Unabomber Praised Ecoterrorist Group Linked to Biden BLM Nominee
Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, granted his first interview after his 1996 arrest to the former editor of Earth First!, the eponymous journal of the environmental extremist group to which President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) once belonged.
Kaczynski, after his nearly 20-year-long bombing spree that killed three people and injured 23, was sentenced to eight consecutive life terms in prison before he invited Earth First! journal editor Theresa Kintz to conduct his first media interview in 1999. Kaczynski said Kintz was the “one journalist” he would “be prepared to trust.”
“As I mentioned earlier, I’ve given no media interviews in part because mainstream journalists have shown themselves to be completely unscrupulous and untrustworthy,” Kaczynski wrote to Kintz. “But you are one journalist whom I would be prepared to trust. Would you like to interview me for the Earth First! Journal?”
The backstory of Kintz’s interview with Kaczynski, as well as audio from the interview, was highlighted in a 2020 documentary series called Unabomber: In His Own Words.
Earth First! is a self-described “radical environmental movement,” though it operates as a group with a symbol, publication, and the motto “no compromise in defense of mother earth.” The FBI linked Earth First! to domestic terrorism because its group members engaged in criminal activity in the 1980s and 1990s — such as tree spiking and property destruction — that the FBI identifies as ecoterrorism.
Tracy Stone-Manning, Biden’s nominee to head the BLM, was a member of Earth First! when she was a graduate student at the University of Montana in Missoula and was involved in a criminal tree spiking case during that same timeframe, about 30 years ago.
In 1989, Stone-Manning mailed a letter to the U.S. Forest Service on behalf of John P. Blount, an individual in her “circle of friends,” crudely warning federal authorities that trees in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest that were scheduled to be cut down had been sabotaged with metal spikes to prevent them from being harvested. Tree spiking, as this form of sabotage is called, is both a crime and, according to the FBI’s definition, an act of ecoterrorism that can be fatal to loggers or millworkers processing the spiked trees.
After the Forest Service received the warning letter, Stone-Manning and six other individuals in Missoula were the target of a 1989 grand jury investigation for which they were subpoenaed and required to submit finger prints and hair samples. However, the 1989 grand jury did not uncover enough evidence to charge Blount or anyone else with the crime. The case was not solved until Blount’s ex-girlfriend reported him to authorities two years later, and in doing so, also named Stone-Manning as the person who mailed the letter for him. In exchange for immunity, Stone-Manning testified in the 1993 trial against Blount, who was convicted for the tree spiking crime and sentenced to 17 months in prison.
Former BLM Acting Director William Perry Pendley references interviews in which Stone-Manning admits she did not come forward about her knowledge of Blount’s 1989 tree spiking until her 1993 testimony. Stone-Manning later filled out a questionnaire for her Senate confirmation hearing with inaccuracies related to the tree spiking case.
Kintz asked Kaczynski, who authored the famous 35,000-word manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, during their interview, “Did you ever think of yourself as an Earth Firster?”
Kaczynski replied, “Not really. As sort of a — sympathizer’s too weak a word — but sort of, Earth Firster satellite?” Kaczynski added that he did not want to subscribe to the Earth First! journal because he felt it might put him on law enforcement’s radar.
''But I did pick up a copy of the journal, and I saw a lot in it that I liked,” Kaczynski said.
