Hello all, it’s been way too long since I’ve been around to bum everyone out, so I now reappear. To be perfectly honest, between struggling with my mental health and staying on top of school I have just not had the spoons to spare to do any writing at all. The guilt of vanishing on all the people who subscribed for months at a time has been a constant weight, and I hope to make up for that with a return to your regularly scheduled content. More to come, and thank you all for sticking around.
“...And when they opened their trunk, they took out these black clothes that could have been uniforms and put them in another car.” The woman speaking is tastefully breathless with concern, rolling the description of their clothes off her tongue with great emphasis. She is addressing a weekly training meeting of the Oathkeepers CPT group, and reporting to the assembled militiamen that she saw some vaguely middle-eastern looking men, described as ‘Swarthy’ and ‘Suspicious,’ outside the grocery store who might just be ISIS.
The assembled room takes this report in stride, neither dismissive nor enthusiastic. They are the community branch of the Oathkeepers CPT Program, grandiosely titled “Civilization Preservation Teams” before a rebranding to the lower-key “Community Protection Team,” and therefore bound to keep up relations with key community members to execute their mission. The program overall was a thinly disguised effort to build a network of survivalist guerrilla cells that could act as an insurgency against a tyrannical regime would seize control of the United States after a societal collapse, or else the paramilitary wing of a nominally Libertarian right-wing political movement to seize control of the United States after a societal collapse (likely to shake out to some mixture of the two in practice).
The local Team was effectively under the personal command of Stewart Rhodes, when he showed up, which was compared by members to a general personally supervising the regular training of an individual infantry platoon out of a need to be a part of things.
Today the room happens to be pared down to the core group of regulars: Army veterans, Contractors, Border Patrol, the composition is heavily on the side of actual professionals without the usual counterweight of elderly hangers-on and fringe weirdos making dubious claims of being Delta Force alumni and/or possessing psychic powers. By weight, the meeting room is around half composed of people who’d been shot at by actual Islamist terrorists and therefore very quickly determined that the chances of these people being ISIS infiltrators is vanishingly small.
It is still necessary to nod politely at this description of a carload of young men who are obviously not from around here being spotted, during peak tourist season, in front of the grocery store favored by all the tourists. The woman is something of a benefactor for the local Oathkeepers CPT branch, hosting its weekly meetings and semi-regular training exercises on a sprawling prepper ranch that doubles as a lucrative “troubled teen residential center.”
The proprietor has been unceasingly welcoming to Oathkeepers and its recently transplanted leadership in a not very subtle effort to make her property the default operating base for Oathkeepers-aligned militia forces. She hosts our activities, pours her Teen Ranch profits into building up solar power and HAM radio infrastructure, rents out cabins to newly arrived Oathkeepers brass and Patriot Movement celebrities like Jordan Page, and generally works to support the mission while cultivating her ranch into a sort of Oathkeepers central compound. Doubtless this is done out of an abundance of patriotic fervor for the cause, and only as a distant second to benefit from the extra post-apocalypse security and clout it will bring when all society comes crashing down.
A lot of people in the area do not like her very much, and the prospect of order breaking down is a frequent worry.
The upshot is that when she narcs on a carload of “swarthy and suspicious types” for handling black fabric in a parking lot, we have to at least pretend to take it seriously. Certainly it sounds like they could be Jihad-ish, and they are definitely not from around here, unsurprising as that may be due to tourists by definition generally not being from around here and every so often not even white. Events like that should be given the appropriate level of due consideration and solemnity.
Our course of action was mostly to make fun of her in the car, “Look out, if you get too much of a tan she’ll call you in on the radio as Driving while Swarthy.”
(For those unaware, this is a play on an old joke about police pulling over black people disproportionately for a variety of flimsy causes that boil down to getting ticketed for Driving While Black.)
The effect of Stewart being in the room, while not decisive, should not be undersold: He was still very much following the arc of his personal myth of being an anti-racist warrior for American freedom, who inspired unending fear in the hearts of Stormfront posters because he was going to one-up the pussy ACLU by just straight up killing people when the moment was right. Driving While Swarthy was thus instantly derided and became a sort of group in-joke for a while, before Stewart’s ego consumed the CPT meetings entirely and the friction of contact with his personality wore down the group completely, but a long while after I looked back and realized it was really only funny because of sheer dumb luck.
The room had happened to be full of fairly reasonable people.
So, for a moment, give me a little room to engage in guesswork and imagine the details that were lost between the parking lot and the militia Conversation Circle. Rewind the scenario and see how it plays out with one or two crucial differences and a shift in perspective:
You are a tourist doing your level best to front like driving the length and breadth of a state as unreasonably large as Montana is still as fun and exciting as it was before the exhaustion set in, finally getting out to stretch your legs in the parking lot of a slightly grimy local chain supermarket to buy overpriced snacks on your way to Canada. A weathered old woman driving an enormous truck glares at you as you and your trendy, slightly hipster-ish friends clamber out of the adventure wagon and rearrange the luggage in the trunk. Her stare holds something harder and more biting than the venom reserved for all the outsiders who keep the local economy barely afloat, but you and your friends are some description of brown skinned and therefore expecting that, especially here.
This town has a touristy facade built up and down the historic main drag, but one turn left or right off the highway leads into a tangled sprawl of haphazard suburb and trailer houses in various states of disrepair. It’s not exactly Klan territory, and odds are that 9 out of every 10 of the people in the slapped-together trailer-and-shed construction multi-generational homes would help you change a flat tire without a second thought, but that 1 is going to be real loud and the number of those helpful people who would be happy to see you move in next door is a lot lower than that ratio.
It would be easy to brush off her glare and suspicious glances as one of a thousand small otherings you experience in a given week, but on one of her loops around the parking lot to keep eyes on you, someone handles a black button down shirt stowed away for special occasions. You don’t know it, but you just escalated this woman’s DEFCON and her first recourse is not to make a panicked post on the town gossip facebook page.
You and your friends take a while to bask in the gorgeous mountain view, something that catches even lifelong residents off guard when a sudden weather change wreaths the mountaintops in half-concealing stormclouds or dusts the peaks with glaring white snowpack that brings their outline into shocking relief against pale blue. While you are preoccupied, the woman from the parking lot has gone home to welcome the local would-be apocalypse warlord and play the host while he holds survivalist court with his supporters. Instead of nodding politely and then laughing off your report, one or two important people in the room are more paranoid about Muslim terrorists or are simply more racist and the balance is tipped. No one is laughing, instead grim men in camouflage and fringed deerskin jackets take her report as seriously as she gives it.
Maybe you’re lucky and some time has passed between your sighting and this meeting, so that you’re long gone by the time the Patrols go out coordinating a search over local amateur radio (mostly over MURS frequencies, since the users are generally unlicensed and to attract less attention from the broader amateur radio community), maybe you’re unlucky and you pick up a tailing Forest-Camo jeep with a dozen whipping antenna and a wall of insane political and religious bumper stickers obscuring the back window. That’s probably as far as it goes, unless Google Maps directs you off onto a weird shortcut and you happen to do something else to excite suspicion in minds already primed for it, which could really be anything at all.
Of course, even if you are safely away by the time the local “Civil Protection” unit gets itself organized, the spring may have just been wound up for a random black Suburban driven by much unluckier nonwhite men to trip a week later.
In retrospect, “Driving While Swarthy” was never that funny at all.
I now get to the part where a lot of lefties who want to write off rural America entirely will throw this into their confirmation bias furnace with all the other field plentifully available on Twitter, and the Redneck Apologists will shake their heads in disappointment for the way I have slandered decent small-town conservatives and throw my newsletter onto the pile of persecution complex field readily available on Twitter.
Allow me a moment to explain, though I must begin with the caveat that I will not be both-sides-ing this like some kind of centrist Nancy-Boy. It is my firmly held belief that conservatism is inherently a racist ideology that always corrodes freedom and grows towards totalitarianism over time, but I still contend that this does not mean that everyone who subscribes to or identifies with mainstream or even fringe conservatism is individually racist or is beyond any dialogue.
It is difficult to really encapsulate racism in rural America, especially with my own limited point of view as one of the whitest people possible. I have not the academic training to examine the complexity of American institutional white supremacy as it seeps down to the forgotten and neglected working class of this country, the classism that said white supremacy pervades and protects, nor the personal experience to offer some deeper truth on the subject beyond people assuming they’re in good company after talking about guns with a frighteningly pale ginger in a gas station for a minute and letting their real views loose.
What I do have are a few Ground Truths to dispense about the generally all-or-nothing popular culture perceptions of redneck America, gained only from my personal observations and a bit of space for perspective from being permanently just a little bit of a weirdo outsider anywhere I go.
The two opposing narratives summarize rural America as such: That everywhere outside the civilized delivery radius of a Pizza Hut is a wasteland of meth-mouthed white nationalist hate and squalid violence painted over with a thin veneer of patriotism and Christian morality, a wreck of miserable people who hate human decency and working infrastructure built by their educated and tolerant superiors the way Tolkien’s Orcs hate light and nature. Then, there is the crisp flag-waving country western twang chiming in to contend that, actually, the only real racists are a vanishingly small number of Kard Karrying Klansmen among a vast population of stoic, yet thoughtful, compassionate and hard-working people unfairly maligned by a nearly aristocratic Liberal society, one that petulantly hates the very people who make life possible with their honest labor.
The truth is that Capitalism has been steadily eating everything decent in this country as it eats itself, but more specifically hyper romantic portrayals like these are harnessed for political and commercial gain even as they hollow out. So long as a story exists that paints someone as a despicable yet pathetic villain and someone as a long-suffering humble hero, it will be used to sell something.
I remind the reader that Montana very nearly went to Obama in 2008. A lot of people who voted for Obama are certainly much more racist or simply unopposed to racism than they would like to believe, but it does speak to a bit of give in the hold of white supremacy and large-C crypto-fascist Conservatism on the rural American West. This is perhaps one of the reasons the Democratic Party recoiled in horror from the 50 States Strategy and doubled down on more surefire methods of losing with dignity: Simultaneously winning too many seats in Congress and gaining broader appeal with working-class rural populations and blue collar white voters would endanger the desired knife-edge balance of power and put the Party threateningly close to being able to do some kind of Socialism.
In my town there certainly is a level of politeness and hospitality extended to everyone, and a great deal of willingness to stop to help strangers broken down on the side of the road or band together for community members in need. There is unthinking sacrifice of time and resources from people living in the struggle with too little of either, and a pervasive exercise of kindness as an everyday virtue. There is also a strong thread of xenophobia, hate, bigotry, and petty grudges fueled by generational trauma and a culture that exalts violence as the ultimate mark of manhood.
In my experience, community aid and volunteer emergency services have concentrated the former, while more and more Oathkeepers and its affiliates gathered the latter. The spectrum is, however, murky and confused, especially to a quick outside view.
Ranking the people I know by their likelihood to join a Fascist movement in persecuting thier vanishingly few POC neighbors, a lot of the folks on the very low end of that list also casually throw around racial slurs in conversation just because their family has for generations. This goes through loggers using the old hard-R’d nicknames for different pieces of equipment in their field to undercover lefties directly quoting their relatives who watch Newsmax. By the same token, a particularly vile local toady of Stewart’s who professed anti-racism and high-minded Libertarian ideals once told me that the U.S. should simply execute every illegal immigrant until they stopped showing up. When I asked him if that included children, he replied “It’ll only have to a few times before they get the message” with a gleam in his eye that betrayed a little too much excitement at the prospect.
This is not to say that all the worst racists locally are cryptic about it, a summer festival two years back featuring a massive white trash family having a loud discussion about their family rules on dating outside their race comes to mind (I was tragically wearing fire department apparel at the time). However, in my view the cryptic ones are much more dangerous.
More broadly: People in the former category, even multi-generational cultural conservatives, genuinely listened when I explained a few facts about systemic racism in America during the BLM uprisings in 2020, having genuinely never heard of the fact that black men receive wildly more and harsher convictions for the same crimes when compared to white men. The latter was shaken to his core when I told him that the only option left to a soldier ordered to murder children is to shoot his superior officer in the back at the next opportunity, and diverted onto mumbling about hanging “Coyote” traffickers instead. He would not be the last person I had that exact same conversation with in this town.
That is the difference between people who behave in generally good, decent, and moral ways and still post Boomer memes on Facebook about not understanding what White Privilege means and the people who deep down will embrace white supremacy for its promise of power, cruelty, and rigid authoritarian hierarchy whether they are openly racist right now or not. It’s the difference between people who are simply in a bubble that keeps them from accessing information that might prove dangerous to those in power, and the people who will discover they really are fascists when the time is right.
This person with the mass grave fantasies did not happen to be in attendance on Swarthy Report day, but I do believe he was one of the people Jason Tatenhove heard having a roundtable discussion on why the Holocaust never happened in the food court of that same slightly grimy local supermarket. The 4-5 man corner discussion on insane bullshit over fried chicken at a plastic table is too specific to match anyone else but this fellow and his crew, when I was still a pipeline to relaying messages to Stewart I would have to duck past to avoid men in performative Amateur Radio accessory vests trying to hand me home-burned CDs about secret UFO technology.
Now, one very out of shape man in a panel van with a suspension blown out under the weight of many mobile radios might not sound like a terrible threat. 4-5 of these guys might not even sound like something to be unreasonably afraid of, beyond the fact that they will certainly be shooting first and certainly armed, but at the wrong time they could have a highly receptive audience.
The aforementioned ‘Delta Force Veteran’ comes to mind, locally famous for about 5 minutes for receiving psychic visions of Russian special forces teams hidden in tunnels in Glacier National Park back when militias still thought that was a bad thing. Much later, and from a totally independent source, I would hear that he and his family bragged about holding a local electric co-op utility van at gunpoint and forcing the repairmen to admit that they were actually CIA agents.
Assuming that this never happened, and that’s a stretch considering that local government seems to have a high tolerance for letting bygones be bygones when deep hill people shoot at employees and cops, it does mean that there is a certain fantasy being harbored and waiting for the right spark.
Islamophobia is a convenient catch, one incident that set the town nearly ablaze was an actual Muslim woman moving into the area and taking a job at a convenience store. A yokel that I would later have a nearly word for word repeat of the Mexican Child Murder conversation with expressed his concerns to me one day, “Last time I heard about a Muslim working at a gas station, it was because there was a terrorist bombing later.” When I asked him if we should keep tabs on every white teen boy because of all the mass shootings he did not have an answer. The woman didn’t stay in town for long.
By contrast, a large Indian (South Asian, not Indigenous) family who bought another gas station up the highway ignited a buzz of fear over whether they would ruin the business by hiring drug addicts, convicts, and let the building fall apart from lack of maintenance. Nevermind that every local gas station is at least in part staffed by people with priors, Amphetamine enthusiasts, and is slowly falling apart from neglect. However, they were not Muslim, and so when they didn’t immediately start stripping the copper out of the walls and letting cashiers shoot up at the counter or whatever the hell was supposed to happen, they were suddenly welcomed with just slightly excessive enthusiasm by people who fervently pretended that they never had any ambiguously racist concerns about the newcomers at all.
It’s the specter of terrorism that provides the best hook for mob frenzy, and the least room for outlasting suspicion and being promoted to Model Minority. Foremost are Muslims due to decades of mass media programming, but BLM and that shadowy and elusive, yet highly paid and professionally organized, ever-present ANTIFA are now not far behind. The “Trans Shooter” will soon join them, a selection of acceptable targets for suspicion or lead. Someone living in the community, attending school plays and becoming a known quantity, might get a pass where someone just passing through might not by simple luck of the draw.
People like Holocaust Radioman are patient in riling up hate in their own way, tirelessly sending out low-level probes day after day after day until the hook snags something. In a room full of the riff-raff of the militia world, the fake Rangers and psychic fraudsters and sovereign citizens, the cultural fear of evil terrorist outsiders that has been primed in millions across the country by the right wing media octopus can be activated and directed.
Holocaust Radioman might not get very many recruits if he puts on a white hood and calls for a lynching, but going to confront alleged Muslim Terrorists based on sketchy second-hand information and with very little in the way of a plan is the American Way. That’s the next best thing to the Red Dawn fantasy, especially now that Russia is just a fellow poor maligned right wing ethnostate fallen victim to evil Worlwide Wokeist bullying. Why choose to sit around a diner dreaming of defending America, when this guy with sixty goddamn radios hanging off him to signal authority like a ceremonial Conch is telling you that we all have to defend America now?
It is night, Google has decided to save 6 and a half minutes off your travel time by directing you down a series of increasingly trashed gravel roads until you hit a dead end where an easement has been blocked by an annoyed farmer with earth moving machinery and a petty streak. When you reverse, a set of headlights switch on in your rear window. Behind the hi-beams there is a confusion of tumbling, stumbling C-team types huffing and puffing behind stumps and boulders with slung Ak-47s and AR-15s and shouting contradictory orders. They’re already as good as certain that you’re an ISIS sabotage team out to blow up Libby Dam or a hit squad gunning for their glorious leader and/or a minor right wing Youtuber. They know that you and your friends are hardened killers who cut your teeth murdering Iraqi soldiers as sure as they know they’re Americas last hope, they may be reading the color of your psychic aura to detect if you’re about to reach for a concealed weapon, and their trigger discipline sucks.
Or you could blow a tire on a piece of broken sickle-bar mower on the side of the road, and get a 2 hour tour of the real rural Montana as the first guy who saw you diverts from his mission to go start a barfight over a poisoned cat (that will end with someone in the ER) and tear through the moss-covered spare tire piles of six different relatives to find you a spare while he explains his favorite conspiracy theory Angelfire websites.
To anyone I know in real life who’s suffered through my scattered, overly wordy attempts to explain what White Privilege means, whether you are gambling on that coin toss your whole life through is a part of it.
For everyone else, that guy is the person I hope we can reach. In small ways for now, eventually on an industrial scale
As I will elaborate on tomorrow, any hope I have for the future of this state rests much more with the latter dude than with any prospect of our politicians restraining the former. For that matter, my hopes of our state level stuffed shirts not being the former guys have hit an all time low.
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