An aerial view of federal land near Nine Mile Canyon, Utah. Photo / James Roh, the Washington Post
To his surprise, Patrick Payne had ended up in a group text with Mike Lee.
Payne is a conservative Idaho outdoorsman who voted for United States President Donald Trump.
Lee is a Republican senator from Utah.
The group was organised by an acquaintance Payne made online, and the topic was homeschooling.
Payne saw an opportunity to directly challenge Lee on his proposal to sell up to 3.3 million acres (1.3 million hectares) of federal land in 11 Western states for the construction of affordable housing.
He texted the senator that Washington was “better than BlackRock”, the global investment firm.
Lee’s response - that he’d “trust anyone owning that land more than the US government” - floored Payne. Several days later, he posted a screenshot of the exchange on X.
“I thought it was important to let people know where he really stood,” said Payne, who spends much of his free time camping and hunting on federal backcountry in Idaho.
That screenshot, posted by a self-described “regular citizen” with few online followers, racked up half a million views and became a flash point in a conservative revolt against Lee’s proposal, one powered by hunters but also prominent podcasters and far-right activists.
When Lee scaled back his amendment to the One Big Beautiful Bill in late June, he said he had listened to hunters.
When he fully withdrew it days later, he said he had been unable to guarantee the land would go to American families, “not to China, not to BlackRock, and not to any foreign interests”.
Its end was met with celebration across the political landscape by Americans who treasure public parks, forests and open spaces.
Yet, as even some liberal advocates acknowledge, the victory was one carried over the finish line by Maga Republicans and others on the right.
They embraced big government when it came to public lands in the West, where the federal government owns nearly half the terrain.
Steven Rinella, a Montana hunting influencer who runs the MeatEater media company, said he thought Lee was surprised by the “primary combatants” who proved pivotal.
“It was like, ‘Oh, all these people that might otherwise agree with me on a broad spectrum of political questions and considerations are really pissed about this.”
The conservatives’ defence of federal terrain is threaded with references not to Sierra Club founder John Muir but to former president Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent hunter who designated millions of acres as public.
Their emphasis is on wild land as an American birthright and embodiment of freedom, held in trust by the government but owned by the people. The latter is a point long made by liberals.
In some ways, such widespread resistance should not have been surprising.
A more modest House proposal to sell federal land in Nevada and Utah had already been scuttled after opposition led by Montana Representative Ryan Zinke (Republican), a former interior secretary who called public land sales his “San Juan Hill”.
Eight years earlier, public outcry forced Utah Represent Jason Chaffetz (Republican) to withdraw a bill that would have transferred 3 million acres of land from federal to state ownership.
On the other hand, resentment against federal landlords, from both Western ranchers and Western politicians, has been simmering since the Sagebrush Rebellion of the ’70s and ’80s.
Trump himself has advocated using federal land for housing. And in what was a clear effort to secure the votes of lawmakers in Montana - where sales are a political third rail - Lee’s proposal exempted public land there.
Betting on those dynamics was a profound misreading of Trump-era conservatism, said Christopher Rufo, a right-wing culture warrior in Washington state who campaigned against the sell-off, which he described as a vestige of libertarianism that today is waning among Republicans.
“Pre-2016, you’d have the small government argument against a kind of federal domination over the land, but Trump and Maga is a nationalist movement,” he said.
“I think many conservatives are now reassessing these questions, and many of us in the West understand that part of a great nation is the preservation of its natural beauty.”
Trump just signed an executive order seeking to “Make America Beautiful Again” and establishing a council tasked with, among other things, preserving public lands.
The order was pushed by a conservative environmentalist who heads Nature Is Nonpartisan, a newly formed advocacy group.
Many people saw Lee’s proposal as selling off public lands to the highest bidder, noted Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition, a right-of-centre advocacy group: “Which is kind of like a new form of economic royalty in America that most people just see as un-American.”
Idaho horseman and meat salesman Braxton McCoy, who became a star of the online right’s uprising, made a similar point about the origins of Western land in a recent interview with Shawn Ryan, a former Navy Seal who hosts a top-20 podcast featuring interviews with veterans.
“Conquest - war, treaties, purchase. That’s how we did it,” said McCoy, a Iraq War veteran, extolling the freedom to hunt, fish, recreate, admire the scenery and go “looking at the freaking stars” on public lands.
He told Ryan, they are “a place where the everyday American can go live like a king used to”.
Ryan shared excerpts from the interview on social media on June 28, along with exhortations that followers call their senators to oppose public land sales. Lee withdrew his proposal that night.
The senator, whose office declined to comment, accused the left of trying to “dupe conservatives” with misinformation about a plan he said would address housing shortages in the West. While the initial version would have mandated the sale of millions of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management acreage, Lee said those would not include the stunning vistas of Western tourism brochures.
His approach is not a fringe idea; some of the region’s Democratic governors also support the acquisition of federal land near cities.
But critics on both the right and left dissected the plan, noting that it gave sole discretion over sales to the interior and agriculture secretaries, didn’t require that land be used for housing and left open the possibility of sales to private buyers who could outbid local governments.
One other point: The measure did, in fact, make eligible for sale some wilderness sacred to outdoors enthusiasts.
Randy Newberg, a Montanan who owns the Hunt Talk forum and podcast, said the proposal was all the hunting community talked about once it surfaced. He said he told Republican lobbyists and advisers in Washington as much when they called for his take on the backlash.
“I said, if you people continue down this path, the pressure you guys are going to expose yourselves to is immense. Because a lot of the people advising elected officials, politicians, don’t live it, breathe it, eat it like we do,” Newberg said.
Westerners, he added, “live here because of what those lands provide them - the opportunity of real freedom”.
Joining the chorus of opposition were Trump supporter and No. 1 podcaster Joe Rogan and right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich.
Montana’s Republican senators were against the proposal. Idaho’s eventually joined them.
In interviews, some conservatives said they support the idea of reforms to improve and speed existing processes for federal land swaps or transfers.
Increased extraction and logging on those lands, which the Trump Administration wants, doesn’t trouble them. Affordable housing is different, though; they say the better solution is to turn away or deport immigrants and revitalise vacant properties in cities such as Detroit.
Lee’s scaled-back version took Forest Service land out of the equation and limited sales to within five miles (8km) of population centres. Still, it didn’t assuage their concerns.
“Common sense tells you we don’t sell one acre, not one,” said Terry Zink, a Marion, Montana, resident who owns an archery business and hunts mountain lions, bears, and bobcats with his team of hounds.
Zink, 59, was a teen when his father moved the family from southern New York to Montana for the hunting, fishing, and landscape.
He wants his children and grandchildren to be able to enjoy the land as he did, and he has watched with worry as more property has been bought by rich out-of-staters and developers who do not allow hunting.
He wrote half a dozen times to his Republican senators, telling them the party needed to get the public lands issue right.
“We’ve got to stick up for everybody in the West, not just Montana,” Zink said. “It’s only fair that everybody gets to use these lands, people from all over the US.”
Payne, a sales representative who co-hosts a podcast on Mountain West topics with fellow Idahoan McCoy, said he spent the last few weeks registering his discontent by calling lawmakers in Washington, tagging them online, sending emails and letters and encouraging everyone he knew to do the same.
He also found himself tussling with Lee online.
Payne calls himself a “son of the Mountain West”, with roots in Utah and cherished memories shaped on public land. He also lived for a time in Texas, where more than 96% of the land is private.
“It was tough,” he said. “There was just no place to go recreate outdoors without getting permission.”
Hopeful liberals and some conservatives have posited that the right’s rebellion over public land sales could make Trump vulnerable.
Lee’s pitch was “political poison for the GOP,” far-right publisher Jonathan Keeperman wrote on Substack recently, which “risks inflicting serious collateral damage on the broader Trump agenda”.
The public lands battle has not shifted Payne’s political affiliation.
“I don’t think it’s going to change my views on transgender surgeries for kids or anything, but I do think there’s some common ground we can find,” he said.
“When you’re out in the backcountry, you’ll see people who are a little more granola-type. They’ve got cameras around their neck instead of rifles. And that’s fine, you know - this land’s for everybody.”