Over Republican objections that stemmed from her role in a 1989 tree spiking case, Senate Democrats confirmed renowned ecoterrorist Tracy Stone-Manning to lead the Bureau of Land Management Thursday. The vote not only signaled approval of Stone-Manning’s past, but also marked the escalation of calls emanating from the left to ramp up tactics of violent extremism in the name of environmental stewardship.
Tree spiking, wherein environmental activists jam 8-to-10 inch metal rods into trees, was a popular tactic among left-wing activists in the late 20th century. Meant to terrorize mill workers as a deterrent to the lumber industry, the spikes — which served as ISIS-style road bombs in Iraq — would then explode saws when processed sending deadly steel shrapnel flying upon impact. In 1987, two years before Stone-Manning’s group spiked trees in northern Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest, a 23-year-old millworker lost teeth and part of his cheek and jaw when an 11-inch spike driven into a tree shattered a large ban saw he operated.
Stone-Manning accepted legal immunity in 1993 after she agreed to testify as a co-conspirator in a 1989 tree spiking case which may have left deadly rods in trees that would present a risk to firefighters today.
“Tracy will bring good old-fashioned Montana common sense to the bureau,” Montana Democrat Sen. Jon Tester said on the Senate floor Thursday. “She will lead the agency with honor and with integrity and, as she has done her entire career, Tracy will bring folks together, from both sides of the aisle and all sides of issues, to get things done.”
Not a single Republican, however, supported Stone-Manning’s nomination in the upper chamber, while Democrats, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, unanimously approved her confirmation.
After the widespread encouragement of last year’s summer of rage, Thursday’s vote signified the Democrats’ further acceptance of violent means to meet political ends.
While the environmental leftist group Earth First formally renounced tree spiking as a tactic in 1990, efforts to revive ecoterrorism as a form of protest have begun to resurface as climate hysteria escalates on the heels of left-wing destruction cheered in the name of social justice.
In September, the New Yorker promoted the new book, “How To Blow Up A Pipeline” with the author as a guest on the magazine’s podcast.
Ezra Klein, the co-founder of Vox and a columnist for the New York Times, reviewed the book in a July column headlined “It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let The World Burn,” where Klein transcribed its direct call to action:
Announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.
“In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse,” reads the book’s description on Amazon. “We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop–with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.”
One can easily imagine the consequences after a brief five-day shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline in May which sparked a nationwide panic.
“How To Blow Up A Pipeline” remains available for sale free of censorship on Amazon. A search for conservative scholar Ryan Anderson’s book on the radical transgender agenda, however, will come up short.
When users type in “When Harry Became Sally: Responding To The Transgender Moment,” the title of Anderson’s book, the page will populate instead with rebuttal work from a rival author, “Let Harry Become Sally: Responding To The Anti-Transgender Moment.”
It seems ecoterrorism, however, may see new life on the left. As hysterical climate predictions continue to ramp up calls for action, the extremism of tactics to meet those calls will only intensify as violence goes excused when the ends are said to justify the means.
