William Perry Pendley, a top Trump administration official in charge of managing one-tenth of all land in the United States, is a past contributor to 21st Century Science & Technology, a fringe magazine of the late cult leader, convicted fraudster and paranoid conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. Documents also indicate that Pendley attended a conference in 1994 where two of LaRouche’s associates called on anti-environmental groups to help kill Senate support for an international biodiversity treaty.

Twitter.com/Sagebrush_Rebel William Perry Pendley poses in a photo posted to his private Twitter account.

If you’re writing for 21st Century Science & Technology, you’re writing for people who really had some Nazi sympathies. Freelance journalist Dennis King, on Pendley's articles in a LaRouche magazine

Pendley joined the Trump administration in mid-July as deputy director for policy and programs at the Bureau of Land Management and by the end of the month was elevated to the role of acting director ― thereby sidestepping the Senate confirmation process for the top BLM job. He’s one of many high-ranking administration officials across the government with a history of battling the very agencies they now run. Pendley’s ascent came as LaRouche’s organization reemerged in national politics with a stunt aimed to embarrass those arguing for a Green New Deal, a sweeping federal policy framework for combating the climate crisis. Earlier this month, a woman working with LaRouche PAC appeared at a town hall meeting that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) held in her home district, pleading with the freshman lawmaker to consider “eating babies” as a solution to curbing planet-heating emissions. The stunt, immortalized in a viral video, was widely mocked. But the beliefs that Pendley, 74, espoused in his writings have largely gone mainstream in the Republican Party. At least eight states across the South and Midwest have enacted laws to increase criminal penalties for anti-fossil fuel protests, according to the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, which tracks anti-protest legislation. The progressive political action committee American Bridge first found ― and shared exclusively with HuffPost ― Pendley’s previously unreported writings. But a HuffPost investigation surfaced more details about his ties to LaRouche, highlighting the degree to which once-marginal extremists now control key portions of the federal government’s response to a rapidly worsening ecological collapse.

The Washington Post via Getty Images Lyndon LaRouche speaks to reporters at the National Press Club in Washington on May 5, 1988.

Writing For LaRouche In a 1992 letter to the editor printed in 21st Century Science & Technology, Pendley came to the defense of the Sahara Club, a radical anti-environmental group dedicated to “fighting eco-freaks and keeping public lands free.” Two years earlier, the BLM had charged several Sahara Club members with trespassing following a protest motorcycle ride through an area of the Mojave Desert that had been temporarily closed to protect the imperiled desert tortoise. The magazine painted the arrests as a BLM setup and claimed that the tortoise was threatened solely because the agency refused to deal with a growing population of predatory ravens. A BLM official responded with a scathing letter clarifying that raven predation was only one of the threats to the tortoise population and calling into question the magazine’s journalistic integrity. “We found it astounding that such an article would be included in a publication supposedly dealing with science and technology,” the official wrote, adding that an internationally known scientist had flagged the article to the BLM with a note that read, “This appears to be the journal of scientific disinformation!” The magazine also ran separate responses to the BLM official from the Sahara Club and Pendley. The Sahara Club claimed the federal agency closed the Mojave area as part of a “personal vendetta” it had against the club. Pendley accused the BLM of being a “pushover” for the Humane Society, which had filed a lawsuit challenging the government’s proposed raven control program. “Robbed of the only program that ― according to the government’s own documents ― would have done the desert tortoise any good,” Pendley wrote, “the government declared war upon the cattleman, the woolgrower, the miner, the off-highway vehicle (OHV) enthusiast and the City of Las Vegas.” The following year, Pendley wrote an article in the magazine slamming a federal judge who ruled that a Montana rancher could not claim self-defense in the killing of a protected grizzly bear. Pendley called the decision “a frightening embrace, by an agency of the U.S. government, of the view of many animal rights fanatics and environmental zealots that human beings are only co-equal inhabitants of the planet, no better than any other creature.”

Screenshot/21st Century Science & Technology An article by William Perry Pendley in the Fall 1993 issue of 21st Century Science & Technology.

The magazine and another LaRouche publication, the Executive Intelligence Review, also ran a number of stories in the late 1980s and early 1990s highlighting the work of Pendley’s legal nonprofit. The fall 1989 issue of 21st Century Science & Technology, for example, includes a brief item about a hotline that the Mountain States Legal Foundation set up for the public to report “acts of environmental terrorism.” Pendley, who served as the group’s president for nearly three decades, was quoted warning about “a small band of radical environmental terrorists” who had vandalized ski resorts and allegedly driven metal spikes into trees. He was referring to the radical environmental group Earth First!, although he didn’t mention it by name. “We need more facts to establish participants, patterns, and to determine the existence of a conspiracy on the part of those who would kill fathers in the name of Mother Earth,” Pendley said in the magazine.

Screenshot/21st Century Science & Technology A news brief that appeared in the fall 1989 issue of 21st Century Science & Technology.

Screenshot/Executive Intelligence Review A piece by Rogelio Maduro in the Sept. 2, 1994, issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Ron Arnold, who is widely considered the father of the wise-use movement, told with The Washington Post in 1995 that the movement was unaware it had joined forces with the LaRouche organization to fight the treaty. He claimed he didn’t know Maduro would speak at the Nevada conference and that LaRouche followers were not welcome at future events. Pendley did not grant HuffPost an interview or respond to a list of emailed questions about his writings and the 1994 wise-use conference. Instead, he sent a statement after this story published in which he accused HuffPost of “cherrypicking.” “As someone in the public arena for nearly four decades, I’ve given countless public statements and written scores of articles on a wide variety of topics,” he said. “Cherrypicking a few of them out of context is neither useful nor connected to my current position. I’m focused now on implementing the policy priorities of the Trump administration and Secretary Bernhardt within the authorities and mission given this agency by Congress. My personal views are irrelevant in this context.” The Interior Department, which is the parent agency of the BLM and is headed by Secretary David Bernhardt, did not respond. The Same Old Torch Pendley has faced an onslaught of criticism since joining the Trump administration. Environmentalists and other critics fear his appointment signals a future sell-off of federal lands in the West, pointing to Pendley’s long history of advocating for just that. Pendley has dismissed such concerns and refused to comment about his past statements, including describing basic climate science as “junk science” and comparing immigrants to a “cancer.” All of it, he told a room full of reporters earlier this month in Colorado, is “irrelevant” to his current job leading a bureau that manages more than one-third of all federal land and 700 million subsurface mineral acres. But the reality is that his opinions and experience taking on the federal government are what make him a perfect fit for the Trump administration, and no doubt a main reason he landed the high-ranking position.

A return to the bad days in the 1990s when radical environmentalists sabotaged logging equipment and endangered the lives of working men and women in the Mountain West and Pacific Northwest. Shame on these domestic terrorists. https://t.co/uLSZ0GKXL4 — Wm Perry Pendley (@Sagebrush_Rebel) November 12, 2018

Nearly three decades after contributing to the LaRouche publication, Pendley and what’s left of LaRouche’s organization continue to pound similar drums. Along with its stunt at Ocasio-Cortez’s town hall, the LaRouche organization has taken aim at 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. In September, the Executive Intelligence Review published a conspiracy-laden “special report” titled “‘CO₂ Reduction’ Is a Mass Murder Policy: Designed by Wall Street and the City of London.” The report’s landing page features a close-up of Thunberg wearing a hooded jacket. Up until his appointment to Trump’s BLM, Pendley was posting under the Twitter handle @Sagebrush_Rebel, a reference to the Sagebrush Rebellion movement of the 1970s and ’80s that sought to remove lands from federal control. His tweets often lashed out at environmental activists like Thunberg, whom he likened to a cult leader. In a phone interview, Rowell marveled at the number of environmental foes featured in his 1996 book “Green Backlash” who went on to hold positions of power in the Trump administration, which has prioritized gutting environmental regulations, and to join the chorus that’s taken to attacking and demonizing the next generation of environmental advocates. “There is nothing more fundamentally pathetic ― a bunch of old right-wingers going after Greta,” Rowell said. This story has been updated with a statement from Pendley.

It is a cult today, it was a cult in the 1960s, that, in the words of James Bond's foe Goldfinger, "expect[s] [us] to die." The cult of Greta Thunberg https://t.co/NYmV7Jw9yZ — Wm Perry Pendley (@Sagebrush_Rebel) April 27, 2019