@SethAbramson It's terrifying to think of how many villain origin stories will come out of this self-inflicted (through sheer apathy and unwillingness to get off the damn computer and hit the streets) nightmare. We can't vote our way out of this. The US as we know it is dead.
I spent my day watching the place I love more than anything in the world be irreversibly destroyed for no reason.
There is not a single logical explanation for what DHS and its contractors are doing to Big Bend. It has become perfectly clear: they are using the destruction of this crown jewel national park as a vehicle to transfer billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of these politically connected contractors.
They are sacrificing our public lands so obscenely rich men who have never once set foot here can get even richer. And if they can do it here in Texas' wildest and most beloved national park, they will do it everywhere.
Governor Abbott, Senators Cruz and Cornyn: WHERE ARE YOU?!
Tourists walked into Yosemite National Park for free last winter.
A day pass normally runs $35 a car. Confused by their own good luck, because nobody was there to stop them or collect a fee.
There were no rangers at the gate. Not short-staffed. Not slow. Gone.
Without rangers around to stop it, visitors are cliff jumping. Flying drones over the valley. Driving the wrong way down one-way roads. One climber scaled Half Dome without the permit required to keep people from dying on that rock face, because there was no one at a desk to ask him for it.
And drivers are parking straight onto the meadows. Some of those wildflower meadows take decades to recover from a single set of tire tracks, if they recover at all. Nobody's there to stop the car before it happens, only someone left to survey the damage after.
One visitor described this spring’s opening weekend as apocalyptic. Cars squeezed onto curbs and into the dirt on both sides of the road. A climber who’d just come off Half Dome said he went looking for pizza afterward and found lines out the door everywhere, calling it a total junk show, more people than he’d ever seen in his life in that park.
This is Trump's Yosemite.
Months later, it's still true. The National Park Service is still down nearly a quarter of its permanent staff nationwide, gutted by DOGE layoffs, buyouts, and retirements the administration never backfilled.
A government watchdog report released this week found DOGE's own claimed savings, $110 billion of them, were riddled with errors auditors couldn't even verify. The cuts were real. The savings mostly weren't.
At Yosemite, the real cost shows up as people, not dollars. The scientists trained to study endangered species and plan for wildfires are the ones cleaning public toilets now, because there's no one else left to do it.
In February 2025, a group of park staff rigged ropes and rappelled down the face of El Capitan to hang an upside-down flag, the universal signal for distress, 3,000 feet up.
This spring, park leadership quietly killed the day-use reservation system that had actually been working, the one that gave Yosemite its sixth-highest visitation year on record in 2024 while cutting down traffic and overcrowding at the same time.
The people who fought hardest to end it weren't rangers or visitors. They were private lodging developers just outside the gates, the ones who profit every time more cars pour in with nowhere to go.
In the last decade, developers have built nearly 900 new hotel rooms, cabins, and glamping units in the towns surrounding the park. Another 1,500 units are already proposed.
Interior's own account posted a victory lap this year, bragging that gridlock days dropped from 120-plus a year to just two, with gate waits under 30 minutes even as visitation climbed 12 percent.
The replies told a different story. One commenter said they live 40 minutes from the park and called it a lie, with lines stretching to Highway 41 in July. Another put it more bluntly: "You are the epitome of mismanagement, and your lies are pathetic."
A longtime Yosemite conservation advocate warns vehicle strikes are already one of the leading causes of bear deaths in the park, and that more cars on the road means more dead bears, this as the park's new superintendent claims there's "zero evidence" crowds are doing any harm at all.
And the rangers who are still standing get yelled at by furious tourists for a mess they didn't create and don't have the staff left to fix.
How many close calls does it take before someone gets killed in a park with no one watching?
🦋Humanity United #DemsUnited
Trump tells communities to stop resisting data centers, because we can’t stop it. He suggests we just go with it because it’s going to happen.
I say resist these data centers with all our might. Pass amendments to the state constitution that no business can exist if it threatens community resources like water.
Yes, Kenny "Trans rights are human rights" Omega is a notorious trumper. I've lost 20 IQ points reading these comments. Any normal person understands that @KennyOmegamanX was standing up for Will, not giving a political opinion.