No, Mike Lee isn’t paving over Yellowstone for condos
June 20, 2025
The left’s idea of stewardship involves bulldozing bison and barring access. Lee’s vision puts conservation back in the hands of the people.
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, Ohio or Pennsylvania — might not even realize how little land their own states truly control compared to federally owned. But the same policies that are plaguing the West could come for them next.