[View Article at Source]Congress should quickly pass the PATRIOT Parks Act. The post This Policy Could Restore Our National Parks appeared first on The American Conservative.

By Bill Davis, Op-ed contributor Monday, September 08, 2025Getty Images Paula Ritchie was the focus of a long New York Times article on June 1, 2025, regarding “Medical Assistance in Dying”…

[View Article at Source]Quiet, competent declinism is no better than loud, silly declinism. The post Not in Defense of Keir Starmer appeared first on The American Conservative.

By Robin Schumacher, Exclusive Columnist Monday, September 08, 2025Unsplash/Javier MirandaFrom time to time, I’ve heard atheists incorrectly try to refute that a creator God exists because of all the…

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Politics This Policy Could Restore Our National Parks Congress should quickly pass the PATRIOT Parks Act. At a celebration in North Dakota on the 110th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, future President Theodore Roosevelt told those gathered: “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.” President Roosevelt would do his part in stewarding our tremendous national heritage by protecting more public land than any other president in American history. From New River Gorge, our newest national park, to Yellowstone, our oldest, these natural marvels have inspired generations of Americans and welcome tens of millions of international visitors every year. We owe it to future generations of Americans to maintain these parks and ensure our children and grandchildren can enjoy their natural heritage. Frustratingly, despite broad interest in our parks, the National Park Service has amassed a deferred maintenance backlog of nearly $23 billion. Roads, trails, campgrounds, water systems, and buildings have fallen into disrepair. Elderly and disabled Americans visiting our national parks are now especially impacted. Tackling this backlog and restoring our beautiful national parks requires creative solutions, and it’s imperative that any new policy put Americans first while stewarding our natural heritage. One way to solve this problem is by charging international visitors a surcharge for entry, with the potential to generate over a billion dollars in additional revenue by more fairly sharing the cost of park maintenance. Enter the PATRIOT Parks Act, which empowers the National Park Service to do exactly that. International visitors don’t have the same stake in our natural heritage and don’t pay taxes for regular park maintenance. It only makes sense to charge these individuals a higher entry fee. Because international visitors are very willing to pay higher entry fees, a surcharge could raise huge amounts of revenue for our parks while hardly affecting visitation. A recent paper from the Property and Environment Research Center shows that even a $100 surcharge on international visitors at Yellowstone would only decrease total visitation by 1.3 percent, all while generating enough revenue to more than cover the park’s entire annual maintenance costs. Charging a $100 foreign visitor surcharge across the entire national park system could provide $1.2 billion in new revenue. This policy isn’t an unprecedented idea. From Nepal to Chile to South Africa, a foreign visitor surcharge is a common practice around the world. It’s not unfair for parks in other countries to charge international visitors more, and it wouldn’t be unfair for American parks to do the same.  Similar policy is common practice between states. From West Virginia to Utah to Montana, many states charge out-of-state residents higher rates for fishing or hunting licenses. This practice is built on the same simple logic that out-of-state residents don’t pay state taxes and therefore don’t have the same stake in the state’s wildlife management as in-state residents do. In the same way, an international visitor surcharge for our national parks is just common sense. After President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the National Park Service to implement a surcharge, many of America’s leading conservation groups voiced support for the policy, from the National Wildlife Federation to Ducks Unlimited to Conservation International. The PATRIOT Parks Act would make President Trump’s policy permanent, empowering the administration and park superintendents to find the right surcharge that works for each park. It would build on the historic measures in the Great American Outdoors Act, signed by President Trump during his first term, which established the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund and permanently funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This support is critical, but our parks need additional funding. International visitors should be pitching in to keep our parks pristine. We cannot allow America’s natural heritage to stagnate or decline. Properly maintaining our national parks is critical to continue cultivating adventure, inspiring awe, and offering visitors the opportunity to counteract the decadence of the digital age for future generations of Americans.  The purpose of the national parks is clear, engraved on Yellowstone’s Roosevelt Arch: “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.” To help our national parks live up to that mission, Congress should quickly pass the PATRIOT Parks Act. The post This Policy Could Restore Our National Parks appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Not in Defense of Keir Starmer Quiet, competent declinism is no better than loud, silly declinism. Opinion-commentate enough and you get a sense (and an appetite) for a good contrarian headline. “In defense of Keir Starmer” is an absolute corker—understated but intensely provocative. It’s the sort of headline that would do well on X, by which I mean that a lot of people would absolutely hate it. Who could defend Keir Starmer? The British prime minister has gone from winning a gigantic majority in the 2024 general election to becoming one of the least popular PMs in history. His approval ratings have hit record lows. How to defend him, then? One could argue that the prime minister has had neglected political accomplishments—a quiet record of unassuming success that a hostile and incurious media has ignored. Sadly, he hasn’t. Back to the drawing board. The undeterred contrarian could argue on the grounds of personality. He could claim, for example, that the prime minister is a fundamentally decent man doing his best in a tough position. Alas, Starmer doesn’t seem to have much of a personality. He’s the sort of man who thinks that watching football is a hobby and that having a pint of beer is a guilty pleasure. Shabby treatment of his former colleagues—like calling the ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn his friend before saying that he wouldn’t wave at him across the street—doesn’t make him seem especially decent. To be fair, Starmer doesn’t seem to have the maniacal self-importance of a Tony Blair or the total shamelessness of a Boris Johnson. (You wouldn’t want to have beer with Sir Keir because it would be boring, rather than because you fear the corporeal presence of evil.) He has had some sympathetic moments as a long-suffering go-between in the strained relationship between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. But you know you’re reaching when the best adjectives you can come up with to describe a leader include “polite.” Perhaps one fruitful avenue of opportunity when it comes to defending Starmer is pointing out what a dreadful set of circumstances he inherited. Starmer did not upend Britain’s demographics, for example. Most of the fault for that lies with governments like those of Blair (’97–’07) and Johnson (’19–’22). Starmer just happened to enter 10 Downing Street when the British public had well and truly had enough. Starmer and his colleagues inherited a grim economy with low growth, crumbling infrastructure, the highest tax burden in decades, and millions of people economically inactive. It would have been impossible to turn this around in 18 months. Some of Starmer’s Labour government’s justly unpopular decisions, like releasing thousands of criminals early, had a lot to do with Conservative irresponsibility—the Tories simply had not built much-needed prisons. The problem is that Starmer has made no real attempt to be different. He has been more critical of mass migration than his predecessors, yes, but his words have not been backed up by his deeds. When it comes to the “small boats” crisis, for example, his government—as Luca Watson has argued for the Critic—has behaved as if the British people are concerned about where migrants will be staying and not the fact that they are staying at all. On economics, as Chris Bayliss has explained, there has been no real attempt to boost productivity. Britain is still being stifled by the web of legislation Tony Blair and his fellow New Labour managerialists spun around it. As a teacher, I can’t blame a student’s former school if I have the same methods. Without big ideas, or any real principles, Starmer has been occupied by marginal projects ranging from the malicious, like the abandonment of the Chagos Islands, to the merely depressing, like banning 16-year-olds from buying energy drinks. When I say “depressing” I don’t mean the policy—which I suppose is defensible—as much as its presentation. “I won’t shy away from decisions to protect kids,” Starmer announced last week. How courageous! No longer need parents lie awake worrying that their sons and daughters might drink a Red Bull! (This sort of petty prohibitionism was also a major feature of Conservative rule.) Starmer is comfortable with rules and not with opinions. He supported Jeremy Corbyn until he didn’t. He thought that women could have penises until he didn’t. His announcement that Britain was at risk of becoming an “island of strangers” could have heralded a serious attempt at left-leaning restrictionism. Within months, though, he was announcing that he regretted his remarks. Can this man make an order in a restaurant without calling the waitress back to ask for a different meal? At this point, the prime minister is rearranging the furniture in a house at risk of collapse. The resignation of Angela Rayner, deputy prime minister and secretary of state for housing, led to a bafflingly pointless reshuffle last week—a reshuffle that was all the more baffling when the dangerously dimwitted and disingenuous Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy and net zero, was one of the few survivors. “This is not chaos,” Starmer’s new chief secretary insisted. To use an online meme: Starmer’s “this is not chaos” T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by his shirt. Can Starmer hang on? It is difficult to see him lasting when the British state is in a doom loop of reshuffles, cack-handed authoritarianism, and marginal opinion poll-chasing. He seems to have thought that his vibe of competence and moderation would carry him along for five serene years after the confusion and corruption of Tory rule. What he missed was that Britain had huge structural problems—not just bad politicians. Being a smoother manager of a dysfunctional system doesn’t stop the system from being dysfunctional. He should have learned that from the bright, hard-working, and doomed Rishi Sunak. There is talk that Andy Burnham, the jovial mayor of Greater Manchester, could replace Starmer. Sadly, I suspect that Burnham feels jovial because he escaped Westminster. I can’t defend Keir Starmer, who has made no serious attempt to change the course of British life, but one thing I will admit is that Britain’s problems go far beyond one man or woman. His successor, whoever that may be, should bear that in mind. The post Not in Defense of Keir Starmer appeared first on The American Conservative.