I don't think I've ever seen Cliven Bundy's comments in their full context:



There's a lot of racialgroups he said, "Let me tell you about..."
His opinion on Mexicans, blacks, and more broadly hispanic people. In some ways he praised hispanics as culturally better than white Americans. With each, he discussed their particular cultural perspective and past experience, in a remarkably less racist way than he is portrayed in soundbytes.

Another user-comment on Youtube by a black user, regarding Bundy's his ethnic terms, points out this is a guy in his 70's saying "the negro", and this is a guy who lived through many decades where the polite term of attempted racial sensitivity changed from "colored" to "negro" to "black" to "Afro-American" to "African American". So in saying "the negro" Bundy is probably using what was the most racially benign term of his formative early adult years. And he does speak compassionately about each group in a way that at least tries to see things through their perspective.

Bundy in this full-context clip comes across as much less racist than as soundbyted on the major network news reports. But regardless, then Bundy said "Let me tell you something I know about the negro....", that is absolutely the point where he lost all public support.

And combining that with the "Alt Right" joining in the protests in Charlottsville in Sept 2017, when someone is overtly racist, or at least is portrayed as racist, that becomes the point where no one even on the conservative side, or even in conservative news reporting, will make any attempt to defendthem, or offer facts that will vindicate them.

I saw that with Fox News in Charlottsville, that they wouldn't defend and clarify that a large slice of the protestors were only protesting to preserve Confederate historical monuments, and had actually told the white supremacists to take their Aryan white-power stuff and leave. Fox News didn't want to do anything that would even potentially allow them to be portrayed as the network that stood up for white supremacists. And to avoid that, they avoided reporting some of the facts.

It looks like this is another example.