Coyote Blog

I discussed the shutdown and its effects on the parks my company operates here (spoiler:  all are still open).  Shawn Regan of PERC has a good article in the National Review on the same subject:

....under new shutdown guidelines established by the Trump administration, our parks have been rightfully spared from serving as pawns in Washington’s partisan budget battles as they did in the past.

Under a contingency plan created by the administration, park officials are allowed to keep sites accessible to visitors during the shutdown with skeletal staffs, rather than being forced to close them as was the case during the 2013 government shutdown presided over by President Obama. That means many important visitor activities and park operations — from snow-coach rides in Yellowstone run by private concessionaires to guided battlefield tours of Gettysburg — can continue yielding economic benefits for the surrounding communities. This week, the National Park Service also announced it will begin tapping unspent visitor-fee revenues to bolster operations at some parks.

These new plans are attracting criticism in the familiar anything-Trump-does-must-be-bad vein. Theresa Pierno of the National Parks Conservation Association slammed the administration’s decision to keep parks open, calling it “unrealistic and dangerous,” even though the NPCA repeatedly called for parks to be reopened during the 2013 shutdown. Representative Raúl Grijalva, the new Democratic chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, pledged to hold hearingson the administration’s decision to support park operations with fee revenues....

The Trump administration’s approach is sensible. Why unnecessarily ruin visitors’ plans or jeopardize the millions of dollars in revenue that local communities receive from park visitation? If visitation begins to pose significant health or safety concerns, the contingency plan gives park superintendents the option to close areas or shut down parks entirely, as some parks have already done.

He goes on to make the very logical point that the vast majority of BLM lands and US Forest Service lands -- whose acreage dwarfs that under management by the National Park Service -- mostly all remain open in every shutdown.  The large amounts of government staffing on NPS lands are needed to handle large visitor concentrations in small areas, something that really is not an issue in most parks in January.

Folks who have been hunting for pictures of overflowing trash cans to paint the current opening of parks as a bad idea could find just as many in the summertime on government lands when the government is not shut down.  Remember, for all the love folks want to throw at the National Park Service at these times, it is an agency that has allowed many of its parks to fall apart, with perhaps $20 billion in deferred maintenance and very little new investment in the modern infrastructure visitors are demanding.  And it has a labor model that is well suited to counting wolves but poorly suited to efficiently cleaning bathrooms and emptying trash cans even when the government is open.  This shutdown is the least of the problems faced by public recreation lands.

I think people get confused about the purpose of the government shutdown.  It is not a punishment, or a timeout, meted out by the law when Congress can't agree on a budget.  It is a mechanical (and logical) requirement that spending on certain activities stop when that spending is no longer legally authorized.  The media acts like it is supposed to be painful, and that Trump is somehow breaking the rules by making it less so.  I often criticize this President, but this is one area Trump should be applauded.  I think the wall funding issue is a dumb reason to go into budget gridlock, particularly when he had 2 years of Republican Congresses to get this done, but given the fact of the shutdown he should be applauded for attempting to reduce its impact on ordinary Americans.  President Obama, for all his reputation of caring and hope, was to my mind overly callous in explicitly trying to make the shutdown more painful for average people.

Readers will know I have been sympathetic with the animating goals, though not necessarily with the tactics and policy prescriptions, of Black Live Matter.  I do believe there are problems with police accountability and violations of due process that disproportionately (though not exclusively) affect the black community.  While we have come an extremely long way (I grew up in East Texas and saw a lot of bad sh*t), brown skin can still incur a presumption of guilt that simply should not be there in our justice system.

On the flip side I have sympathy with the animating goals of the Me Too movement, and have been utterly offended by stories like the ones about Matt Lauer's automatic door lock to trap women in his office (the same Matt Lauer NBC may have fired Megyn Kelly in order to bring back some day).  And as in the case of BLM, while I am sympathetic to MeToo problems, I have not agreed with their tactics or policy prescriptions.

So despite having roughly the same reaction to both movements, why do I say that #blm and #metoo may be headed for a collision?  Let's start with #metoo.  This is basically a victim's rights movement -- lamenting that victims do not get a fair shake in the justice system.  In many ways the movement is a direct descendent of movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish whose theme was that the justice system catered too much to criminals and gave criminals too many rights to the detriment of victims and society.  MeToo argues that "women should always be believed," which in practice is interpreted as meaning that the presumption of innocence and due process for the accused should be dialed back or eliminated.  These would be very familiar ideas to Harry Callahan and Paul Kersey.  So much so that I am almost surprised no director has done a female #metoo version of Death Wish.  Oh wait, Clint Eastwood already made that movie as part of the Dirty Harry series, it was called Sudden Impact.

In this context it is easy to see the potential train wreck that may be coming between MeToo and BLM.  The BLM movement at its core is about people of color being treated as guilty -- by police, by the system, by society -- based on the color of their skin.  BLM is about getting due process for the accused (or merely suspected) where it does not exist today.  Metoo, on the other hand, wants to reduce due process rights of the accused.  These two purposes almost have to come into conflict.

This should not come as a surprise, except perhaps to a generation who grew up in crappy public schools that no longer assign real books like, say, To Kill a Mockingbird.  This literary classic, which in my day was a progressive icon but now is being pushed into the background, was about the trial of a white woman falsely accusing a black man of rape, and how this black man was barely saved in a town where everyone automatically believed the white woman.

But we don't just have to look in fiction for examples, we are seeing it today in universities.  Universities are the one place in America that (due to the mandates of the Obama Department of Education) substantially reduced due process and presumption of innocence for men accused of a variety of sexual crimes by women.  The College Fix is one of the many sites in my feed reader, and it has featured numerous cases of college men suing universities over their being railroaded out of school in kangaroo courts over dubious assault charges.  And do you know what I have observed? A disproportionate number of these men who feel victimized by this system appear to me to be men of color and/or non-European foreigners (example from today).  It should not be a surprise to our SJW friends -- I venture that it is zero surprise to BLM -- that these folks with the least power are hurt the most by the loss of due process rights.

Postscript:  I have written before about where BLM and MeToo went wrong in what were originally good causes.  Here is where I think BLM went wrong.  I can't find where I have talked about MeToo going off the rails in one concise article, so here is a brief description of my view:  For years, and I presume still in some cases today, women have gone to their university or police or employer and reported sexual harassment or sex crime and have sometimes been met with lethargy -- they get patted on the head and told to go away or worse they get blamed for the incident.  But the net result is no serious investigation.  In this context, "believe the woman" makes sense.  A woman's accusations should be treated seriously and get a serious investigation without negative consequences for the woman who reported it.  But for a variety of reasons that desire to have real due diligence in response to accusations has morphed into a desire that the accusation be the same as a conviction.  So we went from a system with no investigation, though with a default to the accused to now a system with no investigation and a default to the accuser.  Neither system makes sense or is consistent with individual liberties and the rule of law and the entire history of our justice system.  "Treat every woman's accusations seriously" would have been a better motto (though maybe with an asterisk for women brought forward by Michael Avenatti).

As a disclosure, I once had a female ex-employee (who I never met face-to-face) accuse me of all kinds of crazy stuff.  The campgrounds I ran were training camps for the Taliban, I was a narcotics dealer, I was harboring fugitives, etc. She posted these accusations on facebook, tried to sue me, wrote letters to the government, tried to get on the news, and even put up yard signs.  She threatened me and my family with pictures of her holding her gun and we had to get a restraining order and a better security system.  It was a nerve-wracking time, and if we had believed all women, I would probably be in Guantanamo now.  By the way, I remember my wife really blasting me for this piece when I said how reluctant I am being alone with a young woman.  I responded to her, "what if I had been alone with [lady described above] for any amount of time?"  She thought for a second and said, "you would have been hosed - she would have accused you of rape for sure."

The media will breathlessly promote stories about any weather event in tail of the distribution curve.  I have written many times that this creates a false impression that these events are becoming more common.  Another element of this selection bias is what gets left out.  Does anyone doubt that if we were having a record-heavy tornado season, this would be leading every newscast?  If but if a record-heavy year is newsworthy, shouldn't a record-light year be newsworthy as well?  Apparently not:

source

Which reminds me of this chart Kevin Drum had the other day as "proof" of man-made climate change

I am not going to bother to go to their data source and pick it apart, though my guess is that I could.  But without even looking at the data sources I know this is garbage.  Think about places where there are large natural disasters in the US -- two places that come to mind are California fires and coastal hurricanes.  Do you really think that the total property value in California or on the US coastline has grown only at inflation?  You not only have real estate price increases, but you have the value of new construction.  The combination of these two is WAY over the 2-3% inflation rate.  This effect is magnified by the nature of the metric, which is not total losses but losses over some threshold.  This sort of threshold metric is easy to game, and says nothing for the total losses which would be a better measurement.

By the way, I am wondering how he automatically blames all of these natural disasters on manmade climate change.  Take the most recent, disastrous fires that hit the Redding, California area this year.  That fire started on BLM (federal) land.  When it was small, California State Fire (CalFire) personnel showed up to put it out.  The BLM told them to go away.  The chance to put the fire out when it was small was lost.  How do you blame a fire that was really due to moronic intergovernmental rivalry and bad forest management policy on climate change?

I won't repeat the charts but this post has charts on many extreme weather events and shows that, with the exception of large rainfall events, there is no trend in any of them.

1.  BLM highlights a real problem and creates a pretty decent plan for addressing that problem

2.  BLM totally abandons their reasonable plan and concentrates on acting as a virtue signalling vehicle

3.  BLM completely loses their minds by antagonizing a natural ally and opposing important minority rights protections

An ACLU free speech event was shut down at @williamandmary. The reason? The ACLU's stance on the First Amendment. https://t.co/vUEWIyduJA

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) October 4, 2017

A few days ago I said I did not understand this anti-free-speech position well enough to pass an ideological Touring test.  Several commenters took a pretty good shot at making the argument for it from the perspective of the oppressor-oppressed political axis.  Let me, though, explain why I think the BLM argument does not work on their own terms.

The key thing to understand is this:  Speech codes are written by and for the privileged.  They are written by the oppressor to shut up the oppressed.  George Wallace did not need the First Amendment, black kids trying to go to the University of Alabama needed it.  So the BLM opposition to free speech is either 1) completely misguided, as the oppressed need these protections the most or 2) an acknowledgement that they and their allies are now the privileged, they are the ones in power, and they wish to use speech codes as they have always been used, to shut up those not in power.  In broader society the situation is probably #1 but on University campuses we may have evolved to situation #2.

Like many of the people who are protesting today in St. Louis the acquittal of  Jason Stockley (please, let's hope it stays peaceful) I am angry about the lack of accountability for this behavior:

Smith tried to flee from Stockley on Dec. 20, 2011, following an alleged drug deal, authorities said. During the pursuit, Stockley could be heard saying on an internal police car video he was going to kill Smith, prosecutors said.

Stockley, riding in the passenger seat of a patrol vehicle with his personal AK-47 in one hand and department-issued weapon in the other, shot at Smith’s car, according to St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Susan Ryan and charging documents.

At Stockley’s direction, the driver of the police car slammed into Smith’s vehicle and they came to a stop, court documents said. Stockley then approached Smith’s car and shot him five times with his service weapon.

Stockley’s lawyers said he fired in self-defense because he believed Smith was reaching for a gun but prosecutors said the only gun recovered from the scene had only Stockley’s DNA on it.

Stockley was acquitted of all charges today.  Just read the above and remember that Smith was not some terrorist about to detonate a nuclear weapon, he was involved in a drug sale.  And here is this police officer chasing him in gunzerker dual-wield mode, crashing his car into him and shooting him after stating his intention to do so over the radio.

But I am also pissed off at BLM.  Why?  Well, I suppose if they encourage folks to violence today I will be mad at them for that.  But I am really mad at the total failure they have become as a change organization.  For years many lone voices have tried to point out issues with police violence and the lack of accountability for it.  BLM did a great job of substantially raising awareness of these issues through protests and disruptions.  But protest and disruption (and collecting donations) is all they seem to be able to do.  The time is long past that they need to be leading the hard work of renegotiating police union contracts and changing local laws.  BLM should have been ready for a day like today with a list of model legislation they can be waving in front of cameras saying this is the list of things we need to be doing in every city to prevent a repeat of this travesty.  Instead, all we will watch is more protests and violence.

Why do I single out BLM?  Why is it their responsibility?  Because they have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.   They wanted to be -- and are -- the de facto leaders on this issue.  They get all the funding.  They get all the celebrity support.  And they are not doing jack except perhaps alienating people they will need to work with to make progress.  They actually had a good plan in the beginning that they have since abandoned in favor of posturing and virtue signalling.   In contrast look at the ACLU, the IJ, and ALEC and how they spend their resources.   It reminds me of exactly how the Trump Administration operates, as so ably described by Megan McArdle today.  Lots of posturing, no ability to do the hard, detailed work to make change.

In my mailbox today is a press release some firm in town called Spectrum Experience.  This press release begins:

 The Tempe-based communications firm, Spectrum Experience, released an email statement yesterday informing clients the firm will no longer work with companies, candidates or causes that are unwilling to publicly state: Black lives matter. Spectrum works with dozens of political candidates and legislators in Arizona, as well as nonprofits and corporations throughout the US; the firm said it does not wish to provide communications support to these clients if they shield White supremacy.

Hmm.  I am pretty sure that the specific phrase "Black lives matter" has become loaded with a lot of political baggage such that failing to entirely endorse it is not the same as shielding white supremacy.  Sort of like refusing to say "I'm with Her" is not really the same as shielding misogyny.  But I will say that this is beautifully representative of the flavor of politics today.  One wonders how a company that claims on its website to "craft innovative strategies for companies, causes, and campaigns dedicated to changing the world" does so while refusing to engage with anyone who disagrees with them.

My take on BLM is here, which is critical of it as I share many of their goals but think their tactics have devolved into unproductive virtue-signaling at the expense of actual progress (sort of exactly like this email).

I was at a function the other day when I was challenged to take a position on the stupid 'black lives matter vs. all lives matter' false dichotomy.    I was fortunate to be in a group that actually let me answer with more nuance.  Here is essentially what I said:

1. There is a real problem with police accountability and police violence in this country, one I have been writing about since long before the BLM movement was even created.
2. The harm of these police accountability issues falls disproportionately, but not solely, on blacks and other minority ethnic groups
3. For any number of reasons, fixing racism is not the immediate answer.  Most obviously, because racism is super-hard to eradicate and has persisted (though improved, IMO) despite a lot of attention over many decades.   It is hard to point to any time and place in human history when some folks have not been seduced by in-group-out-group thinking.  The other reason is that the primary issue is accountability, not racism.  We give police special powers to use force that the rest of us do not have, but impose less accountability on them for the use of force than the rest of us face.  No matter how good most police officers are, this accountability problem is going to allow bad eggs to repeatedly abuse their power.
4. There are real, identifiable steps that can actually increase police accountability and transparency and reduce the types of police violence incidents BLM was formed to oppose.  Early on, BLM actually identified a pretty good list.
5. BLM did a fabulous job of raising awareness and putting these issues near the center of political discussion.
6. Having done so, BLM now has gone completely off the rails.  It appears to be entirely focused on virtue-signalling and disruption and support of progressive issues completely tangential to its initial focus.  It has no coherent action plan.  Colin Kapernick torpedoed his own football career to bring attention to BLM, but once he did so and had microphones thrust in his face from every direction, neither he nor any of his supporters had anything specific to advocate for, other than outrage and telegraphing their victim status.
7. Progress can be made on these issues, but what it will take is a hard city by city slog to change the rules that govern police discipline and transparency.   As I wrote before, BLM "could learn a lot from Conservative and libertarian groups like ALEC, that focus on creating model legislation and local success stories that can be copied in other places."
8. Republicans often oppose police accountability steps -- they don't just support the police, they fetishize them.  But the cities that most cry out for new accountability rules -- New York, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, Los Angeles -- are have Democratic super-majorities and governments whose officials almost to a one have come out publicly in support of BLM.  So why no progress?  One big barrier is the Democratic Party's unwavering support for public employee unions, and it is police unions that are the biggest barrier to implementing the steps BLM should be demanding.  This is another side of this issue discussed earlier in the week.

I am not sure I am able to continue blogging in the current environment.  When I began blogging over 12 years ago, it was to report on my various adventures in trying to run a small business.  It soon morphed into a platform for me to think out loud about various policy issues.  For example, while I didn't really understand this when I started, it became a platform for me to think through mistakes I made in my initial enthusiasm for the Iraq War.  You can see me in the early years evolve from a kind of knee-jerk global warming absolute denier to a lukewarmer with much more understanding of the underlying science.  I think of myself as an intellectual (though one who cannot spell or proof-read) who likes to discuss policy.

But I am not sure this is the time for that.  The world seems to be moving away from intellectualism.  I say this not because Trump voters were somehow rejecting intellectualism, but because intellectuals themselves seem to be rejecting it.  They act like children, they are turning universities into totalitarian monoculters, and they compete with each other to craft mindless 140-character "gotchas" on Twitter.  I challenge you to even find a forum today for intellectual exchange between people who disagree with one another.  In politics, Trump clearly rejects intellectualism but for whatever reasons, the Democratic opposition has as well.

We have a tribal war going on in this country that has officially gone beyond any real policy issues.  While the US and the Soviet Union had real differences in philosophy and approach, most of their confrontations were in proxy wars which bore little resemblance to these values.  That is what politics are now -- a series of proxy wars.  We spend several days focusing attention on Jeff Sessions, but spend pretty much zero time talking about real issues like approaches to the drug war, and police accountability, and sentencing reform.  Instead all we can focus on is the political proxy war of this stupid Russia hacking story.   Obama's birth certificate and Hillary's servers and Russian hacking and Trump's real estate sales -- all we fight are proxy wars.

And like most tribal warfare, the two tribes are incredibly similar.  I have called them the Coke and Pepsi party for years.  Go talk to the the rank and file and sure, one group may like Nascar and barbecue while the other likes Phish concerts and kale, but you will see them asking for the same sorts of things out of government.   Take the minimum wage, a traditional blue tribe issue.  In Arizona, a heavily red state (we have a super-majority in the legislature of the red team), a $10 minimum wage referendum passed by nearly 60% of the vote last year.  The members of the two tribes absolutely hate each other, but they support the same laws.  I guess I should be happy they don't get together, since as a libertarian I think many of these things they want are bad ideas.

People tell me I need to just deal with the adversity.  But I don't mind opposition per se.  I love when I get a chance to respond to real criticism.  Hell, I wrote 5000 words or so here in response to such criticism.  It's fun.  But more likely nowadays I will write a couple thousand words on school choice and the response will be, in total, "Your a Trump cuckservative."  Several years ago I wrote a long article on rail in response to a Joel Epstein piece.  Epstein had argued the US rail rail system was inferior to those in Europe and Asia because we don't have enough passenger rail.  I argued with a series of charts and analysis that the US rail system was superior because it focused on freight over passengers, and that shifting freight to rail had far more environmental benefits than shifting passengers to rail.  Epstein's entire response to my article was, "You should get out of the country more often."  This is the classic intellectual argument of our day.  It was smug.  It implied my article was based on being part of the wrong tribe, the narrow-minded denizens of flyover country rather than the coastal set that have been to Gstaad but not Tulsa.  At it did not even bother addressing the issues raised.

Or look at Black Lives Matter.  BLM actually had what looked to me to be the outlines of a pretty good plan.  To really achieve their goals, though, was going to take a lot of work jurisdiction by jurisdiction, establishing some model legislation and best practices and bringing it to various municipalities.  It didn't even try.  It abandoned this plan in favor of just disrupting sh*t and shaming the unwoke for saying that "all lives matter."  Today, invocations of BLM consist pretty much 100% of virtue signalling for one's own tribe or shaming of the other tribe.  Its the equivalent of dueling fans at a game yelling "Yankees suck!" "No, Red Sox suck!"

People also tell me to just deal with it, that if I love the policy stuff I should ignore these problems.  But let me give you an analogy.  Let's say you absolutely love English Premier League football, but every time you try to go to a game, you miss most of what happens on the field because hooligans are fighting around you in the stands.  Do you keep going for your love of football or at some point is the mess that surrounds it just too much?

Anyway, I am highly tempted just to say "screw it" for a while and focus on something else entirely.  I am trying a different approach as a change of pace, trying to write a more formal policy piece for a think tank, but I am having a surprising amount of trouble doing it well.  Writing such pieces was not really my forte at McKinsey when I was a consultant and I am not sure it is now.  Not disciplined enough in my writing, I think.

Anyway, on a positive front, I now have a dedicated (though very small) room for my model railroad and I installed the first bit of benchwork.  This is sort of like laying the keel for a new ship.  Coyoteblog readers, I know, will be hanging on the edges of their seats for further updates.

From Parks and Recreation:

Jean-Ralphio: Why don’t you use that time to go after one of your passions? Like model trains, or toy Gandalfs or something.

Ben: I don’t know why you jumped straight to model trains. I mean, it’s accurate…

The other day, in writing about how I think Black Lives Matter has lost its way, I said that I supported their goal of increasing accountability of police forces but that goal was going to take a lot of hard, nuts-and-bolts legislative and policy steps that BLM seems uninterested in pursuing.  This article from Reuters (via link from Overlawyered) gives one an idea of some of the issues that exist:

The episode is a telling snapshot of the power police unions flex across the United States, using political might to cement contracts that often provide a shield of protection to officers accused of misdeeds and erect barriers to residents complaining of abuse.

From city to city, union contracts have become just as crucial in governing departments as police manuals and city charters. Yet those contracts are coming under scrutiny amid civil rights protests over alleged police abuses, including shootings of unarmed black subjects.

Reuters, examining the fine print of 82 police union contracts in large cities across the country, found a pattern of protections afforded the men and women in blue:

• A majority of the contracts call for departments to erase disciplinary records, some after just six months, making it difficult to fire officers with a history of abuses. In 18 cities, suspensions are erased in three years or less. In Anchorage, Alaska, suspensions, demotions and disciplinary transfers are removed after two years.

• Nearly half of the contracts allow officers accused of misconduct to access the entire investigative file – including witness statements, GPS readouts, photos, videos and notes from the internal investigation – before being interrogated.

• Twenty cities, including San Antonio, allow officers accused of misconduct to forfeit sick leave or holiday and vacation time rather than serve suspensions.

• Eighteen cities require an officer’s written consent before the department publicly releases documents involving prior discipline or internal investigations.

• Contracts in 17 cities set time limits for citizens to file complaints about police officers – some as short as 30 days. Nine cities restrict anonymous complaints from being investigated.

Police and their supporters will say that Police have a particularly dangerous job and need such extra process protections.  In fact, while there are dangers, it is certainly not among the most dangerous jobs (trash collectors are twice as likely to die on the job than police).  I would argue that we give the police unique powers -- to use violence and to take away a persons liberty -- not possessed by any other citizens and thus we should expect more rather than fewer accountability provisions to go with these special powers.

I will say that I am not particularly optimistic about progress in this area.  The Right tends to fetishize police and are tend to oppose any restrictions on police.  The Left is the natural home for police reform, but most on the Left are loath to take on public employee unions, probably their strongest base of political power, and most of these changes (as seen above) require challenging the police unions.  Black Lives Matter brought a lot of focus to these issues, but they simply can't seem to get past disruption and into policy changes and legislation, and besides the group appears to have been hijacked by the Left to be a vehicle for generic protests of Progressive causes like climate change legislation.

I am embarrassed to admit that I initially supported the war in Iraq (though at least I admit that rather than try to rewrite history as do many public figures).   I got swept up in the post 9/11 nationalism and wasn't very sophisticated in my thinking about such interventions.  But I also think part of the  reason for my support was because the opposition was often so irrational and, well, loony.   At least subconsciously, I must have been thinking, "I can't be on the same side with these idiots."

This was a useful experience, though, because in the years since I have frequently found myself allied with the Left on certain issues where I have been appalled by their opposition tactics.  Black Lives Matter is a great case in point.  I absolutely agree with the premise that police forces need more accountability and that the costs of the current lack of accountability fall disproportionately on African Americans.  I thought this initial BLM 10-point plan was really very good.  But ugh, their tactics.  Blocking highways and threatening drivers, where does that get us?   Or the whole tactic of forcing someone to choose between "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter" -- I mean seriously, WTF?  How is this kind of social justice rhetorical trap at all useful?  And now the movement has so much cred that it has been hijacked by the Left to support climate change legislation and all sorts of unrelated matters, so it likely will never make any actual progress on police accountability.  It would be easy to recoil from all this and shy away from my passion for increasing police accountability because my allies are so off-putting in their tactics, but my Iraq War experience has taught me that this would be a mistake.

And now, we have the opposition to Trump, and all the same loony Left tactics are emerging.  We get lectured by celebrities, and discover that the deepest threat of Trump may be the marginalization of actresses who make $20 million a picture.  We get roads blocked and public violence.    I wonder if all this is driving folks who originally found Trump distasteful into his arms?

I fear that all the oxygen is getting sucked out of the room with protests of crazy hypothetical scenarios while ignoring the real problems that are occurring already.  So everyone is focusing on women marching on Washington, despite the fact that Trump is almost certainly no worse in his personal behavior towards women than Bill Clinton and is likely, on women's issues, the furthest to the Left of all of the 16 original GOP presidential candidates.    We focus on some hypothetical future slight to women while ignoring his economic nationalism, economic interventionism, corporatism, and cronyism that is already on display with Carrier and the auto makers.

As I wrote here, the ability to criticize public figures has limited bandwidth.  Sure, an infinite number of things can be discussed on the Internet, but only a few reach a general consciousness across society.  One way to look at it is to compare it to an NFL game.  In an NFL game, coaches only have two challenge flags they can throw to challenge a bad call by the referees -- after their challenge flags are used, they are out of luck.  The Left is using up all our challenge flags on their own social justice bogeymen, and causing everyone to miss the opportunity to challenge Trump on more relevant faults (of which there are many).

The other problem with the Left's tactics is that they are not well-matched to Trump and likely will be counter-productive.  All this crazy protest is more likely to cause Trump to petulantly lash back.  This one of his worst qualities as a leader, but it is a fact all the same.  Take abortion, for example.  My gut feel is that Trump has never had any problem with abortion, and likely has supported it in the past.  Hell, he's probably secretly paid for a few.  If women's groups had gone and sat down with him quietly and said, "hey, we are worried about creeping restrictions on abortion in many states", Trump probably would have been sympathetic.  This is the Trump, after all, who mythologizes himself as a deal-maker.  But groups on the Left can't seem to do this, in part because of tribal virtue-signalling on the Left.  The Left has decided that their tactic will be to treat Trump as illegitimate, so any group that goes to talk to him is marginalized and excoriated by the rest of the Left.  So rather than sit down and work with a likely-sympathetic Trump, they head out into the streets to denounce him in the craziest possible terms, tactics that may well drive him into exactly the actions that women fear.  If abortion was a big issue for me, I would be pissed at women's groups for their bone-headed tactics.

As I predicted in my letter to the Princeton University President last year, two decades of living in university monocultures and political echo chambers, combined with a one-track focus on social justice, seems to have left the political Left with no ability to engage in rational opposition politics.

The Golden Globe Awards were a magnificent example.  I presume that many of these actors are reasonably intelligent people.  And they are obviously upset and worried about Donald Trump's election to President.  But they can't express anything beyond their fear and loathing.  They can't articulate what specifically worries them, and when they do articulate something specific - e.g "this may be the last Golden Globes Awards" - it is silly and illogical.

Perhaps worse, these critiques of Trump are, IMO, focusing on all the wrong things and sucking the oxygen out of the room for more relevant criticism.  The Hollywood types all seemed terrified that they and their industry are going to somehow fall victims to government authoritarianism.  At some level I guess this makes sense -- when the Left was in power, they used their power to hammer industries they did not like (eg energy) and thus expect that the Right will do the same once they are in power.  But Trump is a New York social liberal who is a part of the entertainment industry.   While I confess that one of the problems with Trump is that he is wildly unpredictable, Hollywood is an unlikely target, at least until they just  went on TV and begged to be one.

An even better example of focusing on all the wrong problems is the confirmation hearings for Jeff Sessions.  If you read pretty much any of the media, you will be left with the impression that the main issue with Sessions is whether he is a racist, or at least whether he is sufficiently sensitive to race issues.  But this is a complete diversion of attention from Sessions' true issues.  I am not sure what is in his heart on race, but his track record on race seems to be pretty clean.  His problems are in other directions -- he is an aggressive drug warrior, a fan of asset forfeiture, and a proponent of Federal over local power.  As just one example of problems we may face with an AG Sessions, states that have legalized marijuana may find the Feds pursuing drug enforcement actions on Federal marijuana charges.

Why haven't we heard any of these concerns?  Because the freaking Left is no longer capable of making any public argument that is not based on race or gender.  Or more accurately, the folks on the Left who see every single issue as a race and gender issue are getting all the air time and taking it away from more important (in this case) issues.    The SJW's are going to scream race, race, race at the Sessions nomination, and since there does not seem to be any smoking gun there, they are going to fail.  And Sessions will be confirmed without any of his real illiberal issues coming out in the public discussion about him.

I have said this before about Left and Right and their different approaches to politics.  The Left is great at getting attention on an issue.  Think of BLM and their protests and disruption tactics -- they had everyone's attention.  But they went nowhere on policy.  I challenge you to list the 5 or 10 policy goals of BLM (they actually had a good set once, but abandoned them).  The Left is great at expressing anger and dismay and frustration and outrage, but terrible about thoughtfully taking steps to fix it.  The Right on the other hand is great at working (plodding, really) in the background on policy issues, often at the local level.  ALEC is a great example, building a body of model legislation, working in groups around the country to try to implement these models.  But they absolutely suck at generating emotion and excitement around key issues (except maybe for wars and in abortion protests).  The only example I can really think of is the Tea Party, and (despite how the media tried to portray it) the Tea Party was extraordinarily well-behaved and moderate when compared to protest movements on the Left.

Trump has an enormous number of problems in his policy goals, not the least of which is his wealth-destroying, job-destroying ideas on trade nationalism.   But all we get on trade are a few lone voices who have the patience to keep refuting the same bad arguments (thanks Don Boudreaux and Mark Perry) and instead we get a women's march to protest the Republican who, among the last season's Presidential candidates, has historically been the furthest to the Left on women's issues.    It is going to be a long four years, even longer if the Left can't figure out how to mount a reasonable opposition.

Postscript:  All of this is without even mentioning how the Left's over-the-top disruption tactics seem to just feed Trump's energy.  At some point, Hercules figured out that cutting heads off the hydra was only making things worse and switched tactics.  If only I could be so confident about the Left.

Apparently, BLM is now protesting for climate action of some sort, temporarily closing an airport in the UK.

BLM has created a very hot brand, and at least for certain segments of the population, it has a lot of accumulated virtue credits.  Now, everyone on the progressive Left wants to use that brand and those virtue credits, and are trying to shove their particular issues under the BLM tent.  BLM is thus in the process of being hijacked.  I give the movement about 60 days to get its messaging in order before its power to actually affect its original issue (police and proprietorial abuse) is at an end.  That doesn't mean that BLM will go away -- if successfully jacked it may be around for decades, but it will be just another progressive shell organization.  This will make its leaders more prominent and even perhaps a lot richer (think gigs at MSNBC), but it will make the goal of getting more accountability applied to police forces a dead letter.

Well, it appears that Black Lives Matters has moved on to climate activism, or whatever, but has mostly fallen off message on police accountability.  Protests in the vague hope of ending racism by closing busy highways and airports and kneeling during the National Anthem are going to get nothing done -- the solution to the problems that sparked the BLM movement are to be found in legislative efforts to create better police accountability measures and to roll back a number of egregious protections from accountability that exist in many union contracts.  The solution is not to throw blanket hate on police officers, many or most of whom are doing a good job, but to recognize that when we give officers unique powers to use force, they need extra accountability to go with those powers.  Today, most police have less accountability for their use of force than you and I do.

Unfortunately, doing that is hard.  It is a tough legislative slog that has to go local city by local city, with few national-level shortcuts available.  It faces opposition from Conservatives who tend to fetishize police, and from Liberals who are reluctant to challenge a public employees union.  And it requires that BLM translate their energy from disruption and attention-grabbing (which they are very good at) to policy and legislation, which they have shown no facility for.  They need to be working on model legislation and pushing that down to the local level.  This original plan actually looked pretty good, but apparently it has been rejected and gets little or no attention.

As a result, BLM seems to be stuck in a pointless do-loop of disruption and virtue-signalling.  I just want to scream at them, "OK, you have our attention -- and many of us are sympathetic -- what in the hell do you want done?"  Unfortunately, their current lists of goals have almost nothing to do with police accountability and appear to be a laundry list of progressive talking points.  It appears to be another radical organization that has been jacked by the Democratic establishment to push mainstream Democratic talking points.

Here is a good example, for a number of reasons.  In the past, the officer likely would have been believed and the woman might have been convicted of something.  I think this happens to people across the racial spectrum, but African-Americans have had a particularly hard time -- given both racist perceptions and lack of good counsel -- in these he-said-she-said cases with police.  Not to mention that African-Americans -- for a variety of reasons including racial profiling in things like New York's stop and frisk program to the tendency of poor black municipalities to fine the crap out of their citizens to generate revenue -- come in contact with police disproportionately more often.

I offered my plan to help African-Americans a number of times in the past:

• Legalize drugs.  This would reduce the rents that attract the poor into dealing, would keep people out of jail, and reduce a lot of violent crime associated with narcotics traffic that kills investment and business creation in black neighborhoods.  It would also reduce the main excuse for petty harassment by police that falls disproportionately on young black men.  No it's not a good thing to have people addicted to strong narcotics but it is worse to be putting them in jail and having them shooting at each other.
• Bring real accountability to police forces.  When I see stories of folks absurdly abused by police forces, I can almost always guess the race of the victim in advance.  I used to be a law-and-order Conservative that blindly trusted police statements about every encounter.  The advent of cell-phone video has proven this to be supremely naive.  No matter how trusted, you can't give any group a pass on accountability.
• Eliminate the minimum wage   (compromise: eliminate the minimum wage before 25).  Originally passed for racist reasons, it still (if unintentionally) keeps young blacks from entering the work force.  Dropping out of high school does not hurt employment because kids learn job skills in high school (they don't); it hurts because finishing high school is a marker of responsibility and other desirable job traits.  Kids who drop out can overcome this, but only if they get a job where they can demonstrate these traits.  No one is going to take that chance at $10 or $15 an hour
• Voucherize education.  It's not the middle class that is primarily the victim of awful public schools, it is poor blacks.  Middle and upper class parents have the political pull to get accountability.   It is no coincidence the best public schools are generally in middle and upper class neighborhoods.  Programs such as the one in DC that used to allow urban poor to escape failing schools need to be promoted.

Both BLM and the campus rape culture movement have a starting point in real problems.

On campus, and even in a few police precincts, women complaining about sexual assault would get patted on the head and sent on their way, their charges going largely investigated.  In part, oddly enough, I think the problem stems from the war on drugs -- for literally decades, campus police have helped to shelter their students from drug investigations and harassment from their local community police force.  I know they did so at Princeton when I was there.  So campus police forces really had a mission to keep their students out of jail and out of trouble.  This is A-OK with me on drugs, but it obviously leads to terrible results when we get to sexual assault.  So something needed to be done to have police forces, particularly ones on campus, take sexual assault charges seriously.

With police, officers have been sheltered from any real accountability for years.  We give the police the ability to use force and other powers that ordinary citizens don't possess, but instead of giving them more scrutiny and accountability to offset these powers, we give them less.  This has really been a bipartisan problem -- Conservatives tend to fetishize the police and want to assume by default that all police actions are justified.  The Left is more willing to be skeptical of police behavior, but they refuse to take on any public sector union and police unions have generally locked in their contracts any number of accountability-avoidance mechanisms.  So something needed to be done to bring accountability to police forces.

And with these quite justifiable and reasonable goals around which many of us could have coalesced into some sort of consensus, both protest efforts immediately overreached into crazy zones.

On campus, the reasonable demand for serious action in response to a sexual assault charge was abandoned in favor of the demand for immediate conviction without due process based on any sexual assault charge.  Oddly mirroring the conservative attitude towards police, activists said that alleged victims had to always believed, and demanded that universities punish anyone accused of sexual transgressions.  The result has become a toxic mess, and in some ways is a setback for justice, as activists have made it easier to get a rapist thrown out of school but perhaps harder to actually get thrown in jail.

With police, activists immediately eschewed the reasonable need for more police accountability and jumped to the contention that all police officers are racist and systematically abuse black citizens.  Their focus seems to be on police shootings, though I find the pattern of petty police harassment (through the war on drugs and programs like New York's stop and frisk) to be more problematic.  Just as in the campus rape debate, a reasonable need for more accountability and investigation of police shootings has morphed into a demand that police officers be treated as guilty by default in all shootings.

Each of these movements have made the problems more visible while simultaneously making these problems less likely to be solved.

I will add that I stick by my evaluation of BLM I wrote a while back.  I actually sort of liked a lot of their proposed plan, but I wrote (see particularly part in bold):

There is much that progressive and conservative groups could learn from each other.  Conservative groups (outside of anti-abortion folks) are loath to pursue the public demonstration and disruption tactics that can sometimes be helpful in getting one's issues on the public agenda.  The flip side is that public disruption seems to be all BLM knows how to do.  It can't seem to get beyond disruption, including the unfathomable recent threat to disrupt an upcoming marathon in the Twin Cities.   It could learn a lot from Conservative and libertarian groups like ALEC, that focus on creating model legislation and local success stories that can be copied in other places.  Many of the steps in BLM's plan cry out of model legislation and successful pilots/examples.

Frequently people will use the existence of threats, including death threats, over the Internet as proof that their cause is more just because their opponents are violent and _________ (fill in the blank with racist, misogynist, etc.).  Most folks firmly believe that only their side is getting these death threats, since they only really talk to and read people on their side.  But as a libertarian that makes common cause with all kinds of groups, what I see is that EVERYONE that says something even mildly controversial gets Internet threats.  The gamergaters get threats and the anti-gamergaters get threats.  BLM gets threats and police defenders get threats.  Heck, I get threats, mostly on climate and immigration issues, and I am a nobody.  And here is the latest source of death threats:  Katherine Timpf dissing Star Wars

More than a month ago, I made some jokes about Star Wars on Red Eye, a satirical political comedy show that airs at 3 a.m., and it has resulted in me being verbally abused and told to die by a mob of enraged fans for the past four days now. ...Then, this week, one Star Wars super-super-super fan who calls himself “AlphaOmegaSin” made a ten-minute (!) video brutally ripping me apart.  The YouTube comments on his manifesto were even better. You know, stuff like:

justin 12 hours ago Maybe a SW nerd needs to sneak into her dark room, dressed like her bf, rape her, but she doesn’t know it’s rape because she thinks it’s her BF.

needmypunk 16 hours ago I hope she gets acid thrown in her pretty little face.

sdgaara2 1 day ago Wouldn’t it be great if she was beaten to death with “space nerd sticks”

etc. etc.   Now, I understand there are a few folks out there who have had to deal with scary and legitimate stalking episodes online.  But in the vast majority of cases, does anyone really treat these as serious threats?  Like actually get scared?  I know I don't.  I would suggest that most folks respond just like Ms. Timpf did -- they treat them as a badge of honor and of proof of the rightness of their cause and the bankruptcy of their intellectual opposition.  I have done the exact same thing.   We have a term called humble brag, e.g. "I was so stupid last night -- Johnny Depp came by my table to say hi and I didn't recognize him."  We need a term for this -- "victim brag", maybe?

I have come to the conclusion that there are a core of people on the Internet that are simply morons, and will react stupidly to about anything.  We should stop ascribing any significance to their showing up in an online discussion.  The fact they show up making their stupid threats has no more meaning than the fact that ants inevitably show up when you drop food on the ground.  You wouldn't write an article that "ants hate me because they swarmed all over the potato chip I dropped."  Let's treat Internet trolls just like we do these insects.

There is much to criticize in how the BLM movement operates, but I can get behind much of the plan they introduced last month.  I don't agree with all of it, but I seldom agree with all of any plan I see proposed from any side of the aisle.

In discussing the plan, Kevin Drum fails to address the elephant in the room for the Left in making progress on this, and that is the enormous reluctance of Democrats to challenge a public employee union.  And you can bet that police unions will likely be the biggest barrier to getting a lot of this done, even perhaps ahead of Conservative law-and-order groups (you can see the token sop thrown to unions in point 10 of the plan, but it ain't going to be enough).

By the way, there is much that progressive and conservative groups could learn from each other.  Conservative groups (outside of anti-abortion folks) are loath to pursue the public demonstration and disruption tactics that can sometimes be helpful in getting one's issues on the public agenda.  The flip side is that public disruption seems to be all BLM knows how to do.  It can't seem to get beyond disruption, including the unfathomable recent threat to disrupt an upcoming marathon in the Twin Cities.   It could learn a lot from Conservative and libertarian groups like ALEC, that focus on creating model legislation and local success stories that can be copied in other places.  Many of the steps in BLM's plan cry out of model legislation and successful pilots/examples.

BLM coalesced as a reaction to police brutality and lack of accountability for how they treated black citizens.  The organization claims its problems are rooted in the ghetto-ization of blacks that has robbed them of their agency.

Can I observe that both these problems are ones of an out of control, unaccountable, over-powered government?  Police are government officials allowed to operate with few checks on their behavior.  Black ghettos were explicitly created by the New Deal and maintained by Federal policy for years.  No doubt many private citizens are still racist, but they can't legally shoot you on the street or say where you can and can't buy homes.

So why does the leadership of BLM so consistently support the further expansion of government power?

I warned you that Cliven Bundy's ranch was the wrong hill to fight on over property rights and the role of government ownership on western lands.  And I was right.

This kind of thing should not come as a surprise.  This is a guy who simply did not want to pay his rent, and used the catch phrases of liberty to try to get sympathy.  I could find about a thousand far more sympathetic examples of folks screwed over by government land use regulations -- e.g. people whose puddle in the backyard is suddenly a wetlands that they can't build on.  But for some reason Conservatives all rushed to pile on this one example.  Stupid.  The media can probably be counted on to hide the unsavory back stories of Occupy Wall Street supporters, but there is no way they are going to do so for a "hero" of the right.   The BLM almost bailed Conservatives out of their stupid support for Bundy by their execrable on-site management of the raid, but Conservatives are now getting what they deserve for jumping in bed with this guy.

Here is something I find deeply ironic:  On the exact same day that Conservatives were flocking to the desert to protest Cliven Bundy's eviction from BLM land, San Francisco progressives were gathering in the streets to protest tenant evictions by a Google executive.   To my eye, both protests were exactly the same, but my guess is that neither group would agree with the other's protest.  I think both protests are misguided.

In the case of Cliven Bundy, I agree with John Hinderaker, right up to his big "But...."

First, it must be admitted that legally, Bundy doesn’t have a leg to stand on. The Bureau of Land Management has been charging him grazing fees since the early 1990s, which he has refused to pay. Further, BLM has issued orders limiting the area on which Bundy’s cows can graze and the number that can graze, and Bundy has ignored those directives. As a result, BLM has sued Bundy twice in federal court, and won both cases. In the second, more recent action, Bundy’s defense is that the federal government doesn’t own the land in question and therefore has no authority to regulate grazing. That simply isn’t right; the land, like most of Nevada, is federally owned. Bundy is representing himself, of necessity: no lawyer could make that argument.

It is the rest of the post after this paragraph with which I disagree.  He goes on to explain why he is sympathetic to Bundy, which if I may summarize is basically because a) the Feds own too much land and b) they manage this land in a haphazard and politically corrupt manner and c) the Feds let him use this land 100 years ago but now have changed their mind about how they want to use the land.

Fine.  But Bundy is still wrong.  He is trying to exercise property rights over land that is not his.   The owner gave him free use for years and then changed its policy and raised his rent, and eventually tried to evict him.  Conservatives and libertarians don't accept the argument that long-time tenancy on private land gives one quasi-ownership rights (though states like California and cities like New York seem to be pushing law in this direction), so they should not accept it in this case.   You can't defend property rights by trashing property rights.   Had this been a case of the government using its fiat power to override a past written contractual obligation, I would have been sympathetic perhaps, but it is not.

I would love to see a concerted effort to push for government to divest itself of much of its western land.  Ten years ago I would have said I would love to see an effort to manage it better, but I feel like that is impossible in this corporate state of ours.  So the best solution is just to divest.  But I cannot see where the Bundy Ranch is a particularly good case.  Seriously, I would love to see more oil and gas exploration permitted on Federal land, but you won't see me out patting Exxon on the back if they suddenly start drilling on Federal land without permission or without paying the proper royalties. At least the protesters in San Francisco likely don't believe in property rights at all.  Conservatives, what is your excuse?

I suppose we can argue about whether the time for civil disobedience has come, but even if this is the case, we have to be able to find a better example than the Bundy Ranch to plant our flag.

By now, readers will know that our company operates public parks and campgrounds in the National Forest without taking one dime of Federal money.  We pay for the cleaning, maintenance, utilities, and staffing of the facilities entirely from the user fees paid by visitors at the gate.  Because we take no government money(we actually make lease payments to the government) we have never been closed in past shutdowns, but we were closed last week as the White House overruled an early Forest Service decision and ordered us closed.

Well, here is a photo from yesterday of the parking lot of one of the recreation areas we operate and were forced to closed.  Doesn't look very closed, does it?

As it turns out, yesterday the local Sheriff was concerned with traffic jams on the highway near here as people tried to park and walk in.  It is a danger I warned the US Forest Service about way back on October 2 in a letter to Cal Joyner, the Regional Forester for Arizona and New Mexico (and was promptly ignored).  The Sheriff forced the gate open and let everyone in.

The amazing thing I found out today, and confirmed through pictures and news reports, is that the Sheriff was accompanied by US Forest Service personnel who apparently accepted this action.  This means in effect that the US Forest Service believes this site is safe to occupy by visitors without our company present to clean the bathrooms, take out the trash, monitor security, watch for fires, stop vandalism, etc.  but is not safe, somehow, with us present and actively staffing the site.  This obviously makes no sense and just points out how arbitrary the decision-making has been.

Starting yesterday morning I begged the US Forest Service to let us return to staffing the site (which should be an easy decision since, unlike opening National Parks, this would require zero dollars from the government) but I got no response.

We have also found numerous other sites operated by third parties like ourselves on US Forest Service land in Arizona still open.  For example, the Oak Flats campground in the Tonto National Forest is still open for business.  In addition, we know of at least three Arizona State Parks, including Slide Rock SP, that operate on US Forest Service land just as we do but who have not been ordered to close.  I know that Fool Hollow SP operates with a special use permit very similar to ours, but unlike us, its permit has not been temporarily suspended and it is open for business.

In fact, I cannot find a single third party who operates on the National Forests in Arizona who have had their operations suspended except for the private campground concessionaires.   The powerful ski associations got their operations on Forest Service lands exempted from the get-go, probably because they have a full-time lobbying staff in DC and I do not.  The same goes true for BLM lands, where the BLM has not closed its campgrounds or parks to the public.  And the same goes true now for the Grand Canyon NP, which has been reopened by the state of Arizona.  In fact, we may be the only recreation operations on Federal land in this state that are still required to close.

Update:  The Forest Service made us cease operations at the Locket Meadow campground near Flagstaff.  After kicking us out, they have reopened the campground to the public (without any staff or services on site).  It is absolutely outrageous that the US Forest Service believes that the campground is fine for public visitation but that our company must be banned from operating it.  Clearly, the resource and the visitors are safer and better protected and better served with us there, so this can only mean that the Forest Service is for some reason arbitrarily targeting our business, rather than use of the land, for shutdown.  I cannot think of any possible justification for this action.  If the campground is safe for public visitation during the shutdown, it is safer for us to operate and keep clean and protected.

PS-  I should say targeting private SMALL companies.  Large companies with political pull seem to be getting the National Parks open where they have operations.  Just like with Obamacare and nearly everything else in modern government, restrictions are passed on private enterprises but exceptions are granted to those large enough to have staff lawyers, full-time lobbyists, and who can bundle a lot of donations.

What I already knew, before today:  When the timber industry was booming, local governments made out well as Federal law gave them a cut of USFS and BLM timber sales dollars in their county.

What I already knew, before today:  Under environmental pressure, serious logging has virtually ended in the National Forest, particularly in northwestern states like Oregon. 

What I learned today:  For the last 15 years, despite the fact there have been no timber sales, the Feds are still paying local government as if there still were timber sales.  The payments last year were $238 million a year to Oregon counties alone.

And for some reason that nobody seems to be able to understand, the local economies have not adjusted structurally to the new economic reality.  I wonder why?

Of the
county's general fund, a full 67 percent -- about $12
million -- had come from the federal timber payments.

Finally, it looks like Congress may cut them off.  Good.  Because the only thing worse than killing an industry for suspect environmental reasons is continuing to pay that industry for not producing anything.

For those who still can't accept that the current ruling conservatives have shed any last remnants of their libertarian / small-government allies, here's this (sorry, I am a little late on this one):

The latest property rights case to hit the U.S. Supreme Court is a
doozy. Quick background: Harvey Frank Robbins bought a piece of land in
Wyoming. The previous owner had agreed in principle to give the federal
government an easement over the land. But the government agents
neglected to record the easement, so Robbins obtained the land without
it. The federal government came back to reclaim the easement, and
Robbins refused.

In the Legal Times  Tim Sandefur explains what happened next:

"The
federal government doesn't negotiate," one official told him. Instead,
they promised that Robbins' refusal would "come to war" and that they
would give him a "hardball education." Then they began a vendetta
against him that would last to the present day.

They cancelled
his right of way over government-owned land, repeatedly harassed the
guests at his ranch, cited him for minor infractions while letting
similar violations by his neighbors go unnoticed, and brought him up on
criminal charges of interfering with federal agents during their
duties. The jury acquitted him after deliberating for less than 30
minutes.

After enduring years of such treatment, Robbins sued,
arguing, among other things, that the BLM agents had violated his Fifth
Amendment right to exclude others from his property.

The
10th Circuit ruled for Robbins, but the federal government appealed.
Conservatives in particular should take note of the stunning argument
from U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement:

"No
court," said Solicitor General Paul Clement in his brief, has "ever
recognized a constitutional right against retaliation . . . in the
context of property rights."