What Do the Bundys Want?

Second-generation radical propagandists tend to be more tempered. You see your father denounced as a loon, and you learn to round off your edges. When the Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy appeared before news cameras twenty months ago to explain why he and his family had escalated a legal dispute over grazing fees on federal land into an armed standoff, he dressed in white button-downs and ties, a costume of civilization and rationality, but spun off-topic badly, into floridly racist monologues about African-Americans. (“I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves?”) There is less pulpit rage in his son, Ammon Bundy, who led an armed militia takeover of several empty buildings in an Oregon National Wildlife Refuge, this weekend. “We pose no threat to anyone,” the younger Bundy told reporters. He wanted more followers to come, and asked them to bring their arms, but he also tried to sound like something other than the symbol of furious resistance that his father had become. He said he had plans to build a libertarian community on the land. “We’re planning on staying here for several years.”