Name: Tracy Stone-Manning

Position: Director Bureau of Land Management

Connections to China and/or Extreme Leftist Organizations:

There has been a significant amount of coverage recently of Joe Biden’s nominee to serve as the head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Tracy Stone-Manning was granted legal immunity back in 1993 for her testimony that she retyped and mailed an anonymous letter to the U.S. Forest Service on behalf of a friend, John P. Blount. The letter warned the Forest Service that trees in an area about to be logged had been spiked, meaning heavy metal spikes had been driven into the trees to deter logging.

Per the usual highly partisan coverage, the story is cast as follows. Ms. Stone-Manning made an innocent mistake in allowing herself to be used in this way. She is very sorry. She was never herself a bad actor. There is nothing to see here but an isolated youthful indiscretion.

As you might guess all of this is at very best highly misleading and conceals a number of much more disturbing truths.

At the time Ms. Stone-Manning typed the letter in question Ms. Stone-Manning was, in fact, living with Mr. Blount. They were both members of a group called Earth First. Earth First was officially designated a terrorist group by the FBI. Ms. Stone-Manning was not only part of the group; she was the editor of one of its publications. ^[i]In local news coverage during this time period, she was sometimes referred to as an Earth First spokesperson.^[ii]

Before mailing the letter Ms. Stone-Manning rented a typewriter and retyped it. She did so by her own admission, because she did want the letter on her personal computer and because her fingerprints were “all over the original.” These hardly sound like the actions of an innocent unaware of the gravity of her actions. They sound a lot more like those of someone who is an active member of an underground organization involved in illegal activity.

Tree spiking is not some innocent prank. It involves hammering metal rods up to ten inches long into trees so that they will be hit when the trees are cut down. Hitting a metal tree spike with a chainsaw will not simply damage or destroy the saw being used. It can result in life threatening injuries to the individual using the chainsaw.

The letter Ms. Stone-Manning typed advised the Forest Service that 500 pounds of “spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length” had been jammed into the trees of an Idaho forest. It concluded with this warning.

“P.S., You bastards go in there anyway and a lot of people could get hurt.”

Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, summed up the situation pretty clearly when he said Stone-Manning “colluded with eco-terrorists who conducted extremist operations that aimed to maim and kill Idaho’s loggers and sawmill workers.”^[iii]

Stone-Manning lied about this entire incident in the paperwork she submitted as part of her confirmation process. She claimed she had never been the target of a federal investigation. In fact, the evidence makes clear that she was one of the prime suspects in the investigation from the outset, and only because she testified for the government and stuck a deal did she escape conviction herself.^[iv]

Earth First is not and never has been some moderate group focused on preserving the environment. It was created as a radical ecological movement heavily infused with Marxist and anarchist ideology. It regards human beings essentially as parasites on planet Earth and advocates “rewilding,” a euphemism for depopulation and the destruction of modern society.

In its founding document in 1980 Earth First laid out a statement of principles, which included opposition to “state capitalism” and “father-figure hierarchies” and an insistence that humankind “has no legitimate claim to dominate Earth.” Members of the group have argued that the collapse of civilization is desirable and inevitable. In 1988 members of the group launched a magazine called Live Wild or Die, an Anarchist magazine whose contributors called for moving “beyond Earth First!” and engaging in “a revolution of desire, a feral revolution.^[v]^[vi]

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth social and environmental.”

David Foreman, Founder of Earth First

“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled river and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.”

David Foreman, founder of Earth First

“The AIDS epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population…If it did not exist, radical environmentalist would have to invent it.”

David Foreman, founder of Earth First^[vii]

“…Human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth today,” and “In our decimation of biological diversity, in our production of toxins, in our attack on the basic life-support system of Earth, in our explosive population growth, we humans have become a disease – the Humanpox”

David Foreman, founder of Earth First^[viii]

Ms. Stone-Manning echoed such themes in her graduate thesis. In that document she described children as environmental hazards and a threat to the planet. Her solution? Chinese style population control limiting the number of children American families could have. ^[ix]

Tracy Stone-Manning is not a kind-hearted environmentalist who made an innocent and isolated mistake. She is a radical Marxist and anarchist who functioned as a core member of a group dedicated to the destruction of capitalism and modern society. Even in Joe Biden’s administration, the most radical in American history, she stands out as extreme and dangerous.

Stone-Manning’s job if confirmed would be to manage public lands on behalf of the American people. It would be hard to imagine someone less qualified or more ill-suited for that role. The woman is an extremist and a threat to the nation. She is Joe Biden’s terrorist, and no sane Senator should vote to confirm her.