Ammon Bundy spoke kindly about the migrant caravans. The backlash has him reevaluating his supporters.

Reached by phone Friday, Bundy disputed the framing of the BuzzFeed story but acknowledged that he was frustrated with some of the elements of the right-wing groups for which he has informally served as leader. “I never joined a movement,” he said. “We were a ranching family. We were ranching, and the government came to take our livelihood away, and we said ‘no.’ It was no more than that.” He said the only real announcement he had made was that he was unplugging from Facebook, after being surprised by the angry response to his remarks on the caravan. His decision to speak out came after his views were solicited on the issue and he sought to do some research to figure out how he felt about it, he said. Bundy, one of the figureheads of the anti-government sentiment that crested with the rise of Donald Trump, made waves last week when he criticized the president for demonizing the migrant caravan at the southern border. The statements were striking for a figure so closely identified with the country’s libertarian and anti-government right-wing. And on Friday, BuzzFeed News reported that Bundy was “quitting the militia movement” and powering down his social media accounts because of the backlash he received for his rebuke of Trump. The story drew a flurry of headlines, including, “Ammon Bundy Quits Militia Movement in Solidarity With Migrant Caravan.”“I was asked multiple times from different various individuals what I thought about these caravans, and I didn’t know, to be honest with you. I didn’t know the facts,” he said. “So I began to research and try to determine the facts." His verdict on the caravan, which he delivered in a 17-minute video at the time, broke sharply with Trump-aligned orthodoxy on the issue. In the run up to the midterm elections, Trump repeatedly disparaged the caravan as an “invasion," a national security threat requiring the emergency deployment of thousands of U.S. troops. “He has basically called them all criminals,” Bundy said of Trump in the video. “What about the fathers, the mothers, the children, who have come here and are willing to go through the process to apply for asylum so they can come into this country and benefit from not having to be oppressed continually by criminals?"...MORE