Welcome back to Weekly Wednesday, the publication whose name is more of an aspiration than a statement of fact.
This time, I am something like the author of an after-action report on a frustratingly preventable catastrophe. Unfortunately, the disaster is still ongoing and its category is ‘Republican State Government,’ more destructive than fire, wind, or flood, and making those latter three worse whenever they occur in the same place and time.
First, however, in lighter news: I have realized that I have been remiss in keeping people up to date on interviews and the like, one of the functions of this regular publication, and have two links featuring my much more interesting mother in recent weeks. The first, a podcast interview with WNYC’s Death, Sex, and Money with Kelly Jones, fellow alumni of marriage to a right wing demagogue, and its second part with On the Media. If you just can’t get enough of Tasha, she also features prominently in this fantastic essay by award winning journalist Mike Giglio, whose coverage of Oathkeepers and Militias is excellent all around and informed by his experience covering the war in Syria and against ISIS. In short, he actually understands what the civil war fantasy is like in practice and his view of Patriot Movement antics in that light is not very kind.
I can’t say that I have any interviews or elsewhere posted content… This week. Stay tuned.
In light of being a full two posts behind on my childhood trauma content, I’ll be delaying the next subscriber poll until my writing que is cleared.
Unfortunately, I now have to turn to one of my least favorite topics and tell you about the state of my home. No one should have to feel sinking dread at having to summarize current events in his home state, but for many even in the privileged United States it’s simply a fact.
It’s time to talk about my state’s governor, Gregg ‘Punchy’ Gianforte.
We’re not eve getting into the recent rampage of line-item vetoes and administrative fuckery, which deserves an essay in itself, but for the sake of necessary background to everything that’s about to go wrong in my state I have to make the overall point clear:
The Montana GOP is using flashy attacks on the LGBTQ community to cover for a land grab.
Gianforte displays a clear pattern of attention-grabbing culture war campaigning while working to steadily exert control over public lands and pave the way for resource extraction. Since the Montana GOP began this session with its trifecta in power, backlash against bills targeting the constitutional rights of Montanans to a clean environment has been buried in the news by a barrage of laws targeting gender affirming care, abortion access, and of course Drag performers. The silencing of Montana state house rep. Zephyr made national news while the open vitriol of the MT ‘Freedom Caucus’ went unchecked.
This is a pattern not unfamiliar to Montana Republicans, as seen when Congressman Zinke alleged a campaign by the nefarious Deep State to destroy the American cowboy while remaining silent on the toll that corporate monopolies are taking on ranching families. Gianforte works from the same playbook, performatively attacking bison preserves while fighting a historic youth lawsuit on climate change. The culture war is often not an end in and of itself, but a flourish of the hand to distract from some swindle.
While Montana has been drawing headlines for acting against the LGBTQ community, it has moved overnight to effectively criminalize accessing public land by ‘corner cutting’ through neighboring private property. This is a nearly 180 degree turn from the old de facto policy of allowing circumstantial and respectful access for hunting, fishing, and camping to land that would otherwise be inaccessible to the public. It’s the sort of thing rural Montanans would be up in arms about, but only if the governor weren’t also protecting the state from the gay agenda.
Of course, once the public is out of the habit of using much of its land it’s much less likely to notice it being stolen away.
The true target of Governor Punchy is clear: Montana’s lands and natural resources. Montana has vast untapped coal reserves, carbon kept firmly in the ground by rigorous environmental protections that Gianforte is working to circumvent. Coupled with the signing of a new law banning state agencies from studying climate change impacts, a decision that will surely prove its merit when we have our next two or three record breaking Wildfire seasons, and historic oil and gas leases on public land, the stage is set for a full commitment to a Montana run by the carbon economy and resource extraction. Montana has some of the best wind power potential in the United States, but clean energy is not an investment that the fossil-fuel-minded consider worth their time.
Considering the history of mining in Montana, and what appears to be a standardized Republican playbook for bringing back child labor, this is itself cause for concern.
Montana does not have its environmental protections by accident, the right to a clean and healthful environment in the state Constitution was paid for by disasters that loom over us to this day. Many people know the tragic story of the W.R. Grace Asbestos mine, but fewer know about our official state lake of acid and poison spawned from an abandoned copper mine. Perhaps the strange new bacteria dwelling in it will one day cure cancer and eat scrap metal, or help us finally eradicate geese once and for all.
Unless we want future generations to wish they only had one toxic waste lake to worry about, we have to keep politicians like Gianforte from using bigotry to distract from exploitation.
Your writing is, as always, excellent. This blog is seriously underrated. I hope you‘ll get the attention you deserve!