Excerpt from Endgame

BLM (p. 549)

From chapter "Identification"

Here’s the real story. You and I both know that the primary purpose of regulatory agencies is to provide buffers between citizen outrage and those who destroy their landbases and their lives,to provide “statements of priorities” without providing legally binding commitments. Anyone who has ever attempted to protect a piece of ground from the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management has run into this: every time someone finds a way to use the agencies’ own rules to stop the destruction, the agencies change the rules.

Scalia was being disingenuous when he talked about the BLM making a “statement of priorities.” Priorities are evident in action (or inaction). Any statement made by the BLM or by anyone else that is not backed up by action is merely a smokescreen, something to create the distractions Lundy Bancroft said are characteristic of abusers: “In one important way, an abusive man works like a magician. His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. . . . His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.”

The same is true here. The BLM states that protecting wild places is a priority but does not do so. The Supreme Court pretends we live in a place where citizens can act to protect their landbases, but tries to prevent them from doing so. The list goes on.

This Supreme Court ruling reminds me of the famous line by John F. Kennedy: Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. I would modify that to apply to our landbases: Those who make peaceful protection of our landbases impossible make violent defense of our landbases inevitable.