National
Location:
Category:
Conspiracy Propagandist
Status:
Unknown
Background
“People’s Rights” is a network of an estimated 20,000 members started in 2020 by Ammon Bundy, the anti-government activist who led the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Sometimes referred to as “Ammon’s Army,” Ammon serves as the leader. The rest of the network is organized in 16 states with “state assistants” placed over “area assistants,” but members can be found throughout the rest of the country.
The network was started primarily to oppose COVID-19 health directives, but leaders have injected “far-right conspiracism, racism, antisemitism, anti-indigenous, anti-transgender sentiment, and omnipresent threats of violence” into the organization.
Ideology
People’s Rights was formed primarily to oppose local and state government COVID-19 health directives. Consequently, there are strong currents of COVID-19 denialism, far-right conspiracism, and anti-government tendencies within the organization.
Individual leaders and members have spread more extreme ideologies within the network, espousing racist, anti-semitic, anti-indigenous, and anti-LGBTQ beliefs in social media groups and at events.
People's Rights
Tactics
After initially recruiting members via social media, the organization has since moved on to a text message-based system. Leaders are given the contacts of each person within their area, and use a “telephone tree” type of communication, keeping the network’s activity away from “censorship” on social media networks.
The hope of the organization was “to establish an ‘Uber-like’ militia response system that can be mobilized whenever people feel like their rights are under attack.” “Bundy and his group frequently use force or threatening actions, to disrupt, postpone, or shut down public events.” People’s Rights “targeted public health officials through such practices as physically shutting down meetings, showing up at officials’ homes, and claiming any attempts to slow the spread of the virus were threats to freedom.”
Utah Connections
The network has 547 members in Utah. There are 4,133 “members” on various Facebook groups and pages, including “Open Carry UTAH - OCU,” which was proclaimed to be an official “arm” of People’s Rights. As of 2020, the organization had one “state assistant,” with twelve “area assistants” covering different parts of the state:
State Assistant - Derrick Staheli
Area 1 Assistant - Nathan Erickson
Area 2 Assistant - Jeena Nilson
Area 3 Assistants - Nathan Brown & Victoria Dortzbach
Area 5 Assistant - Darrin Berg, Wendy Leathan, & Zachary Reed
Area 9 Assistant - Shawna Cox
Area 10 Assistants - Cary Blake, Jennifer Preston, Klay Klemic, & Raul Hevia
Area 11 Assistant - Trevor Wilkerson
Ammon Bundy and others in the People’s Rights Network held a meeting in St. George, Utah in March 2021 as part of a two-week road trip through Utah “to discuss local efforts to resist mask mandates and to hear Bundy share his vision for government in the United States.”
