Is there a sinister GOP plan to destroy Yellowstone and our national parks?



The "one big, beautiful bill” received a draft proposal last week from the Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee-led Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which would mandate the sale of between 2.2 million and 3.3 million acres of public land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service in the American West.

While Lee has framed the proposal as a means to increase affordable housing, critics claim it would do little to aid in the housing crisis and instead would just bar the public from beautiful land they now still can enjoy.

Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck doesn’t share their critique.

“What we mean by ‘affordable housing’ is if you take a look at the percentage of land that is owned in some of these states, you can’t live in a house in some of these states, close to anything, for less than a million dollars. Because there’s no land,” Glenn explains on “The Glenn Beck Program.”


“Can we just look at the perspective here? The federal government owns 640 million acres. That is nearly 28% of all land in America. How much land do we have? Well, that’s about the size of France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom combined,” he continues.

“They own and hold pristine land that is more than the size of those countries combined, and most of that is west of the Mississippi, where the federal control smothers the states, shuts down opportunity, and turns local citizens into tenants of the federal estate,” he adds.

With less land available for citizens, there are higher prices and less state taxes paid on land.

“We’re not talking about selling Yellowstone or paving over Yosemite or anything like that. We’re talking about less than one-half of one percent of federal land that is remote, hard to access, or mismanaged,” Glenn says.

“This is really important,” he continues. “The federal government is, what, $35 trillion in debt, or are we $45 trillion now? I’m not sure. Our entitlement programs are all strained, infrastructure crumbling, and yet we’re still clinging to millions of acres of land that the federal government can’t maintain.”

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No, Mike Lee isn’t paving over Yellowstone for condos



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?

RELATED: Why California’s ‘model state’ is a warning, not a goal

Anadolu / Contributor via 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.

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Are D.C. prisons ignoring Trump’s January 6 pardons? Senator says ‘yes’



Rumors have spread like wildfire that prison officials in Washington D.C. are refusing to release many January 6 prisoners despite President Trump’s pardons for 1,500 of them.

And Senator Mike Lee believes that these rumors to be true.

“I spoke to someone last night who had gone down personally to the D.C. jail, saw that only two of them had been released, and jail officials of the D.C. jail announced that they wouldn’t be releasing anymore last night,” Lee tells Glenn Beck on “The Glenn Beck Program.”

“Now, this is not hard, Glenn. They have names, and they have pardons. They can identify those prisoners who have been pardoned, Trump’s directive was that they were to be released immediately as one should when one sees that somebody’s been pardoned, and they still weren’t out,” Lee explains.


Glenn himself has noticed that in addition, the mainstream media is continuing to treat those pardoned like criminals.

“I was watching CNN last night, and they had people stationed out there, and they were just complaining that criminals that had killed police officers on January 6 were just being released,” he says, adding, “You’re saying that there’s only two that were released last night and nothing yet this morning.”

“That’s right,” Lee says. “My former staffer Sean Peterson was down at the D.C. jail, and he said that they released two of them through a back door, and then a jail official said we’re not releasing anymore tonight, even though there were apparently many more to be released.”

“Now, again,” he continues, “These are people who have been pardoned, and this is a government that has done things like this for a long time. I’ve got story after story of horrible things they’ve done.”

“Is this going to gain any traction?” Glenn asks, adding, “What are you going to do?”

“The first thing we’ve got to do is make sure that these prisoners who have been pardoned are in fact released. But I think the word needs to spread. Now, obviously this is a niche issue. It is a local issue, and it’s an issue that’s very emotional for many of the people who live in and around the area,” Lee explains.

“But I think more and more residents of D.C. are getting wise to the fact that something’s not working right,” he adds.

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