Braxton McCoy, a former Iraq War vet turned land defender, recounts surviving a 2003 Ramadi bombing—shattered bones, embedded ball bearings, and opioid addiction—before quitting 380mg daily prescriptions after five years. His post-military fight shifted to blocking federal land sales, exposing a 249M-acre sell-off scheme with no foreign-ownership limits, while critiquing the Endangered Species Act’s flawed science (e.g., spotted owl logging bans). Now leading the Sagebrush Institute, he warns rural America faces demographic erosion from resettlement programs and foreign investors eyeing U.S. minerals, framing public lands as a cultural birthright—not a commodity. His daughter’s $10K abstinence contract mirrors his war on addiction, tying personal recovery to collective action against systemic threats. [Automatically generated summary]
I want to write my books and hang out with my kids and ride horses and go fishing and hunting.
I mean, that's who I am.
I've said this many times elsewhere.
I don't think it's just me.
I think it worked because there were so many people that were upset.
To a degree, I guess I ended up kind of spearheading some things.
I mean, maybe a way I would look at it is it wouldn't be the first time I've taken point and I'll take point, but it's still a team effort at the end of the day.
And it has to be that way.
If something this important becomes about one guy versus another guy, we'll lose.
There are always huge forces that get embodied in individuals, but it's not so much about the individual as about the huge forces behind him and the horses, the forces that you harnessed.
I think just watching fundamentally we're like the great love of the land by normal people.
I believe that fundamentally, and I don't want to be like overly pious or anything like that, but I believe fundamentally we're called to serve our people.
Yes.
So if it took an idiot horse trainer to, you know, in my view, save a bunch of small family ranches throughout the West, then, you know, so be it.
You're young and stupid and a lot of cultural forces were telling us this was the right thing and I believed it, you know.
And plus as wrongfully as misguided as I was, I wanted to get, you know, take a swing back at the person in our mind, at the people that are taking a swing at us.
I got back to my unit and they weren't going to deploy.
So I volunteered for this other deployment because I just wanted To get there, and this artillery battalion needed a PSD team, so they were a personal security detail.
So they were, you know, looking for guys.
And we ended up with this kind of hodgepodge of random MOSs of just guys that wanted to do this job.
So we did a train up, learned how to do that.
And it's funny, like in keynotes, I used to say we're to try to explain it.
You know, if you're talking to bankers, they don't really know what PSD is.
You know, they certainly know what EP is, but I would say we're kind of like the Army's idea of secret service, except for better trained or not as well trained, you know?
You know, you first you cross that border and, you know, there's oil wells on fire and, you know, busted up cars and then like, you know, just poverty like you've never seen before.
Unless you've been a 19-year-old boy, like it's probably hard to understand what that means.
We're sorry to say it, but this is not a very safe country.
Walk through Oakland or Philadelphia.
Yeah, good luck.
So most people, when they think about this, want to carry a firearm, and a lot of us do.
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It was obvious on video, and he was facing life in prison anyway.
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They'll throw you in prison for defending yourself with a firearm.
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We get around the front of the house and we can see this deck cord going through into the home.
And we're like, let's go all the way around and make sure that it doesn't go through and out just in case they were trying to set somebody up, you know, some innocent people.
And as I was looking inside the building, there was a generator running inside and it was sitting on a piece of plywood.
You know, well, we get around the front and there's right at this stoop, there's a bunch of sandals lined up and it's like oldest to youngest.
So it's like dad, mom, kid, and then all the way down to this like two inch pair of pink like flip-flop deals.
And I had just left my little sister with my mom, who was roughly the same age.
And man, I went from wanting to do that To not wanting to do that really fast, and I think that changed my war for me for the rest of time.
I probably could have got sucked into being overly aggressive and uncompassionate, but that really helped right from the jump solidify that these are actual people.
Well, luckily, we go all the way around and the deck cord was running through out into this olive orchard.
And one of our guys without warning, without warning us, hit a pin flare to light up so we could see the olive orchard.
And my team leader just dove into the ground because he thought we were taking incoming.
So he's like diving into this olive orchard.
And it ended up we were able to solve the problem without doing anything to the home.
And it had turned out, at least from what we were told, that what they had done is captured that family and stuffed them into a cellar and then put that board, that plywood over the hole and then put the generator so we couldn't hear them down there yelling.
And they were hoping that we would just blow them up, you know.
And we didn't.
And I think that, as I say, I'm sorry to just keep rambling, but.
I got hit by a suicide bomber at a glass factory on a security mission.
And yeah, we were providing, just to tell briefly, we were providing security for a Marine element that was recruiting Sunni Iraqis to become Iraqi police officers.
Bremer and others had decided that we couldn't hire any Baathists.
And they also seemed to think that it would be a good idea to have Sunnis police Shia and Shia police Sunnis.
And that's just, I mean, talk about ancient tribal conflict.
It's why the peace settlement after the First World War, you know, the Western nations wound up sending African peacekeepers to Germany to humiliate the Germans.
And then, you know, now there's Iraqis scattered all over the place.
Well, in the, I don't know if they changed this after my time, but in those years, you were not allowed to hire any Bathists for any reason into any government position.
But so the result of that was now we have Iraqis running all over the place and we've got to get them back into lines and get this mission done.
And the lines had to be person with no ID, person with a government ID, person with a government ID that says Bathus on it.
And we were separating them that way.
And then eventually, really high-speed guy, Lieutenant Colonel McLaughlin, Colonel Mac, we called him, he came out there to help us and some dog handlers.
And we were getting these guys in line.
And the next thing you know, a suicide bomber goes off.
And this killed or wounded like 106 people or something like that.
Killed two Americans, our friend and dog handler, Sergeant Cann, and then Lieutenant Colonel Maloflin.
And I try to say this as often as I can now.
He was like 33 years old or something at the time and a lieutenant colonel.
So what had happened is our dog handler or one of the dog handlers that was helping us, Sergeant Can, his dog detected the bomb and grabbed this dude by the arm and was trying to pull him to the ground.
And then it went off.
And amazingly, Bruno, the dog that had done that, lived through the explosion.
What I didn't know was that there were like three bodies on top of me.
And these organs belonged to a different person, an Iraqi person.
And he started removing the bodies.
And I could feel like a little bit of weight go off and then a little bit more.
And then that was pulled out.
And then I could see my hip bones or the top of my hips, not the actual bones, but like my uniform.
And then they rolled me over and my legs were cooked, as the kids would say.
And you could tell because they were not, it was like jello, you know, moving around.
And your femurs, you know, your glutes and quads are so strong that if your femurs break bad enough, they just contract.
So my femur was like as both of them were like the leg was now like as wide almost as it was long.
Like it just retracted like a slinky.
Which might have been the only thing that kept me alive.
I can't even remember exactly how many holes it is, but between knee to hip on both quads is like 30 holes or something.
So had I not had that sort of acted like an internal tourniquet and kept me from bleeding out probably.
Because when they got my uniform cut off, you could, every time my heart would beat, you could see the blood kind of ooze out of the through and throughs.
I have some through and throughs.
And you could just, it was like, I always describe it as like squeezing a water bottle, but with rhythm, you know, and it just kind of pour out like that.
And I had no, my, my blood pressure was so low, they weren't, weren't giving me any, and it was good that they didn't, but they weren't giving me any pain meds or anything.
You know, morphine will kill you if you don't have enough blood pressure.
So they started working on me and then life led me, or excuse me, medevaced me to Fabromati.
It's like, it's like running into Yao Ming, but then, you know, it's like waiting your brains trying to compute.
Like, wait a second.
He was a great, he was a great guy.
I really liked him.
I remember one time we were, I don't remember where we were at on an OP or something, and we try to teach each other the languages, you know, and he points to the tire on their technic, on their truck, and he says, tire.
And I was like, yeah, good job.
You know, and he's like, no, tire.
I was like, wait, is that, that's how you say it in Arabic?
You know, it's like this bonding moment, you know, we're like, yeah, dude.
We were just all kids, you know, arm wrestling and screwing off and, you know, and punctuated every once in a while by war stuff, you know.
And I think it's, I think that experience really matters.
It's so easy to dehumanize people that you're fighting with at that level.
And I think I was really blessed to have multiple experiences to remind me that they're all people.
I think I was 28 when I ran the first time or seven, maybe.
Something like that.
Might have been 29, whatever that year was, 2012, maybe.
I can't be right.
Whatever year it was.
Yeah, I mean, I could get around, but I, you know, I couldn't really walk or anything.
I mean, I could walk, but not well, certainly not well for a 25-year-old, you know.
And then I finally got to get up on the mountain again.
I packed a cane on my back because I thought, who knows what coming down is going to be like, you know, and that felt really good to get up to a mountain lake and be like, holy shit, we did it, you know, after all this time, you know?
And then I was coaching a little kid's baseball program.
This girl that I was with, it was her son's team.
So I was just helping.
And I was throwing BP to him and this kid hit a ball batting practice.
And this kid hit a ball to my glove hand side.
And this is like eight years later or however many.
And I took a couple of steps that just felt different, like they felt almost athletic, if that makes sense.
And I dropped my glove and I just jogged.
I was like, I think I can run, you know, and I ran around the bases.
And then I called some of my buddies from the war and Casey and Johnny and a couple others.
And Casey's like, wears his emotion on his sleeve.
So he starts crying, you know, and, you know, I was like, over here feeling like sea biscuit or something, you know.
And I got really lucky in that my civilian physical therapist and my civilian doctor were really great.
I did that in central Utah.
The one guy, my civilian doctor, he was an MDDO.
So he leaned away from drugs really hard, which was a blessing because I was, you know, leaving Walter Reed, they had me on some ridiculous amount of opioids, like 380 milligrams a day or something.
We basically everybody who gets wounded over there was contracting this infection and they weren't sure it was some bug that does not exist here.
So they had us in quarantine.
So I was in an ice, a quarantined ICU unit for three or four weeks because I couldn't leave ICU until one, I was stable and two, I could be in a wheelchair of some kind.
And they couldn't do that without putting rods in my legs because I had external fixators on, those big cage duels.
And you can't get the rods until you clear the infection, you know?
So they were trying to clear this infection and there was some question about whether they were even going to be able to do that.
Yeah, they were, I don't want to crap on Walter Reed, but they were doing some guys were doing their best and other guys were changing through and through wounds with the packing with like a number two pencil and shit like that.
You know, it was like a roller coaster experience at Walt Reed, but they first to back up even one more step, just to kind of give an idea of how fragile everything was at the time.
They, I first went to Landstool, and my understanding, and this could be wrong.
And my understanding, and this could be wrong, but what was what they would try to do in Landstool is really get somebody very stable and do preliminary surgeries and then send them to Walter Reed.
But they did not do that with me.
They were like, we got to get you to Walter Reed.
So I was only in Lawnstool for less than a week, I think is what it was.
And so I was in tough shape is the only reason I'm saying that.
And, you know, you're waiting.
All I want to do is be able to go take a piss by myself, man.
You know, you're a couple of days ago, you'd been a proud, young former athlete and soldier.
And now you're this, you're basically in hospice care, you know?
And so, yeah, it starts to weigh on you.
And I wanted to get rods in my legs so I could get a wheelchair and have some sense of independence.
But I couldn't do that without clearing these infections.
And then I finally get the rods in and they move me up to a neural ward next to some other guys that had had like the same bug before.
And then they put like a label on your door.
I think that's all necessary.
I'm not, you know, you should say, hey, this guy had this weird bug.
We don't want to spread it, you know.
But I'm up there next to this other guy and things are now it's better because I can talk to a guy, you know, at least room to room.
You know, we're kind of hollering at each other through the wall or, you know, the doorway and stuff.
And then I had a pulmonary embolism and it collapsed, I think it was my left lung.
And then right back into surgery, emergency, you know, they had to decide whether to put one of those IVC filter deals.
Inferior in your inferior vena cava, I think is what it is.
I can say, I'm not good at anatomy.
Largest fan in your body.
And if it's like, if you think of like an umbrella without a skirt on it and then some extra wiring to work as a filter, that's what it is.
But they would deploy it like this, and then it had some kind of legs that would then open up and stick into the vessel to hold it there.
And it would break up blood clots.
What they were trying to figure out is if I had had, because I had deep vein thrombosis already, which is like blood clots in your legs, essentially.
But they weren't sure if I had had a claw originate in my lung or if it had traveled to my lung from my legs.
So that's why they had to put that in.
And then, you know, that was another, I can't even remember how long before I finally got into a position where they could even think about walking.
And one day my, I'm pretty sure I wrote about this too.
So I'm sorry if I'm retelling stories, but an uncle of mine came out and he was really close to me.
And we used to bow hunt and fish together.
And then he got drafted by the Royals out of high school.
And so he's kind of a neat guy.
And I always looked up to him, you know, and he came out to visit.
And I told him, I was like, they don't think I'm going to be able to walk, you know?
And he said, bullshit.
And I got a new young surgeon assigned to our team.
Because at that stage, you've, you know, you've got like multiple trauma going on.
That's like an actual surgical team that's like planning out what to work on next and triaging.
And, well, this guy got assigned on the ortho side.
And he was like 27 and right out of med school and really smart and just kind of a go-getter type guy.
And he said, I think you can do it, but you're going to have to get on your feet like now.
We don't want to risk atrophying your muscles anymore.
And, you know, you're just going to have to start trying.
So my physical therapist at Walter Reed, his name was Solomon.
And he was like this giant black guy.
He played defensive end or something with Phil Sims on the New York Giants.
And then he just did this as a job, I think mostly to be a charitable guy.
He was a really neat guy.
So we go down there to PT and he said, you can walk today.
And I said, yeah, let's do it.
You know, so he helped me up and my bones.
I'm like, my right hand is all in this cast thing.
And then I've got a like a soft cast they put on my humerus because they were trying to let me have at least one ambulatory limb.
So I just put up my arms on those parallel bars and however long those are 10 feet or whatever and walked down and then back.
And I was like shaking, you know, I mean, it hurt like hell.
And anyway, I got to the end and then Solomon helped me to my wheelchair and got my arms draped around him like a prom date or something.
He sat me down and that was my first time I walked.
And yeah, and so it's like the peaks and valleys.
At that point, you're, you know, you're riding really high, feeling like I'm going to make it kind of thing, you know.
Just made Walter Gropius in charge of America's architecture.
No, I know it's in all that war is what did it.
And you're not invited to think about what that means, but I'm not fully aware of what it means, but there's something, something about that war totally destroyed the spirit of the country.
And in retrospect, that program was not a good idea.
As much as I wanted to get out of there, it would have been, I think this bore out in the data.
Like, I don't think it was just me, but I would have been a lot more mentally healthy if they would have just forced me to stay, you know, doing outpatient stuff at Walter Reed, because then at least I'm around guys who get it instead of like my family.
How could they possibly?
It's not their fault.
I think that would have been better, but certainly I was happy to be out of there.
Well, yeah, I think you should be very careful about Tempering with like allowing things into your body.
You know, the term spirits that originated because my understanding of this is that that term came from people who thought you were putting spirits into your body.
So opioids are just that in a different form is what I would think.
And, you know, people get mad at me for this, but I think the same thing about other drugs.
Like if you're communicating with some entity because of something you've taken, I would, I think I would take that pretty seriously because you pretty much.
Seraphim Rose said, not that I want to speak for anybody here, but he says in a follow-up to that, he says something to the effect of those people are actually more your brother than the people whose Christ is only on their lips.
And I mean, that's what I mean with like bringing things into yourself.
We use euphemisms like that.
Like, well, I wasn't the same guy at that period of my life.
Well, think about what that actually means.
Like, what do you mean you weren't the same guy?
You know, if you believe in body, soul, spirit or body, soul, mind, however you want to think of it, what do you mean when you say you were not the same person?
Because like, did your soul leave and go somewhere else?
What do you actually mean?
And I think what you mean is that you have given controls, the control of you over to someone or something else.
I mean, that's the way I view it.
And that, you know, can be wrong.
I would sound like an idiot or whatever, but that is the way that I view it.
And if you don't think about that, you're probably being driven by something.
There's probably a reason you're not taking a step back to think about it.
You know, so when you say, what does it do to your spirit?
I really believe that it's you've, you've given control over to something else.
And so it changes you in every way.
You know, you become dishonest, angry, bitter, deeply depressed.
And when I say angry, I mean at God.
You know, there's a line in there somewhere where he says, even the devils pray.
I think that's kind of like that.
It's like, why would what is it?
What are the devils praying to God for?
Because if we believe in a redemptive God, surely, and again, I don't want to get things wrong and God forgive me if I am, but if we believe in a redemptive God, then they're not praying to ask for forgiveness or else maybe they would be able to get it.
I don't know.
So what are they saying in their prayers?
Well, probably they're probably bitter, you know, saying, I cannot believe you did this to me or whatever it may be.
I don't want to speak for them either.
And I want to be careful here, but I think the source of the bitterness, the root of it, is being angry at God.
And I think opioids do that.
I do think that.
I do.
And drinking too much, I think, does it.
And, you know, anything that makes you not you is going to lead to that eventually.
In fact, like all sin, they say, again, I'm not, I don't want to pretend to know things because I don't.
But I think that the end result of all sin is ultimately anger at God.
And what you're mad about is knowing what you have done.
When you're the dumbest person you're ever going to be on top of that, I had gotten to where I was taking way, way less, but I still like had, you know, I had those hooks.
I know one person, and I don't want to give too much information because I don't want to hurt his feelings or something, but he looks like a different human being now.
I mean, it's been so long.
I saw a picture of him recently and I hadn't seen him for a couple of years.
And I had to look at it for like five minutes because it just didn't even look like the same guy.
I have another family member that went through the same experience, looks like a totally different human being now.
You know, and the reason for that is I've seen how dark that world is and how many people, when it gets your hooks, those hooks in you at a young age, it just ruins kids.
Well, but there's a difference between like the happy chaos of small children and the kind of, you know, multi-year, just like, I just don't give a shit at all.
Like, everything, I mean, it was already on that path or else it wouldn't have worked with her because she's like a well-put together person.
And then I was like back to living the life of my youth.
You know, when I first started dating her, I went down.
My old man has back problems.
It's like every person that's rode colts their whole life.
He needed help.
And I remember when he called me, he had this buckskin horse and he needed a road.
And he's like, well, you're younger.
And I was like, well, like, my body's in better shape than yours.
But I wanted to do it.
So I go down there.
And this is now I'm doing good in life, at least mentally.
And I get on this colt and we're doing good.
And what my old man didn't tell me was that he had a, he would get scared when you'd go to get off.
But my old man didn't want me to know that because he wanted me to kind of solve the problem for him.
So I go to swing off and he starts bucking and it twists my knee pretty good.
And anyway, that was my first time back on a Colt like that.
And then we go sit in the bunkhouse and have like a couple beers and you're just feeling really good, you know, like, wow, I'm like back to my real life.
And so then I started riding colts again and back to normal.
And that's where I'm, I, I'm at now.
And I was guiding hunts for a while, elk and deer and help with some lions in Utah a little bit and occasional bear hunt and just, you know, back being a normal kid from the Mountain West.
So this is one of the, I would just say on the outset, I'm completely 100% on your side, probably for the same reasons on this question, but it is one of those rare issues where it doesn't break down along left and right at all.
And I probably should have asked you to explain what the issue is since we were an hour and a half into this or whatever.
We, so this one organization I was with for a while, I implored them to not let this become a liberals who hunt kind of thing or else we're going to lose.
That got established in 76 under Flipmo, which is the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 76.
But that had rolled lots of older conservation laws into one, into kind of one thing and established a very clear multiple use mandate.
In fact, I think it's the very first paragraph of the bill.
And the multiple use mandate says these lands are held in trust for the American people for hunting, recreating, grazing, and extraction of all forms, just whenever it makes sense.
I mean, we can't go clear cut the redwoods.
I don't think anyone would even, well, people would advocate, certain people would advocate for that, but I don't think anyone's doing that right now.
But there are other places that we should be logging and we can figure this out.
But we instantiated very powerful protections on the main goal is we don't let species die here because we, as a people, think that that would be a sin because God made them.
That's the way I view it.
And I think that's what that's how Nixon thought.
Well, the spotted owl comes in and the claim, so they made it threatened.
And the claim was that this owl needed old growth in order to survive.
It couldn't survive in second growth or new growth.
And second growth is like something that's been cut down, replanted, and then after you whack the forest, this is what comes up.
And they had said that they can't survive that way on and on.
Well, the loggers were saying, we see these things in second growth all the time.
What the hell are you talking about?
And so then we end up with, I believe it's called the Northwest Forest Plan.
And that was in the early 80s, if I'm remembering correctly, or late 80s when that happened, if I'm remembering correctly.
And that locked up something like 56 million acres and just killed timber towns all through Washington and Oregon and had an effect on northern Idaho and destroyed.
I know there are some loggers who think they did that on purpose.
And knowing the way, seeing the way, I don't want to be too conspiratorial, but it would not shock me if one day we learned that people were doing that on purpose because what they actually hated was loggers.
But then if you look at what happened here more recently, and this is important for understanding how we got to this new push for sell-offs, around 2016 or so, a lot was happening right then because of POI and some other things.
But around then, some environmental groups really born out of scientists at universities who actually do care, regardless of what people try to tell you, a lot of those people actually do care.
I mean, they've recovered all kinds of species because of these people, you know, Gila trout and blackfooted ferret and the greater sagegrouse.
You know, these people do care.
Well, they come up with a science-based management plan for this because the environmental groups were pushing and saying you can't do any oil and gas, oil and gas extraction in sagegrouse country.
You'll kill off the sagegrouse.
Well, these scientists come up with this plan and say, don't list these things as threatened.
What if you, Mr. Oil and Gas Company, give us, you know, work with us on this plan?
We think if you do it this way, it can be done without killing off the sagegrouse.
So the oil and gas companies give some concessions and then they do.
And what do you know?
Like they worked.
And oil and gas is still being extracted and the sagegrouse have recovered.
So we now we have people who can solve these problems.
But if you look at the way the right wing, the tools that they use or the levers that they use to kind of pry on the right to get them behind sell-offs is like, well, you're going to get locked out of it by this thing or that thing.
They're going to come spotted out you, you know?
Well, we figured out a solution to that.
And as long as we keep doing that, there's just absolutely no reason to give up our birthright.
It changed a bunch of times, but the proposal was the way it was being sold was, hey, we're just trying to get rid of 0.5% of this land, but that's not how it was originally written.
Originally, it was like a mandatory sell-off of 0.5% of the land and then like 249 million other acres to be evaluated, something like that, which means that's a floor with no ceiling.
And we do a lot of oil and gas and mineral extraction on public lands right now.
But a thing that I think viewers need to understand is when they do it on public land, there's a royalty paid back to both state and federal government.
But if you own the mineral rights or the subsurface rights altogether of your property, you're not paying a royalty.
I mean, sure, you're paying taxes, but you're not paying a royalty whatsoever.
No, and they used a term fair market value in there.
Well, on a lot of these, I mean, you've been to southern Utah, on a lot of these chunks that they were trying to sell off, the fair market value is like 500 an acre.
Yeah, I mean, it's alkali soil with like almost nothing as far as bunch grasses.
It supports an ecosystem, but it, you know, to run, to make it produce, if you're thinking in terms of GDP, which sometimes I feel like this is all those people are capable of, this is unproductive.
So that establishes that it's definitely not about the debt because you're either pulling money out of the coffers or selling it off for next to nothing.
So this is not about the debt.
It's about something else.
And this is why I think minerals at one level or another.
Well, in Canada, I think they own, I think they're the largest foreign owner of agricultural land like tillable in the U.S. And then, you know, Saudi owns a freaking ton of stuff down in Arizona.
And they're putting all kinds of guys out of business down there.
Like they'll punch a deep well because they've got money, lower the aquifer, and then the rancher guy, he can't afford a thousand-foot well.
So then they're able to buy up his stuff because now it's dry.
So there's all kinds of conflicts spread out across this region.
I just can't see why you wouldn't want to limit having more of that problem.
But there was this effort in the last 15, 20 years to like create these astroturf groups, you know, hunters for Kamala, but also, which are always hilarious, you know, loading the shotgun through the muzzle kind of groups.
But there are also more serious efforts to do that where these are clearly fake groups and they're trying to subvert something here.
So that's, it's all real, but it's kind of axiomatic, I think, that like hunters, some fishermen, ranchers, people who train horses, like these are not Kamala Harris voters.
These are almost all conservatives.
So why would you, as a product of that world, someone who shares the values of that world, why would you be all of a sudden on the side of like not selling public lands?
Why is this a con why do you have a conservative position on public lands?
But then something happened as we, you know, from Manassas Cutler in the Ohio River Valley to the 49ers, where we developed as a people out here.
You know, if you stop somebody on the street in New York City and you said, well, maybe not there now because it's like 60% foreign born, pick an actual American city where you're not traveling internationally and stop Americans on the street and ask them what it means to be an American.
They're going to say things like hard work, perseverance, you know, grit, love of country and county and all of that.
They're going to use all of these ideas that actually tie Back to knowing what our people went through crossing those plains, you know, fighting Indians and fighting, you know, Mexicans and then the Brits again,
and, you know, the Spanish and all of this, you know, all of that stuff fed into where we finally, somewhere, I don't know exactly when, I don't think I could put a pin in it, but at some point we became a people that are Americans.
We never describe ourselves in the same way as it seems like Europeans do to me.
And so I think that's a very important piece of this.
And I also think it's somewhat ironic that the area where the frontier closed is now like the primary source of the people trying to kill the country off.
And then now, as a modern people, there is absolutely no way.
Like small ranches, a lot of them are running like 90% of their ground on public allotments and 10% on deeded.
And it's been this way for a very long time, like basically since the TG, the Taylor Grazing Act, which was, I think, 36, 1936.
Another one of these things that rolled lots of laws into one, but it essentially protects the right for Americans to graze on these public grounds to protect the cattle industry, small family farms.
And on that 10% of deeded acreage, at least where I'm from, much of that is going to be like their alfalfa, their hay production for the winter.
And then, of course, a pasture to feed on in the winter.
So my people just won't exist anymore without this.
And some people will say, oh, well, then F them, this is welfare for rich people.
It's like, no, this is welfare for people who are scraping by.
If you want to call it welfare, I don't at all view it that way.
But these people are scraping by.
The margins on cattle are thin.
And if, you know, if you kill grazing, it is over.
So 47 is when the Mormons got to Utah, but a lot of them started that journey west, you know, back around that time, like from Connecticut, New England area.
Most of my family's been here since, you know, the late 1600s, but they were over here, Yankee type people.
And then they, you know, moved west.
I don't mean that as a pejorative, but like that's where they were at, like kind of, you know, in New England.
And so, yeah, it means a lot to me in that sense.
But another thing that the people who are not connected to this industry should think about, we have less than 90 million beef cattle in America right now.
Our herds, our beef herd is smaller than it was in like 91, like 1991.
So there's just, as with GDP and inflation and every other relevant number from which we make decisions about how to run the country, it's a lie.
Population is, I think, the biggest of all lies.
Now we're saying, I mean, three years ago, We've got 10 million illegal aliens.
We've had 10 million illegal aliens for 30 years.
And now, since Trump got in, they're like admitting, I think it's more like 60 or 65 million illegal aliens, foreign nationals living here in violation of our law.
So, anyway, no, no, pardon the lecture, but like we've got more than 330 million people in the United States.
And you're not going to tell me that these people don't know they're doing that.
And then I think there's about, I think 30 plants in the U.S. process 80% of the beef in this country.
So now you've got, you're also sort of as a byproduct, putting your old local butcher out of business.
He can't compete anymore with like $6 hamburger in a tube from Walmart that's got 70 animals packed into it.
He can't compete with that either.
The local guy can't.
Yeah, it's a huge problem.
And then if you add on the sell-off of public lands and squeeze the last of these guys that are hanging on with their small family ranch, it ain't going to get better.
I mean, it's fundamental and both legal and illegal.
A thing I would say to right-wingers to really try to think about these are low population states.
They're high land mass, but the density, population density is extremely low.
I think Wyoming, I've said this elsewhere, but I think Wyoming has around 300,000 voters, but that was 300,000 people voting for Trump, which means we don't know what the next turnout will be because he is a once-in-a-lifetime figure.
There's only one of that guy.
So presumably there's going to be less in the next election cycle.
Who knows?
Well, 50,000 new votes, if you sell this off and fill it up with illegal or legal immigration, whether it's H-1B, H-2B, whatever, I guess those people aren't voting, but aren't voting.
And then, you know, illegals were just imports of whatever variety.
You flip these.
There's not a ton of electoral votes there, but it is.
Let's empty the refugee camps of Somali refugees in Kenya and fly them to Lewiston, Maine, an impoverished, dying mill town full of French Canadians and just see how that works.
So here's the problem that I have with it and why I'm so grateful that you have done what you've done and why I want to talk to you is I'm worried about what the end stage of our debt crisis looks like.
So when you're in debt to a lender, that debt is secured with assets.
So you take a car loan, your loan is secured by your car.
Same with a home mortgage.
They can take your house.
The United States is trillions in debt to a bunch of different countries, investors all over the world, but Japan, China, South Korea, et cetera, Europe.
And we can't pay it, obviously.
And so how do we make good on that debt?
Well, what is the United States?
The United States is a continental-sized landmass that has some of the most valuable resources in the world, which would include the largest bodies of fresh water in the world, the Great Lakes, which would include some of the biggest oil and gas deposits, energy, and which would include some of the most productive farmland in the world.
So I'm really concerned that at some point, it sounds stupid now, but at some point not so far in the future, we're going to be like, well, actually, the Chinese own Lake Superior.
And there are oil and gas fields and the nation itself.
And so if you set up, I don't think that's crazy at all.
Like in the end, the US dollar is a joke and everyone knows that.
It's backed by nothing.
Full faith in credit.
So like, what do we have?
Well, we have federal lands, actually, land, minerals, water.
And I just don't think you want to set up, set the precedent in motion where you could just sell those if you needed to because they don't belong to the current occupants of the White House or Congress.
So I just, it's not, I don't believe it's about debt.
I think if you did it all by, if you did it all, let's say you could get to 6.2 trillion if you did 10,000 an acre or something like that.
I'm having a hard time remembering what I came up with, but 6 trillion is a crap load of money, but we spent 2.2 or whatever it was in the CARES Act a couple of years ago.
I mean, that's in the grand scheme of the way we spend, that's not a lot of money.
We collected emails and we're just trying to disseminate information because I think we need a lot more than one voice out on this stuff.
Because here, like, here's an example.
The everyday American hears, well, why don't we just do a new homesteading act?
And that sounds good.
You're like, oh, that'll take care of our kids.
No, it won't.
First of all, the very last iteration of Homestead Acts, I think the average more than 50% of the people that claimed land on that left it after two years.
So you're just doing a sell-off with a slight delay if you do that.
So we're just going to try to pass information as best as we can and also help.
I think we have a golden opportunity right now to do two really important things.
One, reshape the narrative and make conservation cool on the right wing again.
I think Zoomers have been let down by everyone their whole life.
They just like constantly getting screwed by someone.
And we got a win here and we cannot let them down.
We want to help them keep stacking wins here.
Like we want to be something that doesn't end up screwing them in the end.
So the next time they push, you know, we can help Zoomers.
And if we can shift this narrative with Zoomers and tell them like, this is yours, man.
This belongs to you.
Regardless of what people tell you, this is yours right now.
You can go to Birch Creek Valley in Idaho right now and go camp and fish and do whatever you want.
Get off your ass and go do it.
It'll be fun, you know, and it's yours.
Experience it.
If we can get them to understand that, then that is a huge accomplishment for posterity in the future because then they'll want to protect it forever.
And that'll give us at least until they have grandchildren, which would be great.
And then the second thing I think we have a real opportunity to do is shift the narrative in science back to people who actually want to do real science.
I think COVID for righteous reasons made a lot of people very skeptical of any expert class.
And that, I mean, I am one of those people.
But there are scientists out there who genuinely really want to save this stuff.
That's the guy that's trying to save the healer trout or whatever.
It's not an accident that the most articulate voice in this debate is you and you spend the most amount of time outside.
And maybe part of it is convincing people that nature is more compelling than porn or video games or anything that's happening on your phone.
And I, I mean, the decline in hunting and fishing licenses nationally, as much as I so enjoy being alone, you don't have to compete for a spot because there's nobody there.
There was a funny, my brain is doing a squirrel thing, but one of the funniest tweets I ever saw, I don't, you know, me and this guy disagree at times, but right after that happened, first thing in the morning, Josh Hawley tweeted, I wonder who Loomis will shoot today.
I laughed for like an hour about that.
But yeah, we need to get those kids engaged.
And there are some college programs that do this kind of thing.
A friend of mine runs one of these at a university in the West, takes kids out and teaches them how to hunt ducks and shoot.
And so we need to do much, much more of that.
And that's important as well.
And then one other thing, I guess, if I could say, and I apologize, I'm so bad at answering your questions directly.
I can understand why someone from Maine would be thinking right now, well, I'm never going to see that.
Why do I care?
And there's one answer I think I would give to that that no one else does is we are a union.
And even if you don't want to come out and enjoy the land that is yours, help support us because we support you with various policies that help protect your fisheries and your way of life up here.
And we are a union.
So, you know, we help you.
Please help us back.
That kind of thing.
Same thing with like, I've heard other people say this, and it's true with like the farm bill, which is, although it's like 60% snap now, but the farm bill helps, you know, a guy in Iowa or whatever.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive.
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