President Joe Biden has picked his fair share of controversial and unfit administration nominees. But few have as troubling a past as Tracy Stone-Manning, the woman nominated to lead the Bureau of Land Management.
In the late 1980s, Stone-Manning sent a threatening letter to the Forest Service on behalf of a radical environmentalist group, Earth First, informing officials that many of the trees that were part of a timber sale in Idaho had been spiked — that is to say, activists had driven metal spikes into the timber to damage loggers’ machines and hurt their sales, with grave risk to their lives as well. Stone-Manning later testified before a grand jury about the incident and was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony against the other individuals involved.
Stone-Manning’s letter stated: “This letter is being sent to notify you that the Post Office Sale in Idaho has been spiked heavily. The reasoning for this action is that this piece of land is very special to the earth. It is home to the elk, deer, mountain lions, birds, and especially the trees. The project required that 11 of us spend nine days in God awful weather conditions spiking trees. We unloaded a total of five hundred pounds of spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length.”
That’s just the start. In her graduate thesis, Stone-Manning endorsed Chinese Communist Party-style population control and claimed that in the name of environmental protection, Americans should not be allowed to have more than two children.
“The origin of our abuses is us,” the thesis states. “If there were fewer of us, we would have less impact. We must consume less, and more importantly, we must breed fewer consuming humans.”
As part of the project, Stone-Manning also created a series of advertisements to promote her thesis. One of them referred to children as an “environmental hazard.” Another said, “When we overpopulate, the earth notices it more. Stop at two. It could be the best thing you do for the planet.”
One would think that connections to terrorism and an affinity for anti-natalism would be more than enough to disqualify any nominee, Republican or Democrat. Bob Abbey, the former Bureau of Land Management director during the Obama administration, said as much last week. And Steve Ellis, the deputy director of the agency under former President Barack Obama, echoed Abbey’s concerns and said it would be impossible for Stone-Manning to work effectively with western Red states.
But for some reason, every single Democratic senator voted to advance Stone-Manning’s nomination. Is this the kind of person the Democratic Party wants leading one of the federal government’s agencies? Someone who endorses the anti-family mindset found in China’s totalitarian regime? Someone involved in an ecoterrorist plot that could have fatally injured loggers or mill workers?
Apparently, the answer is yes.
