What do you do when you have a state in crisis, but you kind of like the crisis and want it to continue? You’re down bad for the crisis, as the kids say, but people might be mad at you when it fucks up their lives and your inaction is to blame. What to do then, to make sure the wheels keep falling off society for your fun and profit while dodging all consequences?
Find a scapegoat.
Someone who won’t be missed all that much if they’re killed.
Welcome back to the thing that I write, discarding all pretense of it supposedly being a timely weekly feature. I have dubbed this the Late Edition because the subject it covers is too important to be swallowed up in a larger catch-up post, and to show the true reality of what is happening to my home I have to lay it all out.
So while Stewart Rhodes continues to ramble his way into a possibly extended sentence, one prison interview openly calling for violence at a time, the county commissioners of neighboring Flathead, home of the nearest Costco, incited the murder of a homeless man to cover for their negligence in the face of real problems.
Your local elections matter, people.
Facing an escalating crisis in housing security, with the cost of living squeezing elderly people on fixed retirement income more than ever, 3 GOP members of the Flathead County Commission signed their names to an open letter to their community asking that Kalispell refuse to help and “enable” the homeless population entirely and force them out. Their letter is an attack painting the people pushed out onto the street in Montana’s famously severe and variable weather are in fact a “progressive network” of nomads-by-choice attracted to Montana through the use of millennial devices like the cellular phone and the internet to spread the word… That Kalispell has one overnight shelter that is only open to overnight stays during winter and a couple days a week the rest of the year to let people shower and do their laundry. Forget Portland, America’s nomads are coming to the Flathead.
This is of course insane, but it would be a mistake to assume that Montana local elected officials are simply stupid and repeating a standard anti-poor Conservative line. No, there’s malice behind the seeming stupidity of our local politicians, as former Republican Kalispell mayor Tammi Fisher could tell you after internal power struggles over endorsing openly immoral and criminal candidates lead to her being ousted from the GOP. But if the MT GOP are acting maliciously, then to what end?
The same reason that hatred for the least fortunate is always stirred up, to prevent dangerous solidarity.
As the cost of living crisis continues to constrict, I can feel popular opinion turning against the ruling Republican trifecta with every passing day. Our $2 Billion budget surplus was squandered on tax cuts for the rich while expanded home care for the elderly and housing for veterans was vetoed, and now people I know who have family land that’s been passed down for over a hundred years are seeing their property taxes abruptly rise by thousands of dollars. Many people cannot roll with this extra punch on top of skyrocketing cost of essentials, and many are on the brink of losing everything. An increase in visible homeless people camping where they can, waiting in line for showers or giveaways of day-old bread, panhandling on street corners and staying on park benches with their dogs, is sobering for many people who might not have been paying attention to how bad things really are.
Working people throughout Montana realizing how precarious their position is, that most of the people living in tents by a bridge are very much like them, inspires sympathy, anger, and action. These are all inherently dangerous things to a wealthy and powerful politician, it’s much better if the poor are at each other’s throats while your circle of friends profit from foreclosures and continue to gentrify the Mountain West.
Thus, you paint the victims of your greed as foreign invaders to a community:
“Using social media and smartphones, these wanderers are well-networked and eager to share that Kalispell has ‘services’ to serve their lifestyle. Make no mistake, it is a lifestyle choice for some. In fact, many of the homeless encountered in our parks, streets, and alleys consist of a progressive networked community who have made the decision to reject help and live unmoored.”
Reject what help?
The homeless are cast as an other, alien, a savage parallel society that chooses to wander from city to city consuming the resources of hard-working Conservative-voting urban areas (note the interjection of Progressive, having no bearing on the sentence but establishing the homeless as part of a political enemy) and snort or shoot up spare change donated by well-meaning but gullible passers-by. That sounds very scary, fear being an excellent motivator, and it also sounds like not you. You’re not a networked progressive nomad, whatever that is, you have a job and pay your bills (your bills are paid). This is something of a relief because the majority of these people you see on the streets simply choosing to live without safety or permanence out of Millennial laziness and disdain for law and order means you can’t really be a step away from being one of them.
Or you can tell yourself as much.
This is hardly the first time this year alone that conservative voices have openly taken this stance on some of the most vulnerable people in America, they range from a Fox News commentator newly famous for even worse takes calling for the homeless to be segregated from society (The Bell Riots are due in 2024, after all) and Eureka village idiot and former Oathkeepers hanger-on Brandon Smith openly lauding the murder of Jordan Neely on the New York Subway. The utility of othering and dehumanizing the homeless as nomads by choice, as dangerously mentally ill, as unstable drug addicts, is that you can keep the blinders of Normalcy Bias on longer and pretend that you cannot be on the brink of being those people when you are in fact one missed paycheck away from being those people.
If some people have to die when this messaging leads to the most vulnerable in society being further dehumanized and cast as an aggressor, then that’s just the price of doing Propaganda Business.
It is unclear at this time whether a known Montana white supremacist stepping in to pay the (alleged) murdere’s bail is a feature or a bug. It could be that the people behind the hateful messaging see racism as just part and parcel of the noble calling of hating the poor, or it may be that recasting this murder as a racial one to turn this stupid fuckhead manchild into the Flathead Valley Kyle Rittenhouse was a desirable outcome all along.
What is clear is that we, as a country, have a problem with our lack of empathy for the homeless. Even below the level of policy, online comments on a news story about a fire in a camp or violence at a shelter are filled with vicious and judgemental takes that just so happen to be factually wrong.
If we are to stop more killings from happening, we have to send a clear message that there are no acceptable targets. There can be no one so outcast from a community that everyone shrugs and looks away when they are killed. Vigilante murder is like serial murder, it keeps going and going until there are eventually too many of the wrong kinds of victims to ignore.
We can choose to not let it get to that point, to not let a history of lawless violence against the out-groups of American society repeat, but it means that we cannot look away anymore.