Killing The West, One Symbol At A Time

Of course, Trump is coming for the buffalo.

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Trump’s Interior Department is evicting hundreds of bison from public land so that a handful of well-connected cattle barons can take grazing leases that helped the bison population recover. The cruelty is the symbol. Rewarding the Trump cartel is the plan.

And the West they pretend to love is the next thing they’ll bulldoze.

If you have ever stood on a Montana ridge at dawn and watched a herd of bison move through the bunchgrass like a slow dark river, you already know the argument. You don’t need a policy paper. You just need eyes and a heartbeat. I didn’t know it until I saw it a couple of years ago, and it hit me today like a tidal wave of memory when I heard that the Trump Administration has come now for the buffalo.

The buffalo is the most profound symbol of the American West. Not the postcard West, not the Marlboro Man West, not the Tyler Sheridan West, not the oligarch-with-a-conservation-easement West…the actual West, carved into the land by sixty million animals over ten thousand years before we arrived with Sharps rifles and railroads and decided the fastest way to break the Plains tribes was to kill what fed them.

The hard place. The beautiful place. The place that shaped us as a nation, in fact and in a million dreams of strength, independence, and self-reliance.

By 1884, there were maybe a thousand bison left out of an aboriginal sea of thirty to sixty million. We didn’t thin the herd. We erased it. And the men who did the erasing were celebrated in newspapers as patriots…for a time.

Then America made one of those rare moral course corrections we are sometimes capable of. Theodore Roosevelt: Republican, big-game hunter, founder of the American Bison Society in 1905, pushed the federal government to seed the herds that became Yellowstone, Wind Cave, and Wichita Mountains populations. A century of patient work followed. The population grew and spread.

In 2016, a Republican-led Congress designated the bison the National Mammal of the United States. There are now roughly 500,000 of them. For a hundred years, conservation was the conservative position. Roosevelt. Nixon, who signed the Endangered Species Act. Reagan, who expanded the Wilderness System. Bush 41, who set aside more land than any president since Carter.

Now look at what the second Trump administration just did.

In January, the Bureau of Land Management, at the personal direction of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who yanked the case from career staff at the request of Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, moved to cancel the grazing permits of American Prairie, a nonprofit that has spent two decades restoring bison to 63,500 acres of public land in Philips County. The herd is 950 strong. The fences are electric. The animals are tagged, vaccinated, and managed. BLM approved the permits in 2022 after a full environmental review found no scientifically valid reason to keep buffalo off the land. A 1976 Interior Department holding had already settled the legal question. Forty years of practice settled the factual one.

None of it mattered. The wild buffalo are being evicted because Gianforte asked, and Burgum, his fellow tech-millionaire friend, said yes.

Understand what this is, folks, because it is not a grazing dispute. It is a symbol.

Less than 2% of American beef comes from cattle on public land. Two-thirds of BLM grazing is controlled by ten percent of permit holders, names like Stan Kroenke and Rupert Murdoch. The “save the cowboy” branding on this thing is a cardboard set on a B-movie soundstage. The cowboy is really a hedge fund billionaire.

And when MAGA blames the price of beef on inflation or immigrants or Joe Biden, ask why four companies (the foreign-owned JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef) control 85 percent of American beef processing, up from 25 percent in 1977. Ask why the rancher’s share of every beef dollar has fallen from 62 cents in 1980 to 37 cents today, while supermarket prices have gone vertical. Ask why the Brazilian conglomerate that owns JBS, owned by a Brazilian conglomerate, pays out price-fixing settlements as a line item.

The buffalo are not taking food off your table. The cartel is. But the cartel writes checks. The buffalo do not.

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A Word From Our Sponsor — And Yes, I Use This One Every Damn Morning

Notice something about everything you just read?

I’ll bet you didn’t see the words “Brazilian conglomerate” anywhere near the words “American beef prices” on cable news this week. If your media diet runs to Fox, Newsmax, or whatever frothing podcast has captured your uncle’s algorithm, you definitely did not hear about Burgum yanking a case from career staff to do a personal favor for his Montana billionaire pal. Not a peep.

That isn’t an accident. That’s the modern news economy: different outlets cover different facts, frame the same story to flatter the politics of their owners, and conveniently forget the inconvenient bits. Sometimes a story doesn’t get told at all on one side of the spectrum. There’s a name for that.

It’s called a Blindspot, and it is exactly why I read Ground News every single morning before I write a word.

Ground News is the tool I genuinely wish existed twenty years ago, back when I was still inside the GOP machine watching cable producers massage facts in real time and decide what their viewers would and would not be permitted to know. It pulls the same news event together from across the political spectrum — left, center, right, foreign press — and lays it out side by side. Who’s covering it. How they’re framing it. What sources they’re using. What facts each side is leaving on the cutting room floor.

Their Blindspot feed is the killer app. It surfaces the stories one half of the political media is essentially refusing to cover. The bison eviction. The JBS cartel. The Burgum-Gianforte handshake. The foreign ownership of “American” beef. You can see, in cold clean visualizations, exactly which outlets are silent and which are screaming.

For a recovering Republican strategist who built campaigns out of message discipline — and now spends his life trying to dismantle the disinformation machine I helped construct — Ground News is not a luxury. It is a defense system. It is how I make sure I’m not the one being played.

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If you want to know what is really happening to your country, your buffalo, your beef, and your Bill of Rights, the first thing you have to do is escape the algorithmic bubble that’s been built around you. Trust me — I helped build a few of those bubbles back in the day. I know how the trick works.

Now, back to the prairie.

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This is where MAGA’s West-loving cosplay falls apart. You cannot wear the hat, but kill the icon. You can’t post the Yellowstone memes and then bulldoze the landscape against which the series was filmed. You cannot run on America First while a Brazilian meat conglomerate eats the American prairie and a Montana governor evicts the National Mammal so his donor class can steal the grazing rights.

I was raised in Florida, on salt water and in orange groves. I learned to fish before long division. I hunted quail and dove with my father in pine flatwoods that no longer exist because somebody decided they were worth more as a Publix-anchored strip mall. I camped on rivers that ran tea-dark with cypress tannin.

I watched the sunrise explode over the Gulf as my great-grandfather steered us to the grouper holes off the Anclote point that he knew from dead reckoning and memory. I spent summers in the Panhandle, working on the farms that had been in our family since before the Civil War. I rode horses through palmetto scrub that smelled like ozone and turpentine after the 4 pm rain. We live today amongst long-leaf pine forests reclaimed from industrial timber companies, brought back to life and beauty by people who put their wealth to better use than another jet.

The men who taught me to value those things were Republicans almost to a one, and not one of them would understand what is being done in their name now. Florida is a strip mall run by end-times maniacs rushing to pave the last acre, every field a data center in waiting, a new development with a lyrical name and subpar construction.

Montana and the West, more evocative to millions than my odd homeland, is even more fragile and imperiled.

Conservation is not some communist-inspired idea. It is the most fundamentally conservative idea there is that we are stewards, not owners; that the inheritance must be passed forward larger and not smaller; that some things in the American landscape are so woven into who we are that to break them is to break ourselves. MAGA does not conserve. MAGA consumes.

It strip-mines the meaning out of every symbol, and sullies every good thing this nation has done, then resells the husk to the rubes as authenticity and phony patriotism.

So they are coming for the buffalo.

Of course they are. The buffalo are the test. When billionaire in Helena and a billionaire in Bismarck want to do a favor for a Brazilian meat cartel, then nothing in the American landscape is safe from them. Not Yellowstone. Not the Everglades. Not your river. Not your woods. Not the place you taught your kid to cast a line.

The buffalo built that prairie. The buffalo are that prairie.

MAGA postures and struts as if the West defines them, while they do nothing but defile it.

Don’t get played by the framing. Get Ground News with 40% off the Vantage plan here and see who is — and isn’t — telling you the whole story.