Friday, May 5, 2017

Ignorance+social media= Bliss, squared: why missing the real fights is what the President counts on.


There was a tsunami of outrage a few weeks ago. The President issued another ukase, this one to the Interior Department: review all the national monuments designated by Presidents Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama.

See, that way it looked all nonpartisan, when in fact, it let ranchers and extraction industry honchos skip W's paltry additions- none of which got in without their say-so anyway- and comb over sixteen years of land Democrats wanted to bar them digging up.

That's been inside ball among western state pols for a hundred years.

In the clicktivist cadres of the LGBT tribe, the Chicken Littleists were in full squawk: New York's Stonewall Inn- just added by President Obama in 2016 as the first US national monument marking the gay civil rights movement- was getting the chop!

People were certain! To arms!

This was a typical headline:

President Donald Trump To Review Stonewall Inn's Landmark Status

It's easy to get all het up not reading past the headlines, and not knowing the purpose of the review, and people did.

Management of public lands, and exploitation of them, is a western states' rights issue. The federal government owns or controls huge majorities of the land west of the Mississippi.

It's safe to say The Stonewall has no trees worth cutting down. I've seen them not be there:



It has no oil, gas or mineral deposits under it.

The smallest land monument under review is 330,000 acres; the marine ones total over two hundred million acres.

And that's why it was never going to be on the list of sites to be reviewed, and that's why it isn't:


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