”Market-Based” Environmentalism = Yellowstone Buffalo Genocide

Steve Kelly

February 10, 2026

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Bison in Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Jim Pearce, National Park Service.

Yellowstone bison have flourished for more than 10,000 years. In the 1830s settler-colonialists and other two-legged parasites nearly wiped them out.  Now, almost 200 years later, the old cognitive model, Manifest Destiny, possesses a new plundering herd of uber-wealthy, neo-colonialists engaged in what can best be described as slow-motion domestication, or in other words, buffalo genocide.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, the BLM (Bureau of Land Management), National Park Service, APHIS-USDA (Animal Plant Health Inspection Service), and U.S. Forest Service-USDA are working in lockstep to seize/plunder grass and land that sustains wild Yellowstone bison. Their aim is to boost domestic livestock production on private and tribal lands in Montana and ‘juice’ commercial North American buffalo-meat markets.

The scene in 2026 is ridiculously unreasonable, highly dubious, and sorrowful.  The federal government’s insistence that it’s “…following the law and putting Montanans first” is on its face is laughable and miserably inadequate.  Laugh out loud?  Or you can fight back tears and grieve for the last wild buffalo herds being systematically slaughtered throughout Yellowstone National Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Again!  We have all watched this tragic spaghetti western rerun before, ad nauseum. Government bureaucrats talk in riddles and tongues.

Example #1: Abduction, Quarantine, Extraordinary Rendition

Yellowstone National Park’s Bison Conservation Transfer Program operates like the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program following 9/11. Wild buffalo are snatched from Yellowstone Park, families are torn apart, individuals are tortured in federal prison (quarantine pens) for years and disappeared from their ancestral homelands forever.

Apparently, the government’s aim is to objectify (convert public wildlife and habitat into marketable private property) and tame wild Yellowstone bison and the ecosystem upon which they depend. Once domesticated from years of physical and mental abuse in captivity, separated from their homeland and families, these highly intelligent, sentient beings are converted into a cold-blooded commodity, or things to be marketed like cattle, sheep, or human sex slaves – to meet man’s demand for red meat.

This government program is all about political and social appearances and market-based faux environmentalism.  “Big Green” groups provide greenwash (smoke screen) for a fee in exchange for political cover for greedy individuals and corporations who manipulate the masses, exploit public land and wildlife, and Congress for profit and power.

Recently, seventy-three (73) wild bison – 35 adult females, 36 calves, and two adult male detainees – were abducted from Yellowstone and trucked over 500 miles from quarantine (held captive at a ‘black site’ for years) near Gardiner, Montana to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Eastern Montana. In this final phase their free-roaming instincts (purpose) to migrate and defend the herd have been suppressed, murdered.

This latest bison transfer brings the total to 487 animals abducted and transported to the Fort Peck Tribes for their final year of quarantine and brucellosis testing before being redistributed as domestic livestock or slaughtered to supply the fledgling international buffalo-meat trade.

Montana press has reported that the 500-mile trip for wild bison is being funded and promoted by Defenders of Wildlife who hire the trucks and drivers and assist with disease testing once the animals are detained at the Fort Peck reservation.

These traumatized wild animals were originally captured in the winter of 2022-23 and held at Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS-USDA) pens to ensure they could not transmit brucellosis, a disease originally imported to Montana by domestic cattle.  One should consider APHIS as the forerunner of ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), enforcers of ‘white man’s’ plant and animal world simulation. Both manifest the same rabid behavior as quasi-military ‘word-spinners’ and violent anti-lifers.

Fact: The actual risk of brucellosis transmission from Yellowstone bison to domestic livestock is 0%.  Not a single case in 200 years, not one.  Elk, yes, buffalo, no.

What’s ‘Greenwashing’ worth?  Qui bono?  

All this seems to benefit an incestuous colony of government bureaucrats, government agents and political hacks working at faux-environmental organizations, Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council member groups, and billionaire ‘wannabe cowboy’ tax dodgers and their heavily subsidized livestock herds.

Defenders of Wildlife is now partnering with the feds, the tribes, cattle ranchers. Defenders supplies the trucks and drivers and assists with brucellosis testing and torture of once-wild Yellowstone buffalo while they’re in lockdown at the Fort Peck reservation.

The Bison Conservation Transfer Program is a partnership that includes Yellowstone National Park, the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, APHIS, Montana Department of Livestock, the State of Montana, Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council, Yellowstone Forever, Defenders of Wildlife and Greater Yellowstone Coalition.

Example #2:  American Prairie is Buffalo Game-Farming

Outside Yellowstone National Park, there is almost always a fence keeping kidnapped buffalo from wandering off, migrating, or behaving like all other wildlife species. There are no actual wild, free-roaming bison (wildlife) within the fenced perimeter of American Prairie’s privately-owned game farm – all 900 animals are managed as livestock.

According to the Montana State Veterinary Lab in Bozeman…

American Prairie’s bison herd is actively managed as livestock.  They are regularly handled, herded, ear tagged, PIT tagged, and have been branded when required.

These bison are corralled and put into a squeeze chute to undergo vaccinations as per regulations, screened for disease…

Very few people singing the praises of American Prairie’s operations today are aware of the origin of this market-based (classic neoliberal economic model), privatized ‘conservation’ planning prototype, initiated, and coordinated in 2001 by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

In March 2001, the Montana Prairie Foundation, a non-profit foundation, was formed.  WWF provided critical research, inventories, migration studies, monitoring and began reintroducing bison to the American Prairie Reserve, now called American Prairie.

More Sentimental Greenwash

Moreover, an aggressive propaganda campaign is re-framing the narrative on national TV and social media feeds, luring eyes away from the reality of buffalo abduction, torture, and genocide.  What appears instead to the unsuspecting public is a “win-win” human-interest lullaby dripping with buffalo bliss, interagency cooperation and interracial peace and harmony. These pseudo-events (perennial propaganda campaigns) spread high-volume Greenwash through a firehose to gaslight voters before the next election.  Shamelessly, Defenders is “Johnny-on-the-spot” providing Greenwash and manpower to cover up all the buffalo blood, and the Democratic Party’s extreme indifference to the atrocities and pathological mistreatment of Yellowstone’s wild buffalo herds – all for a few votes in 2026.

Faux environmentalism is the raison d’être (purpose) for “Big Green,” Washington, D.C.-based organizations, who talk the talk in public, but always act with laser focus to elect Democrats. Strengthening environmental protection laws to benefit America’s declining wildlife populations is the false front employed to dupe the public.

The buffalo transfer program established a programmatic conduit and monetized, government-subsidized market for the liquidation of wild Yellowstone buffalo into a steady flow of red meat offered up to hunters willing to pay, and tribes willing to accept live animals and free butchered meat from the federal government.  Cleverly, the program exploits a Montana State legal loophole around the law which prohibits ‘game farms.’

Tribal and state hunters kill wild Yellowstone buffalo relocated onto fenced-in pastureland (there is always a fence) i.e., ‘game farms’ outside Yellowstone National Park.  Others are handed over to participating tribes for slaughter.

Likewise, American Prairie has marketed, ‘hunted’ and slaughtered hundreds of its bison herd for private consumption regardless of its non-profit tax status.

Free meat buys votes, generates revenues, and enriches a handful of useful faux-green puppets who help organize and perpetuate the subterfuge.  Think of it as money laundering, but instead of currency, buffalo meat, sourced in Yellowstone National Park is the medium of exchange.

From a wild bison’s perspective this represents the ultimate objectification, commercialization, and commodification of free-roaming, migratory Yellowstone buffalo. An abducted, transferred, fenced wild buffalo is a dead buffalo!  Now, can we all see more clearly similarities to international human trafficking, the sex-slave industry and links to off-shore banking (money laundering)?

Under the current political system, the American people have no control over what their government does.  Historically, voters switch periodically from one oligarchic puppet herd to another oligarchic puppet herd, seldom, if ever, becoming fully aware of the fundamental power structure under which we all live.  This is plutocracy/oligarchy, not democracy, or a constitutional republic.

As the bourgeois, dancing-puppet herds rock on, bedazzled by AI-induced hallucinations, mired in deep denial and gross mass indifference, won’t somebody, please, give me a buffalo cheeseburger?

Steve (“guitar”) Miller’s 1968 classic tune, Livin’ in the U.S.A., lives on.

Steve Kelly is a an artist and environmental activist. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.  

We All Need to Have a Serious Conversation About Revolution

Nicky Reid

February 9, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Well, it’s official dearest motherfuckers, America has become the world’s largest third world dictatorship. If the first two months of 2026 don’t prove this to you with flying colors than I’m terrified to ask what will. Since Christmas, Donald Trump has been swinging the Executive Office high above his head like some sick orange Gogo Yubari with a White House shaped meteor hammer, decapitating everything in sight.

He has kidnapped another nation’s strongman and held what’s left of his regime hostage for their entire oil industry like some God sized Baby Face Nelson. He has bluntly demanded that Europe hand over Greenland like a lunchroom dessert and threatened to just run it over with his bike if they refuse.

He has also turned an entire department of the federal government into his own private paramilitario that raids American cities like masked Mongol hordes and leaves poorly trained, twenty-year old trolls to police the streets with machine guns and videogame sadism.

With each one of these blatantly desperate stunts Donald Trump seems to be pushing the envelope of acceptable statecraft just a little further, testing both America’s and the world’s tolerance for increasingly obscene violations of international and constitutional law while pushing us all a little closer to Brave New World territory each and every time he gets away with it, and he just keeps getting away with it.

The problem is that every institution of power hypothetically capable of reigning in this unhinged imbecile was designed by the very system he finds himself in charge of for the express purpose of making that system unaccountable to any power above capital and now, a rogue section of capital in this country has recklessly decided to bet the house during apocalyptic times on the whims of said unhinged imbecile who also happens to possess a ferociously ignorant and populist-flavored cult of personality.

And thus, your favorite humble contrarian muckraker finds herself in the uncomfortable position of conferring with the Never Trumpers and Always Demers, that one Donald J. Trump is indeed the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, and we are all very seriously fucked. It’s not as if I didn’t see this coming. I have been ranting for years about the inevitable collapse of Pax Americana’s New Rome. Any system of power massive enough to govern the globe from the barrel of an ICBM is inherently unsustainable and naked despotism has historically been the last resort of collapsing empires.

I just didn’t see it all coming down so quickly and I definitely didn’t see a verbally incontinent, reality television rapist being the Sith lord capable of steering Helter Skelter into the sun… but here we are now, entertain us…

Having belched that barrage of coprolalia into the void, the real question we all need to be asking right now is what the fuck are we going to do about it. A pretty good portion of humanity clearly seems to recognize that we are gazing into the abyss at the moment but how exactly do we turn this ship around from the brink of oblivion?

Every shitlib and his neocon cousin is going to tell me to get out and vote, but we’ve tried that already. In fact, we’ve been trying that since King George, voting for every savior one side or the other has thrown at us from Jefferson to Kennedy and they have all led us here.

With a lecherous, syphilitic baboon in office, only electable by the fact that lesser evil liberal democracy has chased us down a rabbit hole where your average Democrat is now to the left of Richard Nixon and your average Republican salutes a Manhattan national socialite who treats tax dollars the way Tony Soprano treats pocket change at the racetrack.

Third parties are all fine and good. I’m a registered Libertarian who voted for Jill Stein twice. But let’s face it, the entire electoral system in this nation is corrupt beyond repair. Just look at the way they screwed Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders in the Primaries just for using the talking points of third-party candidates. The sick, sad and depressingly sick reality here is that America did not become this fucked up yesterday.

It has been a long, excruciating process that began with a bunch of genocidal slave rapists in white whigs calling their runaway apartheid colony a democracy and ended with happy shiny people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton holding hands and endowing the Executive Office with the powers of Ozymandias before discrediting anything to the left of Satan by draping globalism in a rainbow flag and singing kumbaya while throwing babies into the fires of Palestine.

At some point we all have to address the colossal elephant in the room. That which is unspeakable in politically correct quarters. At some point somebody has to say the word ‘revolution’ and I’m not talking about some commie-scented air-freshener for a champaign socialist candidacy in SOHO. I am talking in no uncertain terms about all of us putting our partisan tribalism aside and doing what I think we all know needs to be done. I am talking about having a serious and ongoing conversation about overthrowing the government of the United States of America.

I know, we could all go on some Palantir kill list just for thinking such heresy out loud but at the end of the day there is no polite way to do this. Our government is fucking evil and it needs to go.

This doesn’t have to mean some epic bloodbath; however, I do feel obliged by reality to alert you that we’re already in some epic bloodbath as we speak and being polite doesn’t seem to be doing anyone any favors. With that being said, the success rate of a bunch of bros with Kalashnikovs toppling the king isn’t much higher than getting the ghost of Eugene Debs in the Supreme Court, and even in the best-case scenario, it has a tendency of merely replacing butchers with slightly more diverse butchers.

Don’t get me wrong, any form of substantial revolutionary change is going to be an uphill battle that probably includes some actual fucking battle, but I don’t think coming in shooting is a very productive or moral way to start.

The powerful have worked very hard over the centuries to associate the word revolution exclusively with wanton acts of bloodshed but there is more than one way to skin a state.

The general strike comes to mind. Under such a scenario, a broad coalition of workers would organize and essentially agree to cease all economic activity, including working, thus shutting down the economy until their demands are met. This tactic has been gaining more and more steam among left-wing laborers attempting to force the goons of ICE from their cities.

However, while the general strike seems to have widespread appeal among the rank and file, the major unions themselves have become too corrupted by the two-party plutocracy to do anything but dump cold water on the fire. For any major strike to be truly revolutionary it would have to be done wildcat style without even consulting union leadership beyond letting them know that it’s on whether they like it or not. It would also need to be done with a single demand front and center and that demand is the full and immediate removal of the current regime in charge of the Executive Office along with the dissolution of that office itself.

The First Russian Revolution of 1905 was largely fought this way and though it ended in bloodshed, it also left the Czar in a weak enough position to make a Second Russian Revolution downright inevitable.

And the general strike can be taken to the next level with a mass unarmed occupation of the location of the seat of power itself. This was attempted with the anti-Vietnam war protests of May Day 1971 in which about 15,000 protestors flooded the streets of Washington DC, blocking major intersections and bridges under the slogan “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.”

Most modern historians now claim it failed to achieve anything other than affecting the largest arrest for civil disobedience in US history with local, state, and federal officers dragging away over 12,000 shaggy haired participants. However, then-CIA Director Richard Helms has admitted that the spectacle delivered a devastating blow to the Nixon Administration’s credibility, softening them up for the upheaval of Watergate, and we now know that similar protests led by GIs in barracks across the globe inspired the Pentagon to pull the plug on Vietnam less than two years later.

More recently, we also saw how easy it was for Donald Trump to manipulate a pack of poorly armed diabetic boomers to take the Capitol on January 6. I’ve long joked that if that mutiny were thrown by a bunch of anarchists, they would still be smoking dope and playing hacky sack in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone as we speak.

All these things considered however, I personally do not hold a great deal of hope for any of these tactics leading to anything more substantial than regime change and as I stated earlier, our problems as a country are far greater than any single regime.

This is why I have come to favor agorism; Samuel Edward Konkin’s tactic of taking the entire economy off the grid by expanding the black and grey markets into a vast and diverse counter-economy of alternative currencies, barter systems, and mutual aid societies that simultaneously creates a viable alternative to the corporate state system while also starving it of its revenue. This also helps to answer the biggest question that plagues every revolution; what’s next?

What we need now is much bigger than any single revolutionary act or even any single revolutionary movement. What we need is a revolutionary mindset. To get ‘we the people’ to completely rethink the way we approach power itself. I am still a strong supporter of democracy, but I tend to believe that the only truly democratic system of governance is that of the direct democracy, specifically of the consensus variety. The fact that this only works on a small scale is perfectly natural considering that nothing really works on a large scale and in here lies the crux of our current predicament.

America itself is a construct that is inherently unsustainable as well as inherently incompatible with democracy as anything but an empty slogan to commit war crimes under. The leviathan must be broken down into autonomous sized pieces, into self-sustaining communes, collectives, and polities. The American people will never truly know freedom until they accept these basic facts and begin building real existing democracies within the shell of Ozymandias. That way, once that colossus finally is overthrown, there won’t even be a need to replace it. A thousand little democracies will already be there ready to bloom through the cracks of the ruins.

And that is true revolution, dearest motherfuckers, we may just need to remove another Czar to give us a little more time to build it under weaker despots and that is the dangerous conversation I am attempting to start right now. Please, don’t shoot the messenger three times in the face, I get enough of that shit from my own government.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.