots like Bundy, the county sheriff is the highest-ranking and really only legitimate law enforcement officer. The concept came out of the anti-Semitic and racist Posse Comitatus movement of the 1970s and is often referred to as the “county supremacy movement.” The hope was that if anyone could calm Bundy’s supporters, it was Gillespie.

“The BLM is going to cease this operation,” Gillespie told the raucous crowd. “The Gold Butte allotment will be reopened to the public, and they will be removing their assets.” He then turned to Bundy. “What I would hope to sit down with you and talk about is how to have this facilitated in a safe way.”

The audience screamed back, “Where are the cows?” and demanded the release of Bundy’s cattle. “Bring the cows back! You’re holding them hostage to broker a deal,” one particularly voluble Bundy ally cried.

When Gillespie was finished, Bundy walked quickly toward a jerrybuilt podium on risers. Holding a yellow legal pad in his hands, Bundy spelled out his demands: The federal government would open up all restricted public lands, remove BLM equipment from the area, and end its tyrannical campaign of harassment against his family and other ranchers in the area by returning his cows. Lastly, the BLM would disarm federal agents.



Federal agents manned a corral where they held the Bundy’s cattle while protesters gathered outside.

“We want those arms delivered right here under these flags in one hour,” Bundy said, his voice creaking with age, before turning his attention to the news media present to ask them to document that his demands were being met. When Bundy was finished, Gillespie turned to his deputies and left without saying a word.

The time that followed was tense. Then, suddenly, one hour and 20 minutes after Gillespie departed, Bundy again took the stage. He ordered the nearby freeway blocked and condemned Sheriff Gillespie for failing to protect the people from federal abuses.

“Let’s go get those cattle,” he said. “All we got to do is open those gates and let them back on the river.” As a final note he offered, “We’re about to take this country back by force.”

Cowboys on horseback lining the overlooking buttes rode off into the distance. Cars and trucks peeled out of the dusty roadside clearing the BLM had set aside for protestors , bound for a corral two miles away that was protected by BLM agents, where the federal government had confined Bundy’s cattle.

In a low-lying wash where gates held the Bundy herd, an angry, heavily armed crowd grew, defying orders and engaging in a tense game of chicken with BLM rangers in riot gear demanding through loudspeakers that they disperse. They shouted profanities and gripped their weapons. Militia snipers lined the hilltops and overpasses with scopes trained on federal agents.

What happened was not unplanned. As Payne later told the SPLC, he had ordered certain gunmen “to put in counter sniper positions” and others to hang behind at the ranch. “[M]e and Mel Bundy put together the plan for the cohesion between the Bundys and the militia… . Sending half of the guys up to support the protesters … and keep overwatch and make sure that if the BLM wanted to get froggy, that it wouldn’t be good for them.” Perhaps in an effort to justify his actions, Payne claims that the BLM is a “private corporation,” not a government entity.

Law enforcement officials were in trouble. “The hair was up on the back of my neck,” Clark County Assistant Sheriff Joe Lombardo recounted later to KLAS-TV. “There was a lot of firepower out there and it made me nervous. Anything could happen.”

But what actually happened was unexpected. The BLM, without any prior announcement, packed up and left. The Bundys, BLM officials later confirmed, unlatched the gates and left on horses to retrieve their cattle. In a statement provided to news media that day, the BLM said it suspended operations “because of our serious concern about the safety of employees and members of the public.”

For the antigovernment movement, it was a major victory. By threatening violence, they had suspended the rule of law, at least temporarily, in the name of liberty.

Recounting the day several weeks later from the Bundy compound, Payne smiled. In the days before the standoff, he and Cliven Bundy had toured the public lands Bundy was using, looking for ways to defend them if necessary. He knew the battlefield, planned the response by Bundy supporters, and made sure snipers were in position. In his telling, his planning could not have gone more perfectly.

“Not only did they take up the very best position to overwatch everything, they also had the high ground, they were fortified with concrete and pavement barriers,” Payne said. “They had great lines of fire and then, when I sent in that other team, for counter sniper positions, [the BLM agents] were completely locked down. They had no choice but to retreat.”

The reason, he boasted, was “overwhelming tactical superiority.”

Victory at the Ranch

As BLM rangers climbed into their trucks and left on that April afternoon, a handful of Bundy supporters hung a banner from an overpass on Interstate 15. The red, white and blue sign read, “The West Has Now Been Won.” Since then, this sentiment has swept the antigovernment movement, which continues to see the federal retreat in the presence of an armed citizenry as an historic moment in defense of the Constitution.



In the aftermath of the freeing of Bundy’s cattle, his supporters declared victory.

“There is a new spirit of resistance abroad in the land. The folks in Nevada were not cowed by federal guns pointed at them,” Vanderboegh wrote on his blog, before warning officials, “I would look at what happened in the desert today and be very, very afraid.”

Vanderboegh was right. A “new spirit of resistance” had burst forth across the West. Bolstered by populist rage and supported by a far-flung network of militias and a handful of public figures, BLM policies have been characterized as a tyrannical blueprint to destroy state sovereignty, sully the Constitution and steal public lands away from “the people.”

Two days after the standoff, Nevada Assemblywoman Michelle Fiore (R-Las Vegas) posted a picture on her Facebook page showing her feeding a calf at the Bundy ranch. Earlier, she had told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that federal actions were “horrifying.”

Ignoring the fact that Bundy and his followers were the ones who drew their weapons, U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told The Los Angeles Times, “You can’t just show up with guns blazing and expect to win the hearts and minds of the public.” Chaffetz, a firm advocate of those protesting the BLM, concluded, “The federals need a little more Andy Griffith and a lot less Rambo.”

The Fever Spreads

A month after the standoff, San Juan County, Utah, Commissioner Phil Lyman led a protest against a ban on the use of motorized vehicles in Recapture Canyon that was meant to protect archaeological sites from damage. Waving Gadsden flags just like those draped over the slain officer in Las Vegas and decrying the actions of the BLM, Lyman and several dozen ATV riders — including members of Bundy’s family — rode into the canyon to defy BLM authority. Lyman told the SPLC that the ride was meant to be a peaceful protest, but he did little to conceal his rage over what he characterized as federal tyranny.

“If things don’t change, it’s not long before shots will be fired,” Lyman said, joining other conservative lawmakers such as Chaffetz in warning of violence if the federal government didn’t rein in the BLM. “We can avoid it. But it’s not going to be by the people changing their attitudes and accepting more intrusion into their lives. It’s going to be by the federal government acknowledging people’s freedom.”

The Bundy blow up has spawned other imitators. This May in Texas, militias and their allies came to protest a BLM survey of more than 90,000 acres along the Red River, fearing the federal government was planning a land grab. A month earlier in Utah, two men pointed a handgun at a BLM worker in a marked federal vehicle while holding up a sign that said, “You need to die.” In New Mexico’s Otero County, a brewing confrontation between state and federal officials ended after BLM officials opened gates cutting off water for grazing cattle to protect the jumping mouse. Again, there were conspiracy theories demonizing BLM efforts to protect the environment.



Many of Bundy’s supporters were heavily armed, with several carrying semi-automatic weapons.

And in mid-June, more violence erupted, as a BLM ranger and a California Highway Patrol officer were shot and wounded, allegedly by a self-declared sovereign citizen, Brent Douglas Cole, who was camping outside of Nevada City, Calif.

None of this has tamped down the rhetoric. The Bundy standoff has actually brought the spotlight to the antigovernment movement, and its leaders are soaking up the attention. Polarizing figures such as former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack and Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers have been eager to take advantage of the moment.

Mack, a longtime militia darling who has led a push for county sheriffs to stand against federal law enforcement agencies, told one crowd, “We don’t believe that bureaucratic policies and regulations supersede the Constitution. I came here because I don’t believe the BLM has any authority whatsoever. Grazing fees do not supersede life, liberty and the pursuit of property.”

Domestic Terrorists and Racists

It remains to be seen how the movement will react as law enforcement moves to prosecute possible crimes by those at the ranch who Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has dubbed “domestic terrorists.” Doug Gillespie, the local sheriff, said the FBI was investigating militia members who aimed loaded weapons at law enforcement officers, legally considered assault against an officer, a federal crime carrying a sentence of up to 20 years in prison if a deadly weapon is involved.

“There will be consequences, definitely,” Assistant Sheriff Jim Lombardo, who oversaw police operations at the scene of the standoff, added. “That is unacceptable behavior. If we let it go, it will continue into the future.”



Cliven Bundy (with cowboy hat) was nearly always accompanied by a personal security detail, headed by a man who calls himself “Buddha” (far left).

Some of Bundy’s mainstream political support has fallen away, too, especially after Bundy made racist comments reported by The New York Times.

“I want to tell you one more thing about the Negro,” Bundy said, talking about black families he’d see as a younger man in North Las Vegas. “Because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? … 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 comments quickly spread across national news media, and many former supporters rushed to condemn Bundy as, in the kindest terms, an ignorant rancher, but more accurately a racist. Support from right-wing Republicans and conservative news media vanished overnight, with racism apparently being a greater sin among these folks than antigovernment extremism, hatred of law enforcement or flouting the rule of law. This left a void for a new, more radical cadre of supporters to lionize Bundy’s defiance.

Among them are politicians belonging to the Independent American Party (IAP)— the same party whose banner rabidly anti-immigrant former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo ran under during his bid for to become governor of Colorado. In late May, at an IAP event to honor Bundy for “his courage in standing up for state sovereignty,” Bundy and his wife, Carol, signed paperwork to join the Nevada chapter.

“Cliven Bundy is my hero,” Janine Hansen, an IAP candidate running for Nevada’s 2nd congressional district, told a gathering of supporters. “We cannot allow this incredible opportunity that Cliven has given us to die. … It’s time that we are no longer serfs on the land in the State of Nevada. It is time that we become sovereign in our own state, our own sovereign state. It is long past time. We are not the servants of the BLM.”

Bundy remains an outlaw, and his ranch is still populated by dozens of heavily armed antigovernment activists. His well-armed supporters have relied on a convoluted network of conspiracy theories to justify their aggression against the BLM in Nevada — “hired thugs,” as Payne described them.

“There are not two truths here. In the universe, there’s one truth. Who’s on the right side of that truth?” Payne told the SPLC. “The people who stand in defense of other people’s lives, liberty and property, or the people that stand against other people’s lives, liberty and property?”

Having waited so long to move against Bundy, having underestimated the resistance they would encounter once they decided to move, and now facing an entrenched and organized band of antigovernment zealots, federal officials are in a very difficult position. They have their work cut out for them.