Hello everybody, welcome to Weekly Wednesday: My roundup of stuff that isn’t really deserving of its own post, and also not as niche as the side projects like reviews of trashy right-wing fiction I plan to eventually infest this place with. The mainstay is going to be my take on local politics and activism, so expect it to be more depressing than hearing about my childhood.
This week we’ll be sticking with an email I sent to my local state rep Neil Duram, someone I knew a little bit and used to genuinely like from our interactions, followed by my bitter postscript at the way things turned out and screenshots from other people’s much more enlightening conversations with him about things like religious morality.
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First, however, I would like to take a moment to thank everyone for the outpouring of support we received received after the BBC interview aired. Over one million people have seen video of my mother and I talking about our lives, which seems insane. I’ve been somewhat putting my thank-you message on an unattainable pedastel and week after week has slipped by without a peep, so here it is, very much late, as we resume regular posting.
I have a plan for the next two posts on this page, an essay I’ve meant to write for a while on paramilitary violence and authoritarianism that’s become unfortunately very relevant to the current storm over Trans Rights and a write-up on my experiences of the Oathkeepers CPT program and how it worked (or didn’t). After that, I will start leaving the order of posts up to paid subscriber polls instead of paywalling content, alternating between Childhood Stories and “Deprogramming” essays meant to be share-able with conservative or undecided friends, family, associates,and strangers on the street. However, you will all still have to guess what the content actually is based only on vague and needlessly mysterious essay titles on a list somewhat like this:
(Titles in yellow have been previously posted)
Life is like a box of chocolates: Sometimes you get Hydrocodones and sometimes you get razor wire.
Now, without further ado, we get to one of my greater disappointments in recent memory: Neil Duram. Good ol’ Neil is a state House representative for my district in Montana and someone who always struck me as a decent and upstanding guy, exhibiting some good community policing qualities in our limited interactions while he was working as a MT Highway Patrol trooper on our stretch of U.S. 93 and generally being well respected in the emergency services circles. As such, Neil may have in fact been the last Republican of any kind to receive a vote from me for the rest of my life after he voted to silence fellow House representative Zooey Zephyr.
When the news that Duram had decided to put party over the good of the people worked its way through local activist group chats, I wrote Neil an email that I have now reworked into an open letter by removing some personal references in the beginning and annotating with links for context. In the time since, the open pursecution of Montana’s first openly Trans representative has become national news, especially following a lively House floor protest that was organized quietly in group chats and email forwards to avoid picking up counter-protesters and her subsequent removal from the legislative session. Rep. Zephyr is now suing with the assistance of the ACLU, the beginning of what may be a lengthy legal battle following a judge refusing to step in.
Below, the document that I poured all of my indignation and malice into on a night when I should have been doing homework, may it help provide some perspective.
Hello there Mr. Duram, it's been a pretty long while since we talked. You may remember me from the times we met while I was working at the rural gas station along your rounds as a Highway Patrol Trooper, volunteering with the local fire department, or else just because I'm the son of the Oathkeepers president who lived in Trego (I have since changed my name from Dakota Stewart Rhodes to Dakota Vonn Adams). I regret that I haven't kept in touch regularly, since I always mean to become more involved in politics and I do generally like you. However, I am writing today because I am pretty severely disappointed.
To put my one small voice in perspective, I am one of the many voters the GOP has bled since 2016. I have shifted ever leftwards since being a cultishly enthusiastic Trump voter in 2016, the first election I ever voted in, as a conservative-leaning Libertarian. I have now basically given up on the GOP as a party with a viable vision for the future of this country, and switched camps despite my differences with the Democratic party platform. Despite this, I still voted for you in the last election. In fact, you were the only Republican I voted for in the midterms. Regardless of whether that vote truly mattered in the result, it was an affirmation that I still regarded you highly and believed you have the best interests of Montanans at heart.
The upshot is that while I expect less than nothing from the current MTGOP, I have not lowered my expectations of you.
Voting your assent to silencing Rep. Zooey Zephyr is a frankly dismaying show of party line loyalty in my view. Personally, considering that the issue at hand is literally one of life or death for young people who want to be their genuine selves, I do not consider the bloody hands remark to be inappropriate. However, I recognize that this may be viewed differently by the body of the MT House of Representatives. What is uncalled for is restricting her voice for the entire remainder of the legislative session, along with reports of other Democrat legislators being silenced for speaking on her behalf which I can only hope are inaccurate. This paints a very bleak picture of the ethics of Montana Republicans to say the least. The fact that the deliberate incivility and disrespect shown by the so-called Freedom Caucus, in referring to Rep. Zephyr by the wrong pronouns among many other slights, has not been called out by anyone within the MTGOP with anything approaching the same level of severity, or at all, dims my opinion of the entire body further.
The invocation of a school shooting in particular is childish and obscene on a level beyond anything said by Rep. Zephyr, and mischaracterizing her words as a "threat" is clownish. Yet, there is no reprimand for the Freedom Caucus.
What the people shouting into your inbox are seeing, what I am seeing, is an extension of a worrying and sinister trend in state level partisan politics that has the GOP increasingly finding it acceptable to attempt to silence and censure opposition politicians for impassioned speech on subjects that damn well merit it. Cutting off Zooey's mic for the remainder of the debate on SB0099 would have been one thing, even if I disagreed with it, but cutting her off until such time as she apologizes and recants for a truly held conviction is authoritarian and absurd. In this light, opting for silencing her instead of censure or expulsion appears very much like an attempt to make vocal opposition Go Away without inviting the energized opposition and national spotlight that the Tennessee legislature just invoked on itself.
I am not asking you to vote with her, even if I view the facts as self-evident when it comes to which outcome would best serve the Montanan’s inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness. I am not asking you to consider the hypocrisy of relying on the intent of God the Creator while also making allowances for surgically altering Intersex children, or the intent to protect children from irreversible surgical procedures without banning plastic surgery for minors or male circumcision. I am not even asking you to make use of the subject matter expert sitting next to you on this issue regardless of your own moral or religious beliefs on gender and sexuality.
I am, however, asking you to not take the Speaker at face value when he says that silencing someone is not really silencing them, so long as they publicly recant their earnestly held beliefs and pass some arbitrary and unspecified threshold of "regaining trust." I am asking you to condemn the petty misconduct of some within your own party as strongly as mildly strong words from a democrat.
I am asking you to help uphold the last shred of hope I have for meaningful dialogue between parties on critical issues, instead of majority power being used as a hammer in an endless struggle to dominate a contemptible sectarian foe.
I am asking you to prove me right when I argue to hold out some hope for some future in the political process. As harsh as this email might sound, I have also been going to bat for you and your basic integrity all day over this vote, and I trust that you won't make me look like a fool.
NOTE: Since sending the original version of this letter and receiving the above lukewarm dodge of a reply, I have reexamined the public information on Rep. Duram’s work in the legislature this session and noticed several worrying bills associated with his name. These begin with an attempt at an election integrity task force that do not have the job qualification requirements Duram spells out for a State Lottery oversight position, a study on judicial removal and recusal, a vague revision of laws related to the State Supreme Court, and a bill on “maximizing personal liberty” in judicial interpretation. These are eyebrow-raising in the context of an intense State Supreme Court race in the last election, which saw the MTGOP openly backing a candidate in a supposedly nonpartisan race on very partisan lines. Of note, Montana still recognizes abortion rights under a 1999 Supreme Court ruling that may put the brakes on my state’s new ban once the lawsuits get going. Taken as a whole, the picture is increasingly ominous and I believe that, on this last extension of good faith, the clown is me.
On further review of Neil’s communication with local activists…
This was very thoughtful & coherent. As another commenter noted, your focus & clarity regarding local matters is laudable.
Backyard pol is such an important arena. Even getting rebuffed by clowns, it's still important work. Good shit, mate. Solidarity from the Glove.