XPost: talk.politics.misc, or.politics   
   From: TrumpFucksKids@gmai.com   
      
   He has enraged our demented imperialist leader!   
      
   He will be labeled an Enemy of The TrumpenReich.   
      
   Ammon Bundy Is All Alone   
      
   The anti-government militia leader can't make sense of his allies' support   
   for ICE violence.   
      
   February 1, 2026, 7:30 AM ET   
      
   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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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