Tracy Stone-Manning’s nomination to the Bureau of Land Management tells Americans the White House will reward left-wing extremism and violence.
From early on, the Biden administration has urged the need to combat “domestic terrorism” and touted a high standard of “ethics.” Joe Biden shot gaping holes in the sincerity and credibility of both goals when he nominated an ethically compromised eco-terrorist, Tracy Stone-Manning, to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which controls nearly 250 million acres of resource-rich federal lands.
The confirmation process has brought to light Stone-Manning’s domestic terrorist past. Some argue it makes her unfit to command the approximately 12 percent of the American landmass BLM controls, access to which is key to countless Western jobs and the region’s economic and cultural vitality.
A History of Domestic Terrorist Exploits
During her years as a graduate student at the University of Montana, Stone-Manning was involved with the eco-terrorist group “Earth First!,” which in 2002 was labeled a “radical group” by the FBI. The group gave rise to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), an organization the FBI described as a “serious terrorist threat” in the early 2000s.
Earth First! has extensive connections to ecological terrorist movements across the globe. It recently endorsed an attack on logging equipment in Chile, labeling the destruction of “no less than 26 machines” as a “beautiful coordinated attack,” according to the Earth First! Journal. The group also expressed unqualified support for terrorists — dismissed by some in the media as “vandals” — who recently set fire to part of a Tesla factory in Germany.
Closer to home, ELF was responsible for the 1998 arson attacks on ski buildings and equipment in Vail, Colorado. In May 2001, ELF firebombed the office of Toby Bradshaw, a biologist at the University of Washington, to protest his work genetically modifying trees.
More recently, in December 2020, “Earth First!” was scrawled across a natural gas pipeline in Aspen, Colorado, where an “intentional disruption” of gas service left hundreds of households without heat or hot water in the midst of a brutal winter cold snap. That crime remains unsolved, despite the Biden administration’s selective campaign to hunt down and prosecute domestic extremists.
Back in 1989, Stone-Manning directly supported the terrorist group’s tree-spiking activities. Tree spiking involves driving spikes or nails into the trunks of trees before they are cut down. The spikes can splinter upon impact with a logger’s chainsaw or a sawmill blade, sending out shards of flying metal. The aim is to maim or kill lumber industry workers, or damage equipment.
