Ammon Bundy Is All Alone
Not so long ago, Ammon Bundy was the most famous right-wing militia leader in America. His two armed standoffs with federal agents had made him the face of the Patriot Movement: a loose assemblage of anti-government extremists, Second Amendment maximalists, and more than a few white nationalists. Even some mainstream elements of the Republican Party embraced him as a modern folk hero. But Bundy’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown now threatens to make him a pariah within his own community.
In November, Bundy self-published a long essay titled “The Stranger,” in which he labeled the Trump administration’s treatment of undocumented immigrants a “moral failure.” “To call such people criminals for lacking official permission” to be in the country, he wrote, “is to forget the moral law of God, the historical truth of our own founding, and the Constitutional ideals that continue to define justice.” On a recent livestream following the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota, Bundy told his audience that ICE’s conduct “clearly looks like tyranny.” If the government threatened his family, he said, he would fight back by whatever means necessary.
I spoke with Bundy a few hours after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti. “It’s sickening to me,” he told me over the phone, “just to see the parallels of history repeating itself.” (In his November essay, he had compared the administration’s treatment of immigrants to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.) He added, “When it comes to the more humanitarian side of it, I think the left has it much more correct than the nationalist right.”
[Read: Ammon Bundy has disappeared]
Bundy, to be clear, has not gone woke. He believes that Democrats, whom he calls “communist-anarchists,” are “spurred by wickedness.” (So, he says, are Republicans, whom he calls “nationalists.”) He believes that government has no business providing virtually any social services. He believes that homosexuality is a sin. And don’t ask him about vaccination requirements.
But perhaps Bundy’s central belief is the inviolability of individual liberty, and in this he has remained fairly consistent over the years. During the first Trump presidency, Bundy took heat from some of his followers for opposing the administration’s anti-immigration agenda, and when I first spoke with him a few years ago, he reiterated those views. If he has become something of an outcast, that testifies less to a transformation in his thinking than to a broader realignment on the far right. Bundy, in his relative ideological fixity, offers a stable reference point against which to measure that shift.
In 2014, Bundy and his father, Cliven, marshaled about 1,000 militiamen and other supporters to repel government agents trying to impound their cattle in Bunkerville, Nevada. (Twenty years earlier, in an effort to protect the endangered Mojave desert tortoise, the Bureau of Land Management had ordered Cliven Bundy to remove his cattle from federal lands; he ignored the directive.) The standoff turned the Bundys into the first family of the Patriot Movement and darlings of conservative media. They might not have been quite at the Republican Party’s ideological core, but they weren’t very far away from it. They were avatars of a conservative belief in the importance of individual liberty and the righteousness of resistance—even armed resistance, if necessary—to government tyranny. In a Fox News poll asking thousands of viewers whether they were “Team Cliven Bundy or Team Federal Government,” 97 percent answered “team Cliven.” Several Republican U.S. Senators publicly defended the family. Sean Hannity repeatedly had Cliven on his show.
Two years later, Ammon led a six-week occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon that left one rancher dead, shot down by police officers after a backwoods car chase. From 2022 to 2023, he was embroiled in a slow-motion standoff with local and state law enforcement in Idaho stemming from his refusal to pay a $52 million judgment against him in a high-profile defamation case.
By that point, the breadth of Bundy’s support had substantially diminished. His exploits no longer garnered the attention of Fox News and its mainstream conservative viewership. And now, even some of his greatest supporters—people whom he and his family inspired to become militants in the first place—seem, in an ideological sense, to have deserted him. After Good was shot and killed, I reached out to a number of those who stood with Bundy at Bunkerville, at Malheur, or afterward. None of them would condemn ICE, and some expressed enthusiastic support.
[Robert F. Worth: Welcome to the American winter ]
When I asked Nick Ramlow, a Montana militant and member of Bundy’s People’s Rights Network, about Good’s killing, he referred me to a recent Supreme Court opinion and stressed that “a jury will make a determination of liability when a civil suit is brought.” In other words, Ramlow, who once told a sheriff that he “better keep his nose clean” because Ramlow had “a bigger army than he does,” didn’t want to comment one way or the other until the courts weighed in.
Eric Parker, who in 2014 made a name for himself by training a semiautomatic rifle on federal agents at Bundy Ranch and who is now the head of the Real Three Percenters of Idaho, had nothing but praise for the agent who killed Good. “I mostly think it’s important to note how impressive it was to get those first two shots off in under a second,” he told me, adding that Good’s wife should be criminally charged (for what, he did not say). Lee Rice, a longtime People’s Rights member and steadfast Bundy supporter who participated in the Oregon standoff, told me when I first met him in 2023 that he didn’t “believe in the government running roughshod over you.” When I spoke with him recently about ICE’s tactics in Minnesota, he said, “I’m supportive of what’s going on, because we need to get these clowns out of here.” Good deserved her fate, he added, because she’d sided with undocumented immigrants.
Some of those in Bundy’s orbit have responded favorably to his essay and video, and a few have changed their mind about ICE enforcement since the killing of Pretti, which the Trump administration has tried to justify by pointing out that Pretti was carrying a gun. “I feel completely different about this one,” Parker texted me after seeing the video of Pretti’s death. Unlike in the case of Good, he didn’t see any self-defense rationale for the shooting. “No detainment just fighting. Disarmed him then shot him.”
But, on the whole, Bundy’s former allies seem to remain solidly in favor of the masked, armed federal agents. Just the other day, Bundy told me, he had a contentious conversation with a militant who had joined him at Malheur. Bundy had always thought that he and his supporters stood for a coherent set of Christian-libertarian principles that had united them against federal power. “We agreed that there’s certain rights that a person has that they’re born with. Everybody has them equally, not just in the United States,” he said. “But on this topic they are willing to completely abandon that principle.”
Bundy finds this ideological betrayal totally baffling. He would start to say something—“I can’t understand how they think …” or “They just can’t, they can’t …”—only to abandon the thought mid-sentence. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” he told me finally. “It’s scary, actually.”
And so Ammon Bundy is politically adrift. He certainly sees no home for himself on the “communist-anarchist” left. Nor does he identify anymore with the “nationalist” right and its authoritarian tendencies. The party that embraced him and the people who supported him have, by and large, left him behind.
He feels, he told me, “a little bit alone.”