Good News: Our Public Lands Have Been Spared, For Now, Because a Conservative Accidentally Had a Conscience
Apply Now—Before Accountability Finds You!
In today’s episode of “You Must Be THIS Morally Compromised to Serve,” Kathleen Sgamma, a perfectly respectable oil and gas industry insider with all the right credentials to plunder public lands, has withdrawn her nomination to head the Bureau of Land Management.
Why? Because back in 2021, gasp, she briefly acknowledged reality. Worse, she committed the cardinal MAGA sin: she expressed disgust over the Capitol riot and implied that maybe, just maybe, spreading violent misinformation is bad. Oops. That 15-second lapse in blind fealty has come back to bite.
Sgamma had all the right stuff otherwise. MIT grad. Longtime booster of oil drilling, hard rock mining, and cowboy capitalism on public lands. She even leads the Western Energy Alliance, which sounds like a Star Wars villain syndicate but is actually just an oil lobby group that likes to keep its member list more secret than Dick Cheney’s horcruxes.
But alas, in Trump’s second coming, policy alignment isn't enough. You must also offer ritual praise for Jan. 6, consider Liz Cheney a traitor to the cause, and believe Trump was the real victim of the insurrection he incited. Anything short of that and you're out, like a bouncer at Mar-a-Lago spotted you reading The Constitution.
Former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt even chimed in from whatever fossil fuel-friendly cavern he slithered out of to scold Sgamma: how dare someone seek a position in Trump’s government while harboring… a moral thought. It's embarrassing, really.
But let’s take a moment to celebrate. Thanks to this brief outbreak of disqualification-by-integrity, 245 million acres of public land, the equivalent of ten Texases, remain unsold to the highest polluter. For now.
Of course, Trump will find someone else, someone who thinks Mount Rushmore should be replaced with a fracking rig and believes sage grouse are Antifa operatives in disguise. But until then, enjoy the fleeting moment where an oil lobbyist got rejected for being too ethical. In this timeline, that’s what passes for hope.