Weekly Wednesday: Cattle Call

It's unprofitable to blame Capitalism

Welcome back to the sometimes weekly publication that may even go out on a Wednesday.

Today I’m going to take a minute for spitefully sniping at one of my favorite targets, Ryan Zinke, a Congressional embarrassment growing tumorously from my home state of Montana.

First, however, I would like to thank the Flathead Democrats for offering me a spare ticket to their spring shindig, and Rep. Zooey Zephyr for the momentary lapse in judgment that caused her to take a picture with yours truly. I will use this as a moment to plug getting involved in your local groups, subtly waving these handy links to Run for Something and the Meetup.com list of Democrat or otherwise left-of-fascist groups that may be lurking near you, just waiting to absorb more component persons.

Now, onto the unfortunate state of Montana.

Some time ago, Zinke took it upon himself to Redpill the rest of us with the Deep State plot to destroy the American Cowboy, something that many people will somewhat rightfully dismiss out of hand as performative nonsense. It is performative, and it does not make sense, but it is also speaking to a slice of the Montana voting base that will hear someone finally calling out a suppressed truth.

The perception of a slow moving government, corporate, and cultural machine aiming to extinguish the American West has been a staple of right wing libertarian and conspiracy theory thought for decades. The libertarian conspiracy theory YA novel Out of the Grey Zone (Written by an old associate of Stewart’s, Claire Wolfe) features the slowly strangling effort of the dystopian socialist future government to force all human habitation out of the West and convert it into an enormous nature preserve. These fears are echoed in decades of conspiracy theory surrounding the now infamous Agenda 21, believed by the conspiracy right to be the founding document of a new Enclosure or Highland Clearance, and a conservative tradition of casting insane anti-human environmentalists as villains in ham-fisted fiction.

Case in point, the ongoing struggle in Montana between the nonprofit American Prairie’s (formerly American Prairie Reserve) attempts to restore historic bison ranges and conservative ranchers who see a threat to their way of life. Across Montana cattle country, you can see signs promoting an effort to thwart it: “Save the Cowboy, stop the American Prairie Reserve.” Their website presents the project as an effort to surround and destroy rural American communities to create a personal theme park for billionaires, which has more in common with the shadowy plots of right-wing dystopian fiction than anything that American Prairie is actually up to.

It must be understood that the idea of the Cowboy is at play here just as much as the actual job and accompanying lifestyle, the Cowboy is emblematic as a figure of the romanticized American West as we perceive it in popular culture. Independence, self reliance, traditional family structures, the spirit of living close to the wilderness, traits often co-opted by crypto-fascists in their imagery and construction of a shared identity with their marks. If a leader identifies with a population that is suffering, and symbolically makes that suffering his, then conversely any attack on the leader becomes an attack on the population.

The cowboy is masculinity, morality, the way America was When It Was Great, and just coincidentally white in portrayal despite one third of all Western cowboys in the frontier era being black men. It is this cultural identity that the Cultural Bolsheviks *ahem* Cultural Marxists want to destroy, along with the actual physical lifestyle, replaced by effeminate androgynous polycules with they/them pronouns on their Starbucks cups and a designated safe space corner in the pod house.

Accusations against other environmental efforts in the rocky mountains follow a very similar pattern: Surface level concerns about very real factors, like increasing population of deer and elk, coming with rewilding of prairie that could lead to increased disease and predator activity, over-grazing, and restricted access to multiple-use public lands; Undercurrent allegations that the ultra-rich are using environmental causes to drive out decent rural people for their own ends, puppeting environmentalist dupes who don't realize that commercial beef cattle ranchers know much more about what's best for the land than stuffed shirt academics who just study the land without living it; Finally, a core of certainty that all this Green Agenda nonsense is really a front by some New World Order-affiliated conspiracy to drive out or control a population that might be independent enough to resist them and destroy a cultural keystone of the American spirit.

What level you get depends on what Powerlevel of conspiracy knowledge you display, levels 1-2 are great for public outreach but recruiting the true believers who drive a movement like this happens when someone name-drops the CFR in conversation.

If it were really about the environmental impacts, logistics of multiple species sharing grazing land, hunting access, or any of the other surface-level concerns then simple dialogue would have solved this problem a while ago. Bison grazing on prairie actively restores it because they graze somewhat shallower over much larger ranges and spend less time near water sources, promoting more diversity in plant life and cultivating prairie that is measurably more resistant to drought and wildfire than prairie graved by beef cattle or by deer, elk, and antelope alone.

No study has found evidence of a real risk of disease transmission, and the evidence supporting alternating commercial cattle and wild bison grazing as a workable strategy is pretty strong. Further, there should be no ideological reason to force a nonprofit to stop buying private land on the open market or paying fair value for grazing leases on public lands, by conservative standards that should just be the free market.

Finally, the argument that local ranchers know best how to manage the prairie because of long experience living on the land and working with state and federal agencies to manage and ‘improve’ it falls pretty short in the face American Prairie cooperating easily with those same agencies and Indigenous peoples who have been on the land in the American West just a bit longer.

Like many who hold a belief for reasons they don’t really want to admit, the arguments of Save the Cowboy are a weird and unsteady mix pulled from a scattering of viewpoints with frequent appeals to emotion and ‘common sense’ as a preemption of being thrown up against hard facts. Hard facts, after all, are hoity-toity academia nonsense to be disregarded out of hand when you don’t like them. It’s a result of starting with a position that stems from a much harder to defend place, like the predatory New World Order Ecofreaks trying to destroy American masculinity and make us all vegetarian, and working backwards from that to whatever more sensible objections are easily at hand.

This pattern holds true for an effort some years ago to create a safe migratory corridor for Grizzly bears, a more local issue that caused of concerns in Oathkeepers circles that future safe paths would cut through planned Survivalist stronghold areas throughout rural Montana, for numerous efforts to fight deforestation and protect wetlands and lakes, and especially when it comes to the reintroduction of wolves. The War on Wolves was one of the more hardcore militant movements that has gone relatively unnoticed in the mainstream, having huge overlap with local sovereign citizen and militia scenes.

The wolves being reintroduced allegedly carried foreign diseases and threatened to devastate local elk populations, being superior hybrids with monstrous imported Siberian wolves that did not belong in the local ecosystem and would devastated it like Tigers on the Serengeti, they were a plot to steadily drive small ranchers out of business by loss of their cattle, make hunting for food harder. Ultimately, the wolves were only an excuse to declare vast swaths of land UN wildlife preserves that all independent farmers, ranchers, and hill people would be evicted from, forced into guarded FEMA tent cities like the British Boer War concentration camps and probably coerced into working at McDonalds and getting on Welfare.

Of course, when I asked a local game warden about the tamer parts of that he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

The local character I refer to as Holocaust Radiovest gave a War on Wolves embroidered patch pride of place on his eponymous vest of many pouches and bragged, in select company, about associating with people who quietly organized ten man squads of hunters with AR-15s to stalk game trails and set ambushes on water sources in an effort to cull as many reintroduced wolves as possible.

I remain unconvinced that SovCits like Holocaust Radiovest really care that much about the reality of the wolves, it’s much more likely that a convenient wedge issue opened a space where they could break out further into the gun-owning-conservative mainstream and recruit. Much like Oathkeepers and, the comparison being inevitable for being so very on the nose here, Bundy Ranch.

This is what Zinke is talking about when he alleges a Deep State assault on the rural Mountain West and the Cowboy Spirit. Much of the country will naturally disregard it out of hand, a soundbite that will hit the front page of Neoliberal web forums and illicit eye-rolling disregard. To the voting base that keeps people like Zinke and Governor ‘Punchy’ Gianforte in their jobs, mobilizes for local elections to push their agenda forward on the ground, and exert social and cultural control of public discourse, it is sweet music for the long-suffering.

Of course, for there to be an issue to exploit there has to be a problem. Cattle ranchers, independent farmers, woods people, and rural Americans in general are feeling a pinch that very much seems like consistent pressure to force them out of their homes and their way of life by slow strangulation. American Prairie, after all, would not have been able to buy up so many private ranches if they hadn’t been put up for sale in the first place. So, is someone actually killing the American Cowboy? Who or what could this nefarious force be?

꧁༺ 𝓒𝓐𝓟𝓘𝓣𝓐𝓛𝓘𝓢𝓜 ༻꧂

Excellently summarized by More Perfect Union, and featuring one of my personal favorite YouTube commentators, vertical monopolies and non-competitive Oligopoly by food processing and distribution giants have been inevitably grinding down independent farmers and ranchers to be replaced with industrialized food production under direct corporate control. The position of the family rancher or cattle farmer is being made increasingly untenable, as huge entities that enjoy government favoritism and nearly inexhaustible resources slowly push them out. The slow war to destroy the American Cowboy is in fact being waged by vast entities at the direction of powerful men in dark rooms, but there isn’t a single thing environmentalist or socialist (barring Corporate Welfare) about it.

The general trend continues through society, as monopolies and short term profit incentives tighten the screws on ordinary people. The price of living increases while wages and opportunities stagnate, and the anchors that stabilize rural communities are eroded away. The few remaining manufacturing jobs are bought up, chopped apart, and sold out to reinforce monopoly power, healthcare costs skyrocket as rural clinics and small hospitals close, gentrification and inflation erode the already slim margin of safety that those on fixed income depend on to maintain housing security.

The outlook is ever more bleak: It’s already heartbreaking to see a conversation between two elderly people people talking about counting down the days they have left of working through chronic joint pain at low-wage jobs before Social Security kicks in. If the GOP can wrangle slashing social security, medicaid, and eventually fully dismantle institutions like the Postal Service, then rural America will choke and die.

Sensing blood in the water, sharks circle to buy property. We are already decades past the point of major lumber companies, that were once the main employers where I live, seeing the trends and shuttering their operations to transition into becoming real estate brokers first and foremost. As the mills closed down and the workers were laid off, tree-hugging environmentalists were blamed for the death of the American Lumberjack while the companies quietly pivoted to put their full weight behind the gentrification of the Rocky Mountains.

The enclosure of the Mountain West as a billionaire’s playground is, in fact, coming unless we stop it, the enemy just isn’t American Prairie.

A fact that billionaires like Gianforte would rather us not figure out.

What politicians like Zinke and Governor Punchy accomplish by throwing the blame onto those dastardly environmentalists is not only to appear to be fighting for their constituents while doing nothing, effectively stepping into the ring on behalf of the American Cowboy only to shadowbox, but actively distracting from the real culprits out of solidarity with them. In short, far from being a ridiculous rallying cry against the anti-cowboy Illuminati, speeches like Zinke’s are shrewd moves to secure a political foundation and facilitate an enormous swindle.

While liberal Twitter laughs, Zinke pulls off the scam.

The real tragedy is not going to be when the next Bundy Ranch inevitably erupts in Montana, it is going to be when even that is spun by the stuffed suits responsible to further the agenda that created the problem in the first place.