In April 2014, the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy led an armed rebellion against federal agents who had confiscated his cattle and arrested his son, Dave. The four-day standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, was among the most bizarre and portentous episodes of Barack Obama’s presidency—the story of a nostalgic, right-wing cowboy leading a quixotic rebellion against cosmopolitan forces, “federal overreach,” and the rule of law. Bundy won the standoff in every conceivable sense. Twice, he beat federal prosecutors in court. His cattle graze federal lands, without a permit, to this day. Among modern American reactionaries, Cliven Bundy is a folk hero.
Last week, Longreads and Oregon Public Broadcasting launched the Bundyville podcast, which—in the course of seven episodes—examines and complicates Bundy’s folk tale. The journalist Leah Sottile, based in Portland, hosts Bundyville. Sottile travels through Nevada, speaking with Bundy’s neighbors, his allies, his critics, and, eventually, Bundy himself. Bundyville doesn’t simply revisit the April 2014 standoff in Bunkerville and the longer, deadly winter 2016 standoff—led by Cliven Bundy’s son, Ammon—at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon. Ultimately, Sottile fashions a longer, broader account of the regional concerns and reactionary sentiments that Bundy notoriously embodies. Thus, Bundyville is a podcast about withering American mythologies imperiled by the nation’s advancement but nonetheless entrenched—rather violently—by the nation’s anxieties about the future.
In the second episode of Bundyville, Sottile summarizes a century’s worth of contention between Nevada residents and federal agencies, the regional distrust owing to a fraught history of nuclear weapons testing, wildlife preservation efforts, and land management bureaucracy. The history Sottile presents is enough to justify, in the most general terms, a Western rancher’s distrust of the U.S. government. The tensions begin with Harry Truman and the nuclear age, they spike in 1976 after Congress passes the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and they now seem to have culminated in the 2014 standoff with federal authorities, popularly depicted in certain circles as Obama’s private army of land-grabbing thugs. Bundy, aligning himself with the sovereign citizen movement, thrashes against the federal government as a republic unto himself.
In the course of its seven episodes, Bundyville underscores the historical context for sovereign citizen activism in the West, though it delays until its last couple of episodes the more contemporary observations, such as local opposition to Bundy and that ranchers are, in fact, an infinitesimal political group in Nevada. Bundy’s rebellion is largely a right-wing media spectacle. Truthfully, it turns out, some of Cliven Bundy’s neighbors cannot stand him and his family, whose politics they regard as a local nuisance. Bundy’s fellow ranchers pay their grazing fees and otherwise abide by the law, and Bundy’s selfish, chaotic activism amounts to a repudiation of their relatively peaceful livelihoods. “Are we not a nation of laws?” one frustrated neighbor rancher asks Bundy at a town meeting. Other ranchers—speaking to Sottile in the years following the Bunkerville standoff—associate Bundy’s politics, and his temperament, with Donald Trump. Sottile speaks with one Nevada couple, Victor and Annette Fuentes, who seem ambivalent about Bundy’s methods after having consulted with him and his family about their own struggles with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has diverted water from their land to a surrounding wildlife refuge. In Episode 7, Victor Fuentes, a Cuban immigrant, offers the series’s most passionate defense of Bundy’s outlook, even as Fuentes resists the appeal of armed resistance: “When I came, here, to America, I never thought I’d be going through this here ... in a country who proclaim to be free, where the people are free and the government respects the law,” Fuentes says. Sottile fears that Fuentes’s 40 acres, which hosts a religious outpost named Patch of Heaven, could be the next Bunkerville—the site of an armed standoff with disgruntled landowners and federal agents. “Victor is holding back, but Annette is ready to fight,” Sottile reports.
Unsurprisingly, the Bundy family is more than happy to lead the right-wing circus that descended upon Bunkerville and threatened to spread from there. The activists who do support Bundy in his rebellion against the federal government include right-wing web media figures, most of them tourists, who couldn’t seem any further removed from farmland and its attendant concerns. “More than ranchers,” Sottile reports, “Bundy’s movement attracts people who feel like they’ve been wronged by the government—people who are eager for a gun battle and are willing to die if that means making the government look bad.”
Bundy, 72, is a proud and plainspoken man. He basks in the rhetoric and aesthetics of American frontierland. He clings to his guns, and to his dramatic religious convictions, in the anti-Obama extreme. Seemingly, Bundy represents a righteous, old-fashioned industriousness that the federal government punishes through taxation, regulation, confiscation, and other undue impositions. But Sottile’s reporting reveals a man whose hereditary claim to the land is largely fictional, and whose productivity is rather negligible. Bundy is a far better showman than a farmer. On trial in Las Vegas, Bundy arrives to court in a white limousine.
Sottile accounts for Bundy’s life after the April 2014 standoff, as Bundy’s armed rebellion against federal agents has became a legal rebellion against federal prosecutors. For more than half a century now, the FBI’s arrogance has been a dark theme in American politics. In Sottile’s account, the FBI empowered Bundy and hastened his martyrdom by mismanaging the evidence presented at his two criminal trials. In the most sympathetic stretch of Sottile’s reporting—the Las Vegas criminal trial, covered in Episode 4—the government’s failure to win a conviction against Bundy and his sons, Ammon and Ryan, does seem to bolster Bundy’s skepticism of the feds. “In Nevada, prosecutors broke the rules, and that fed into the Bundys’ paranoid suspicions,” Sottile reports. In the main, however, Bundy is a fool who takes a whimsical view of federal law. Routinely, Bundy conflates truth, as spelled out in the Constitution, and myth—specifically, the White Horse Prophecy—as spelled out in the apocryphal musings of Church of Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith. Bundy has memorized the U.S. Constitution and recites select passages at will, but then he also attributes a radical environmentalist group’s slogan to the Bureau of Land Management. So much of Bundyville plays out in the criminal courts, and yet the relevant laws can seem wholly beside the point.
There’s no real mystery at the heart of Bundyville; no great, unsettled question about Bundy’s ludicrous claim over federal lands. Sottile opens with aggressive hints of a “gotta hear both sides” approach to Bundy, but she decisively concludes that Bundy’s key claims—about his heritage, and about his claim to the disputed grazing land—are mistaken. “The Bundys’ beliefs about the Constitution have been definitively, unequivocally disproven,” Sottile writes for the Longreads website. “They’re not true.” In the podcast’s most rigorous moments, Bundyville is less about Bundy’s logic, or even his quirkiest motivations, and more about his means: representing himself at trial, and in the press, Bundy sells a sob story about hard life, corroded mystique, and the working man’s dwindling fortunes in the rural American West. Self-consciously, Bundy represents the lawless, glorious days of the frontier—which, of course, is no longer a frontier, but is nonetheless rife with economic uncertainties, wild personalities, and personal yearnings for autonomy and dominion.
The Bundy family exploits these yearnings with the promise of spectacular violence as liberation. In the podcast’s first episode, Sottile suggests that Bundy’s following might resemble a cult. Ultimately, her reporting never really supports that characterization; Bundy mostly recruits supporters who learned to resent and antagonize the federal government all on their own. Bundy doesn’t brainwash anyone. He’s not exceptionally charismatic; he is—as Sottile describes Bundy after finally meeting him at his small, sparse home in Mesquite, Nevada—an embattled grandpa. In Obama’s America, the Bundys were strange rebels, lashing out against the very notion of a federal government. In Trump’s America, the Bundys are forefathers of a much broader backlash, now the dominant mode of American politics. Ryan Bundy is currently running for governor of Nevada—of course he is. The Bundy family won the West, and then Trump won the country. The rest is just a victory lap.End of article
