The 5 Biggest Lies Being Used to Destroy Public Lands

For many Westerners like me, public lands and the laws that protect our shared environment are the most tangible example of American exceptionalism. I don’t mean to minimize rights or the critical limits on government in our founding documents, but as we are learning, those words and norms can be twisted by snakes like Stephen Miller or aggressively altered by a highly-politicized SCOTUS. Our rivers, mountains, forests, and prairies are not like those malleable words; they are real and tangible.

And so for millions of U.S. citizens, there is nothing more anti-American than the current Republican rush to first sell or destroy our birthright through profiteering and industrialization, giving away minerals, old-growth forests, grass, oil, and natural gas found on or below our public land.

Indeed, the giveaway can’t just happen. There must be a real concerted effort; bedrock environmental laws that generations of Americans demanded must be broken or repealed. Our federal management agencies built up over the last 150 years must be weakened, gutted, and DOGEd. Bribes must be proffered and accepted. And most importantly, we, the owners of public lands, must be herded towards indifference, spurred to irrational anger, and prone to accept, even celebrate, illegality and immorality on an unprecedented scale.

Sadly, that’s all occurring right now, largely because Republicans are effectively deploying one of their proven tactics: the repeated spreading of bald-faced lies about our public lands. Here are the 5 of the biggest GOP whoppers and the truth you need to confront each one:

1. LIE: National Monument designations were forced on us by D.C. bureaucrats with no public comment

   TRUTH: Just last month, Utah Senator Mike Lee (Dbag - Utah) - once again marched out this old lie about the use of the 1906 Antiquities Act in his celebratory dance after the Trump admin rolled back Monument designations for nearly 3 million acres in Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments.1

   

   As with the designation of other national monuments, an extensive public comment process was undertaken, and in this case, more than 2.7 million comments were gathered before designation. These inputs included official statements from more than 330 Native American tribes, conservation orgs, and religious groups, many near to the Utah sites. What Lee really meant to say was that oil companies and huge mining corps did not get to overrule those millions of American citizens, and that really hurts his feelings.

2. LIE: Gotta Drill Baby Drill in America because…energy independence

   TRUTH: Another oldy but goody from the Republicans who repeatedly use this lie to justify opening up public lands for their corporate oil buddies who need another private jet.

   Case in point: Ryan Zinke, who served as Trump’s first interior secretary before he was… check’s notes … yes, wow, FIRED for corruption from the Trump admin (did not think that possible), started the lying way back in his first secretarial order in 2017. “Today I took action to sign a series of directives that put America on track to achieve the President’s vision for energy independence.” 2

   

   To demonstrate how brazenly dishonest these people are, it was also Zinke who, just two years prior in 2015, also proudly voted to approve the first ever legalization of exporting all the surplus oil and gas produced in America.3. That’s right, the same corrupt Interior Secretary who said we have to drill to be independent from importing oil also voted to export oil that we produce instead of using it here, which is…checks notes again…the opposite of “independent.” (side note - this guy also made a pile of money lobbying for ConocoPhillips - I know, it’s a real shocker!)

3. Lie: Log it or Lose It.

   TRUTH: If you live in the west, and a forest fire starts, you can count Republican politicians instantly issuing statements with some version of “see, I told ya, we gotta log it or lose it.” Montana’s Steve Daines wears this one out, and repeatedly used it to advocate for a 6-fold increase in logging on federal lands in Montana last year.4

   As proof of Steve’s dishonesty, just last week a large fire blew up just north of where I live in Kalispell, Montana. And yes, you guessed it, the Skillet fire erupted in some of the most intensively logged country in Montana. According to the “log it or lose it” crowd, fires are only supposed to happen elsewhere where no logging ever happened.

   

   Yes, in some very recently logged areas, or smaller areas where effective clearing is possible, fires are easier to fight and slower to spread. And yes, of course, if we clear-cut every single tree from every single acre every single year, we will have a less fire-prone landscape, but it will be a Blade Runner movie where only big industry CEOs are happy, and the rest of us are locked in an industrialized hellscape. (As a public lands owner, I want to register my opposition)

   The real truth that Republicans like Daines don’t want you to hear is that the MOST fire-resilient and most wildlife-rich landscapes are those with old growth and natural multi-age fire scars mixed in, and this will become increasingly true as climate change worsens the fire risk everywhere.

4. LIE: You are locked out of your land by the elitists - No one can hunt, fish, or graze livestock on National Monuments or Wilderness Study Areas

   TRUTH: This is a dumb one, because, well, people can read and most all of the larger “controversial” national monuments of the last several decades protect hunting, fishing, grazing, etc. in the official designation documents. That has not stopped Mike Lee, Steve Daines, and yes, even the well-known master outdoorsman, Donald J Trump, from repeatedly deploying this lie as they constantly attack wilderness and monument protections across the nation. “You can’t go hunting, you can’t go fishing, you can’t do anything, you can virtually not even walk on it,”5 Trump said as he swiftly scrambled up a steep rocky hill in the Utah backcountry. (Sorry - the quote was real, but that last scrambling part was my lie - Trump probably said this between McRibs at the White House, I mean Gaudy Gold House).

   Thankfully, the New York Times called him on his b.s. earlier this week: “But recreation has been allowed in Bears Ears since President Barack Obama designated the monument in 2016. And government documents reviewed by The New York Times show that Trump administration officials were briefed on recreational opportunities inside the monument about a month before the Oval Office event. The documents suggest that the administration was “lying or spreading misinformation about these fantastic public lands” when it justified cutting the protected areas, said Steve Bloch, the legal director at the nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, who reviewed the records at the request of The Times.”6

5. LIE: Oil Corps, Mining companies and Grazers pay their fair share to profit from our public lands

   TRUTH: This is really a doozy, and you ought to be hopping mad about it, because unless you are CEO at EXXON, a big public lands rancher or a Mining CEO, you are handing what are effectively big welfare checks to these people.

   Oil companies, thanks to demands from Republicans and the “Big Beautiful Bill”, pay about 12.5% royalties on public land but closer to 25% on private land. 7. Grazers get a 95% discount on public land ($1.35 per animal unit on public land, compared to about $25 per animal unit on private land).

   

   And the kicker is mining, since it is governed by the General Mining Act of 1872, which requires ZERO royalties from bulldozing your public lands. You heard that right, they get your mountain and river, you get notta.

One Last important truth before we all rush to the whiskey … the upside here is that for Trump and the Republicans, all these sweetheart deals we are giving to all of these extractive corporations leave so much more room for those Trump-boy crypto bribes and for the Mar-a-Lago campaign contributions that keep this grift churning.

Ok… grab the bottle.

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