Draw Lots

My awful time in Chuck Baldwin's Liberty Fellowship.

I've been around a lot of weird people.

The migration of my childhood social life is a curve that extends from the old Ron Paul campaign volunteer crowd to the increasingly deranged and paranoid militant following that Stewart would build around himself later. The space between covers a vast spectrum of odd encounters, guys with baby doll head necklaces discussing music theory around a campfire to militiamen worrying over secret sonic detection surveillance built into fiber optic internet cables tracking their footsteps. Thus is life in The Movement: The Patriot Movement, Militia Movement, Liberty Movement, Sovereign Citizen Movement, and the muddled gray slurry that arises from all of those melding together that will compel it's component people to either throw extremely mediocre BBQs or storm a Federal building. My people, so called.

The strange conversations with people in The Movement were usually the safest I could have, as far as my own social awkwardness went. Trying to talk to regular people was often painful and loaded with pitfalls I did not understand, it was much harder to notice my own failings when I was speaking with a woman who was utterly convinced she was going to be made the next President by secret ballot. The absolute worst case scenario was nodding politely at complete nonsense, with next to no chance of embarrassing myself. About eight in ten conversations I ever had outside my home were so outlandish that they were barely conversations at all; This was a terrible environment for practicing any social skills but was endlessly entertaining. However, after all the earnest conversations about psychic green berets, ancient aliens, and secret Russian special forces stashed in every corner like loose change lost behind a couch, nothing touches the obstacle course of discomfort that was my time with the congregation of Chuck Baldwin's Liberty Fellowship.

Those with some familiarity with Pastor Chuck are likely already bracing themselves for the ride ahead, but as a kid with an already unusual upbringing I had no idea what I was in for when we began to attend Baldwin's weekly services in the dingy conference room of Kalispell's Red Lion hotel. I had a little inkling of Chuck's history, extensive political involvement with the Constitution Party and endorsements for Ron Paul on the heels of disowning Bush over the Iraq war, and even then this was fairly standard for the Movement. I had very little idea who Pat Buchanan was, except that his name was vaguely familiar, and was a long way from developing my now trademark antipathy for Ronald Reagan. I knew that all Movement events and gatherings had their share of mixed fruits and nuts, so I was braced for hearing a lot about the Gay Agenda (a point I was specifically forbidden from arguing to avoid friction) and the destruction of the Twin Towers by laser satellite. Only vaguely aware that he was one of “our people,” I walked into a veritable human trail mix bag of mania and Multilevel Marketing Moms.

I had very little experience Churching, and so did not notice anything particularly odd about service being held in a hotel convention space despite the church having been in the area since 2011. The armed guard in the hallway outside was similarly unremarkable, I was so used to armed security at events that his presence just sort of slid off my attention. After the initial strangeness of singing along with unfamiliar hymns the sermon itself was well worn ground: Globalists, government overreach, the Christian duty to resist tyranny and evil, 501C3 tax exemptions as a muzzle for silencing righteous opposition, etc. It seemed to be simply a religious repackaging of the political rhetoric that I was well versed in, rhetoric that already carried heavy references to Christianity in its appeals to the Founders and Natural Law to begin with.

What I did notice were the people in the front rows who would punctuate Baldwin's sentences by shouting “Hallelujah!” and “Praise Jesus!” needlessly loud, spending the entire sermon upright with their arms raised and their bodies swaying side to side to a rhythm I could not hear. I had never seen anything like it, and the display disturbed me for some deep reason I could not immediate identify. It wasn't that I was unnerved by them engaging so totally an event I found boring, I understood well enough that different people liked different things, it was the ecstasy in their rapturous faces and max-volume voices as if this so far unremarkable (to me) Sunday service was a life milestone to be celebrated. I ducked out early, to some disapproving stares, jogging down the highway from the dingy outskirts to the downtown where I caught a boxing class at our regular gym, not knowing that I had just hit a high water mark: The sermon I had exited through a side door was the best I would ever experience at liberty Fellowship.

Next time, and every time after that, I would have to talk to those people.

The talking cannot be understated, Stewart thrived off the attention of his prepper peers and would effectively hold court after every Movement event for hour after hour, presiding over a shifting formation my family called the Conversation Circle. The Conversation Circle would form after any speech while the folding chairs were still being put away, linger until event staff turned off the lights, migrate to the parking lot, and if particularly strong could survive being disassembled to travel to a nearby restaurant to the dismay of any wait staff who liked going home on time. The more cultish devotion Stewart received, the stronger the Circle would grow as he cultivated and shepherded it to bask in its adoration. As soon as we were in the car, of course, Stewart would bemoan the persistent Circle and how it had stolen his evening, as if he had no power to say goodnight and walk away from the same conversation he'd been having on repeat for well over ten years. Unless his tiny audience was exhausted and found a chance to escape, the Circle would persist until Stewart had wrung all the attention and devotion that he wanted from it, and his want was endless.

The people Chuck Baldwin had drawn together had a lot of devotion to wring out.

Stewart could pull a crowd for his personality cult worship Circle from generally any Movement event, but the well at Liberty Fellowship seemed to be bottomless. Time after time I found myself stranded wherever the Circle happened to wash up for hours after the already odiously long service had concluded. I began to understand something about the kind of people who would move more or less the greatest diagonal distance across the country possible to follow a political pastor, and how thoroughly fucked my Sundays were going to be for the foreseeable future. Baldwin had selected a group of nearly perfect followers from his enormous Pensacola, Florida congregation for his pre-apocalypse move to the mountain valley around Kalispell, which was quickly becoming a Survivalist mecca. Stewart could not have asked for an audience better suited to hang tirelessly on his every word.

Liberty Fellowship had floated into Kalispell on the same migratory current that would later bring Stewart and the Oathkeepers high command to the far Northwestern corner of Montana. Following the cue of apocalypse fiction author James Wesley Rawles, a mass flocking of doomsday preppers had begun to a region of the US dubbed the 'American Redoubt.' This was not a new concept, the recent craze was an updated version of the Appalachian Redoubt concept that was itself named for the famous WWII Swiss civil defense strongholds. The Redoubt labeled a swath of defensible mountain terrain stretching through Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon that was to become a gun-toting Libertarian haven when the wheels came off civilization. Increasingly, Montana's Flathead Valley was becoming a hot spot for this End of the World As We Know It preparatory migration and a nexus of Militia and antigovernment networks.

I did not learn until much later that Randy Weaver had attended services at Liberty Fellowship, but I was totally unsurprised. I only know for certain that it was not while Stewart was in attendence because there were no fireworks over a prior contact in which Stewart kicked Weaver out of an Oathkeepers parade over his white nationalism.

Thus we washed up in a dingy rental in Evergreen, a crime-riddled suburb of Kalispell, shortly after Liberty Fellowship landed with its select congregation of doe-eyed ideological devotees. Our task, set by Stewart, was scouting ahead for Oathkeepers leadership who would move up after us and draw the upper echelons of the Org into a national militia stronghold, and our first task was to network with the friendly groups already on the ground. Ordinary Movement folk were bad enough, but the Liberty fellowship people were just kind of vacant on top of it all: It wasn't just the same conversation at every event now, with the occasional interesting aside, it was the exact same step-by-step showering of praise on Stewart for being such a Great Man and a simplified version of the standard Coming Collapse of Society spiel I had heard all my life every single week. Each and every Sunday, without end, was a dumbed down and perfectly repetitive version of the worst and most boring parts of every Movement gathering, all allowed to run their full length to further my father's need for praise.

Stewart's hold on the center of attention was nearly unchallenged, Chuck had no interest in interacting with his congregation. Week after week he intentionally directed them to after-service hangouts at a nearby diner so that he could take his own family to Famous Dave's with minimal risk of encountering his followers, and instead of realizing that this was frankly a good idea we sorted ourselves with the sheep. I was condemned to a weekly partisan religious ritual that would last an average of roughly 7 hours between Service and Circle. For a fidgety, restless, totally unmedicated ADDled youth who constantly had to hold back The Wrong Opinions it was a foretaste of Hell.

The only bright spots were in Chuck's sermons, which would sometimes divert wildly from the abstracted doom-and-gloom economic forecast and the Christian duty to disobey a criminal government. One day the sermon would switch track midway into a surprisingly based rant about the civilian deaths of the Global War on Terror, and the cowardly practice of counting every dead 'military age male' as an enemy combatant killed to downplay the collateral damage of our forever war in the Middle East. At other times he would launch into a passionate rebuke of belief in the Rapture, delving into historical context and mistranslations in a way that approached a critical reading of the Bible. More often than anti-war or anti-misconception lectures he would take strange asides into advocating for corporal punishment of children, using anecdotes centered around a misbehaving “Little Timmy” while pointedly not addressing his adult son Tim in the audience.

At no time in the sermons I saw did he delve into the anti-Zionist rants he is well known for, the ones familiar to many on the internet for their tendency to stray right up to the line of antisemitic Jewish Conspiracy theory, except when he would fire himself up over attempts by some politician or another to sound out support for an unjustified war against Iran. Even then, the spoken criticism only extended to understandably calling Israel an apartheid state in league with war profiteers that held an unhealthy fascination in the minds of apocalyptic Evangelicals. This, again, will be familiar to many readers who have been watching with some concern the evolving love affair many Christian Conservatives have with the idea that a conflict over Israel will finally bring about the much-longed-for end of the world. The idea of a wing of the GOP, interests aligned with the Military Industrial Complex, deluding itself into encouraging a nuclear war in the Middle East for the purpose of summoning Christ is comforting to very, very few people, and so Chuck kept his many beliefs about 'Zionist Corruption' of American culture and the Rothschilds under his hat for the duration of our time in his conference-room congregation and catered his language to anti-war Libertarians.

To dismiss accusations of racism, provoked by such antics as accusing Zionists of destroying America from within and letting Randy Weaver in the door, he would sometimes bring up every single person of color and interracial couple in his congregation for a painfully awkward public display in front of the Livestream cameras.

In the background, Chuck was using his religious platform to maneuver for power. My parents managed to talk him out of arrogantly attempting a run for Governor in his very first year in Montana, a move sure to make him look like a Carpetbagger, which was initially borne out by the crash-and-burn of other transplant politicians like Ryan Zinke (who would eventually worm his way into Congress after an initial disastrous pro-Drone speech to Baldwin's congregation), but Stewart did invent the Oathkeepers Chaplain position on the spot to bind the power centers of the Montana Redoubt movement together. Both had designs on the Governor's office and, eventually, the Presidency, which would have lead to an interesting struggle for power between Baldwin and Stewart if Trump hadn't come between them and ended the love affair early.

I was totally unaware of all of this, struggling to make it through the weekly mental chore of avoiding any mention of my belief in dinosaurs, gay rights, or freedom of religion while I was bombarded with MLM sales pitches and Old Testament drama. I learned my lesson on avoiding any entanglement with Fellowship disputes early, at the time we joined a major rift had driven the congregation apart, already underway when I ducked out the side door to catch my boxing class, over a landlord-tenant dispute and the Biblical ritual for drawing of lots.

A recent prepper migrant, who kept bees and was generally a cool guy, and his insane backwoods landlord, who had dynamite hastily pawned off by the family of Timothy McVeigh's accomplice Terry Nichols buried in a hillside, had both begun to attend Liberty Fellowship for the purpose of Survivalist networking in the midst of a bitter argument over a security deposit. Despite this being absolutely no one's business except, perhaps, the civil court's, members of Baldwin's transplanted worship mob had taken it upon themselves to study the Biblical casting of lots and attempted to divine who in this situation was the 'liar.' I had never heard of this, being generally ignorant of the Bible except for the parts that were commonly politicized, and my distinct impression was that the church we had just joined was tearing itself in half over the result of playing Biblical pickup sticks to mediate a dispute that hadn't been their concern to begin with. Baldwin had to intervene to cool everyone off, launching from this into the first of many sermons on abstaining from gossip and bickering within a church that never quite took. This incident did not strike me as an encouraging sign, but I decided to reserve my judgment on these people and try not to snidely mock them in private the way Stewart consistently did.

This reservation did not last long. The lightning rod for some of the worst behavior was Tangy Tangerine, a Tang knockoff invented by Veterinarian-turned-'Naturopath' Joel Wallach of “Dead Doctors Don't Lie” fame, peddled by a Christian Multi-Level Marketing scam that spread like any other preventable disease through insular social groups opposed to the 'medical establishment.' Growing up, I had no idea how unreasonably expensive this totally pedestrian orange drink powder was because we got so many boxes given to us by people desperately attempting to snare Stewart as the ultimate Downline. We may have barely had money for utilities after expensive martial arts classes and tactical gear, whichever tear we were on at the time, but I probably unknowingly drank thousands of dollars in magical health-promoting orange drink. However, no amount of Tangy Tangerine ownership was sufficient, and nearly every conversation had potential to turn on you and become a sales pitch. I will now illustrate with one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my entire life to date:

I was wandering through the after-service mill and churn of the congregation, the time between all the people with things going on in their lives making small talk before they left and the forming of the Circle that would consume the rest of my evening. I rounded a people pileup shuffling between rows of chairs and saw a dour looking middle aged woman slowly backing my mom into a corner, knowing before I engaged that she was fending off yet another Tangy Tangerine sales pitch gunning for the Oathkeepers mailing list. The conversation turned, however, when I walked up and interposed myself; My attempt to extricate mom from the entrapment of orange dust marketing was outmaneuvered instantly, the way the weight and momentum of a large attacker can be redirected by a skilled opponent. She started to gush over me in a way that was very disquieting, bordering on flirtatious, and pivoted to include me while still standing in a spot that physically blocked my mother from leaving her corner without breaking decorum and shoving the woman out of the way.

I had gone from tiredly intervening in a captive sales pitch to being on the defensive in a psychological sparring match: Instantly I was put on the back foot and kept unbalanced by her fawning, losing control of the center before I knew that I was a target. I was strapping, handsome, very likely a charismatic genius in the making like my father, and oh so tall.

“You should meet my son, he's your age. Come here!”

Another gangly youth, even skinnier than I was at the time and coming up to about my shoulder, was unceremoniously yanked from where he'd been carefully blending into the crowd behind his mother and placed next to me for direct comparison. I felt instant solidarity with this other kid, a fellow prisoner of Liberty Fellowship and a victim of this conversation. He stood next to me, feet shifting and shoulders slumped, while his mother loudly exclaimed that we were the exact same age and I was sooo much taller. “Oh my goodness, this boy is your age and you are just so short compared to him!” The boy shrank in himself, people gave us the side-eye and grimaced, and she continued to loudly prattle on about how gosh darn stunted her son was when stacked up against my masculine height. My mind raced while my mother watched, amused in a car-crash spectator sort of way, and waited to see what I could come up with to take the sting out of that.

I frantically sorted through my mental files for something, anything to respond with. Jokes and deflections I'd memorized to get through social interactions were torn through for an answer that would disarm this horrible experience, working at a level of panic that the tiny librarian inside my brain hadn't dealt with since the last time a girl had shown interest in me. There was absolutely no way to counter her words, they were an incredibly harsh and mean statement of fact that I couldn't deny without being disingenuous, so they had to be circumvented. I conjured up all the weird niche reading I'd ever done on the internet and our vast, disordered home library and broke everything down into categories. The magazine articles, forum posts, dusty books, and VHS documentaries crowding my memory were scoured for everything to do with 'height.' I seized on what I thought was a clear winner.

“Well, I'm going to die sooner. Shorter or average height people live five years longer than people over 6', it's scientific. Uhm, our hearts just wear out faster because of the extra strain.” I waved my hand up and down my torso, indicating all the extra me that my poor heart would have to pump blood through with the limited number of beats set for my lifespan.

“Don't worry about that,” She said brightly, turning fully and closing the distance directly into my face as she smoothly switched targets, “As long as you drink plenty of Tangy Tangerine you'll be fine.”

My interruption had been undone, in trying to salvage the situation for her poor son I'd walked directly into a health-related topic and given her a hook to peddle faux vitamin C flavor that would revitalize the self-esteem of my immune system and rendition my free radicals to a body chemistry gulag. My failure to wonder why she'd chosen to suddenly pinion her son set me up for the fall, perhaps drinking more of her Antivaxxer Orange C would have enhanced my mental abilities and let me foresee the trap. Only the gravitational pull of the Conversation Circle saved me, and I managed to escape without her using me as a stepstone to broach an Oathkeepers Tangy Tangerine endorsement to Stewart. Before I broke away from her bubble, I saw her slap her son's hand away from a cookie plate someone had brought and admonishing her painfully skinny son to make sure he was cutting weight for wrestling competitions. I hope he drank plenty of Tangy tangerine.

This was not the last time someone would try to use mom and I as conduits for getting orange powder hooks into Stewart, and every attempt would be in vain. Secretly, to escape the notice of my mother who loudly mocked the MLM structure that had infected the church, Stewart had already signed on as a distributor with the spouse of the dynamite guy. This was, of course, part of a larger plan: Stewart meant to move us into their rental cabin, despite their obvious combined and separate insanity, while he began to build out his compound community in the kind of remote mountain town that has McVeigh-associated dynamite buried in the hills.

Continually ordering Tangy Tangerine to pile on top of our many free samples from other sources would help keep on their good side, and just maybe turn a profit if Stewart could bring out his inner huckster. People were always buying illegal raw milk in huge glass jars from Dynamite Wife's very own cows in the parking lot of Liberty fellowship events, looking something like a drug handoff conducted by middle age church women long before that was a cool image in pop culture. The black market milk trade obviously meant that they were pillars of the community and possibly, like his mother, connected enough to actually wring a profit from distributing MLM shit. Stewart was ever eager to cash in, and the fact that they certainly had assets for a post apocalyptic compound themselves appealed to his laziness; The Dynamite compound would simply be absorbed into the larger Rhodes survival community in his mind.

It was, truth be told, simply a part of Stewart's nature: Despite coming from a family with an extensive history of MLM ringleading and real estate scams, Stewart was a bit of sucker for the same kind of pitch. He frequently bought into obvious wastes like Timeshare schemes and was, while professing to use Tangy Tangerine as a ploy to gain favor with the landlords, scheming to betray them and switch to using Alex Jones as his supplier before advertising the crap on the Oathkeepers website. The plan was tragically cut short by other people in Oathkeepers who were not so easily swayed by cultish sales pitches aimed at stay-at-home-moms, strangling a rich Oathkeepers-InfoWars partnership in supplement shilling that might one day have gotten Stewart's likeness on the BrainForce packaging. Like ships in the night.

Just like the falling through of the Tangerine Upline, Oathkeepers' relationship with Baldwin would not pan out in the long term. Stewart saw Liberty Fellowship as a networking opportunity first and foremost, and one that was not fundamentally different from joining an MLM to gain access to a mailing list that would serve your own purposes. Stewart always jumped the gun though, being a bit too quick to take over leadership of the after-service dinner meetings from actual church functionaries like the secretary and burning his chance to cultivate a stronger and more beneficial relationship with Baldwin in favor of playing big man to his congregation after hours. The smarter path might have been to focus on Chuck, perhaps make a habit of going to the Famous Dave's after service some days to develop a more personal connection over ribs than the Survivalist alliance of convenience that had welded Liberty Fellowship and Oathkeepers together. They could have bonded over dissing Donald Rumsfeld and the IQ of the Liberty Fellowship congregation and become best friends, it would at least have improved my evening and made Stewart and Chuck's falling out all the more explosive to watch.

Pastor Chuck would stay true to form when the Militia Movement and Oathkeepers swung themselves into alignment with Trump, keeping up a record of going against the grain dating back to his harsh condemnation of the Bush presidency and doubling down on criticism of The Donald when everyone else fell in line. They split dramatically when Stewart, constantly a month behind on the Conservative cultural zeitgeist, wrote an open letter to Trump begging for harsher lockdowns and the deployment of the National Guard to shut down major cities in Hazmat suits. Baldwin left the Org with a scathing resignation letter that played a lot better with the Oathkeepers membership than Stewart's demand for military-enforced shutdowns, and effectively forced Oathkeepers into a full reversal of stance on the pandemic. I believe that this sway did a lot more to damage Stewart's reputation than many people realize, he was generally correct on the seriousness of the pandemic (if overly authoritarian in his proposed action) but waffled when criticized by someone else with considerable Movement clout. His new position might have been more popular, but the change with the wind was noticed.

Stewart committed a grave sin, buckling under pressure in the standard politician way that he himself had mocked his entire life and thereby damaged his own credibility. For all of his faults and highly flawed beliefs, Baldwin stuck to his guns on what he believed to be right. He happened to be on the popular (and factually wrong) side of the argument over COVID measures, but stayed undaunted when he set himself in opposition to Trump and MAGA as a continuation of his stand against the earlier Bush cult of personality. Where Stewart clung to Trump like a pilot fish to a shark, in a category with treasonous weaklings like Lindsey 'Ladybug' Graham, Baldwin stayed the course by his own ideals and kept a dedicated following who appreciated the character and consistency. It also, coincidentally, has kept Baldwin from being thrown into an Alexandria holding cell on federal charges acquired doing stupid shit to keep Trump's favor. While the leadership of the modern Conservative movement, Christians in particular, gamble everything on Trumpism, Baldwin stands apart.

Baldwin's choice to stand by his principles may well have positioned him to fully realize his ambitions in the coming years; As Trump's star falls and his inner circle is poisoned to the remaining conservatives who are not fully developed cultists, a vacuum will appear that a self-branded Constitution Christian can exploit. If DeSantis has not attempted to seize power and plunged us into a civil war by 2025, Baldwin and Liberty Fellowship should be watched carefully. Any remaining conservative movement that survives the defeat of the current insane GOP will not be any more enthusiastic about 'moderates' and 'bipartisanship' than it is now, the people that are will effectively become right wing Democrats under the pressure of strategic voting. An arch-conservative and anti-Trump political pastor with established credibility, however, will have strong appeal, especially if a party realignment occurs during a looming crisis in the Middle East.

With Trump's sabotage of the Iran nuclear deal setting off a spiraling deterioration between Israel and Iran, Baldwin's long-established history of opposition to war with Iran and the funding of Israel is going to give him credibility with conservatives suspicious of the military industrial complex and pro-Israel lobbyists. The specter of Iran-Israel war over WMDs is already on the horizon and starting to become a polarizing issue conservatives while standard Neocons seem stuck in a 90s attitude of supporting Israel at any cost, blind to how the American public has become weary of war and is beginning to sour on Israels treatment of Palestinians. Baldwin's prior accusations of secret cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia are being increasingly vindicated, and Israel seems to determined to live up to the Apartheid State label, which he cunningly wraps up with rhetoric that blames 'Zionists' for degeneracy in modern American media without ever quite extending that to all Jews. Baldwin will be able to channel antisemitic conspiracy theory, legitimate criticism of Christian Zionists in the US and

the actions of Israel, anti-war rhetoric, and a history of principled opposition to bad faith actors like Trump and Stewart within conservatism all wrapped together in a mass popular appeal package for Republicans who will be hungover from the Trump debacle 10 years from now.

Stewart allowed fear to lead him to a jail cell on behalf of a leader willing to sacrifice him out of hand, Baldwin's Liberty Fellowship is still there every Sunday.

When Stewart is living out his final days in a the darkness of a federal penitentiary, you will still be able to score Tangy Tangerine sales rep packages and black market raw milk from the parking lot of Chuck Baldwin's campaign rallies. Drink up, America.

Tune in next week for more about the explosive living situation in deepest, darkest Trego, Montana that we discovered through Liberty Fellowship, and some musing about political organizing and Stewart's narcissism. Remember, your democracy is in danger: Take all necessary measures, and monitor this frequency until the emergency concludes.