Does the Government Track Anti-Public-Land Extremists?

Some supporters of public lands and former federal officials argue that these high-profile occupations are only the tip of a more serious crisis: a simmering and abusive siege on federal employees who work for the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and other agencies that manage public lands. They also allege that the federal government does not keep track of these types of extremist threats to federal employees. On Friday, Democratic leadership on the House Natural Resources Committee will ask the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether any of the agencies that oversee public land systematically follow anti-federal threats against public employees. The Government Accountability Office is Congress’s watchdog over federal agencies and public finances. “Unfortunately, while the events at Malheur may have been unusually public, they were not an isolated incident. Many of the Malheur plotters are associated with a broader anti-government movement that, for decades, has targeted federal facilities and employees throughout the Western United States,” says Raúl Grijalva, a Democratic congressman from Arizona and the ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee. In the letter, Grijalva requests that the GAO investigate whether any federal agency tracks threats from anti-government protesters or keep a security plan to address them. He also asks it to calculate the cost of “intentional damage done to federal property” by these groups...more

This issue goes far beyond federal land managers. Incivility in our society is seemingly found everywhere, from the guy on the street to Trump's tweets.

An objective look at history will tell you, "Societies are peaceful and democratic to the degree that individual citizens feel vested in the political process and in their own communities. When people begin to feel voiceless, powerless, and/or disfranchised, the social order begins to break down and deteriorate." 

A return to civility is certainly called for, along with the original principles that guided the founding of this nation.

The "tracking" of folks, either left or right, violates both.