In the spring of 2020 (I probably have told this story before) I was on a Zoom with members of the Society for Environmental Journalism who were interested in federal lands.
It was fascinating, because most of the folks on the call were interested in reporting on what they felt was an possible armed rebellion of people in the Interior West. I don’t know where they got this idea, but it didn’t bear any resemblance to reality. Meanwhile Sammy Roth and I were both interested in the tension between environmental concerns and renewable buildout (next post is a comprehensive story that Sammy posted recently).
Almost four years later, we can see what was the real story and what was fear-mongering (why and to what end, I have no idea). The story continues to be promulgated in certain quarters.. Bundys.. bad .. far-right antigovernment militas…ready to pounce. I don’t actually see what good this fear-mongering does; I don’t think it changes anyone’s mind politically. I also don’t think that “their wackos are wackier than our wackos” leads to thoughtful political discourse.
I always make fun of these folks who seem to think there are masses of incipient Bundys somewhere between the Mississippi and the Sierra. But it seems like the discussion might be heating up again. Our friends at High Country News have an interesting article called
What the Bundy Bunkerville standoff foreshadowed
Ten years after the impasse between the Bundy family and the BLM, the doctrine of white oppression is widely embraced.
and many are not.. western at all.
When the Bundys declared victory, it was hailed as a win for their vision of the American West, a place where white ranchers are heroes and yet also an oppressed minority. But their triumph went beyond Bunkerville: It was a victory for the entire far-right antigovernment militia movement and paved the way for ultra-conservative ideas to dominate the Republican Party’s agenda. All this foreshadowed a nationwide political storm — one that would divide lifelong neighbors, polarize the nation and help lay the groundwork for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Ten years after Bunkerville, the people and ideas that shaped the standoff are key to understanding American politics as the country faces its next presidential election.
Scholars have long studied the particular flavor of conservatism that has thrived among the Mormon subcultures of the Mountain West — “the Mormon Corridor.” In 2003, John-Charles Duffy, now a professor at Miami University, wrote in Sunstone Magazine that some members of the LDS Church resisted the changes in the 20th century that were aimed at making the faith more palatable to a wide audience: “The older, hardline tradition of constitutionalism, coupled with accusations of government tyranny, has survived in an LDS subculture devoted to ultraconservative politics.” In the 1990s, LDS leadership responded with mass excommunications, hoping to push out the ultra-conservative constitutionalists and survivalists. But the beliefs continued to flourish, if quietly.
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So the LDS threw the bums out..shouldn’t we give them credit? And if those folks got kicked out, is it accurate to characterize their views as “Mormon”?
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And in publicly proclaiming their beliefs and tying their ideology to the standoff, the Bundys moved “the boundaries of what’s expected Mormon political discourse,” Park said. He pointed to the Utah Legislature. “You see a lot of far-right Mormon conservative voices,” Park said, “who don’t go fully Bundy, but they’re willing to go half Bundy. They’re willing to take advantage of this anxiety.”
I wonder exactly what “half-Bundy” means?
In 2022, the Deseret News — a newspaper owned by the LDS Church — reported on “an emerging pattern” of public protest driven by conspiracy theories that had recently emerged in the Utah Legislature. “A deep distrust in the federal government and also a broad agreement with deep-state conspiracies,” Park said, became the norm.
The norm of whom exactly?
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Still, lawmakers from around the region declared their support for the Bundys. Several of them remain in office today, including Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and Idaho state Rep. Heather Scott. President Donald Trump unlawfully appointed William Perry Pendley — a vocal Bundy sympathizer — deputy director of the BLM. (He served for over a year, despite never being confirmed by the Senate.) More recently, Pendley authored a 22-page section of Mandate for Leadership, the 922-page manifesto of Project 2025, a vision for the country drawn up by a far-right think tank. Pendley lays out how the Department of the Interior would function during a second Trump administration, seeking “American energy dominance” through oil and gas leases and a complete reinstatement of Trump-era Interior policies.
I would just say tying “Trump-era Interior policies” and Bundys seems a bit of a stretch.
THE ANTI-GOVERNMENT and ultra-conservative Mormon beliefs that were so key to the Bundy standoff are deeply rooted in Western identity. The Bundy story appealed to a shared “‘rural mentality,” Cooter said, that is prized by militia groups.
“Even if they live in cities, even if they live in suburbs, this idea of rurality means a lot to them, in no small part because it’s sort of an extension of our imagining of the frontier (and) what real men and real Americans are supposed to be,” she said. “It’s almost like they’re trying to make up for the fact that they’re not living in that rural environment where they have to prove themselves in a very stereotypically masculine way.”
An old white man in a cowboy hat complaining about government overreach was, essentially, an ideal story for them — a narrative that reinforced “that frontier piece of masculinity,” Cooter said.
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Park, the historian, saw the Bundys’ refusal to acknowledge Indigenous land rights when they talked about Western land ownership as another nod to that conservative brand of Mormonism. “That Manifest Destiny ideology, of course, is widespread in America,” he said. “But it had a particularly Mormon flavor, because they believed this is a land that God has prepared for us.”
Political leaders like former President Trump have advanced a worldview in which white rural Americans are an oppressed class. But Cooter said that this idea gets at something much, much deeper in the American psyche.
“That starting line realistically goes back to the founding of our country,” Cooter said. It “is really baked into this idea of the American mythology that’s going to be very difficult for us to ever move away from.”
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I wish the reporter had asked how exactly did the “white rural Americans were an oppressed class” went back to the founding of the country. Since according to this website (not fact-checked) 94% of the population in 1800 was rural.. did they feel oppressed then? And that is not to say that Tribes and Hispanics have not had problems with federal “overreach”.. see the history of New Mexico and the Forest Service. And of course, overreach is in the eye of the beholder.