Spirit Cowboy
I wonder what the longest word count to call someone an idiot in human history is.
I present a smaller and more lighthearted story than usual today, jogged in my memory by disastrous clown Ryan Zinke’s recent antics in Congress while supposedly representing my state. It’s an interesting example of the bumps in the road that one can encounter on the meander from moderate Republican to nonsense-sprouting grifter, and a case of how mainstream Republicans can sometimes find themselves out of step with the radical base they’re trying to galvanize. My one problem is that I’m not quite sure if I actually saw this one.
It’s funny that my most unreliable memories are not from early childhood. It’s a logical assumption that dim and distant incidents are from when you’re small, the most likely distorted, but the reality is that the worst thing for your memory can be hearing other people’s. The human mind accessing a memory pulls up key details gathered by our survival-oriented brains and fills in all the gaps with the same process that goes into imagining the future, a phenomenon well understood by now due to studies into the horrendously unreliable nature of eyewitness testimony. Personal beliefs, prejudices, and over time the weight of what you think happened all distort the past. The worst of all is hearing the recollection of others, reinforcing and filling in a group consensus on events that changes more rapidly and fixes more firmly than any one person’s. For this reason, witnesses to a crime or accident are ideally interviewed separately before they can speak to each other and corrupt recall.
I don’t know whether the presence of Ryan Zinke in Montana politics is more of an ongoing criminal enterprise or a disastrous slow-moving accident, but the same principle applies.
Since this episode of Liberty Fellowship Antics has entered Northwest Montana survivalist myth in some ways, I’ve heard this mild anecdote told and re-told so many times that I can no longer recall if I actually suffered through it in person. For my part, I usually did my level best to zone out and pretend I was somewhere else until I could slip away to pace aimlessly in the parking lot. Either way, what you’re getting is the version that’s been accepted as fact by the local prepper scene and all who are unfortunately adjacent.
As I’ve covered in a previous post, Liberty Fellowship is an odd migratory survivalist congregation that followed right-wing fringe pastor Chuck Baldwin to the Flathead Valley in a bid to position themselves for the End Times. This was part of the greater and more nebulous American Redoubt Movement that also saw Stewart move my family and, eventually, Oathkeepers leadership to the same place. Stewart inserted himself into the Church, held inconspicuously (save for armed guards) in hotel conference rooms to this day, in an effort to stand midstream and open-handed while a steady supply of preppers and right-Libertarians swam North to apocalypse safety like the world’s most irritating returning salmon.
Others saw the same networking and recruitment opportunity Stewart did, and the after-service dinners became something of a radical right social networking scene. This meant they were pretentious and dull beyond imagining for the most part, and likely the most dangerous and yet boring crowd poor Sykes Cafe has ever had to regularly host. It’s difficult for an outsider to imagine a room full of alternate reality beliefs like holograms covering for the World Trade Center’s destruction by space lasers being boring, but it is if you’ve been hearing the same conspiracy theory conversations on repeat for your entire life. After the thin novelty wears off, the underlying lack of imagination or personality shines trough.
Stewart usually had the spotlight, being the charismatic center of gravity since Pastor Baldwin almost never deigned to mingle with his congregation, and generally held court at the largest table with multiple plates set in a semicircle like a medieval noble at a banquet. The exceptions were when we hosted outsiders who wanted to say their piece before an obviously highly motivated and unified bloc, and one of these was Ryan Zinke.
Zinke has had a career of the kind that’s going to become tragically generic in the near future of the United States: Distinguished military service, higher education, and a gradual rightward shift in politics to the outer fringes to cover for a career in petty graft and mooching off taxpayer dollars. He has traveled a very J.D. Vance trajectory in the extent to which he’s sold out after promising to represent the little guy. His accomplishments in Congress and as Trump’s Secretary of the Interior have been the dispensations of handjobs to oil and mining industrialists via expanded access to public lands, to himself and his aides by having special flagpoles erected to announce his presence in public buildings, and to Ron DeSantis by exempting Florida and only Florida from offshore oil drilling after a friendly sunshine state visit.
In between this and effectively calling a third of the Department of the Interior employees traitors to the United States at an oil magnate conference, he has found the time to live large on expense cards and arrange suspect real estate deals in multiple states. The latter ultimately got him canned by the Trump Administration, but did nothing to dissuade Montana voters from crowd surfing him back to DC.
On this stop, one campaign function or another, he made a fairly critical miscalculation. Perhaps because he did not understand how insular and suspicious this group was, or what beliefs motivated them to move to defensible and isolated Northwest Montana, Ryan made a play to secure what might have been a critical campaign volunteer workforce with a script for the wrong audience.
Stepping up in front of the crowd in the grandma’s-house-pattern carpeted back dining room of beleaguered Sykes, Zinke addressed everyone over the venue microphone in what could best be described as a Spirit Halloween cowboy costume, all pristine unwrinkled lines and a silver belt buckle visible from outer space. Zinke dove in self aggrandizing and full of himself, reinforcing the quiet judgment that had already been rendered on his outfit and slick polished persona, and heavily leaned on his career as a Navy SEAL. The latter wasn’t really his fault, being inside knowledge that locally SEAL veterans had gotten a bit of a reputation for supposedly thinking they could appear from nowhere and assert leadership in militia circles and were often suspected of being informants, but it compounded on itself when he delivered the emotional height of his speech: That the hand-wringing over flying killer robots had gotten far out of hand, that anything that killed terrorists and protected American military lives was a net good, so say it with me now,
“GOOOOOOO PREDATOR DRONES!”
In some versions there was a fist pump and pose, like one would pair with a cheer for a sports team, which is vaguely in my mental image of the scene but more subdued than a lot of the imitations I’ve seen over the years. The room stayed dead silent and Zinke finished his remarks under a collection of judgemental flat stares. This is because Zinke had just been addressing a room filled with Christian and Constitutionalist Patriot Movement militia who fully expected to be insurgents hunted by those same drones within a decade, peppered with more secular or nonviolent Right-Wing Libertarian who were at this point still opposed to the Global War on Terror on moral grounds and thought of the drone program as a continuous war crime. This group consensus had, in fact, lead to Baldwin himself coming out hard against Obama’s drone policy on both future civil war and humanitarian fronts, indicting the fudged official counts of civilian and ‘combatant’ deaths with admirable accuracy.
With a speech that could and did play excellently to mainstream warhawk Republicans, Zinke lost the immeasurably crazier and more dedicated Liberty Fellowship crowd in under a minute and lost them forever. The summary judgment after he left was a simple phrase; “All hat, no cattle.”
Once, and only once, have I wished that Montana in general had more in common with the fruit variety box at Liberty Fellowship.
William L. Shirer's descriptions of Hitler's inner circle in RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH should be in the running. (Of course, Shirer was enjoying some personal revenge on those arse-clowns while still being both factually precise and historically valuable about it. Not a chance which comes along very often.)