Some books age into prophecy, and others are simply ignored until the world they described arrives. James Pogue’s Chosen Country falls somewhere between the two. Published in 2018, before Trump’s first impeachment, before January 6, before the border wall became both symbol and scaffolding for a white nationalist state, it reads now not as a dispatch from the past but as an early draft of the present. It is a book about land, guns, God, paranoia, spectacle, the slow death of American federalism, and the rise of a movement that believes itself divinely chosen to rebel. The story he tells begins in the snowbound Oregon desert, where a group of armed men occupied a wildlife refuge in early 2016 and declared it theirs. It ends (though Pogue doesn’t spell this out) with the United States government effectively capitulating to the ideological heirs of that rebellion by electing them.
Pogue arrived at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon, on the second night of the occupation. He wasn’t the only outsider; a small militia had taken over the site to protest the reimprisonment of two local ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, convicted of setting fire to federal land. They were poster boys, useful to Ammon Bundy and his armed followers, but the grievance went deeper than their case. What Pogue saw, and this is the great strength of his book, is that the rebellion wasn’t simply anti-government. It was a cry for control: over land, over history, over meaning. The men at Malheur saw themselves as custodians of the “real America,” that great mythologised territory where white farmers and ranchers live free of regulation, taxation, and oversight. And crucially, they didn’t think of themselves as the fringe. They thought they were the vanguard.
“The rebellion at Malheur wasn’t just a cry against federal authority. It was a howl against a liberalism that claims moral authority while outsourcing economic ruin to the margins.”
There’s an image in the first chapter that sticks. A campfire burns in the snow, surrounded by camo-clad men feeding logs into it with slow deliberation. A sniper’s silhouette paces a watchtower overhead. The mood is tense, paranoid, but also oddly communal. These men aren’t just angry—they’re brothers-in-arms, unified by loss and mission. They talk in half-spiritual, half-military terms. “We’re like the best people you could possibly imagine,” one says. It’s a phrase that should be risible, and perhaps is, but Pogue doesn’t laugh. He embeds. He drinks their beer, eats their pizza, shares their bunkhouses. If he judges them, it’s quietly.
That restraint is part of what makes the book so readable, but it’s also its greatest risk. Pogue wants to understand these men, not to dismiss them. He gives them space to speak. Jason Patrick, a central character, becomes something like a tragic antihero. Raised in rural Washington by a homesteading father who died of Agent Orange–related cancer, Patrick came of age believing in the Constitution, the frontier, and personal sovereignty. After the 2008 crash wiped out his roofing business and home, he fell down the familiar libertarian rabbit hole—one where the federal government is not just inefficient but illegitimate. By the time he reached Malheur, he was already under court order not to leave Georgia or possess firearms. “But meanwhile,” he tells Pogue, “I’m standing here in Oregon, taking a federal building.”
The book is littered with these origin stories. Men radicalised not by ideology in the abstract but by foreclosure, war, cancer, and state neglect. What emerges is a portrait of white male disaffection in the American West that predates Trump but aligns perfectly with his rise. These men didn’t need Trump to become insurgents. Trump needed them to become president. They were already angry. Already armed. Already convinced that the government was not theirs.
Pogue devotes whole chapters to the geography of the Great Basin, the Mormon roots of anti-federalism, the stolen land of the Paiute people, and the slow erosion of public trust in land management. At times it reads like a Mike Davis book in slow motion: arid, hostile terrain slowly cultivated into ideology. The Great Basin is a literal drainage basin (water comes in but doesn’t leave) and it becomes a kind of metaphor for the self-contained worldview of its settlers. Outsiders don’t understand, and that’s the point. What urban liberals call “the environment,” these men call “home.” What others call public land, they call legacy.
One of the most important and under-discussed sections of the book is Pogue’s account of how land ownership functions in this context. The entire ranching economy of the West depends on public land leases. Ranchers don’t own the land—they lease it from the federal government, often at cut rates. But they pass those leases on as if they were property. Their resale value, their inheritance logic, their whole familial and financial structure depends on the fiction that they own the land they graze. When the Bureau of Land Management reduces grazing allotments, or prioritises conservation, they don’t see it as policy, they see it as theft. And when that happens repeatedly, it doesn’t just spark lawsuits. It sparks militias.
One thing Pogue captures, though perhaps too gently, is the uneasy triangle between federal regulators, environmentalists, and extractive capital. The small ranchers of Harney County don’t just resent the Bureau of Land Management; they resent the way federal conservation rules end up targeting them while leaving the likes of Chevron, Barrick Gold, and real estate developers largely untouched. Environmental NGOs push for national monuments, endangered species protections, and water restrictions that sound noble in the abstract but land, quite literally, on the shoulders of people barely breaking even. The federal government enforces those rules on behalf of the “public”—but that public often lives a thousand miles away, and the corporations that do the real damage have better lawyers. “We get the regulations,” one rancher tells Pogue. “They get the subsidies.”
Pogue doesn’t quite follow this thread all the way to its conclusion, but the implication is there: the rebellion at Malheur wasn’t just a cry against federal authority. It was, at least in part, a howl against a liberalism that claims moral authority while outsourcing economic ruin to the margins. Trumpism heard that howl, and promised to silence the regulators, not the ranchers.
But there’s a harder truth underneath all this. Trump doesn’t care about these people. The MAGA GOP doesn’t govern for rural ranchers, or for the opioid-ravaged, or for the guy who lost his land in a federal grazing dispute. It governs for itself. Trump doesn’t believe in decentralisation or frontier liberty or “returning the land to the people.” He believes in raw power. In June 2025, he federalised 4,000 California National Guard troops and deployed Marines into Los Angeles to protect ICE operations and suppress protests—overruling the California governor, and ignoring legal challenges. The case—Newsom v. Trump—has dragged through the courts, but the Marines are still there. The feds haven’t left.
This is the contradiction the rebels at Malheur never saw coming. They wanted less government. Trump gave them more, just aimed at someone else. They wanted recognition. What they got was absorption into a movement that speaks in their idiom but governs in the opposite direction. They were the emotional scaffolding for a new regime, but not its beneficiaries. What Pogue shows, almost despite himself, is how quickly rebellion can be captured, rebranded, and re-weaponised against others.
“They wanted less government. Trump gave them more—just aimed at someone else.”
Let’s be clear: Trump doesn’t even pretend to have principles. Not really. For him it’s about timing and image, not ideology. He could support you in the morning and denounce you by the afternoon—if it serves the brand. One minute you’re a patriot standing up to Washington; the next you’re an embarrassment he barely remembers. The Malheur occupiers believed in something. However warped or incoherent it might have been. Trump believes only in himself.
“Trump doesn’t care about these people. He governs for the brand. One minute you’re a patriot, the next you’re a problem.”
What these people needed (still need) is stability, solidarity, and structural change. Not a billionaire demagogue with a short attention span and a longer enemies list. Trump gave them pageantry. He gave them shout-outs. But what he withheld was the one thing they actually thought they were fighting for: control. Real autonomy. The power to shape their lives, their land, their futures.
In the end, Chosen Country is a book about people who went looking for that power and found only performance. They weren’t just betrayed by the federal government. They were betrayed by the man who promised to destroy it. And now they are governed, not by faceless bureaucrats, but by a man who wields that same machinery. Just louder, cruder, and even more remote.
