"This Land WAS Our Land. From California to the New York Island."
The Profound Loss of Public Lands for Timber, Mining and Corporate Farming is Happening in the Chaos that is Trumpism.
The past weeks have offered America a clinic in misdirection, but perhaps that's giving too much credit to intentional strategy when what we're witnessing might simply be the natural result of unleashing chaos at a velocity that makes comprehension impossible. While the nation fixated on theatrical pandemonium—the Epstein files surfacing like some ghoulish jack-in-the-box, the bombardment of Gaza and Qatar, Venezuelan boats under attack, Putin's drones violating Polish airspace, and the shocking intensity surrounding Charlie Kirk's murder—another horror story was unfolding in federal agencies across Washington. There, wrapped in the seductive rhetoric of returning to traditional American values, the Trump administration has been systematically dynamiting nearly a century of regulatory protections with the methodical precision of a demolition crew operating at warp speed.
This is the Project 2025 playbook: flood the zone with so much simultaneous upheaval that Americans lose all sense of orientation, their capacity for sustained attention fractured across a dozen crises occurring simultaneously. It's governance by cognitive overload, where the sheer velocity of change makes meaningful resistance—or even comprehension—nearly impossible. While citizens are still processing one dramatic policy shift, three more have already been implemented with the breathless efficiency of a cable news ticker scrolling past their ability to focus.
Trump's pitch is to strip away the suffocating web of modern regulations and return America to a simpler, more prosperous time when men were men, business was business, and government didn't strangle the entrepreneurial spirit. It's a seductive vision, painted in Norman Rockwell hues and seasoned with just enough nostalgia to make even skeptics wonder if we've lost something essential. But the speed at which this vision is being implemented makes careful consideration impossible—by the time Americans understand what's being dismantled, the wrecking ball has already moved on to the next target.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's announcement about repealing public lands protections came sandwiched between seventeen other policy reversals that week, each demanding its own analysis, its own outrage, its own mobilization of opposition that never materializes because the human attention span wasn't designed for this volume of simultaneous assault.
The genius of the Project 2025 strategy lies in its understanding of human cognitive limitations. Americans are creatures of sequential processing, built to handle one crisis at a time, to deliberate, debate, and decide before moving to the next challenge. But democracy requires time: time for public comment periods, legislative hearings, and for citizens to understand policy implications and organize meaningful responses. The Trump administration has weaponized velocity itself, creating a tsunami of change that moves faster than democratic institutions were ever designed to process.
Let's take a stroll down memory lane to this golden age that Trump and his lieutenants so lovingly invoke. America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, that glorious epoch before the jackboot of regulation stamped out free enterprise. It was indeed a time of unfettered capitalism, when titans of industry like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan built their empires without the annoying interference of safety inspectors, environmental assessments, or worker protection laws. It was also an era when change moved at a pace that allowed society to adapt, where the robber barons at least operated within a temporal framework that permitted opposition to organize and eventually triumph.
Today's robber barons have learned from their predecessors' mistakes. Why allow opposition the luxury of time to coalesce when you can implement changes faster than resistance can form? This was the era when coal miners worked in conditions so dangerous that cave-ins and explosions were considered routine occupational hazards. In 1907 alone, more than 3,200 miners died in workplace accidents—not because the technology didn't exist to make mining safer, but because safety measures cut into profit margins. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 incinerated 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women, trapped behind locked exits that management had installed to prevent theft. Their charred bodies piled up against doors that opened inward, inspiring decades of fire safety regulations that Trump's deregulation warriors now view as bureaucratic overreach.
This was the America where meat packers swept rat droppings into sausage machines and sold tuberculosis-infected beef to unsuspecting families. Where patent medicines promised miracle cures while delivering alcohol, opium, and occasionally death. Where rivers ran the colors of whatever chemicals local factories were dumping, and cities were shrouded in smoke so thick that street lamps burned at midday. But even then, reformers had time to investigate, expose, and mobilize public opinion. Upton Sinclair could spend months researching "The Jungle," muckraking journalists could build sustained campaigns, and progressive politicians could craft legislative responses that lasted decades.
The Project 2025 approach eliminates such luxuries. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio became so polluted with industrial waste that it literally caught fire—repeatedly between 1936 and 1969. Lake Erie was declared dead, its waters so choked with industrial runoff that fish couldn't survive. The air in Pittsburgh was so thick with steel mill smoke that office workers changed their white shirts twice daily. But those disasters unfolded over decades, allowing environmental movements to build, scientists to study, and regulations to emerge. Today's environmental rollbacks happen at tweet-speed, faster than ecosystems can collapse, faster than scientists can issue warnings.
The regulations that Trump now demonizes weren't born from bureaucratic tyranny; they were written in the blood of workers, the tears of families, and the ecological collapse of entire regions. But they were also written slowly, through democratic processes that allowed for debate, amendment, and public input—processes that the Project 2025 strategy has rendered obsolete through sheer temporal overwhelm.
Consider the Federal Communications Commission's announcement soliciting suggestions for rules to eliminate, titled "DELETE, DELETE, DELETE." The regulations they're eager to incinerate exist because early radio and television were chaotic free-for-alls where powerful transmitters drowned out weaker ones, emergency frequencies were jammed by commercial broadcasters, and children's programming was nothing but toy advertisements. But the FCC announcement came during a week when Americans were also processing immigration raids, energy policy reversals, education funding cuts, and healthcare regulation changes—a cognitive load that makes sustained focus on any single issue nearly impossible.
The Project 2025 strategy recognizes that human attention operates like a spotlight, capable of illuminating only one area at a time with sufficient intensity to drive action. Flood that spotlight with a dozen simultaneous demands, and it becomes a flickering strobe, providing neither the sustained illumination necessary for understanding nor the focused intensity required for resistance.
When Trump's team targets nursing home staffing requirements, they're returning us to an era when elderly Americans warehoused in understaffed facilities died from neglect with the regularity of seasonal flu outbreaks. The Mine Safety and Health Administration's crystalline silica protections—now under assault—exist because miners' lungs were once considered acceptable collateral damage. But these attacks happen simultaneously with rollbacks across dozens of other agencies, creating a cacophony of crisis that overwhelms the public's capacity to respond.
Russell Vought, the pale avatar of bureaucratic destruction orchestrating this regulatory apocalypse, has instructed agencies to bypass the public comment periods required by the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act. For regulations too legally entrenched to immediately obliterate, the administration simply refuses to enforce them while implementing seventeen other policy changes that week. This approach relies on the 1985 Supreme Court decision Heckler v. Chaney, which established that agencies' enforcement decisions are generally beyond judicial review.
The velocity itself becomes a form of authoritarianism. When change happens faster than democratic institutions can process, democracy ceases to function even if its formal structures remain intact. Elections become meaningless when policies can be reversed faster than voters can understand their implications. Congressional oversight becomes impossible when the targets of investigation multiply faster than hearings can be scheduled.
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence tool, deployed to scour federal regulations for elimination targets, represents the perfect marriage of 21st-century technology with 19th-century morality operating at inhuman speed. The AI isn't identifying outdated regulations so much as systematically targeting any rule that dares to prioritize human welfare over corporate profits, and it's doing so faster than human minds can comprehend the implications of each targeted regulation.
Steve Cicala of the National Bureau of Economic Research captured the stakes: airplane safety, baby formula safety, the safety of meat and packaged foods, the water we drink, workplace safety—all hanging in the balance. But his warning gets lost in the noise of simultaneous crises, another voice in a cacophony of experts trying to warn about dangers that multiply faster than warnings can be issued.
Trump's nostalgic vision isn't a return to some lost paradise—it's a reversion to an era when corporations externalized their costs onto workers, communities, and the environment while privatizing their profits, but now accelerated to a pace that makes the historical comparison almost quaint. The original robber barons operated within constraints of time and communication that at least allowed opposition to eventually organize. Today's digital robber barons have eliminated time itself as a constraint.
The rhetoric of populism seamlessly masks the reality of plutocracy accelerated beyond democratic comprehension. Trump presents himself as the champion of forgotten Americans fighting against elite bureaucrats, while simultaneously appointing industry insiders to dismantle the very protections that keep those forgotten Americans from being forgotten corpses. Doug Burgum announces the death of conservation protections while speaking to energy executives in Milan—a location chosen with all the subtle symbolism of a mob boss conducting business in a cemetery.
When Burgum declares that artificial intelligence is more important than climate change because power is needed immediately, he's providing a glimpse behind the curtain at the real priorities driving this administration. But his statement gets buried beneath an avalanche of simultaneous policy announcements, another data point in an information stream moving too fast for traditional journalism to track or citizens to process.
The administration's timeline reveals a sophisticated understanding of how to weaponize velocity itself against democratic institutions. The frustrations from Trump's first term, when regulatory rollbacks moved at the glacial pace of actual democratic deliberation, crystallized into a determination to circumvent democracy entirely through the simple expedient of moving faster than democracy can function. The Supreme Court's convenient decisions limiting agency authority provided the legal cover, Vivek Ramaswamy mapped out the strategy, and Russell Vought orchestrated the execution with digital precision.
The 60-day deadline for agencies to compile their regulatory hit lists isn't evidence of efficiency—it's proof of predetermined outcomes implemented at inhuman speed. What we're witnessing is the bureaucratic equivalent of a demolition derby, where the only measure of success is how quickly and thoroughly the destruction can be accomplished.
Kent Lassman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute offers the most accidentally revealing metaphor when he describes regulations as sedimentary rock that's been building up for hundreds of years. Indeed they are—layer upon layer of hard-won protections built through decades of struggle, each stratum representing lives lost, communities poisoned, and environments destroyed in the pursuit of unregulated profit. But now we're witnessing the regulatory equivalent of strip mining, where entire geological eras of democratic progress are being dynamited away in weeks.
These regulatory protections weren't formed by natural geological processes—they were built by people who witnessed the carnage of unfettered capitalism and decided that human dignity and environmental stewardship were worth more than corporate convenience. The Clean Air Act emerged from choking smog that killed thousands. Food safety regulations came from children dying of contaminated milk. Mining safety rules were paid for with the lives of workers crushed in preventable accidents.
The tragedy is that Trump's supporters, many of whom work in the very industries that will be affected by this deregulation, have been sold a bill of goods wrapped in the flag and delivered at a pace that makes critical evaluation impossible. The coal miners cheering the elimination of silica dust protections don't realize they're applauding their own death sentences. The families living downstream from chemical plants don't understand that energy independence means their children will drink poison. The workers in meat processing plants don't grasp that reducing bureaucratic burden means returning to the days when workplace injuries were considered the cost of doing business.
This isn't a return to American greatness—it's a reversion to American greed, dressed up in patriotic nostalgia and sold with the efficiency of a carnival barker hawking miracle cures at auction speed. The American way of life being protected isn't the life of working Americans; it's the lifestyle of corporate executives who view human suffering and environmental destruction as acceptable externalities in the pursuit of quarterly profit targets.
As this unprecedented experiment in regulatory demolition unfolds across hundreds of federal agencies at warp speed, the pattern becomes unmistakable: every rollback benefits corporate interests at the expense of public welfare, every elimination of oversight removes barriers to private profit accumulation, and every appeal to traditional values masks unprecedented greed implemented at velocities that make traditional democratic resistance structurally impossible. The great unraveling has begun, accelerated beyond the capacity of democratic institutions to respond, and the only thing golden about this age will be the bank accounts of those wealthy enough to profit from the misery of everyone else.
You can always email me at: Josh@thepowellhousepress.com