Editor’s note: Este artículo está traducido al español.

Amy Patterson was still settling into her new home in Mesquite in 2014 when she caught wind of a series of antigovernment protests happening just a few miles down the road in Bunkerville near a cattle ranch owned by a man named Cliven Bundy.

The Montana transplant decided to drive down to see what the fuss was about. She arrived to find Bundy and his supporters locked in a standoff with federal agents over a court-ordered seizure of hundreds of his cattle that had illegally grazed on U.S. Bureau of Land Management lands since 1993.

The stalemate climaxed on April 12, 2014, when a large group of Bundy-backed armed militiamen and supporters assembled near the Toquop Bridge, near the pen where the BLM held more than 300 repossessed cattle. Dozens of armed federal agents confronted them.

Patterson, now 68, vividly remembers the ensuing standoff.

“We were just going to watch it from the bridge, but then, all of a sudden, we heard someone say they’ve got guns pulled on us,” she recalled. “We all ran down to the wash together, but I didn’t really think I was in any danger. I felt safe with the guys with the guns. I didn’t feel safe with the BLM. One of my favorite parts was watching them back out.”

The feds decided to retreat, and Bundy got his confiscated cattle back without paying the more than $1 million he owed the BLM in grazing-rights fees. The moment gave an emerging far-right, antigovernment movement a new hero it could rally around; critics equated their stand to domestic terrorism.

Nearly 11 years later, on April 5, roughly three dozen Bundy supporters gathered at his 160-acre ranch for a reunion set in a grassy clearing littered with mesquite tree saplings and cow pies. The family invited the Sun to the event.

Patterson attended sporting a T-shirt commemorating the 2014 standoff, which put Bundy and his two eldest sons, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, behind bars for nearly two years until a federal judge declared a mistrial in 2017 after discovering that prosecutors improperly withheld evidence.

After her husband died in 2015, Patterson said she found a sense of community among fellow Bundy supporters when she began making regular trips to the Lloyd D. George U.S. Courthouse in Las Vegas to protest some of the trials that stemmed from the standoff.

When Patterson arrived at the reunion, 65-year-old U.S. Navy veteran Eddie Jenness had just finished pitching a small tent in the shade. The pair had been Facebook friends for more than a decade, but this was their first in-person meeting.

Fresh off a 5½-hour drive from his home in Sun City, Ariz., Jenness said he had been looking forward to the camaraderie.

“If you listen to the media, we’re a bunch of white terrorists and Nazis — you name it. But there’s two sides to every story,” he said. “I believe in people that do what their heart tells them to do to help others, and my heart has been in this the whole time. That’s what this thing has always been about for me. It was ranchers in trouble who were getting run over by the federal government.”

For the next several hours, Jenness and Patterson mingled with a colorful cast of characters that included some of Bundy’s most outspoken supporters.

Among them was Brand Thornton, a karaoke-loving 72-year-old Alamo resident who participated in both the 2014 standoff and a related 2016 armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon.

Ammon Bundy had orchestrated the latter incident, a 41-day affair in protest of local ranchers who were jailed for setting fire to federal lands. It ended when Oregon State Police officers in an FBI-assisted pursuit shot and killed Arizona rancher LaVoy Finicum. Afterward, a federal jury found Ammon and Ryan Bundy and five co-defendants not guilty of firearms charges and conspiracy to impede federal workers.

“I was one of the original guys that first showed up,” Thornton said. “I had been following it, and instinctively I knew the government was up to no good. They’re always up to no good.”

Now a stalwart Bundy ally, Thornton comfortably outlined why the family hadn’t renewed its cattle grazing permit — a standard practice for ranchers who want to let their animals roam BLM-managed lands — for the last 32 years.

According to Thornton, “It has to do with the land rights issue, and Cliven was always 100% correct. All the new states entered on equal footing, which meant they were sovereign. They owned their land. So, we need to kick the federal government out of all these places.”

Just over five hours after the festivities began, Cliven Bundy arrived wearing a cowboy hat, flannel shirt, bolo tie and leather suspenders etched with a logo that stands for “victory over oppression.” Ryan Bundy and Cliven’s youngest son, Arden Bundy, followed close with boxes of fresh beef and vegetables.

As the meal simmered in a large cast-iron pot, the 78-year-old Bundy family patriarch produced a small pamphlet from his breast pocket containing the original text of the U.S. Constitution. The devout Mormon likened it to Scripture and said he believed that God “guided the Founding Fathers to write this document to be the law of the land.”

“A 2-year-old can understand this,” Bundy added as he explained his argument against federal land ownership. In his interpretation, the Gold Butte National Monument area where his cattle still graze belongs to Clark County and the state of Nevada.

In other words, the BLM never had any claim on it in the first place. The U.S. Supreme Court has historically ruled against this analysis.

“They claim they own like 80% of Nevada,” Bundy said. “Where do they get that power? They don’t get it out of the Constitution. It doesn’t say nothin’ about public land.”

He went on to refer to the 2014 Bunkerville affair as a protest, rather than a standoff.

“We weren’t protesting the federal government, we were protesting our sheriff to do his job,” Bundy said. “He should get between us and the federal government, and he should run the government out of the state and out of the county.”

His 2014 triumph came largely due to the presence of armed militia members associated with right-wing paramilitary organizations like the Oath Keepers, Operation Mutual Aid and the Three Percenters.

Years later, Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009 and played a key role in escalating the Bundy standoff, touted the victory in Bunkerville as a blueprint for the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “We need to go to Washington with that same conviction,” he told ultraconservative radio host Alex Jones just two months before rioters descended on the building after Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020.

Bundy acknowledged that he wasn’t even present when the tense exchange in Bunkerville nearly erupted in violence. Instead, he said, the militias had his back.

“I thought it was my job. I had hundreds of people who had guns pointin’ at ’em, and I thought that I should be the one that goes forward,” Bundy said. “But the good Lord said, ‘it’s not your job’. A minute or so later, I was inspired. It was your job, and you guys got the job done.”

Vincent Easley II, a Clinton, Ark., resident who was also present in 2014 and served as the front-facing organizer of this year’s reunion, said it was clear to him that Bundy’s unwavering faith made a difference in his successful stance against the BLM.

“When they arrested him — and I came to the trial — I didn’t think there was no way they’d ever, ever get out,” he said. “But the faith that they hold is so deeply rooted. It’s a part of their being. And when he stood up, he knew that he would prevail.”

Easley — a self-described “anarchist” and nondenominational follower of Christ — also touted the role of social media and what he calls “pirate radio,” or niche programming operating without a broadcasting license, in bringing people with fervent antigovernment views together to support Bundy’s cause. Today, Easley spends much of his time traveling the country as a correspondent for a fringe, ultraconservative outlet Real Liberty Media.

“It was an awakening time,” Easley said of the internet’s growth in the years leading up to the 2014 standoff. “What originally would have been pirate radio was one person out there on a rooftop. Now, it’s open, and there’s an avenue for people to explore, to question and to investigate.”

Those technological advances helped Easley connect with other reunion attendees like Roger Roots, a Montana-based libertarian attorney with John Pierce Law who said he volunteered his legal services to defendants in cases related to both the 2014 Nevada standoff and the 2016 Oregon refuge occupation.

“The federal, quote-unquote, Justice Department is so formidable and has so many resources that almost no one can fight them. It’s amazing that the Bundys got the outcome they ended up with — a true miracle,” Roots said.

Roots went on to serve a role on the legal teams of 14 defendants charged with participating in the Jan. 6 riots. While courts convicted all 14, he noted that “we did beat, probably, the most counts.”

Today, he represents clients like Joe Maldonado, who achieved fame and notoriety in 2020 as the star of the Netflix series “Tiger King.”

Roots said his legal experience had only solidified his belief that budget cuts were the only way to “check the power of these prosecutions.” He said he supported President Donald Trump’s efforts in that realm but added that he had opted to vote for the Libertarian presidential candidate in each of the last three presidential elections.

“I certainly am grateful for his pardons, and he’s good on some other issues. There are some other things I don’t necessarily agree with,” Roots said.

Like what?

“Some of these deportations without due process,” Roots replied. “I’m a libertarian, so I think everybody should have rights.”

His take was relatively rare at the reunion, however. Others, including Cliven Bundy himself, expressed their steadfast support for the new administration.

“What he’s doing is really close to what I would do,” Bundy said of Trump. “I watch him, and I think, ‘I couldn’t do what he does’. I don’t know how he does it.”

With Trump back in office and a loosely organized army of supporters behind him, Bundy, whose sprawling family tree includes 101 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, said he no longer saw himself as “the last man standing.”

“One thing that we had in our favor is we had the people, and a lot of them. Another thing we had in favor was we had just a few militia people who were exercising their Second Amendment (rights), and that made a difference,” he said. “Most of them guns were all pointed at the people, and we the people still marched forward. Eventually, we had a victory over oppression.”

[email protected] / 702-948-7811 / @DatSchneids