Cliven Bundy‘s pro-slavery, racist comments have soured a lot of the conservative supporters who regarded his fight with the Bureau of Land Management as a good opportunity to question the federal government’s control over vast swaths of federal land.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” Bundy told supporters in Nevada in the presence of a New York Times reporter. “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.”