Posted on 03/04/2026 5:23:24 AM PST by MtnClimber
A small cadre of activist judges and environmentalist litigators wields outsized power, crippling industries, mismanaging forests, and undermining America’s interests.
With the world anxiously watching the conflict in Iran, it was no surprise that the first segment in the March 1 edition of CBS’s 60 Minutes featured an interview with Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last Shah. The second segment, however, returned to a staple theme of the CBS news team. It presented a perspective on a current issue calculated to discredit the Trump administration and its supporters.
In this case it was threats leveled against activist judges by members of the “far right,” with a particular example involving a lone judge in Washington state who struck down Trump’s executive order, which—to put “perspective” aside for plain reality—was going to stop Chinese intelligence operatives from paying U.S.-based (Chinese-owned) surrogacy companies to produce U.S.-born babies. The kids are then taken back to China to grow up under CCP indoctrination. With all the privileges of “birthright” U.S. citizenship, they grow up to become valuable agents to be reinserted into the U.S.
Rulings like this anger Americans with common sense. Some of them become overwrought. They leave nasty voicemails. In some cases, they resort to violence, although the only example that 60 Minutes could come up with was against a judge’s son over a litigation ruling she’d made that wasn’t the least bit related to a political issue.
If 60 Minutes offered balanced coverage, they would take a serious look at the power that just one judge still can wield over policies affecting the entire nation. There are 677 district judgeships in the U.S., as well as 178 circuit court judges. Even though the June 2025 Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc. limited the ability of individual judges to issue nationwide injunctions, it did not entirely take away that power, nor did it diminish the ability of a single federal judge to stop major industrial projects in their tracks.
There are numerous high-profile examples of how activist judges have used their power to thwart initiatives of the Trump administration, but while the visibility of these rulings has risen, they have been around for a long time. One of the biggest areas where individual activist judges have been able to exercise sweeping power is in the de facto partnership some of them have formed with environmentalists.
During the Obama Administration, environmentalist NGOs turned litigation into a business model, collecting millions by suing the U.S. EPA, which would immediately settle and pay their legal fees. Far more costly, however, was the fact that these rulings would shortcut the normal deliberative process, fast-tracking aggressive new regulations on power plants, fertilizers, waste management, air quality, water quality, and so on. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated that just Clean Air Act regulations coming from the “sue and settle” scam between 2009 and 2017 totaled an estimated $70 billion in costs to industries and, ultimately, to consumers.
The cost inflicted by environmental activist judges is not just economic. In some cases, they have also caused horrific mismanagement with catastrophic consequences both for the environment and for people. Needlessly destructive wildfires are a perfect example. The way to preserve healthy forests is to strike a balance: to the extent humans suppress naturally occurring wildfires, they must engage in other means of fuel reduction. To neglect this balance, only putting fires out, is to turn America’s forests into tinderboxes. And thanks to environmentalist litigators and activist judges, that is exactly what has happened.
A December 2025 investigative report published by the Breakthrough Institute describes the asymmetric power that a handful of environmentalist litigators and activist judges can wield. It is important to note that the Breakthrough Institute is not a “right-wing” organization. Formed in 2007, it embraces the potential of technology and innovation and is critical of typical environmentalist anti-growth ideology. In this article, the authors provide numerous examples of how just a few attorneys have literally destroyed the responsible management of forests across the U.S., especially, of course, in California. They write:
A small but loud environmentalist minority opposes fuels reduction, instead claiming that California’s forests must be left untouched. They use outdated environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Endangered Species Act, Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and National Forest Management Act in courts to delay, and sometimes cancel, projects that would mitigate the wildfires that destroy the ecosystems they claim to protect.
In a particularly amazing example, they identify one group, the “Conservation Congress,” that has sued the U.S. Forest Service dozens of times. This “group” is operated by just one person: Montana resident Denise Boggs. Sometimes Boggs loses her cases, but she wins them often enough to stop fuel-reduction projects that are critical to forest health—projects that can’t wait until the next fire season.
While Boggs is a lone maverick with outsized influence, she is joined by powerful nonprofits that spend millions of dollars in litigation. They include the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and many others with a national presence. Thanks to their litigation, timber harvest permits are denied or delayed, prescribed burns are stopped, and mechanical thinning is prohibited.
As a consequence, wildfires that can’t be immediately extinguished turn into fires without any historical precedent. With densities five to ten times higher than what is considered normal, trees are stressed and dehydrated because there are too many of them competing for limited water, soil nutrients, and sunlight. Across mountains and canyons, conifer forests that were never supposed to get so overgrown and dried out explode into superfires that can’t be contained. The environmentalists call it climate change, and policymakers ban gasoline-powered cars.
It is reasonable to assume that some environmentalist litigators and the judges who rule on their behalf are sincere in their belief that somehow, if you stop putting out natural fires and then do absolutely nothing to reduce the resultant fuel accumulation, that will eventually foster healthy forests. But to an outsider—expert or casual observer—it is difficult to attribute this lack of common sense to honorable motives. What else is at work? A hatred of timber companies and their profit motive? A conviction that humans are a parasitic scourge on the earth, teeming multitudes that should be confined to dense cities and reduced to lives of scarcity? The business incentives inherent in the sue-and-settle model?
While those are plausible ways to explain why litigators and judges are preventing responsible forest management and are causing similar counterproductive impacts across most industries in the U.S., here’s another possible explanation. Policies implemented by Western nations to combat the “climate crisis” have come at a staggering economic cost, with no end in sight. In 2022, a McKinsey report estimated “net-zero” spending at $3.5 trillion per year, with most of it coming from the United States and the European Union. The International Energy Agency predicts clean energy investment to rise to $4–5 trillion per year by 2030. There’s a lot of money on the table.
This much money attracts special interests within the U.S. like moths to a flame, but the climate alarm that motivates ordinary voters to support these staggering expenditures comes from nations that want to see Americans and Europeans squander their economic wealth and eviscerate their industrial capacity because it will weaken them. That is, our adversaries. And more than any other nation, that would be China, a nation that still uses coal for 55 percent of its energy.
Why else, if not to weaken America, would the innocuously named, CCP-aligned “Children’s Investment Fund Foundation” have spent hundreds of millions to influence U.S. climate and energy policy? In a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in December 2025, signed by 30 state attorneys general, they allege this organization has, in just the last 10 years, “funneled more than half a billion dollars into U.S. activist organizations as part of a broader effort to push radical climate and DEI policy on U.S. soil. In particular, CIFF has invested over $800 million in climate change initiatives. That includes directing nearly $65 million into climate change litigation, including a $7 million grant to CCI (a main promoter of U.S. climate litigation)—e.g., ‘strategic litigation against heavy emitters and financial institutions to force 1.5 C-aligned conduct’—and $200 million into energy-related initiatives—such as a $29 million grant to a consortium including the Natural Resource Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund.”
These are “perspectives” you will never see on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Activist judges, and the litigators they indulge, may excite passionate objections from some minute fraction of the hundreds of millions of people they affect with their rulings. And if any of them cross the line from angry protest to criminal behavior, their actions must be condemned and prosecuted. But a balanced report would survey the harm wreaked by a small minority of activist groups and aligned judges and the powerful forces that nurture and profit from their misguided rulings.
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It looks like the Supreme Court has more work to do the reign in the activist judges.
Activism isn’t part of the function of judges. When judges routinely engage in activism, and no one in the political structure attempts to reign them in, violence becomes a real option.
You sure see those words - activists, activism - a lot these days. I guess it pays to act, and leftists are very good at it.
We on the other hand are mostly passivists - we just pass.
Andrew Jackson time.
That two-thirds vote required to convict upon impeachment is entierly too high. We really need, say three-fifths instead. And these judges need to be profiled and tracked by patriots, citizen journos, and private detectives to make sure that if they don’t toe the line of Constitutionalism there are many ways to push back.
That two-thirds vote required to convict upon impeachment is entirely too high. We really need, say, three-fifths instead (although I don’t see a practical way to get it). And these wayward judges need to be profiled and tracked by patriots, citizen journos, and private detectives so we can be sure they know that if they don’t toe the line of Constitutionalism there are many ways to push back and they have reasons to be afraid.
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