Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates Warn Against Artificial Intelligence Technology

As technology continues to explode exponentially, science fiction is rapidly becoming science fact. Wednesday on radio, Glenn highlighted several stories involving some of the greatest minds alive. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates are all warning about the dangers of AI and are trying to figure out ways to ensure the survival of the human race.

Listen to this segment from The Glenn Beck Program:

GLENN: I want to share something with you that is going to sound absolutely crazy, much more crazy than when I said, "We're going to be able to print everything. We're going to be able to print organs. We're going to be able to print guns." Remember when I brought the 3D printer on about four years ago, and we were printing little stupid things.

And I remember -- I don't remember who it was, one of the cameramen, it was Justin, right? One of the cameramen was on, and he just shook his head. And I printed a little Batman head for him. And he was like, this is ridiculous. We're not going to be able to print these things. Okay. Sci-fi, and we're going to get flying cars too.

And a year later, we had a guy on the show who gave us a printed -- 3D printed gun that works.

The world is changing. And what this is going to sound like is, you're either a Luddite and you don't want technology -- which is not true. I don't think there's any way to stop this. I think Elon Musk is right on his approach. Or it just sounds so like a movie, like terminator, that you're fighting robots.

And I want you to know that you shouldn't fear the robots. That's not what I'm saying. I want you to hear a story that is on Elon Musk and his billion dollar crusade to stop the AI apocalypse. That's the headline.

It starts with a story that I gave you yesterday in hour number one of this broadcast. And it's Elon Musk. And it's Demis -- Demis, what's his name? Hassabis. And Demis and Elon are having lunch at SpaceX. And Elon says, "I'm working on -- this is the most important project for all of humanity, right now." His trip to Mars. Pat doesn't even think that trip to Mars is going to happen.

PAT: Uh-uh.

GLENN: It will. I'm telling you now, we will colonize Mars. And it won't be done by a government. It will be done by Elon Musk. And here's why: Demis says, "No, you're not working on the most important project. I am." Now, he's in charge of DeepMind. DeepMind is the Google project that is gobbling up every -- everybody who is working on AI. Artificial, super intelligence. And they are racing -- Google and DeepMind are racing to artificial intelligence.

Now, artificial intelligence is going to be fantastic. We will -- through artificial intelligence, we're going to be able to figure out cures to cancer. It's so far beyond any supercomputer. It will be able to learn itself. You won't have to program. You won't have to build. It will build itself. It will teach itself.

It's true artificial intelligence. It is living intelligence. And it will be so far -- we will look like mice to this intelligence.

He said -- Demis said, "Well, no, no, I'm working on the most important project for humankind. I'm working on artificial super intelligence." And that's when Elon Musk said, "No, the reason why I'm going to Mars is to make sure there's a human outpost because you're going to get us all killed."

Now, as crazy as that sounds, these conversations are happening. And they're happening a lot in Silicon Valley, with some of the smartest people out there. People who agree with Elon Musk, that this could be the end of all humanity, within the next 40 years, are Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking and a long list of others. But those are pretty prominent guys.

So if you read the story -- let me just give you a couple of them: Some in Silicon Valley were intrigued to learn that Hassabis, a skilled chess player and former video game designer once came up with a game called Evil HEP Genius, featuring an evil scientist who creates a doomsday device to achieve world domination.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist Donald Trump adviser, who cofounded PayPal with Musk and others and who in December helped gather skeptical Silicon Valley titans, including Musk to meet with Donald Trump, told me a story about an investor in DeepMind, who joked as he left a meeting, quote, does anybody else feel like we ought to shoot Hassabis now because we're approaching our last chance to save the human race?

Elon Musk began warning about the possibility of AI running amuck three years ago. Probably hadn't eased his mind when one of Hassabis' partners in DeepMind, Shane Lang stated flatly, "I think human extinction will probably occur, and this technology will play a part in it."

Okay. So wait. Wait. Shouldn't we put the brakes on that? If somebody said that in your office and other great minds around the world were saying the same thing, wouldn't it be time for you to say, "Hey, guys, can we just stop for a second?"

STU: I oddly do work in an office where someone does say that fairly regularly, just to points that out.

PAT: You do? Where's that? Weird.

STU: I don't know.

GLENN: Before DeepMind was gobbled up by Google in 2014 as part of its Google AI shopping spree, Musk had been an investor in DeepMind.

He told me that his involvement was not about a return on his money, but rather to keep a wary eye on the arc of AI.

It gave me more visibility into the rate at which things are improving. I think they're improving at an accelerating rate, far faster than anybody realizes. Mostly because in everyday life, you don't see robots walking around.

Maybe your Roomba or something. But a Roomba is not going to take over the world.

In a startling public approach to his friends and fellow techies, Musk warned that they could be creating the means of their very own destruction. He told Bloomberg's Ashley Vance, the author of the biography of Elon Musk, that he was afraid that his friend, Larry HEP Page, the cofounder of Google and now the CEO of its parent company, Alphabet, could have perfectly good intentions but still produce something very evil by accident, including possibly a fleet of artificial intelligence enhanced robots capable of destroying all of mankind.

Sometimes, what will happen is a scientist will get so engrossed in their work that they really don't realize the ramifications of what they're doing.

Having some sort of merger with biological intelligence and machine intelligence, it may not be the -- it may be the way to escape human obsolescence. A Vulcan mind meld, if you will.

We're basically already there. We're already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you. But the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow. We're now looking at a neural interlace, a lace inside of your skull that would flash data from your brain wirelessly to your Dylan devices or to virtually any unlimited computing power in the cloud for a means of partial brain interface. We are roughly four years away from that.

STU: Four years away from --

GLENN: Thinking and it doing. Did anybody see --

STU: You're not touching a screen.

GLENN: You're not touching anything.

STU: You're just thinking, I want the temperature to go up in this.

GLENN: And it goes up.

PAT: What? Four years!

GLENN: We're four years away.

PAT: No way.

GLENN: Did anybody see the article yesterday that came out -- for the first -- Pat, for the first time, somebody now has received the first real bionic legs that it operates exactly like your legs do. You think, and it does.

PAT: Boop, boop. Boop. Boop.

STU: I saw that documentary. That's --

GLENN: Yeah.

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: Others, you have to start moving and get, you know -- and get it to move for you. This is now bionic. I believe it -- I believe they were legs, that as you think, it happens. And they have them now with hands --

PAT: Are people being fitted with those?

GLENN: Yes.

PAT: Are they really?

GLENN: Yes. The first one has fitted, and it's working now.

PAT: Oh, how outrageous is that?

GLENN: And that was the story yesterday.

Yeah. So what's the difference between that and this?

PAT: I don't know.

STU: Can we quickly point out that if you can think, I want the temperature to be higher in this room, the divorce rate is going to be 100 percent in this country.

GLENN: Oh, yeah.

PAT: My wife and I are thermostatically incompatible.

(laughter)

GLENN: He went on to say, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning a demon. You know all those stories where there's the guy with the penneagram and the holy water, and he's like, yeah, yeah, no, I -- listen, we can control the demon. I'm just going to call it forth. It doesn't work out, said Musk.

(laughter)

Let's see. Musk is stoit HEP about his setbacks, but all too conscious of the nightmare scenarios. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer, and that is the way he's acted through most of history. We are the first species capable of self-annihilation.

Here's the nagging thought that you can't escape as you drag around from glass box to glass box in Silicon Valley. The lords of the cloud love to yammer about turning the world into a better place as they churn out new algorithms, apps, and inventions, that, it is claimed, will make our lives easier, healthier, funny, closer, cooler, longer, and kinder to the planet.

And yet, as you drive around after these meetings, there's a creepy feeling underneath it all, a sense that we are the mice in their experiments, that they regard us humans as betamaxes HEP or eight tracks. Old technology that will soon be discarded so they can get on with enjoying their new, sleek world.

Many people have already accepted this future. We'll live to be $150, but we'll have machine overlords. They argue not about whether, but rather how close we are to replicating, improving, and replacing ourselves.

Sam Altman, the 31-year-old president of Y Combinator, the Valley's top start accelerator, believes humanity is on the brink of such invention.

The hardest part of standing on an exponential curve is, when you look backward, it looks flat. When you look forward, it looks vertical. It's hard to calibrate how much you're moving because it always looks the same. You'd think that any time Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Gates are raising the same warning about AI, as all of them are, it would be a ten-alarm fire. But for a long time, the fog of fatalism over the Bay area was thick. Musk's crusade was viewed as a Luddite view.

STU: I mean, Elon Musk is not a Luddite. I think that's pretty clear.

JEFFY: No.

GLENN: No. The paradox is this: Many tech oligarchs see everything they're doing to help us, and all of their benevolent manifestos as streetlamps on the road to a future where, as Steve Wozniak says, humans are the streetlamp's pets.

Musk is not going gently. He plans on fighting this with every fiber of his carbon-based being. Musk and Altman have founded Open AI. Now, this is the way to solve it: Open AI, a billion-dollar nonprofit company to work for safer artificial intelligence. His view is, nobody is going to be able to stop this. Nobody is going to be able to stop this. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle. And we're going to have people within ten years that are uploading and are transhumans. They are what's called transhumanism.

As we're talking about the stupid gender and what you feel like today, forget about all that nonsense. Transhumanism is real and it will happen in the next ten years, where you will merge with machines.

He believes that the problem is not -- not robots. The problem is AI merging on the internet.

Now, we saw a documentary with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

STU: Oh, yeah.

GLENN: Where at first you thought that it was the terminator robot that was the problem.

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: And in later --

PAT: It was Skynet.

GLENN: It was Skynet.

PAT: We should have known, it was Skynet.

GLENN: That's what he says is the problem. We'll get back to this here in a second.

[break]

GLENN: Oh, no. I can't take it. I can't take it.

You know, I am full in, on AI. We're going back to Musk here in a second. I'm full-in on super intelligence. I will even be the pet. I will serve Skynet, if it will fix my television.

(laughter)

I cannot get -- it's -- I'm ready to go back to cable.

PAT: What's wrong with it?

GLENN: Oh, the remote control won't control -- won't work with Apple. Sometimes it doesn't work with the cable. You know, sometimes it doesn't turn the TV on at all. Sometimes it will turn everything on, but won't turn on the Apple box.

STU: Ugh.

PAT: And you've obviously had people out to try to fix it.

GLENN: Oh, I can't tell you how many thousands I have probably dumped in this. I just -- just give me a knob. Just give me a knob. Or Skynet. I will serve you, Skynet. I will serve you.

STU: TVs aren't going to work. But the AI thing is going to turn out well.

GLENN: It's going to be really good.

PAT: Really well. Yeah.

URGENT: FIVE steps to CONTROL AI before it's too late!

MANAURE QUINTERO / Contributor | Getty Images

By now, many of us are familiar with AI and its potential benefits and threats. However, unless you're a tech tycoon, it can feel like you have little influence over the future of artificial intelligence.

For years, Glenn has warned about the dangers of rapidly developing AI technologies that have taken the world by storm.

He acknowledges their significant benefits but emphasizes the need to establish proper boundaries and ethics now, while we still have control. But since most people aren’t Silicon Valley tech leaders making the decisions, how can they help keep AI in check?

Recently, Glenn interviewed Tristan Harris, a tech ethicist deeply concerned about the potential harm of unchecked AI, to discuss its societal implications. Harris highlighted a concerning new piece of legislation proposed by Texas Senator Ted Cruz. This legislation proposes a state-level moratorium on AI regulation, meaning only the federal government could regulate AI. Harris noted that there’s currently no Federal plan for regulating AI. Until the federal government establishes a plan, tech companies would have nearly free rein with their AI. And we all know how slowly the federal government moves.

This is where you come in. Tristan Harris shared with Glenn the top five actions you should urge your representatives to take regarding AI, including opposing the moratorium until a concrete plan is in place. Now is your chance to influence the future of AI. Contact your senator and congressman today and share these five crucial steps they must take to keep AI in check:

Ban engagement-optimized AI companions for kids

Create legislation that will prevent AI from being designed to maximize addiction, sexualization, flattery, and attachment disorders, and to protect young people’s mental health and ability to form real-life friendships.

Establish basic liability laws

Companies need to be held accountable when their products cause real-world harm.

Pass increased whistleblower protections

Protect concerned technologists working inside the AI labs from facing untenable pressures and threats that prevent them from warning the public when the AI rollout is unsafe or crosses dangerous red lines.

Prevent AI from having legal rights

Enact laws so AIs don’t have protected speech or have their own bank accounts, making sure our legal system works for human interests over AI interests.

Oppose the state moratorium on AI 

Call your congressman or Senator Cruz’s office, and demand they oppose the state moratorium on AI without a plan for how we will set guardrails for this technology.

Glenn: Only Trump dared to deliver on decades of empty promises

Tasos Katopodis / Stringer | Getty Images

The Islamic regime has been killing Americans since 1979. Now Trump’s response proves we’re no longer playing defense — we’re finally hitting back.

The United States has taken direct military action against Iran’s nuclear program. Whatever you think of the strike, it’s over. It’s happened. And now, we have to predict what happens next. I want to help you understand the gravity of this situation: what happened, what it means, and what might come next. To that end, we need to begin with a little history.

Since 1979, Iran has been at war with us — even if we refused to call it that.

We are either on the verge of a remarkable strategic victory or a devastating global escalation. Time will tell.

It began with the hostage crisis, when 66 Americans were seized and 52 were held for over a year by the radical Islamic regime. Four years later, 17 more Americans were murdered in the U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut, followed by 241 Marines in the Beirut barracks bombing.

Then came the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, which killed 19 more U.S. airmen. Iran had its fingerprints all over it.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, Iranian-backed proxies killed hundreds of American soldiers. From 2001 to 2020 in Afghanistan and 2003 to 2011 in Iraq, Iran supplied IEDs and tactical support.

The Iranians have plotted assassinations and kidnappings on U.S. soil — in 2011, 2021, and again in 2024 — and yet we’ve never really responded.

The precedent for U.S. retaliation has always been present, but no president has chosen to pull the trigger until this past weekend. President Donald Trump struck decisively. And what our military pulled off this weekend was nothing short of extraordinary.

Operation Midnight Hammer

The strike was reportedly called Operation Midnight Hammer. It involved as many as 175 U.S. aircraft, including 12 B-2 stealth bombers — out of just 19 in our entire arsenal. Those bombers are among the most complex machines in the world, and they were kept mission-ready by some of the finest mechanics on the planet.

USAF / Handout | Getty Images

To throw off Iranian radar and intelligence, some bombers flew west toward Guam — classic misdirection. The rest flew east, toward the real targets.

As the B-2s approached Iranian airspace, U.S. submarines launched dozens of Tomahawk missiles at Iran’s fortified nuclear facilities. Minutes later, the bombers dropped 14 MOPs — massive ordnance penetrators — each designed to drill deep into the earth and destroy underground bunkers. These bombs are the size of an F-16 and cost millions of dollars apiece. They are so accurate, I’ve been told they can hit the top of a soda can from 15,000 feet.

They were built for this mission — and we’ve been rehearsing this run for 15 years.

If the satellite imagery is accurate — and if what my sources tell me is true — the targeted nuclear sites were utterly destroyed. We’ll likely rely on the Israelis to confirm that on the ground.

This was a master class in strategy, execution, and deterrence. And it proved that only the United States could carry out a strike like this. I am very proud of our military, what we are capable of doing, and what we can accomplish.

What comes next

We don’t yet know how Iran will respond, but many of the possibilities are troubling. The Iranians could target U.S. forces across the Middle East. On Monday, Tehran launched 20 missiles at U.S. bases in Qatar, Syria, and Kuwait, to no effect. God forbid, they could also unleash Hezbollah or other terrorist proxies to strike here at home — and they just might.

Iran has also threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz — the artery through which nearly a fifth of the world’s oil flows. On Sunday, Iran’s parliament voted to begin the process. If the Supreme Council and the ayatollah give the go-ahead, we could see oil prices spike to $150 or even $200 a barrel.

That would be catastrophic.

The 2008 financial collapse was pushed over the edge when oil hit $130. Western economies — including ours — simply cannot sustain oil above $120 for long. If this conflict escalates and the Strait is closed, the global economy could unravel.

The strike also raises questions about regime stability. Will it spark an uprising, or will the Islamic regime respond with a brutal crackdown on dissidents?

Early signs aren’t hopeful. Reports suggest hundreds of arrests over the weekend and at least one dissident executed on charges of spying for Israel. The regime’s infamous morality police, the Gasht-e Ershad, are back on the streets. Every phone, every vehicle — monitored. The U.S. embassy in Qatar issued a shelter-in-place warning for Americans.

Russia and China both condemned the strike. On Monday, a senior Iranian official flew to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin. That meeting should alarm anyone paying attention. Their alliance continues to deepen — and that’s a serious concern.

Now we pray

We are either on the verge of a remarkable strategic victory or a devastating global escalation. Time will tell. But either way, President Trump didn’t start this. He inherited it — and he took decisive action.

The difference is, he did what they all said they would do. He didn’t send pallets of cash in the dead of night. He didn’t sign another failed treaty.

He acted. Now, we pray. For peace, for wisdom, and for the strength to meet whatever comes next.


This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Globalize the Intifada? Why Mamdani’s plan spells DOOM for America

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

If New Yorkers hand City Hall to Zohran Mamdani, they’re not voting for change. They’re opening the door to an alliance of socialism, Islamism, and chaos.

It only took 25 years for New York City to go from the resilient, flag-waving pride following the 9/11 attacks to a political fever dream. To quote Michael Malice, “I'm old enough to remember when New Yorkers endured 9/11 instead of voting for it.”

Malice is talking about Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist assemblyman from Queens now eyeing the mayor’s office. Mamdani, a 33-year-old state representative emerging from relative political obscurity, is now receiving substantial funding for his mayoral campaign from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

CAIR has a long and concerning history, including being born out of the Muslim Brotherhood and named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding case. Why would the group have dropped $100,000 into a PAC backing Mamdani’s campaign?

Mamdani blends political Islam with Marxist economics — two ideologies that have left tens of millions dead in the 20th century alone.

Perhaps CAIR has a vested interest in Mamdani’s call to “globalize the intifada.” That’s not a call for peaceful protest. Intifada refers to historic uprisings of Muslims against what they call the “Israeli occupation of Palestine.” Suicide bombings and street violence are part of the playbook. So when Mamdani says he wants to “globalize” that, who exactly is the enemy in this global scenario? Because it sure sounds like he's saying America is the new Israel, and anyone who supports Western democracy is the new Zionist.

Mamdani tried to clean up his language by citing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which once used “intifada” in an Arabic-language article to describe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. So now he’s comparing Palestinians to Jewish victims of the Nazis? If that doesn’t twist your stomach into knots, you’re not paying attention.

If you’re “globalizing” an intifada, and positioning Israel — and now America — as the Nazis, that’s not a cry for human rights. That’s a call for chaos and violence.

Rising Islamism

But hey, this is New York. Faculty members at Columbia University — where Mamdani’s own father once worked — signed a letter defending students who supported Hamas after October 7. They also contributed to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. And his father? He blamed Ronald Reagan and the religious right for inspiring Islamic terrorism, as if the roots of 9/11 grew in Washington, not the caves of Tora Bora.

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

This isn’t about Islam as a faith. We should distinguish between Islam and Islamism. Islam is a religion followed peacefully by millions. Islamism is something entirely different — an ideology that seeks to merge mosque and state, impose Sharia law, and destroy secular liberal democracies from within. Islamism isn’t about prayer and fasting. It’s about power.

Criticizing Islamism is not Islamophobia. It is not an attack on peaceful Muslims. In fact, Muslims are often its first victims.

Islamism is misogynistic, theocratic, violent, and supremacist. It’s hostile to free speech, religious pluralism, gay rights, secularism — even to moderate Muslims. Yet somehow, the progressive left — the same left that claims to fight for feminism, LGBTQ rights, and free expression — finds itself defending candidates like Mamdani. You can’t make this stuff up.

Blending the worst ideologies

And if that weren’t enough, Mamdani also identifies as a Democratic Socialist. He blends political Islam with Marxist economics — two ideologies that have left tens of millions dead in the 20th century alone. But don’t worry, New York. I’m sure this time socialism will totally work. Just like it always didn’t.

If you’re a business owner, a parent, a person who’s saved anything, or just someone who values sanity: Get out. I’m serious. If Mamdani becomes mayor, as seems likely, then New York City will become a case study in what happens when you marry ideological extremism with political power. And it won’t be pretty.

This is about more than one mayoral race. It’s about the future of Western liberalism. It’s about drawing a bright line between faith and fanaticism, between healthy pluralism and authoritarian dogma.

Call out radicalism

We must call out political Islam the same way we call out white nationalism or any other supremacist ideology. When someone chants “globalize the intifada,” that should send a chill down your spine — whether you’re Jewish, Christian, Muslim, atheist, or anything in between.

The left may try to shame you into silence with words like “Islamophobia,” but the record is worn out. The grooves are shallow. The American people see what’s happening. And we’re not buying it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Could China OWN our National Parks?

Jonathan Newton / Contributor | Getty Images

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, or Pennsylvania — might not even realize how little land their own states truly control. But the same policies that are plaguing the West could come for them next.

Lee isn’t proposing to auction off Yellowstone or pave over Yosemite. He’s talking about 3 million acres — that’s less than half of 1% of the federal estate. And this land isn’t your family’s favorite hiking trail. It’s remote, hard to access, and often mismanaged.

Failed management

Why was it mismanaged in the first place? Because the federal government is a terrible landlord.

Consider Yellowstone again. It’s home to the last remaining herd of genetically pure American bison — animals that haven’t been crossbred with cattle. Ranchers, myself included, would love the chance to help restore these majestic creatures on private land. But the federal government won’t allow it.

So what do they do when the herd gets too big?

They kill them. Bulldoze them into mass graves. That’s not conservation. That’s bureaucratic malpractice.

And don’t even get me started on bald eagles — majestic symbols of American freedom and a federally protected endangered species, now regularly slaughtered by wind turbines. I have pictures of piles of dead bald eagles. Where’s the outrage?

Biden’s federal land-grab

Some argue that states can’t afford to manage this land themselves. But if the states can’t afford it, how can Washington? We’re $35 trillion in debt. Entitlements are strained, infrastructure is crumbling, and the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and National Park Service are billions of dollars behind in basic maintenance. Roads, firebreaks, and trails are falling apart.

The Biden administration quietly embraced something called the “30 by 30” initiative, a plan to lock up 30% of all U.S. land and water under federal “conservation” by 2030. The real goal is 50% by 2050.

That entails half of the country being taken away from you, controlled not by the people who live there but by technocrats in D.C.

You think that won’t affect your ability to hunt, fish, graze cattle, or cut timber? Think again. It won’t be conservatives who stop you from building a cabin, raising cattle, or teaching your grandkids how to shoot a rifle. It’ll be the same radical environmentalists who treat land as sacred — unless it’s your truck, your deer stand, or your back yard.

Land as collateral

Moreover, the U.S. Treasury is considering putting federally owned land on the national balance sheet, listing your parks, forests, and hunting grounds as collateral.

What happens if America defaults on its debt?

David McNew / Stringer | Getty Images

Do you think our creditors won’t come calling? Imagine explaining to your kids that the lake you used to fish in is now under foreign ownership, that the forest you hunted in belongs to China.

This is not hypothetical. This is the logical conclusion of treating land like a piggy bank.

The American way

There’s a better way — and it’s the American way.

Let the people who live near the land steward it. Let ranchers, farmers, sportsmen, and local conservationists do what they’ve done for generations.

Did you know that 75% of America’s wetlands are on private land? Or that the most successful wildlife recoveries — whitetail deer, ducks, wild turkeys — didn’t come from Washington but from partnerships between private landowners and groups like Ducks Unlimited?

Private stewardship works. It’s local. It’s accountable. It’s incentivized. When you break it, you fix it. When you profit from the land, you protect it.

This is not about selling out. It’s about buying in — to freedom, to responsibility, to the principle of constitutional self-governance.

So when you hear the pundits cry foul over 3 million acres of federal land, remember: We don’t need Washington to protect our land. We need Washington to get out of the way.

Because this isn’t just about land. It’s about liberty. And once liberty is lost, it doesn’t come back easily.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.