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The New Leviathan: Glenn interviews author David Horowitz UPDATED

June 25, 2012
Wilson

Writer

UPDATE: Glenn also took time to talk to David Horowitz on GBTV Monday night:

Original Story:

On radio this morning, Glenn interviewed former Communist David Horowitz, a man who has now dedicated himself to exposing progressives, radicals, and extremists. And while Horowitz's latest book, The New Leviathan, contains some chilling information about how organized and funded the left has become, he said that he now sees that American conservatives are starting to wake up to the realities in front of them.

Transcript below:

GLENN: I will tell you that there are few heroes and lots of villains. There are few heroes in today's society. There are a few people that have stood and stood and stood for a very long time and tried to warn the American people, tried to warn the ruling class, if you will, that there's trouble coming, and knows it inside and out. And one of those heroes, in fact, a guy who I think has given us more time than maybe anybody else besides the Navy SEALs has been David Horowitz. David Horowitz has been standing guard for a long time. He was a Communist. He was raised by communists, he was part of the 1960s radical movement. When he started to see the slaughter after the Vietnam War, he woke up and said, what ‑‑ guys, we were wrong. They didn't care. And he realized it wasn't about the principles, it wasn't really about doing good. It was really about power and control. And he started to talk about that. And he was rejected by the left and the right and then the right would listen to him, if I'm not mistaken, David ‑‑ stop me at any time ‑‑ the right would listen to him when it was advantageous to him but still they really didn't get it. David Horowitz is a guy who, when I first started looking into the Tides Foundation and everything else, I found Discover the Networks, which is one of the best tools out there if you really want to know who's connected, how it's connected. It's really complex, very difficult to understand, but he's made more sense of it than anybody else. David Horowitz has a new book out called The New Leviathan: How the Leftwing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future. It is one of the most frightening books you will read because it's all true and all about how far behind anybody who loves freedom really is. David, welcome to the program. How are you, sir?

HOROWITZ: Thank you, Glenn. Actually I'm not as pessimistic as my book would lead people because ‑‑

GLENN: It's breathtaking.

HOROWITZ: I see a dramatic change in American political life and that is the awakening of the people. The awakening of conservatives. When I first, when I left the left 25 years ago, actually conservatives were quite kind to me, but they didn't really want to take in if the message. They were in a kind of denial because ‑‑ first of all because it was too horrible to contemplate that there were so many people that want to destroy this country. So many Americans, American citizens, Americans born, Americans privileged especially, privileged Americans who have a hatred in their heart for America.

And the second thing is that conservatives don't like politics. If you're a conservative, you're probably in the private sector, you're a creator. Politics is real ‑‑ is a lot about destruction. You're a creator. If you're running a business, you want every customer possible. So you don't want to get involved in divisive battles. And then kind of the attitudes change a little and I got support because they ‑‑ I mean, here was a guy who was willing to mix it up and get into the street fight and I ‑‑ you know, I don't take any credit for that. That's really all I know how to do. And that's the way I was brought up.

GLENN: But we haven't ‑‑ I mean, all of us, first of all, after communism fell, we all thought, oh, Communist, it's a joke, that's proven wrong, it's not working." So any hiding communists or anything like that, "Oh, please, it's ridiculous. Nobody really believes that." And we're all in that moment of, you know, after September 11th, all ‑‑ even the progressives standing there on the steps of the capitol holding hands and singing Kumbayah and everybody thought, we're all Americans. No, we're not.

HOROWITZ: No.

GLENN: No, we're not. And your book outlines the staggering, again, just the appendix just breathtaking. It is the number of groups and how much money they have on the left. Let me just start here. There are 14 liberal groups that have a billion dollars in assets.

HOROWITZ: More than.

GLENN: Yeah, more than a billion dollars in assets. 14. The conservatives have zero. There's nobody on the side of conservatives that have the juice and the power of these foundations.

HOROWITZ: Let's dramatize it. I mean, the Koch Brothers have a foundation. It's worth $239 million. Sounds like a lot of money. The Ford Foundation has $10 billion. It's 30, whatever that is, five times, 35 times the size of the Koch Brothers. And, of course, the Gates Foundation is three times the size of Ford. The leftwing foundations ‑‑ and they are the ones that they fund Occupy Wall Street, they fund the radical organizations that gave Obama his start, that trained him, that brought him up through the ranks. They have $104 billion in assets whereas the conservative foundations have only $10 billion total, 75 conservative foundations. But that's just the, I don't know, it's just the base of the iceberg because they then fund other tax‑exempt foundations, 501(c)(3)s.

For example, the Ford Foundation created the Environmental Resources Defense Council many years ago. And actually it created them to fight DDT just to do this very briefly. DDT, the Rockefeller foundation in the old days when it was the conservative foundation funded a global malaria eradication program using DDT. Along came the Ford Foundation and the Environmental Resources Defense Council which now, by the way, has $139 million in assets. It's grown to gigantic size. It started with this malaria campaign. They conducted a campaign against DDT using Rachel Carson's famous, or should be infamous book The Silent Spring which claimed that DDT would kill all the birds. Completely false, no scientific basis, but it's a classic of the environmental movement.

They persuaded even the Nixon administration to ban DDT and so malaria returned. And malaria kills three million people a year. It's killed since the ban on DDT100 million people probably. 95% of them are black children under the age of 5 in Africa. All this blood is on the heads and the hands of the ‑‑ without the Ford Foundation, this never would have happened.

GLENN: Ford Foundation, I was talking to a friend who actually knew Henry Ford and he said ‑‑ they were having lunch together one time and he said, "The worst thing I ever did was let go control of the foundation"

HOROWITZ: Yeah.

GLENN: Because it went off the rails. They always do that.

HOROWITZ: We print, in our book The New Leviathan, we print Henry Ford's resignation letter from the board which says in so many words that you are attacking the very system, the Ford Foundation is dedicated now the very system that created this wealth. And, you know, in his behalf, he had to save the Ford Motor Company which was in the hands of a gangster after his grandfather died in 1947 and that's why he let the president of Studebaker, who turned out to be a progressive, be president. And that's true of a lot of, well, most of the venerable American foundations.

GLENN: So how we ‑‑

HOROWITZ: Rockefeller is now a leftwing foundation. Carnegie, Hewlett, Packard, Kellogg, Casey, Joyce, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are funding the left. These are government‑backed institutions.

GLENN: When you have Soros join this ‑‑

HOROWITZ: And Soros.

GLENN: I mean, how do you possibly win, David?

HOROWITZ: Well ‑‑

GLENN: Because you ‑‑ wait. We haven't even talked about the universities. The universities are the think tanks now.

HOROWITZ: Of the left, right. Look. I had this experience. I was on a panel in Paris in 1986 organized by the committee for the free world and we had the Vietnamese there. It was an anniversary of the America's defeat in Vietnam. The French. And I was on a panel. And the topic of the panel was, is communism reversible. This is 1986. And nobody thought it was. I certainly didn't. And three years later it was gone. The fact of the matter is that America is ‑‑ first of all, it's not like European countries. We are an individualist country. We were founded by individualists. We had a frontier. So ‑‑ which created an incredible spirit of independence. If you didn't like the way things were here, you went west a little ways and you founded your own, and you did it on these principles. And these, the founders, it's not just the original founders but all along the way the founders of America were incredible people. You know I'm thinking ‑‑ you know the Mormons who went across the country and then came to Salt Lake and they said, "Hey, you know, let's ‑‑ let's build it here in the middle of nowhere."

GLENN: That's crazy, yeah. Yeah.

GLENN: You know. Or as I was saying to Glenn earlier, Dallas is a little, a little shack in the middle, log cabin actually in the middle of Dallas where some guy walked across the plains and you have to be to Texas to see how vast it is and said, "I'm going to stop here and this is where I'm going to raise ‑‑ you know, do whatever I did," and he was the founder of Dallas. That spirit is so antithetic to everything these collectivists want to do that I still think we have a fighting chance.

GLENN: Okay. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I want to talk to you a little bit about ‑‑ because the book lays out the path to presidency for Obama and how everything was just a network of these radical progressives. We'll get into that here in a second. The name of the book is The New Leviathan by David Horowitz and it's all ‑‑ it's the dirt on what ‑‑ on how this, how this machine that they've built really works. We'll come back to David here in just a second.

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(OUT 11:19)

GLENN: Chapter 12 in my new book cowards is young socialists, why kids think they hate capitalism. David has helped us with several of our ‑‑ several of our books and he is ‑‑ being a reformed Communist, he knows about radicals and revolutionaries and how they work. He has a new book out called the New Leviathan: How the Leftwing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future. And if you really want to know what you're up against, if you really want to see how all of this works, you want to see how screwed we are on the EPA, how much ‑‑ how much money the leftwing organizations have.

VOICE: The leftwing 501(c)(3) ‑‑ by the way, this book is really about the Shadow Party on steroids. George Soros is an important player here but when you see how many of them there are, you'll appreciate what we're up against. The environmental leftists, we divided environmental groups into pro free market and anti‑free market. The anti‑free market wants huge government controls. They think that corporations are the cause of everything from the mythic global warming to every other environmental problem we have. So they have built into them this anti‑capitalist, anti‑freedom agenda. The progressive environmental organizations have $9 1/2 billion in assets. That's bigger than the EPA budget which is 8.7 billion. And also dwarves the pro ‑‑ there are pro free market environmental organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. There are 32 of those and they have $38 million. So that's the left ‑‑

GLENN: To give you some idea of how ‑‑

HOROWITZ: 249 times, times as big.

GLENN: We're not coming to ‑‑

HOROWITZ: But that's ‑‑ that's not the end of it because the left through the Democratic Party and through brainless Republicans gets itself funded by the government. What's the disparity there? They get annually $570 million to fund these anticapitalist, anticorporation environmental organizations, and the pro free market environmental organizations get 728,000. 570 million versus 728,000. You can do the math on that.

GLENN: We're bringing a ‑‑ we're not bringing a knife to a gunfight. We're bringing a toothpick.

HOROWITZ: A toothpick, exactly right.

GLENN: To a ‑‑ to a gunfight.

HOROWITZ: But I'm going to have to say this over and over. Look at Wisconsin. They had all their forces out in Wisconsin and they lost. And why did they lose? Because the people are waking up.

GLENN: They ‑‑

HOROWITZ: Glenn, I mean, you're the Clarion voice here in waking them up.

GLENN: I think people are just, I think people have sensed for a long time that something's not right. I think they started waking up in George W. Bush. I mean, Pat, you and I both have an awakening about the same time, don't you think?

PAT: Mmm‑hmmm. Mmm‑hmmm.

GLENN: It was just a couple of years after September 11th and we're like, something's not right. By 2004 we were pretty awake and I think we're ‑‑ I think we're still somewhat asleep, but we're waking up. And people are just, people are waking up all over the country.

HOROWITZ: I think you can date it from 9/11. 9/11 started the turn and then Obama has really, you know, it's like that when they go to hyperspeed. That Obama really said, people suddenly realized we could lose this country.

GLENN: How much is Obama really in charge of things? How much of this is Obama and how much is he the face?

HOROWITZ: I think if it were only Obama, it wouldn't be such a big problem. I think that Obama is pretty incompetent. I think that's pretty evident. He let Pelosi and Harry Reid run his ‑‑ and the unions. I think the ‑‑ one of the values in this book The New Leviathan is to give you a picture of how it works and how big it really is. And again with the unions. Look, all that Scott Walker had to do was to take away the, you know, the government collecting dues for the unions and give people the freedom to leave and half their members left. So this couldn't ‑‑ you know, this can turn pretty quickly if we have people who have the stomach and the spine to do the right thing.

GLENN: Did you see how Obama is now asking for donations?

HOROWITZ: From weddings? They're shameless.

GLENN: All of the money that they have.

HOROWITZ: Not enough.

GLENN: What are they doing? I guess it is, it's not enough.

HOROWITZ: Never enough.

GLENN: It's never enough. The name it book is The New Leviathan: How the Leftwing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future. You want to see what it really looks like, you want to see why I've had so many sleepless nights in the last couple of years. David lines it out unlike anything I've ever seen before. New Leviathan available in bookstores everywhere. Back in just a second.

URGENT: FIVE steps to CONTROL AI before it's too late!

MANAURE QUINTERO / Contributor | Getty Images

By now, many of us are familiar with AI and its potential benefits and threats. However, unless you're a tech tycoon, it can feel like you have little influence over the future of artificial intelligence.

For years, Glenn has warned about the dangers of rapidly developing AI technologies that have taken the world by storm.

He acknowledges their significant benefits but emphasizes the need to establish proper boundaries and ethics now, while we still have control. But since most people aren’t Silicon Valley tech leaders making the decisions, how can they help keep AI in check?

Recently, Glenn interviewed Tristan Harris, a tech ethicist deeply concerned about the potential harm of unchecked AI, to discuss its societal implications. Harris highlighted a concerning new piece of legislation proposed by Texas Senator Ted Cruz. This legislation proposes a state-level moratorium on AI regulation, meaning only the federal government could regulate AI. Harris noted that there’s currently no Federal plan for regulating AI. Until the federal government establishes a plan, tech companies would have nearly free rein with their AI. And we all know how slowly the federal government moves.

This is where you come in. Tristan Harris shared with Glenn the top five actions you should urge your representatives to take regarding AI, including opposing the moratorium until a concrete plan is in place. Now is your chance to influence the future of AI. Contact your senator and congressman today and share these five crucial steps they must take to keep AI in check:

Ban engagement-optimized AI companions for kids

Create legislation that will prevent AI from being designed to maximize addiction, sexualization, flattery, and attachment disorders, and to protect young people’s mental health and ability to form real-life friendships.

Establish basic liability laws

Companies need to be held accountable when their products cause real-world harm.

Pass increased whistleblower protections

Protect concerned technologists working inside the AI labs from facing untenable pressures and threats that prevent them from warning the public when the AI rollout is unsafe or crosses dangerous red lines.

Prevent AI from having legal rights

Enact laws so AIs don’t have protected speech or have their own bank accounts, making sure our legal system works for human interests over AI interests.

Oppose the state moratorium on AI 

Call your congressman or Senator Cruz’s office, and demand they oppose the state moratorium on AI without a plan for how we will set guardrails for this technology.

Glenn: Only Trump dared to deliver on decades of empty promises

Tasos Katopodis / Stringer | Getty Images

The Islamic regime has been killing Americans since 1979. Now Trump’s response proves we’re no longer playing defense — we’re finally hitting back.

The United States has taken direct military action against Iran’s nuclear program. Whatever you think of the strike, it’s over. It’s happened. And now, we have to predict what happens next. I want to help you understand the gravity of this situation: what happened, what it means, and what might come next. To that end, we need to begin with a little history.

Since 1979, Iran has been at war with us — even if we refused to call it that.

We are either on the verge of a remarkable strategic victory or a devastating global escalation. Time will tell.

It began with the hostage crisis, when 66 Americans were seized and 52 were held for over a year by the radical Islamic regime. Four years later, 17 more Americans were murdered in the U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut, followed by 241 Marines in the Beirut barracks bombing.

Then came the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, which killed 19 more U.S. airmen. Iran had its fingerprints all over it.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, Iranian-backed proxies killed hundreds of American soldiers. From 2001 to 2020 in Afghanistan and 2003 to 2011 in Iraq, Iran supplied IEDs and tactical support.

The Iranians have plotted assassinations and kidnappings on U.S. soil — in 2011, 2021, and again in 2024 — and yet we’ve never really responded.

The precedent for U.S. retaliation has always been present, but no president has chosen to pull the trigger until this past weekend. President Donald Trump struck decisively. And what our military pulled off this weekend was nothing short of extraordinary.

Operation Midnight Hammer

The strike was reportedly called Operation Midnight Hammer. It involved as many as 175 U.S. aircraft, including 12 B-2 stealth bombers — out of just 19 in our entire arsenal. Those bombers are among the most complex machines in the world, and they were kept mission-ready by some of the finest mechanics on the planet.

USAF / Handout | Getty Images

To throw off Iranian radar and intelligence, some bombers flew west toward Guam — classic misdirection. The rest flew east, toward the real targets.

As the B-2s approached Iranian airspace, U.S. submarines launched dozens of Tomahawk missiles at Iran’s fortified nuclear facilities. Minutes later, the bombers dropped 14 MOPs — massive ordnance penetrators — each designed to drill deep into the earth and destroy underground bunkers. These bombs are the size of an F-16 and cost millions of dollars apiece. They are so accurate, I’ve been told they can hit the top of a soda can from 15,000 feet.

They were built for this mission — and we’ve been rehearsing this run for 15 years.

If the satellite imagery is accurate — and if what my sources tell me is true — the targeted nuclear sites were utterly destroyed. We’ll likely rely on the Israelis to confirm that on the ground.

This was a master class in strategy, execution, and deterrence. And it proved that only the United States could carry out a strike like this. I am very proud of our military, what we are capable of doing, and what we can accomplish.

What comes next

We don’t yet know how Iran will respond, but many of the possibilities are troubling. The Iranians could target U.S. forces across the Middle East. On Monday, Tehran launched 20 missiles at U.S. bases in Qatar, Syria, and Kuwait, to no effect. God forbid, they could also unleash Hezbollah or other terrorist proxies to strike here at home — and they just might.

Iran has also threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz — the artery through which nearly a fifth of the world’s oil flows. On Sunday, Iran’s parliament voted to begin the process. If the Supreme Council and the ayatollah give the go-ahead, we could see oil prices spike to $150 or even $200 a barrel.

That would be catastrophic.

The 2008 financial collapse was pushed over the edge when oil hit $130. Western economies — including ours — simply cannot sustain oil above $120 for long. If this conflict escalates and the Strait is closed, the global economy could unravel.

The strike also raises questions about regime stability. Will it spark an uprising, or will the Islamic regime respond with a brutal crackdown on dissidents?

Early signs aren’t hopeful. Reports suggest hundreds of arrests over the weekend and at least one dissident executed on charges of spying for Israel. The regime’s infamous morality police, the Gasht-e Ershad, are back on the streets. Every phone, every vehicle — monitored. The U.S. embassy in Qatar issued a shelter-in-place warning for Americans.

Russia and China both condemned the strike. On Monday, a senior Iranian official flew to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin. That meeting should alarm anyone paying attention. Their alliance continues to deepen — and that’s a serious concern.

Now we pray

We are either on the verge of a remarkable strategic victory or a devastating global escalation. Time will tell. But either way, President Trump didn’t start this. He inherited it — and he took decisive action.

The difference is, he did what they all said they would do. He didn’t send pallets of cash in the dead of night. He didn’t sign another failed treaty.

He acted. Now, we pray. For peace, for wisdom, and for the strength to meet whatever comes next.


This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Globalize the Intifada? Why Mamdani’s plan spells DOOM for America

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

If New Yorkers hand City Hall to Zohran Mamdani, they’re not voting for change. They’re opening the door to an alliance of socialism, Islamism, and chaos.

It only took 25 years for New York City to go from the resilient, flag-waving pride following the 9/11 attacks to a political fever dream. To quote Michael Malice, “I'm old enough to remember when New Yorkers endured 9/11 instead of voting for it.”

Malice is talking about Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist assemblyman from Queens now eyeing the mayor’s office. Mamdani, a 33-year-old state representative emerging from relative political obscurity, is now receiving substantial funding for his mayoral campaign from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

CAIR has a long and concerning history, including being born out of the Muslim Brotherhood and named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding case. Why would the group have dropped $100,000 into a PAC backing Mamdani’s campaign?

Mamdani blends political Islam with Marxist economics — two ideologies that have left tens of millions dead in the 20th century alone.

Perhaps CAIR has a vested interest in Mamdani’s call to “globalize the intifada.” That’s not a call for peaceful protest. Intifada refers to historic uprisings of Muslims against what they call the “Israeli occupation of Palestine.” Suicide bombings and street violence are part of the playbook. So when Mamdani says he wants to “globalize” that, who exactly is the enemy in this global scenario? Because it sure sounds like he's saying America is the new Israel, and anyone who supports Western democracy is the new Zionist.

Mamdani tried to clean up his language by citing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which once used “intifada” in an Arabic-language article to describe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. So now he’s comparing Palestinians to Jewish victims of the Nazis? If that doesn’t twist your stomach into knots, you’re not paying attention.

If you’re “globalizing” an intifada, and positioning Israel — and now America — as the Nazis, that’s not a cry for human rights. That’s a call for chaos and violence.

Rising Islamism

But hey, this is New York. Faculty members at Columbia University — where Mamdani’s own father once worked — signed a letter defending students who supported Hamas after October 7. They also contributed to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. And his father? He blamed Ronald Reagan and the religious right for inspiring Islamic terrorism, as if the roots of 9/11 grew in Washington, not the caves of Tora Bora.

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

This isn’t about Islam as a faith. We should distinguish between Islam and Islamism. Islam is a religion followed peacefully by millions. Islamism is something entirely different — an ideology that seeks to merge mosque and state, impose Sharia law, and destroy secular liberal democracies from within. Islamism isn’t about prayer and fasting. It’s about power.

Criticizing Islamism is not Islamophobia. It is not an attack on peaceful Muslims. In fact, Muslims are often its first victims.

Islamism is misogynistic, theocratic, violent, and supremacist. It’s hostile to free speech, religious pluralism, gay rights, secularism — even to moderate Muslims. Yet somehow, the progressive left — the same left that claims to fight for feminism, LGBTQ rights, and free expression — finds itself defending candidates like Mamdani. You can’t make this stuff up.

Blending the worst ideologies

And if that weren’t enough, Mamdani also identifies as a Democratic Socialist. He blends political Islam with Marxist economics — two ideologies that have left tens of millions dead in the 20th century alone. But don’t worry, New York. I’m sure this time socialism will totally work. Just like it always didn’t.

If you’re a business owner, a parent, a person who’s saved anything, or just someone who values sanity: Get out. I’m serious. If Mamdani becomes mayor, as seems likely, then New York City will become a case study in what happens when you marry ideological extremism with political power. And it won’t be pretty.

This is about more than one mayoral race. It’s about the future of Western liberalism. It’s about drawing a bright line between faith and fanaticism, between healthy pluralism and authoritarian dogma.

Call out radicalism

We must call out political Islam the same way we call out white nationalism or any other supremacist ideology. When someone chants “globalize the intifada,” that should send a chill down your spine — whether you’re Jewish, Christian, Muslim, atheist, or anything in between.

The left may try to shame you into silence with words like “Islamophobia,” but the record is worn out. The grooves are shallow. The American people see what’s happening. And we’re not buying it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

How private stewardship could REVIVE America’s wild

Jonathan Newton / Contributor | Getty Images

The left’s idea of stewardship involves bulldozing bison and barring access. Lee’s vision puts conservation back in the hands of the people.

The media wants you to believe that Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is trying to bulldoze Yellowstone and turn national parks into strip malls — that he’s calling for a reckless fire sale of America’s natural beauty to line developers’ pockets. That narrative is dishonest. It’s fearmongering, and, by the way, it’s wrong.

Here’s what’s really happening.

Private stewardship works. It’s local. It’s accountable. It’s incentivized.

The federal government currently owns 640 million acres of land — nearly 28% of all land in the United States. To put that into perspective, that’s more territory than France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom combined.

Most of this land is west of the Mississippi River. That’s not a coincidence. In the American West, federal ownership isn’t just a bureaucratic technicality — it’s a stranglehold. States are suffocated. Locals are treated as tenants. Opportunities are choked off.

Meanwhile, people living east of the Mississippi — in places like Kentucky, Georgia, or Pennsylvania — might not even realize how little land their own states truly control. But the same policies that are plaguing the West could come for them next.

Lee isn’t proposing to auction off Yellowstone or pave over Yosemite. He’s talking about 3 million acres — that’s less than half of 1% of the federal estate. And this land isn’t your family’s favorite hiking trail. It’s remote, hard to access, and often mismanaged.

Failed management

Why was it mismanaged in the first place? Because the federal government is a terrible landlord.

Consider Yellowstone again. It’s home to the last remaining herd of genetically pure American bison — animals that haven’t been crossbred with cattle. Ranchers, myself included, would love the chance to help restore these majestic creatures on private land. But the federal government won’t allow it.

So what do they do when the herd gets too big?

They kill them. Bulldoze them into mass graves. That’s not conservation. That’s bureaucratic malpractice.

And don’t even get me started on bald eagles — majestic symbols of American freedom and a federally protected endangered species, now regularly slaughtered by wind turbines. I have pictures of piles of dead bald eagles. Where’s the outrage?

Biden’s federal land-grab

Some argue that states can’t afford to manage this land themselves. But if the states can’t afford it, how can Washington? We’re $35 trillion in debt. Entitlements are strained, infrastructure is crumbling, and the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and National Park Service are billions of dollars behind in basic maintenance. Roads, firebreaks, and trails are falling apart.

The Biden administration quietly embraced something called the “30 by 30” initiative, a plan to lock up 30% of all U.S. land and water under federal “conservation” by 2030. The real goal is 50% by 2050.

That entails half of the country being taken away from you, controlled not by the people who live there but by technocrats in D.C.

You think that won’t affect your ability to hunt, fish, graze cattle, or cut timber? Think again. It won’t be conservatives who stop you from building a cabin, raising cattle, or teaching your grandkids how to shoot a rifle. It’ll be the same radical environmentalists who treat land as sacred — unless it’s your truck, your deer stand, or your back yard.

Land as collateral

Moreover, the U.S. Treasury is considering putting federally owned land on the national balance sheet, listing your parks, forests, and hunting grounds as collateral.

What happens if America defaults on its debt?

David McNew / Stringer | Getty Images

Do you think our creditors won’t come calling? Imagine explaining to your kids that the lake you used to fish in is now under foreign ownership, that the forest you hunted in belongs to China.

This is not hypothetical. This is the logical conclusion of treating land like a piggy bank.

The American way

There’s a better way — and it’s the American way.

Let the people who live near the land steward it. Let ranchers, farmers, sportsmen, and local conservationists do what they’ve done for generations.

Did you know that 75% of America’s wetlands are on private land? Or that the most successful wildlife recoveries — whitetail deer, ducks, wild turkeys — didn’t come from Washington but from partnerships between private landowners and groups like Ducks Unlimited?

Private stewardship works. It’s local. It’s accountable. It’s incentivized. When you break it, you fix it. When you profit from the land, you protect it.

This is not about selling out. It’s about buying in — to freedom, to responsibility, to the principle of constitutional self-governance.

So when you hear the pundits cry foul over 3 million acres of federal land, remember: We don’t need Washington to protect our land. We need Washington to get out of the way.

Because this isn’t just about land. It’s about liberty. And once liberty is lost, it doesn’t come back easily.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.