American Thought Leaders - Government Land Grabs, from ‘Natural Asset Companies’ to Agenda 2030: Margaret Byfield

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

“They’re trying to create this new asset class ... and they get to arbitrarily decide how much they are valued. So, it’s not that the marketplace is going to value them. It’s going to be a bureaucrat sitting in a room saying that the air you breathe is worth X, and the air I breathe is worth Y.”Margaret Byfield was raised on a 7,000-acre ranch in Nevada. For nearly 30 years, her family fought the federal government to maintain ownership of their property and its resources. But ultimately, the government prevailed.“The federal government was never supposed to own the land. In fact, that was one of the big conflicts after our Revolutionary War,” says Ms. Byfield.Today, she is executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, working to protect the production of food, fiber, minerals, and energy from agendas that seek to erode individual property rights.“Agendas like 30 by 30, well it’s going to really harm our food production. How are we going to feed our nation and the world? Well, that’s not a problem to them because their belief is there are too many of us and therefore this is just the way to get rid of part of us through starvation,” she says. “Either you have the right to own property, or you are property.”We discuss Natural Asset Companies, ecosystem services, the United Nations’ sustainable goals, and other government land grabs being carried out in the name of conservation and protecting the environment.“Fifty percent of the West is owned by the federal government. So, the East is privately settled, which is how our country was supposed to be settled,” says Ms. Byfield.

And that's what's really unique about what they're doing. They're trying to create this new asset class, and they get to arbitrarily decide how much they are valued. So it's not that the marketplace is going to value them. It's going to be a bureaucrat sitting in a room saying that the air you breathe is worth X and the air I breathe is worth Y. Margaret Byfield was raised on a 7,000-acre ranch in Nevada. For nearly 30 years, her family fought the federal government

to maintain ownership of their property, but ultimately, the government prevailed. The federal government was never supposed to own the land. In fact, that was one of the big conflicts. After our revolutionary war, agendas like 30 by 30, well, it's going to harm our food production. How are we going to feed our nation and the world? That's not a problem to them because their belief is there are too many of us. And therefore, this is just the way to get rid of part of us through starvation. Today, she is the executive director of American Stewards for Liberty. Either you have the right to own property, or you are property. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.

Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year. And Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is telling Americans to brace themselves for potentially more pain ahead. But there is one way to hedge against inflation. American Hartford Gold makes it

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So let's start with natural asset companies. And this proposal to establish this new, I guess, I don't know, system of natural asset companies was defeated. And this has been celebrated as a victory. So I want to get you to explain to me what exactly this is and why it's important and where we're at. So in September of 2021, the New York Stock Exchange partnered with a group called the Intrinsic Exchange Group, who was funded by and started by the Rockefeller Foundation. And IEG is really supported by, funded by the same entities that are pushing the climate crisis narrative, the 30 by 30 agenda, and net zero decarbonization, all of these agendas that will lock up the land and lock up our productivity. So they're the entities that push the creation of this new vehicle that would be listed on the New York Stock Exchange called natural asset companies.

And this would allow for the enrollment of our protected resources into these companies along with the natural processes, the ecosystem services that can be enrolled in these companies and then private entities, in other words, the same people who are pushing the agenda to lock up our land land would then be the investors in the private vehicle where these are enrolled, these protected lands, and be able to profit off of them. So it really was a very scary proposal and really a stealth attempt to gain control over America's resources, land and resources.

And it was done very quietly. The SEC issued the proposed rule October 4th and allowed only for 21 days of comment, and they were going to make their decision, which would have been November 18th, 2023, to list these natural asset companies. And that would have started something that would have been extremely detrimental to our nation.

I just want you to break down a few things for me. For those of us that aren't as familiar with the terminology, you said something called ecosystem enrollment. That seems very abstract to me. What are we talking about here? So they have come up with something they call ecosystem services. And that is what they are trying to value off of the land that are the processes, natural processes, things that nature did in typical principles of property and how you acquire property. It's not

man's hand working in the land to create a product. This is what nature does with or without us. And they are trying to monetize these, so quantify them. So think of things like pollinization, photosynthesis, clean air, clean water, water filtration, those kind of things. That's what they were trying to say, hey, there's a value there that we are not quantifying. That's what would be enrolled in these natural asset companies that then the investors would then control these processes, which would then control the actual land. For most people, when you first start talking about this, they're going to say, what are you talking about? This sounds crazy. And when I first started reading about it, I dug into it deeply, but I didn't talk about it because I thought they're going to think this is

a crazy lady saying this. Because it really doesn't make common sense. But this is exactly what they were trying to do. And we were within days of it actually happening in America. Maybe explain to me like who actually has the ownership and who confers the ownership? Because this is the foundational question, right? Like, you know, take something like pollination, right? And we need the bees to do this pollination work, for the systems to function,

natural systems to function well, right? Now, if someone's going to own that somehow, which is still very abstract to function, our natural systems to function well, right? Now, if someone's going to own that somehow, which is still very abstract to me, frankly, like who gets to give that ownership to someone and who is it that can own it in the first place? Just briefly, if you could clarify that for me. Yeah, it depends on the land. It depends on who owns the land.

So in this SEC proposed rule, it was stated very clearly that things like our national parks, those ecosystem services could be enrolled in these natural asset companies. And so that would have to be the federal government enrolling them. And these natural asset companies could be created by governments, it's said in the proposed rule. So but then when you turn to private land, so a lot of the private lands have conservation programs on them, federal conservation programs or conservation easements in perpetuity that are held by land trusts. Now those easements are a separate right, it's a development right that you can go to the Nature Conservancy's balance sheet

and you will see a line item on their balance sheet of what they own worldwide, billions of dollars' worth of conservation easement. That's a separate right that they can enroll with or without the landowner's consent. So it's not necessarily obvious what right a conservation group would have to land? Well, I think the first thing to understand is there hasn't been a landowner out there that thought they were selling their ecosystem service rights,

because that is really a new creation created out of thin air. I mean, that's what's so crazy about trying to understand this. Our marketplace is based on what a consumer will buy and what they won't. That's what drives our marketplace. This is not something that people will buy or not buy. And that's what's really unique about what they're doing. They're trying to create this new asset class,

and they get to arbitrarily decide how much they are valued. So it's not that the marketplace is going to value them, it's going to be a bureaucrat sitting in a room saying that the air you breathe is worth X and the air I breathe is worth Y. So it's all arbitrary. That's part of why it's hard to wrap your arms around what they were trying to do. But what they are saying is that by the act of conserving the land, they are increasing

those processes, those natural processes like pollinization, clean air, photosynthesis, all those kind of things. They are increasing that. Therefore, it is the work of the land trust or the federal government protecting the lands that is creating this new value and increasing the ecosystem services. Okay, wait a sec. But now you're telling me this isn't private owners anymore.

You're telling me that it's these conservation trusts, which typically would be NGOs, or the actual federal government that are suddenly asserting this value and, I guess guess holding it somehow. This is very, again, this is all very abstract, right? Right. So, what exactly is happening here?

Well, okay. So, let's go back a little bit. This concept of valuing natural processes really began in around the 1980s by the United Nations. They're the first to really start talking about how do we value these processes. And to give you just a little bit of perspective, I've been involved in these issues for over 30 years, actually longer than that.

I was born into these battles. My family had a case against the federal government and I learned a lot about the environmental movement during that process because they came in to take our land. And so you have to understand the environmental movement is not about whether or not we're going to use the resources. It's about who is going to use the resources. That's really the big fight that is playing out here.

And it's something that the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, that has been what they have been pursuing for all these years. So let me jump in just for a second. It makes some sense, you know, and I'm coming in as someone who was a field biologist for years, later evolutionary biologist, a lifetime ago, almost. But it makes some sense to say that, for example, the process of pollination or whatever has value, intrinsic value, right? It makes sense to say that. We should, because we don't want to, you know, sort of destroy that, for example, through some sort of pollution. Or if someone were to pollute and destroy that process, it would make

sense for there to be some cost for that person to do it, for doing that. Like, that's logical to me right that's how i always understood these types of let's see these types of ideas that you just described as coming having come out of the u.n yeah so what you're talking about are externalities so in financial terms they've always considered these parts uh and its influence on the actual product being consumed they call themities. They just have never monetized it before. That's not something that was ever appropriate, nor should it be so today.

So it's not that the value was never considered in this. It's that the step that the UN and in America, the natural asset companies were trying to accomplish was for the first time ever Monetizing these putting a value on them where they can say if you monetize them somebody owns them to me, right? There's been all sorts of examples of large corporations polluting in ways that have been very destructive to human beings, the natural environment, and so forth, right?

And so my understanding of why you would put a value there is you could say to that company, hey, you've just made a ton of money for yourself, but you've actually destroyed the environment and the process, and you should have to pay for that destruction or somehow mitigate it. That makes sense to me, right? Yeah. And there's laws on the books, nuisance laws, to where you can't do anything with your

property that harms your neighbor's property. I mean, obviously, humans are imperfect. So we are going to have those issues. But you look at the history of that, those things can be solved. We already have lots of other books that do that. And so this next step was for profit. It was not to solve that problem. Sure. Let's just dive in to a little bit of your background so we can kind of understand where you're coming from, this view. Because, you know, for many of us looking at, again, these natural asset companies,

this seemed to be like a new thing that just kind of appeared out of nowhere. In fact, this is something that you've told me has been development for a while. And you've been looking at this and related processes over decades, I think, right? So just tell me about that journey. Yeah, so I was raised on a ranch in Nevada. Pretty large-sized acreage that we ran on, 1,100 square miles. We were a medium-sized ranch in Nevada.

It takes about 50 acres to feed a cow, so it takes a lot of land. But what people don't normally understand, unless you live in the West, is 50 percent of the West is owned by the federal government. So the East is private, privately settled, which is how our country was supposed to be settled. The federal government was never supposed to own the land. In fact, that was one of the big conflicts after our Revolutionary War is where the state's going to compile all of their land into one pot, the federal government, and allow them to sell those off because they didn't trust the

federal government. They didn't want the federal government holding on to the land. So all of our acreage was disposed of and settled by the people until you get to the West. And that's when politics changed. And there's a whole story of how that happened. The end result is 50% of the land in the West is owned by the federal government. The West is federalized, and in the state that I grew up in, Nevada, it is 87% government-owned. So our ranch, we had on the 1,100 square miles, it was a grazing operation. We owned all the grazing rights and the water, and we had 7,000 private deeded acres. But because we owned all that water, the US Forest Service filed an application

over our water rights. If we were to abandon our water rights, they would be next in line to acquire those and then use their regulatory powers to basically drive us out of business. So it was, that was really the taking. That was what they were doing. And this began in 1978. So we're, that was really the taking. That was what they were doing. And this began in 1978.

So we're talking about a long time ago. And we fought them for 13 years and won every round, except that you really didn't get any resolution. They'd come back and do the same thing to you the next time. So finally in 1991, my parents filed the first federal lands grazing takings case against the federal government. And we, again, we won every round except the last one. The claims court, U.S. claims court,

awarded us $14.1 million for the taking of our property. And then it was appealed to the USDC circuit and unfortunately came before three eastern judges who had no concept of the federal lands issues, which is very complex. And they really just punted on two technical issues and said we didn't have standing and ripeness and they kicked the case out. So after 27 years in court, we lost everything. We lost the ranch. We were never compensated. But I think that the good thing that came out of that is that we had a front seat in the fight. You know, we were on the front lines. And we had to understand who were all the people attacking us and why were they after our property. And that's where I think I grew up with a different understanding of the power of the federal government when they own the land,

how much control they have over the people. I know that personally. And the second thing is how much power the environmental movement has and what their real agenda is. I think that most people look at the environmental movement and think of they're trying to save species, they're trying to protect open spaces. Things that we would all say are great things, but actually the real movers and shakers behind the movement, that's not what it's about at all.

They don't believe in private property ownership. They don't believe that you or I could manage a piece of land. They believe that it should be done in a big consolidated network where they have where all of the you know highly degreed people our scientists are making the decisions on this land let me jump in and this will be relevant to a number of viewers so why the DC Circuit Court I mean it feels like the kind of the least relevant court possible in this almost in this kind of case and also one that you might imagine wouldn't be you know would would view the world differently than say a

Nevada court might it it's because it was in the US Court of federal claims that's why where you file a takings case and so then the DC Circuit has jurisdiction over that so that's why I did it up there that's that's why it ended up there. That's curious in the first place. Okay, so we'll put Ipin in that. You're describing 1,100 square miles and just sort of overnight your jurisdiction over that evaporated and there was no recourse. Right, the Supreme Court didn't take the case up. But you know we need to think about that too. That was in the period of 1978 through 1991. Our case is a really good illustration of what's wrong with our system of government because there is a fourth branch of government and

that's the administrative agencies. So during that period, think of who was our president. We had Carter, we had Reagan, we had Bush. So arguably we had two conservative presidents during that period that had staffed the departments with very good people. And yet even though there were good people at the top who would disagree with what the agencies were doing to my family, they really had no way to penetrate that in order to control the agencies to get them to do the right thing and pull them back. There's a really good book, if people really want to drill into what is wrong with the administrative state, that was written by Secretary Bernhardt called You Report to Me. And he just came out with it last year, and he is 100%

correct. And as he sat as Secretary, what you learn in that book is how little power he really had over the agencies. Congress has acquiesced so much power to these agencies. The courts have facilitated it because they haven't pulled it back. So cases that are challenging like the Chevron deference are really important right now. Those are things we need to get reversed so that there's some control over the administrative agencies. Congress will write the law and say, like to the U.S. Forest Service, they write the National Forest Management Act,

which gives them the directive to manage the national forests. And then they write regulations on how to implement that. And it's through that regulatory rulemaking process that they are actually writing law. And so Congress has delegated that to them, acquiesced that. And then they are also in control of the administrative judges. So then they judge the law. And then they are the ones who enforce it. So they execute the law. So the administrative agencies have all three of those powers, which our founders worked very hard to make sure were all separated in our Constitution.

That's why we have a Congress that makes the law, a judicial system that judges the law, and an executive branch that executes the law. Those three are separated, and that is what has protected us. All three of those powers come together in the administrative agencies, making them almost untouchable. And for the average citizen like my family, that's not wealthy, that's just out there trying to make a living off the land,

it's very, very difficult to fight and win against those. And our story actually has had a lot of a lot of attention a lot of people know about it but we are one story and we know that it's happening to hundreds and hundreds of people in this nation and have been has been happening for years. Explain to me what this 30 by 30 plan is and I want to go back to looking at how the UN was looking at these valuations and how that's impacted what's happening here. So 30 by 30 is an international agenda to permanently protect 30% of the world's land and oceans by 2030. And when they say permanently protect, they mean lands that we the people do not utilize.

It has actually been implemented in other places like the Netherlands. Natura 2000 is basically 30 by 30 in the European Union, which has now led to all of the farmer protests that we're seeing. So ostensibly, you know, I understood the farmer protests having a lot to do with changes in regulation that would prevent the farmers from being able to be successful at farming. Essentially it would take away their land. So how is this 30 by 30 over years agenda or the equivalent in say the Netherlands playing a role?

Yeah, so 30 by 30 is the agenda, but it's the implementation that you're talking about. How did they get to the 30 by 30? How are they getting there? So like in the Netherlands they are regulating nitrogen emissions and they're saying that there are too many nitrogen emissions therefore we have to get rid of the cows, therefore we have to get rid of the ranchers, therefore we need 2,000 to 3,000 landowners in the Netherlands to voluntarily sell their land to the federal government. So that's the process. And so in America, really, it took a while for it to take hold here. Primarily, I think they had a hard time figuring out how they were going to do it here because we're different than other nations. We actually own the land. So the people own the land,

which is how we were intended to be as a nation. So it's a lot easier to put the 30 by 30 agenda into a nation where the government already owns the land or there's already that collectivist control over the property in some form. But when President Biden was elected, we were watching the environmental groups and we saw that they started talking in all of the materials about the 30 by 30 agenda. So we really dug into it. It was initiated six days after he came into office. He implemented the 30 by 30 agenda through Executive Order 14008. And I remember, you know, I had then-governor, now-senator Ricketts on about this.

Maybe you can tell me how successful that movement was, but this is something you were involved in right from the get-go, I think. Yes, he was the first elected leader we sat down with and briefed him on what 30 by 30 was. And he doesn't look at staff talking points, he actually reads all the material. And he had me personally walk him through all the pieces, everything I was talking about that led to the 30 by 30 agenda. And still to this day, he has asked me the hardest questions about 30 by 30. He really dug into it so that he had a full depth understanding of the process. And it bothered him, of course. And so he took a pretty active role in this. He wrote a letter that was signed by 14 other governors to oppose 30 by 30.

And he really took the position that he was going to stand between the federal government and his constituents, which was Nebraska. And in so doing, he really led the way nationally for us on the 30 by 30 agenda. And that really led to it becoming known very quickly as a land grab. I mean, this was a federal land grab. It sets up a very close, obvious collaboration between the U.N. and the U.S. federal government. And this isn't something that, you know, again, maybe you were aware of these, you know, deep collaborations, but I think a lot of us weren't.

It is absolutely the international agenda. And the Biden administration is really the first administration to fully all in implement the UN agenda. We've had other presidents that have kind of taken parts of it that they've tried to get into our society. But the Biden administration, they are all into the whole of government approach that comes right out of all of the UN speak. And so really not just 30 by 30, not just natural capital accounts or some of these other agendas, but net zero, decarbonization, all these other things that we are fighting.

That all comes from that. It's a belief in the globalist agenda, and it is America last. So Agenda 2030 is initiating all these sustainability goals. The propaganda is that this is the way that society and humanity is going to save itself. It stems from the belief that humans, by simply breathing, walking, using resources, we are destroying our environment, which makes no sense. If you look at everything that they base the climate crisis agenda on, everything is a model. It's a prediction into the future. And as a scientist, you know that models can be very useful to help you figure out

what area you should study more. But a real scientist does not rely on the results of a model that extrapolates out 20, 30, 50 years in the future to fundamentally change policy in society. And also ones that have been shown to not manifest as the model would suggest over similar periods of time, right? Exactly. You would correct it in the very least, which they haven't done. But it's about the agenda. It's not about what is actually happening.

The people behind the agenda have the belief that there are too many of us, so we are overpopulated. So that's why when you talk about agendas like 30 by 30, well, it's going to really harm our food production. How are we going to feed our nation and the world? Well, that's not a problem to them because their belief is there are too many of us and therefore this is just the way to get rid of part of us through starvation. And I know that sounds crazy, but this is what they say. This is what they are advocating, and it's their purpose for the agenda.

And so you have to realize that, especially with 30 by 30, when it first came out and they said, we're going to permanently protect 30% of America's lands and oceans, my first response was, they're talking about our land, not about their land. So they're trying to impose their agenda on other people, not on them. They will be the people who will control the land, get to say what happens to the protected lands, and we will be the new serfs. That is really the society that they see.

It's an elitist viewpoint. And they do believe that they're smarter than the rest of us, and they can make better decisions with the land than we can. That's part of it. Another part of it is for some people it's about money, and some people it's about power and control. And it's really nothing new. Society has fought these battles over and over through history. This isn't a new agenda. It's just new players trying to implement that on us. There's this sort of,

you know, frankly authoritarian or totalitarian impulse among some segment of our society that really believes that they really know better. It doesn't matter what compelling evidence there is in the contrary, that really they don't. But believe that and feel good about the idea of imposing that on others for their own good, right? Yeah. So Klaus Schwab, who said, you will own nothing and be happy, right? Well, what you need to realize about that, somebody is going to own it. Somebody is going to own the land. Somebody is going to own the resources. All these things that we use every day, somebody will own that. And they have

self-appointed themselves to be that. And we will be the leasers of that. So it's exactly the opposite of what our founders were trying to prevent when America was established. It was from the different perspective. It wasn't about kings or royalty or elitists or globalists that would control the population. It was about self-sufficiency, self-reliance, that the individual would have equal opportunity, not equal status, equal opportunities. That's why when the eastern states were settled, like when Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, 540 million acres, he opened that up to settlement, and every acre of that was settled. And depending on where you settled,

you could acquire anywhere from 120 to 640 acres. And that was based on how many acres it took to make a good living, to raise a family and to be productive and have a product to contribute to society. So it's equal opportunity and equal protection. In other words, it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor. We are all protected under the law from all kinds of ills. That's what America is about. And so it's based on this idea of self-sufficiency. The individual, we the people, would run this government. And that's what they are really taking away. That's what they're trying

to do with the sustainability agenda, the Agenda 2030. It's all about canceling all that, moving the resource wealth, all the natural wealth into the hands of the elites and the globalists where they will control us. And this harkens back to something that my dad said 30 years ago, which still I think is more poignant today than when he said it. And he said that either you have the right to own property or you are property. And when you think about that, that's really where they are headed. So when they say you will own nothing and like it, somebody will own that. It's just their plan for us is it will not be us, which then makes us their property.

When you really start thinking about it on that level, it's absolutely chilling what they are trying to do. Well, so let's talk about the natural asset companies, which is something that you've worked, I think you played a very important role in certainly alerting people and probably advocating for stopping, at least for now, I guess, this movement towards this new asset class, which frankly is very abstract to me, right? Because you're taking basically natural processes and you're saying there's going to be a monetary value. that's fine, that makes sense to me. But then someone's deciding what this value is and that someone actually gets to own it. So someone is assuming kind of sovereignty over, say, pollination, okay, which is something that, of course, we need in our natural systems

to function, right? So just very briefly, can you just explain to me what this is and what, I guess, was won by stopping these natural asset company class from coming into existence with the New York Stock Exchange and where we stand? The IEG and New York Stock Exchange were trying to create that market vehicle where these natural processes could be quantified and monetized and enrolled, and then the world elite could invest in those products. And that was the vehicle, that was the mechanism they had to get set up to make this idea work, because they needed the Security Exchange Commission to approve the rule to allow these to be listed on the New

York Stock Exchange. So that's the proposed rule that was released on October 4th, was to finish out that process so that they could establish these. Once that would have been done, then NACs could have been created all over the U.S. And so a natural asset company would take like the Florida Forever program, so an area of land, a conservation area, and all of the ecosystem services in that area then could only be enrolled, if they were going to be enrolled in anything, they would have to be enrolled into that specific NAC. And then the investors would invest in that.

Now what was important is not only were these rights, these ecosystem rights or ecological performance rights enrolled in the NACs, but then the SEC rule was conveying management authority over those assets to the natural asset companies, which now, if you think of something like our national parks, let's say the federal government decided, okay, we're going to take Yellowstone National Park, we're going to roll it in a NAC. That means now whoever the investors are who own that NAC company, it's a private company now, have the management authority over our national parks. That's what this rule was doing. So instead of the National Park Service

managing the land, now you had a third party private entity that also had some form of management authority over these lands. And that was part of the concern that we raised is who's managing what in this process. And also the SEC doesn't have the authority to decide who's going to manage our lands or the ecosystem services on our lands. And by simply approving this rule, that is what they were doing, is they were conveying that authority to private entities. So it created a lot of problems. But what's really interesting about what you're describing is it could also be foreign interests, right, that are controlling this, or it could be interests that don't have a particular vested interest in that

area in the first place, which has been, you know, with the consolidation of large companies, which has been the trend, right, globalism, right? Right. And from the corporate perspective, which hasn't worked out well, I guess. Yeah. So Exhibit 5 of this SEC rule specifically invited foreign investment into these NACs. Let's say, like the Grand Canyon area, if there was a NAC created in there where we have a lot of critical minerals, which now the Biden administration, through the 30 by 30 program, has locked up and will not allow development off. They have withdrawn these. So now these are protected assets.

Those can be enrolled in a NAC, these critical minerals. And then you have like China Sovereign Wealth Fund investing in it, having management authority over those resources. And NACs had to manage the resources that were enrolled for sustainability and to increase the production of the ecosystem services, which, and including there could be no oil and gas, there could be no mineral extraction. So it would make sense that a foreign enemy that wanted to control our resources and keep us from developing our resources while they exploit theirs and increase their standing worldwide. It was a perfect way for our enemies to control us and become more powerful in so doing.

And this knack rule would have just been a simple doorway for them to do that through there. And that's what I think people don't really understand is how close we were to really harming not only the development and the production of our resources, but national security. situation where those entities could also exert a very significant influence on the federal government to allow them to use that material, in the case of the China's liberal wealth guard, for the Chinese regime to kind of lobby hard for its own benefit, as it does in multiple areas here in D.C. all the time anyway. That was absolutely something that we foresaw too. The way that it was structured, that could be done. And let me give you an example. One of the things that the rule said is that there was one thing that could be done that would cause a NAC to be delisted. And that was if they violated the sustainability requirements. So let's say that you have an area that China

is heavily invested in through one of the NACs and because everything has to be managed for to increase the ecosystem services that means all productive uses really have to be decreased. And so once you eliminate the productive uses people can't make make a living off that land anymore. So they're going to end up acquiring all that property directly. In other words, as landowners sell out, they can't farm a ranch there under the sustainability requirements, just like you're seeing in the Netherlands. I mean, those kind of policies can be shaped and put into place in these NACs. And so eventually,

you have the landowners abandoning their private property because they can't make a living there anymore. But you have the wealth fund, the sovereign wealth fund there to buy them all up or their interest. And so once they acquire all those rights, all they have to do is start mining it, drilling it, and they get delisted from the New York Stock Exchange as a NAC, which means they're no longer prohibited to do any of that, and they own everything outright and can develop it outright. Thirty by Thirty, the natural asset companies, that's all about gaining control of our resources. This is not about whether we're going to use our resources, it's about who is going to use our resources.

In America, that's supposed to be the people, we the people, the small land holder. In fact, there's a great letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote when he was in France and he had been walking through the French countryside and he was noticing all these king's lands and how there were all these great resources that could be developed that could support a lot of families and yet the masses in the French countries, in France, were in extreme poverty because they had no property. They couldn't make their own living. And so he writes back home in this letter and he says, in America, we can't let this happen. In America, it's the small landholder that is the most important part of the state.

And he really was right about that because think about what a piece of land does. If you own a piece of land, it gives you the ability to grow your own food, to build your own structure, protect your own home, raise your family, produce something that can feed your family and can contribute to the local economy, and that you can make a decent living from. It allows people to be independent and self-sufficient. The other thing it does is it means if the people own the land, then we control the resources. And so if the people own the natural resource wealth of the country, they can always control their government and they can always protect their individual liberties. And that's why it's so important to understand that land and liberty are intricately connected. You can't have one without the other.

The people have to own the land to have that individual liberty. And that's really, and see, our opponents know that as well. The people behind the 30 by 30 agenda. I mean, think of what Karl Marx said when he defined socialism. He said, it is the abolishment of private property.

Our ability to own property is what allows us to have our individual liberties. They know it. I think sometimes us in America, we really have forgotten that. We haven't been taught that in recent years. And so we don't understand how important it is, them trying to control our property through, you know, all of these great sounding agendas like conservation and saving species, those are all devices

they're using to get control of the land and to remove the landowner, the private individual from the land. And the NACs, the natural asset companies, were the next step in, after they had cleared title through the 30 by 30 agenda, got rid of the small landowners, or at least got control of the land of the small landowners through it, then the world elite would be able to profit from those protected lands. So in other words, we couldn't use them, but they would be able to profit from them through this natural asset company scam that they were trying to pull off.

So these national asset company class, this has been stopped. But my sense is this isn't the end from everything you've been telling me. So what's next on your agenda or what you think is going to happen? So we do expect the natural asset companies to come back. They will come back in a new form. So we're watching that.

But more importantly, what we're really focused on now is the federal government is trying to do the same thing by creating what they are calling natural capital accounts in order to monetize these natural processes and place them on the federal balance sheet. I mean, they are literally talking about adding a line item to the federal balance sheet that has a value of these natural processes for the purpose of increasing the collateral base to increase the national debt.

And there's other reasons for it as well. But that is really the next thing. The natural capital accounts is the next opportunity they have to actually monetize these natural processes, which they have not been able to accomplish before. So that is our next target. They are implementing this through a 15-year plan and through 27 federal agencies. So I liken our battle against the natural asset companies more like an airstrike, where we were able to very quickly marshal incredible people in really important

positions that use their authority to really stop the NACs. And that was essential. And that was done in three months' time from the moment they issued the rule. So it was pretty phenomenal. But stopping the natural capital accounts through the White House strategy is going to be more like trench warfare. We're going to have to dig that out via the federal agencies. So it's going to be a little different battle. That's the thing that the American people need to really be thinking about and watching for. Well, Margaret Byfield, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.

Thank you. I really appreciate this. And the key to all of this is getting the people educated on these because I really believe that once they know about this, they know what to do, what is right and what is good for our country. I have a lot of faith in the American people. And I think that programs like yours are what bring these things to light.

Well, thank you. Thank you all for joining Margaret Byfield and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.