The concrete parking lot was radiating heat outside of Mercury Studios in Irving, home of notoriously weepy conservative pundit Glenn Beck’s media empire. A faux colonnade painted on one side of an otherwise unremarkable building presaged the menagerie of kitschy Americana inside, where the far-right True Texas Project was about to hold a meeting. Headlining the event was Margaret Byfield, executive director of American Stewards of Liberty (ASL), a nonprofit based in Georgetown, Texas, that is best known for trying to whittle down the number of animals on the endangered species list.
Byfield had come to North Texas to discuss a relatively new initiative for ASL, one she and her husband Dan have spent the last year and change traveling the country promoting. They were there, in Margaret’s words, to “build the fighting force” to lobby against what she frames as one of the largest “land grabs” in history.
The Byfields have led fights over property rights and habitat protection with great intensity for decades. Margaret’s father, Wayne Hage, was the subject of one of the largest takings cases in history, Hage v. United States, for failing to pay grazing fees after using public land. Margaret Byfield launched the property rights group Stewards of the Range in 1992, which later merged with American Stewards of Liberty in 2009. ASL is now leading the crusade against a conservation agenda known as the 30 by 30 Initiative. Under 30 by 30, countries are encouraged to voluntarily set aside 30 percent of their ocean and land as protected areas by 2030 in order to reduce threats posed by climate change. It first emerged in 2019 as a proposal in the journal Science Advances and was quickly championed by a number of organizations, including the Center for American Progress—a fact that Byfield presented as a dire portent.
