LP Leaders Direct Libertarians to Volunteer for Federal Land Expansion

An LNC communication on Bears Ears asked Libertarians to mobilize behind an organization whose purpose is federal control of land.

On July 30, the Libertarian National Committee sent members a communication on the reduction of Bears Ears National Monument. It was drafted with Region 9 Representative Alex Flores, issued over the name of Vice Chair Amanda Griffiths, and cleared through the Advertising and Publications Review Committee.

The letter contained a call to action naming one organization by which Libertarians should mobilize. That organization has spent forty-three years working to place more American land under permanent federal designation.

What happened at Bears Ears

In 2016, President Obama designated Bears Ears National Monument under the Antiquities Act and created a commission giving five sovereign nations a role in management: the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni, the Ute Indian Tribe, and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. President Trump reduced the monument by roughly 85 percent in 2017. President Biden restored it in October 2021.

Utah and the Blue Ribbon Coalition sued over that restoration. On June 23, 2026, the Tenth Circuit reversed the district court’s dismissal of those suits and remanded for consideration of whether the 2021 orders were lawful.

On July 13, 2026, Trump signed two proclamations reducing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by a combined three million acres.

This is a strong argument for getting the federal government out of the business entirely.

What the letter claims

The letter from Griffiths and Flores is presented as an implementation of the Resolution on Tribal and National Sovereignty. The problem is that when you set the two documents side by side they point opposite directions.

On what makes an agreement binding. The resolution grounds itself in Article VI, where treaties are the supreme law of the land, and names the Treaty of 1852. The letter applies “nation-to-nation” to an Antiquities Act proclamation, a unilateral executive act revocable at will, which is exactly why the boundary has moved four times under four presidents without anyone’s agreement.

On where sovereignty comes from. The resolution holds that liberty is inherent to people and that no act of conquest or legislation can extinguish it. The letter says the 2016 designation created a commission granting the five tribes a role in a landscape it concedes they stewarded long before the United States existed, and states that legitimate authority comes from the consent of the people. The Statement of Principles grounds rights in the individual. Consent of a people has never been this Party’s test.

On the remedy. The resolution condemns the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act for extinguishing aboriginal title across 360 million acres and replacing sovereign governance with corporate governance, and closes by encouraging the Party to explore how to empower these nations to reclaim their independence. The letter asks the federal government to restore a monument designation and reinstate a federally created advisory commission, routing participation through an environmental nonprofit in Salt Lake City that no affected nation chose.

One document asks the federal government to relinquish jurisdiction. Twenty-four days later, the other asks it to exercise jurisdiction more generously.

Then there is the opening sentence, which lists self-determination, free exchange, mutualism, and good-faith agreements as things Libertarians stand for. Mutualism is a nineteenth century school built on occupancy-and-use property, meaning you own what you actively work. Platform section 2.1 recognizes three ways property moves, and lapse of use is not among them. Applied consistently it would void every claim the resolution makes, since aboriginal title and Hawaiian Kingdom sovereignty both depend on rightful claim surviving generations of forced non-possession. Challenged on the LNC Public List, the Vice Chair defended the term on the merits, declined the accurate substitute that Region 1 Alternate Sonja Feintech offered, and called the objection manufactured outrage.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

The letter directs Libertarians to make their voices heard through in-person demonstrations and days of action coordinated by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and to consider filing amicus briefs. SUWA is a 501(c)(3) founded in 1983, headquartered in Salt Lake City with offices in Moab and Washington. It is not a tribal sovereignty organization and does not present itself as one.

Its stated purpose is advocacy for federal wilderness designation and other protective federal land-use designations pursued through litigation, administrative rulemaking, congressional advocacy, and public education. It authored America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, first introduced in 1989 and reintroduced in every Congress since. The Act is designed to place approximately 8.4 million acres of public lands in Utah under the National Wilderness Preservation System, a federal wilderness designation.

Section 2.2 of the Party’s Platform holds that competitive free markets and property rights are what protect the environment, and that private landowners and conservation groups have a vested interest in maintaining natural resources. Section 2.3 opposes all government control of energy allocation and production. The Statement of Principles opposes government interference with private property, naming confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain.

SUWA’s institutional program is to lock 8.4 million acres of federal land into wilderness designation, the most restrictive and least reversible classification the federal government applies, permanently foreclosing disposal, transfer, or privatization. The Party’s official voice asks its members to support that.

The political profile

SUWA’s current board chair, Tom Kenworthy, is a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, the Democratic policy organization founded by John Podesta.

Hansjörg Wyss served on SUWA’s board during the prior decade and no longer appears among its current directors. He currently sits on the board of the Center for American Progress, alongside former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and CAP president Neera Tanden.

Wyss is a Swiss national. His own counsel conceded in a 2021 FEC filing that he is a foreign national within the meaning of the Federal Election Campaign Act. He operates two vehicles. The Wyss Foundation, a 501(c)(3), which held an endowment of roughly $1.71 billion as of 2023. The Berger Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) founded in 2007 as the Wyss Action Fund, has donated close to $500 million to left-leaning nonprofits, shares facilities and staff with the Wyss Foundation, and has the same president, Molly McUsic, who also sits on the CAP board of directors. His foundation’s western lands grantmaking has gone substantially to conservation nonprofits that lobby for new wilderness areas, new national monuments, and restrictions on drilling, mining, and grazing on public lands.

On May 15, 2021, Americans for Public Trust filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Wyss, the Wyss Foundation, the Berger Action Fund, the New Venture Fund, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, alleging violations of the foreign national contribution ban. The Commission dismissed it in 2022 on a 3-3 deadlocked vote, and Americans for Public Trust then sued the FEC to compel action. The respondents argued that neither Wyss entity engages in electoral activity and that Wyss holds no board seat at the Berger Action Fund.

He has since been named in the administration’s public campaign against nonprofit funding of protest activity, which it has described as the “protest industrial complex” and “Riot Inc.”

In February 2026, Rep. Rudy Yakym criticized Public Citizen for continuing to accept Wyss-linked funding, saying organizations operating in the American political system should be clear about where their funding originates. This is the kind of publicly available data a national political party must review before putting its name behind a mobilization request.

The credibility question

In the best case scenario, nobody looked. A communication went through multiple drafts, named an outside organization for members to mobilize behind, and no one so much as read their mission statement. If they did do their due diligence, that means the Party’s official voice knowingly directed Libertarians to volunteer for federal land expansion. The Vice Chair’s answer to the resulting criticism has been that the objections are factional noise. Alex Flores responded by asking the complainant what he had done for the Party.

In one letter, an Antiquities Act proclamation became a binding contract, popular consent became the source of legitimate authority, and a nineteenth century socialist property doctrine became a libertarian value.

That direction is consistent with the Vice Chair’s published positions. In July 2025, the Libertarian Party of North Carolina published her essay “True Liberty is Violence to the Fiction of Certainty” in a series titled In Defense of Political Violence. It argues that non-aggression cannot serve as the founding principle of a political ideology, that cause must prevail over conscience, and that libertarians must be prepared to rebel against the state and to become it.

Article 4 of the Party Bylaws defines a member as a person who has certified in writing that they oppose the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals. Article 6 bars anyone who is not a sustaining member from holding office. The certification is the qualification for the seat.

Article 2 states why the Party exists. It is organized to implement and give voice to the principles embodied in the Statement of Principles, by five means, the fifth of which is “entering into public information activities.” A press release is the direct exercise of the only function Article 2 assigns.

This letter was sent out as a mass communication to subscribers and signed by two officers telling readers to be there, issued by a Vice Chair whose prior writing claimed that “We must be willing to do violence against the state through rebellion, and even to become the state through revolution, not any time it is possible, but every time it is necessary.”