The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 23, 2014, at a Hillsdale College event in
Colorado Springs, Colorado.
For many or maybe even most Americans, reports that a rancher in Clark County,
Nevada, was at odds with federal land bureaucrats, that scores of federal lawyers were litigating
against him, and that SWAT-garbed and heavily armed federal law-enforcement officers had
surrounded his place might have come as a surprise. They might have been even more
surprised, in the wake of this standoff—which ended short of deadly escalation thanks in part
to negotiations by a local sheriff—to hear that over 50 elected officials from nine Western states
had gathered in Utah to discuss a state takeover of a significant portion of federally owned land
in the American West. But Westerners—especially rural Westerners who make a living on the
federal lands that predominate beyond the hundredth meridian, by logging, mining, ranching,
or developing energy resources—were not surprised at all.
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