Trump dramatically SHRINKS Bears Ears National Monument and slashes another by half in the name of ‘states’ rights’

AGENDA 21 RADIO

President Donald Trump unveiled a plan Monday in Utah to dramatically scale back two national monuments – calling it an important move for ‘states’ rights.’

‘Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They’re wrong,’ he said in the cavernous Utah Capitol Rotunda in Salt Lake City.

‘The families and communities of Utah know and love this land the best. And you know the best how to take care of your land. You know how to protect it, and you know best how to conserve this land for many, many generations to come,’ he said.

‘Your timeless bond with the outdoors should not be replaced with the whims of regulators thousands and thousands of miles away. They don’t know your land, and truly they don’t care for your land like you do.’

The Bears Ears and the Grand-Staircase Escalante national monuments span millions of acres in Utah and are among 27 national monuments that Trump ordered his Interior Secretary to review earlier this year.

The result, he said, is that ‘public lands will once again be for public use.’

As Trump signed a proclamation rolling back the Obama- and Clinton-era national monument designations, his audience briefly broke into a chant of ‘Four more years!’

‘We’re going to be doing something that the state of Utah and others have wanted to be done for many, many years,’ the president said as he left the White House.

‘It will be one of the great, really, events in this country in a long time. So important for states’ rights and so important for the people of Utah.’

Trump commented Monday as he left the White House for a trip to Salt Lake City.

Trump previously had condemned the act of creating the Utah monuments as a ‘massive federal land grab.’

Utah Republican leaders had complained that the monuments locked up too much federal land.

And Trump said ‘this tragic federal overreach’ had resulted in ‘harmful restrictions on hunting, ranching and responsible economic development.’

President Trump arrived in Utah on Monday, greeting well-wishers ahead of a speech where he will declare a rollback of multimillion-acre plots of federally protected lands

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told a crowd in the Utah Capitol Rotunda that the Antiquities Act, an obscure law that Barack Obama used to broaden federal monuments in Utah, ‘was never meant to prevent. It was meant to protect.’

‘Our public land is for the public to use,’ Zinke said.

During his short Utah visit, the president also met with leaders from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and toured the Mormon ‘Welfare Square,’ a facility that provides aid – and jobs – to poor families.

He complimented the LDS leaders for ‘the respect you have all over the world’ for taking care of people.

But outside, riot police had to disperse a crowd of people jeering the president with shouts of ‘Shame on you!’

Other protesters outside the state capitol yelled ‘F**k you Trump!’ as the president’s motorcade sped by

Trump traveled to Utah with Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utahan who has been in office since 1977 and faces a decision soon about whether to run for an eighth term.

Asked Monday if he was encouraging Hatch to run again, Trump gave reporters a clear ‘yes.’

Protesters yelled ‘Shame on You!’ and ‘F**k you Trump!’ on Monday in front of the Utah state capitol; a different group of activists were dispersed by riot police outside the LDS Welfare Square facility

That’s seen as a move to block Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee – who has been openly hostile to Trump – from running.

Asked if he was sending a message to Romney, Trump would only say: ‘He’s a good man. Mitt’s a good man.’

Hatch introduced Trump on Monday, saying he had the ‘redundant task’ of introducing the most famous man in the world.

Trump’s move to shrink the sprawling Utah national monuments by nearly two-thirds overall has drawn howls from environmentalists and some tribal leaders, who call the move illegal and another affront to Native Americans.

San Juan County, Utah Commissioner Rebecca Benally, a Navajo native, spoke Monday before Trump and said she was outraged by the establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument ‘in our own backyard.’

Benally, a Democrat, said her people had been denied access to ‘an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware’ where they had harvested medicinal plants and harvested wood for centuries.

She cast the battle over Bears Ears as a struggle between natives who want to stay connected to their ancestral lands and bureaucrats who want to control them.

 

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