Is Cliven Bundy A Racist? And If He Is, What Changes?

This comes from Pravda-on-the-Hudson, so it's highly suspicious. It's certainly not like they haven't lied for partisan purposes many times before. But they're claiming that their reporter overheard Bundy say the following (h/t Hot Air):

Cliven Bundy stood by the Virgin River up the road from the armed checkpoint at the driveway of his ranch, signing autographs and posing for pictures. For 55 minutes, Mr. Bundy held forth to a clutch of supporters about his views on the troubled state of America — the overreaching federal government, the harassment of Western ranchers, the societal upheaval caused by abortion, even musing about whether slavery was so bad.

He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Hmmmm. If Cliven Bundy said this - and considering the source and the timing let's really emphasize that 'if' - he's going to forfeit a lot of sympathy from me and others. 'Family life' under slavery certainly existed, but whether it was in ancient Rome or 1840's Georgia, it was always subject to the owner's approval and changing financial circumstances at any given time.

That doesn't change the fact that contrary to what you're hearing,  he may in fact have had a legal case of sorts (look up 'prescriptive easement' and 'adverse possession', especially as they apply to Nevada law for details) nor does it change the fact that the Bureau of Land Management tried to seize land under false pretenses, participated in the illegal taking of private property without compensation by stealing Bundy's cattle and sent an armed SWAT team to lay siege to Bundy's home and  act like Nazi brown shirts in general.

This purported statement  does serve quite conveniently to distance Bundy from people that were supporting him politically. As such, the timing is pretty suspicious, but I will merely report this, wait to see what if anything Cliven Bundy has to say about it and let you draw your own conclusions.