

Bundy with militia supporters on April 12, 2014. (Credit: Ryan Lenz, SPLC)

One year after hundreds of heavily armed antigovernment “Patriots” swarmed the Nevada desert to help rancher Cliven Bundy in his fight with the federal government – an event that nearly ended in bloodshed – the Bundy family is ready again.

Beginning on Friday, the family plans to hold a three-day celebration to mark the anniversary of the April 12, 2014, standoff with Bureau of Land Management (BLM) agents, and the subsequent decision by the federal government to abandon efforts to confiscate Bundy’s cattle as payment for more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees.

Dubbed “the Battle of Bunkerville” by the antigovernment movement, the standoff led to widespread animus toward the federal government in a movement already fixated on conspiracy theories that covered everything from the secret introduction of endangered desert tortoises to push Bundy of public lands, to the idea that the federal government had secret plans with the Chinese government to turn large swaths of Nevada into solar farms.

In the months after the standoff, patriot paranoia spread across the American West, too – a trend that was documented in a Southern Poverty Law Center special investigative report, War in the West, that tracked the spread of Bundy’s ideas and revealed that the April 12 standoff was part of an orchestrated, planned militia effort, not an organic uprising of populist fury.

The Bundy's have said the weekend celebration will include camping, hiking, shooting, cowboy poetry and a barbecue. Speakers at the weekend celebration include former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, Nye County (Nevada) Sheriff Sharon Wehrly and Nevada Councilwoman Michelle Fiore, who has taken on Bundy’s fight with the feds in the state legislature. Bundy will deliver remarks about the last year on Saturday evening.

The anniversary of the Bundy standoff is more than a moment of celebration for the antigovernment movement, though. It is also a reminder that a year has passed during which the federal government has done nothing to hold Bundy accountable for those who committed crimes that day, and has let Bundy stand in bold defiance of a federal court order.

The BLM has yet to respond to dozens of requests in the last year for comment.