Every argument for dismantling America's public lands is built to sound reasonable: we need affordable housing; the West shouldn't be run by faceless bureaucrats in Washington; public lands represent a broken promise to the states. Episode four, "The Lies," pulls those arguments apart, and asks a more consequential question: who profits when we believe them?

The episode opens with Scott Fitzwilliams, who spent his career in the U.S. Forest Service and rose to supervise Colorado's White River National Forest — the most visited in the country. He and his deputy carried more than sixty years of combined wildfire experience — knowledge that takes a career to build and cannot simply be rebuilt by the next election. Then came the DOGE firings: probationary employees terminated by form letter for "performance," a claim Fitzwilliams calls a  ...