New Book Provides Inside Look At Cliven Bundy

Cliven Bundy: American Terrorist Patriot

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

Most people in northeastern Clark County are familiar with the plight of the renown Bunkerville rancher, Cliven Bundy. That is mainly because of Bundy’s famous April 2014 standoff with federal officers under the I-15 bridge over the Toquop Wash near Mesquite. But there is a lot more to Bundy’s story than that one dramatic incident. A new book, entitled “Cliven Bundy: American Terrorist Patriot”, aims to tell the whole story in detail, from Bundy’s perspective.

The book, released last week, is written by Mike Stickler of Washoe Valley, Nevada. Stickler bills himself as an author of several Christian Living books, radio host, sought-after motivational speaker, entrepreneur and ex-felon.

Interestingly, it is that last distinction that first got him connected with Cliven Bundy. Early this year, Stickler spent two months in the same federal detention facility where Bundy is being held.
“It was kind of just a strange happen-stance that our paths crossed at all,” Stickler said last week in an interview with the PROGRESS.

Stickler, 57, had been serving a thirty month federal sentence on tax fraud charges. According to Stickler, in one of his business organizations an employee had mismanaged some federal grant funding. Because he was the principle in the company, the mismanagement had landed him in Lompoc Federal Correctional Camp in California.

In early 2017, toward the end of his sentence, he was transitioned into a half-way house in Las Vegas. But space at the half-way house was not yet available for him. So he was transported to a Pahrump detention facility to wait for an opening. That is where he met Cliven Bundy.
“I was pretty upset about being there at the time,” Stickler said. “It wasn’t where I was expecting to be at all. But it turned out to be a good thing.”

Stickler said that he didn’t know much about Bundy at the time. While he was somewhat familiar with the standoff from the national news coverage, he hadn’t paid a lot of attention to it. From what he had heard, though, he had expected Bundy to be more of an extremist.
“I’m a pretty level-headed guy,” Stickler said. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all. So I expected Cliven to be one of those a tin-foil hat wearing kind of guys. That is where I started out. But in the end I’ve gone to considering him a good friend. I am certainly a supporter at this point. But I definitely didn’t start there.”

Once Stickler had arrived in Pahrump, it didn’t take long for him to become acquainted with Bundy. The two men had a lot in common.

Stickler grew up along the central coast of California in a rich agricultural area. He attended college at California Polytechnic State University, a school in San Luis Obispo known for its agricultural programs. Since that time, he had spent a good portion of his adult life in farming and ranching pursuits: raising and training cutting horses, cow and calf operations, raising beef, etc.

Stickler and Bundy found that they had a lot to talk about. They began sitting together for many hours talking about beef cattle ranching, desert farming and more.
“He would always sit down and start off by saying, ‘Mike, teach me something!’,” Stickler said. “But by the time we were finished, he always ended up teaching me. He had experience and knowledge about so much; from horses to irrigation systems to raising melons and alfalfa in dry, arid places.”

Eventually the conversation turned to Bundy’s ongoing dispute with the federal government over grazing rights. Cliven began relating the story of his 20 year legal struggle with impressive memory of the details, Stickler said. When he finally came to the part about the Bunkerville standoff and the weeks leading up to it, Stickler was astonished by the story.
“I was amazed by what had happened,” Stickler said. “I mean a ranching family being under such intensive federal surveillance, being infiltrated by under-cover FBI personnel posing as supporters, snipers on the surrounding hilltops; What a story! I found myself telling Cliven that he really needed to write a book.”

According to Stickler, Bundy’s eventually response was, “Well you are the author, maybe you should write it!”
Stickler thought about that for a few days and then came back to Bundy saying that he would like to give it a shot. But Bundy gave him one condition.
“He told me, ‘If you will tell MY story, I will give it to you’,” Stickler said. “But it was important to him that the story be told honestly from his perspective. And I agreed to that.”

From that point, the two spent every working day that they could going through all the details from the beginning. Stickler hand-wrote extensive notes during those interviews. Then he compiled those notes into a narrative and mailed packets of them back home to his wife in Washoe Valley.
“When Cliven told me his story my mind was pretty clear about him,” Stickler said. “There were no other voices; no opinions or conflicting comments, only his. So I was completely focused on what he had to say.”

The book includes a fairly complete biography. It begins with Bundy’s early childhood growing up on the range in desert of northeastern Clark County. It continues through his teens and early twenties and tells about his family background and values.

A large portion of the book sets up the Constitutional argument of Bundy’s legal case. It chronicles the more than 20 years of legal battles, back and forth, over Bundy’s grazing rights.  Then it covers in great detail, Bundy’s recollection of the events of April 2014 that ended with the standoff under the I-15 bridge.

When Stickler was finally released from custody at the end of the summer, he went home and began going through all of his notes. Now he had the freedom to do more extensive research into Bundy’s story from other sources. Stickler said that he was impressed with the consistency he saw in the news accounts of the event as compared to Bundy’s recollection of them.
“To be honest I wasn’t sure I believed everything that Cliven had told me,” Stickler said. “For example, I really thought what he had told me about snipers on the surrounding hillsides was just an embellishment. But it didn’t take very long of looking on the internet that here was video showing exactly what he said; and it was posted in very credible news outlets, not just whacko sources. The BLM man in charge of the Bunkerville operation, Dan Love, even admitted it in court recently, that that had happened. The more I fact-checked, the more I found that Cliven had been incredibly consistent throughout.”

Since the trial began last month, Stickler has spent a lot of time in the Las Vegas courtroom witnessing the proceedings first hands. He admitted last week that he is unsure how it will all end up but it is clear that the stakes are high.
“I’m not a Constitutional lawyer, so I really don’t know if he is right legally,” Stickler said of Bundy. “But you also have to ask if he is morally right, and that is a much bigger question. If so, then I think that we have an obligation to get involved and help to make changes in the laws and regulations to prevent this kind of federal overreach.”

Stickler says that his goal, in writing the book, has been to stay true to Cliven’s side of the story – and to provoke thoughts on some very fundamental questions.
“The title of the book; “Cliven Bundy: American Terrorist Patriot”; really raises the important question: Is he a terrorist or a patriot?” Stickler said. “That is the question that the reader should ask going in.”
Stickler recognizes that hundreds of thousands of words have been written with differing viewpoints about Bundy over the past few years. In his book, Stickler says he has done all he could to present Cliven’s viewpoint – then to leave the conclusion up to his readers.
“The idea is that, once you have heard his story, you decide the answer to the question,” Stickler said. “In the end, what happens in the courtroom will put the punctuation mark on all of it.”

“Cliven Bundy: American Terrorist Patriot” will be available at the book’s website http://ClivenBundy.net and at Amazon.com. The book may also be available soon for purchase in local stores pending negotiations with local business owners.