Sen. John Kennedy calls out Fish and Wildlife Service’s ‘DEI plan’ to kill off barred owls

Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana will be the special guest at the Nov. 22 Alaska Republican Party gala in Anchorage — and it couldn’t come at a better time.

Kennedy, a national treasure known for his sharp humor and unflinching common sense, is once again speaking truth to bureaucratic absurdity in Washington.

This week, Kennedy took to the Senate floor to ridicule the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s latest scheme – a 30-year, billion-dollar plan to shoot nearly half a million barred owls in the name of “equity” for another bird, the northern spotted owl.

The Interior Department calls it “species management.” Kennedy calls it what it is: “DEI for owls.”

He’s right.

Under the Biden administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service finalized what it calls the Barred Owl Management Strategy, a breathtakingly expensive plan to lure and kill as many as 500,000 barred owls over the next three decades across 11 million acres of the Pacific Northwest. The goal is to “level the playing field” for the northern spotted owl, a smaller, pickier species that’s been losing ground for decades.

The problem isn’t new. Back in the 1990s, environmentalists swore up and down that logging was destroying the spotted owl population. They spiked trees to save the spotted owl. Logging was shut down, communities were wrecked across the Northwest, and tens of thousands of jobs vanished. But later, biologists quietly admitted that the real threat wasn’t chainsaws. It was another owl.

The barred owl, bigger, bolder, and far better at hunting, had simply moved west. Nature did what nature does. One species adapted and expanded, the other didn’t. That’s not discrimination, that’s ecology.

Now, after decades of failed “science-based” management and ruined livelihoods, the federal government’s solution is to send in the snipers. At a cost of $1.35 billion, taxpayers will foot the bill for an owl genocide that will have to continue forever to keep the illusion of control. It’s a perfect metaphor for bureaucratic thinking: create a crisis, spend a fortune, and never solve the problem.

Kennedy, never one to mince words, mocked the plan with his trademark Louisiana wit: “Spotted owls, good. Barred owls, bad. But the barred owls won’t lose their constitutional rights – they’ll kill them. They’re gonna kill 453,000 of them, dead as Jimmy Hoffa.”

You can almost hear the gasps from the pearl-clutchers in the Capitol press gallery. But Americans laugh, because he’s saying what we are all thinking.

Whether it’s DEI in government hiring, ESG in the markets, or “equity” in wildlife management, Washington has lost the plot. The federal government isn’t God. It can’t reorder nature or society to fit its political ideology. The barred owl didn’t “colonize” the West. It migrated there. It didn’t “oppress” the spotted owl. It out-hunted it. That’s not injustice – that’s instinct.

Kennedy’s voice stands out because he reminds us that common sense is still a virtue in public life. He’s not afraid to mock bad ideas, and he’s not intimidated by the bureaucrats who defend them. When he comes to Anchorage for the fall Republican gala, Alaskans will be hearing from a man who speaks for them — a straight-talking defender of reason in a city where reason too often goes extinct.

In an era when the Left can’t tell the difference between biology and ideology, John Kennedy is the rare politician who can still tell the difference between a bird and a boondoggle.