A new leaf for Ammon Bundy

Ammon Bundy, the rancher at the center of a 2016 standoff with the government at an Oregon wildlife preserve, said he is leaving the militia movement after criticizing President Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Bundy shut down his social media accounts and announced that he was stepping away from “patriot groups,” BuzzFeed News reported Thursday.

He said the decision comes after he faced fierce backlash for opposing Trump’s attacks on a caravan of migrants.

"It's like being in a room full of people in here, trying to teach, and no one is listening," he told the outlet. "The vast majority seemed to hang on to what seemed like hate, and fear, and almost warmongering, and I don't want to associate myself with warmongers."

Bundy said it was “incorrect” for Trump to characterize the group of Central American migrants traveling toward the U.S. as “all criminal.”

"To group them all up like, frankly, our president has done — you know, trying to speak respectfully — he has basically called them all criminals and said they’re not coming in here. ... It seems that there’s been this group stereotype,” Bundy said in a video posted to Facebook.

"What about the fathers, the mothers and the children that 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 with criminals?" he added.

Bundy told BuzzFeed News that his followers’ strong support for the president was one of the reasons he has to step away from the militia movement.

[...]

"The time we find ourselves in now that is closest found in history is Germany in the 1930s, and they had a leader that was loved, and it was the same kind of following," he said. "I don't want to say there is that extreme similarity, but it very well could go that way, and people just give up their thinking, their rights, and they give up their government because they were so willing to follow him."

  

Props to Ammon.