Episode 39: Matt Shea and White Supremacy in the Pacific North West (with Jason Wilson)
To round off our first year, Daniel is joined by special guest Jason Wilson to talk about the fascinating figure Representative Matt Shea. Hopefully this edition will please those listeners who've been asking for longer episodes! Content Warning. Notes and links (thanks to Jason for this compilation): Kenneth S Stern (1997) A force upon the plain : the American militia movement and the politics of hate. https://www.worldcat.org/title/force-upon-the-plain-the-american-militia-movement-and-the-politics-of-hate/oclc/1002393469&referer=brief_results Kathleen Belew (2019) Bring the war home the white power movement and paramilitary America https://www.worldcat.org/title/bring-the-war-home-the-white-power-movement-and-paramilitary-america/oclc/1129866369&referer=brief_results (great overview and analysis of lots of things we discussed) Linda Gordon (2018) The second coming of the KKK : the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American political tradition https://www.worldcat.org/title/second-coming-of-the-kkk-the-ku-klux-klan-of-the-1920s-and-the-american-political-tradition/oclc/1076323469&referer=brief_results (really good material on the 1920s Klan in Oregon) Jane Kramer (2003) Lone patriot : the short career of an American militiaman. https://www.worldcat.org/title/lone-patriot-the-short-career-of-an-american-militiaman/oclc/52724431?referer=br&ht=edition David A Neiwert (1999) In God's country : the patriot movement and the Pacific Northwest https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-gods-country-the-patriot-movement-and-the-pacific-northwest/oclc/493949695&referer=brief_results (Exhaustively detailed contemporaneous work on the militia movement in PNW) David Neiwert (2009) The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right https://www.worldcat.org/title/the-eliminationists-how-hate-talk-radicalized-the-american-right/oclc/7390575626&referer=brief_results (This speaks to the right generally but is important for our context) David Neiwert (2018) Alt-America : the rise of the radical right in the age of Trump https://www.worldcat.org/title/alt-america-the-rise-of-the-radical-right-in-the-age-of-trump/oclc/1017576651?referer=br&ht=edition (Best view of the current moment from long time PNW reporter) David Helvarg (2004) The war against the greens : the "Wise-Use" movement, the New Right, and the browning of America https://www.worldcat.org/title/war-against-the-greens-the-wise-use-movement-the-new-right-and-the-browning-of-america/oclc/53993117&referer=brief_results (Specific account of the development of anti-environmental politics in the west) Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (2011) Drawing the global colour line : white men's countries and the international challenge of racial equality https://www.worldcat.org/title/drawing-the-global-colour-line-white-mens-countries-and-the-international-challenge-of-racial-equality/oclc/1052849084&referer=brief_results (Just brilliant in historicizing the development of white supremacy - in thought and policy - across settler colonial societies around the turn of the twentieth century. Pankaj Mishra draws on it here https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/opinion/race-politics-whiteness.html) Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons (2000) Right-wing populism in America : too close for comfort https://www.worldcat.org/title/right-wing-populism-in-america-too-close-for-comfort/oclc/247742295?referer=br&ht=edition (Chip and Matthew have done lots of fantastic work but this is essential) James Corcoran (1991) Bitter harvest Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comitatus : murder in the heartland https://www.worldcat.org/title/bitter-harvest-gordon-kahl-and-the-posse-comitatus-murder-in-the-heartland/oclc/1087601191&referer=brief_results Mark Fenster (2008) Conspiracy theories: secrecy and power in American culture. https://www.worldcat.org/title/conspiracy-theories-secrecy-and-power-in-american-culture/oclc/1087739570?referer=br&ht=edition (Chapter 2 has a good discussion of the 1995 congressional hearings on the militia movement) James Coates (1995) Armed and dangerous : the rise of the survivalist right https://www.worldcat.org/title/conspiracy-theories-secrecy-and-power-in-american-culture/oclc/1087739570?referer=br&ht=edition (Pretty good contemporaneous account of the different strands underpinning the militia movement and the 1990s far right) Elinor Langer (2004) A hundred little Hitlers : the death of a black man, the trial of a white racist, and the rise of the neo-Nazi movement in America https://www.worldcat.org/title/hundred-little-hitlers-the-death-of-a-black-man-the-trial-of-a-white-racist-and-the-rise-of-the-neo-nazi-movement-in-america/oclc/1037466174&referer=brief_results (Important account of white supremacist movements in PNW in 1980s and 1990s) Leonard Zeskind (2009) Blood and politics : the history of the white nationalist movement from the margins to the mainstream https://www.worldcat.org/title/blood-and-politics-the-history-of-the-white-nationalist-movement-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream/oclc/965823835?referer=br&ht=edition Leah Sottile (with Ryan Haas on the podcasts) Bundyville https://longreads.com/bundyville/ (Definitive journalistic take on Matt Shea’s place in the contemporary patriot movement in PNW) Daniel Levitas (2001) The Terrorist Next Door The Militia Movement and the Radical Right. https://www.worldcat.org/title/terrorist-next-door-the-militia-movement-and-the-radical-right/oclc/229019637?referer=br&ht=edition James A. Aho (1995) The politics of righteousness : Idaho Christian patriotism https://www.worldcat.org/title/politics-of-righteousness-idaho-christian-patriotism/oclc/931074407?referer=br&ht=edition (Incredible, now-underread contemporaneous sociological work on the 1990s far right in Idaho, including Richard Butler/Aryan Nations) Daniel HoSang and Joseph Lowndes (2019) Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity https://www.worldcat.org/title/producers-parasites-patriots-race-and-the-new-right-wing-politics-of-precarity/oclc/1090989510&referer=brief_results (Very good current scholarship, great analysis of patriot movement and some direct analysis of Joey Gibson/Patriot Prayer) Michael Barkun (2004) Religion and the racist right : the origins of the Christian identity movement https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=wikipedia&q=isbn%3A080782328 Other stuff: Me on Ruby Ridge: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/26/ruby-ridge-1992-modern-american-militia-charlottesville Me on the local context of Malheur: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/14/oregon-militia-occupation-revolt-motivation-politics-public-land-ranching-environment And here is the link to an upload of John Trochmann’s Blue Book https://docdro.id/BZnxAiI
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Daniel tells me what he learned from years of going where few of us can bear to go and listening to what today's far-right, the alt-right, white nationalists, white supremacists, Nazis, etc.
Talk about and say to each other, in their safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, their live streams, etc.
The Waffle SS, I call them, and do they waffle.
Daniel listened, so we don't have to.
Needless to say, these are terrible people, and they say terrible things, so every episode comes with a big content warning.
Daniel and I talk freely about despicable opinions and acts, and sometimes we have to repeat the despicable things that are said, including bigoted slurs.
So be warned.
And so welcome to episode 39 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast where I talk about terrible people.
Since you're hearing my voice first yet again, we haven't done this in a while, but Jack is away doing something else on this holiday weekend.
But I am joined by someone I've been trying to get on this podcast for a while, but is absolutely busy all the time, as we all are, fighting these guys.
I am joined by the journalist Jason Wilson.
Jason, say hi.
Hi, Daniel, and hi to your listeners.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
I mean, this is one I sort of kind of low-key had mentioned to a couple of people, and everyone has been excited for this for a long time, but like the Kevin MacDonald episode, which we delayed and delayed and delayed, this podcast is ultimately an exercise in delayed gratification for everyone.
But I'm very happy we're doing this today, and the reason that we really wanted to do it now is because of some recent and ongoing drama with someone named Matt Shea and the American Redoubt and the militia movement.
And everyone wants me to cover the militia movement more, and so we're going to do a little bit of it today.
And Jason here is an expert on Shay in the Redoubt and all that, so we're going to get into it.
So, Jason, just before we get started, would you mind just kind of telling the audience who you are and what you do?
May not know, which I don't suspect is going to be many, but please go ahead.
Yeah, so I am a journalist, writer and journalist.
I live in the Portland area in the Pacific Northwest.
I am a columnist for Guardian Australia and I'm a frequent freelance contributor to the Guardian US as a feature writer and news reporter and investigative reporter.
And I've been reporting on The right and the far right.
Not quite since I arrived in this country because I didn't have a visa that enabled me to work in that way initially but really solidly for the last probably five or six years and I'd say non-stop since January 2016.
I feel like after the Malheur situation where I reported on that for The Guardian.
Since then, it's really been kind of non-stop.
Malheur, the Malheur fallout, and then all the stuff that happened, you know, during 2015 and 2016 during the election campaign, you know, and all of the various things I've reported on since then.
I've kind of been not able to put this beat down since around then.
And, you know, I went to Charlottesville for The Guardian.
I've reported a lot on the various things that have been happening in Portland, where I live, you know, with Joey Gibson and Patriot Prayer and, you know, other stuff in the Pacific Northwest.
And Representative Shea is one of those kind of big stories of the last five years, even though he's been active and, you know, has been seen as problematic by some for much longer than that.
I've seen this problematic by some.
That is the understatement of the podcast, I suspect.
Yes.
You mean his vision of Christian theocracy among big chunks of the North American continent is somewhat askance of other people's views?
Yeah.
Is that what you're arguing?
I think so with what's happened in the last year and really he's been the main story I suppose I've worked on this year.
I've published I think eight or nine pieces on him in the last year.
I guess the story of him was that people always Noted that he had a way of voicing kind of extremist beliefs in public, that he obviously had connections with what we call the Patriot movement, we might discuss what that is later, and various fundamentalist and dominionist Christian currents.
He had those connections, he had ideas about, territorial ideas that I suppose we'll discuss as well, that echoed the ambitions of of open white supremacists in the past, even if he didn't speak about it in quite the same terms.
People have noted all that, but perhaps this year or in the last year, really since November 2018, you know, a bunch of reporters, including me, have been able to excavate some more detail about his plans, his beliefs, the way he's prepared to execute them.
And that has all been pretty disturbing.
Yes, no, absolutely.
And so I want to be clear here that, like, normally what we discuss on this podcast are sort of explicit white supremacist, white nationalist, you know, neo-Nazi figures.
And Matt Shea, while sort of coming out of a community that has some of those same tendrils of DNA, the patriot movement is
Not explicitly racialist and in fact in a lot of ways is sort of explicitly Anti-racialist although you know again these things get complicated And then they are obviously arguing for this sort of like coded white supremacy even when they claim not to be But I guess the I guess the place to start here is Described for the audience again who may not know just kind of a quick process on like what the Patriot Movement is Like what do we mean when we say Patriot Movement?
It's a very, you know, the way I use it and the way I've observed others use it is it's a very broad descriptor, you know, that takes in a lot of currents that have, you know, cropped up over the last 30, 40, even 50 years.
So really, what is at the heart of the Patriot movement, the core belief that most people share, Is a belief that the Constitution, I suppose, has been misinterpreted and and implemented incorrectly and that the federal government as it stands right now.
Um, has basically exceeded its authority in all kinds of ways.
Um, you know, one of the big ones is, is land management.
Um, so, uh, the Bundys, um, you know, during their occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, we're constantly talking about how, uh, the federal government's ownership and administration of public lands is basically constitutionally illegitimate.
Um, so, um, That's the big one, you know, the idea that the federal government has overreached its bounds.
And that is a belief that, you know, in its more radical expressions can lead you to occupying a bird sanctuary.
But, you know, there is a version of that kind of belief, a quieter articulation of that belief that you'll find amongst ordinary Republicans in the Pacific Northwest and probably all over the country.
So that's one big thing.
Certainly here in the Midwest and in the South where I grew up, it's very prevalent.
I mean even they use similar arguments in terms of like anti-regulation.
Oh, the federal government shouldn't be able to control in-state eshuaries and shouldn't be able to impose federal regulations on local businesses.
They use that same kind of rhetoric, which is ultimately kind of built around this kind of libertarian, quote-unquote libertarian ethos from oligarchs are trying to use the rhetoric of the common people in order to engage in dastardly behavior, et cetera.
So there is some high and low elements kind of going on.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think like there is, for some of these folks, there is a kind of A sort of principled libertarianism, you know, that certainly is present in the Patriot movement.
Whether we agree or disagree with it, I think that there are people who, you know, arrive at this position, you know, there are people in parts of the Patriot movement who arrive at this position through You know, reasoning from the political principles that they happen to hold.
But there is a material aspect to this as well, which we saw come out in the whole Malheur situation, which is that, you know, these beliefs mesh really well with situations where people come into conflict with the federal government over land management.
So the whole Malheur deal was an occupation in response to the imprisonment of the Hammonds, Dwight and Stephen Hammond, father and son ranchers, who have a property near Burns, Oregon, which was, you know, is the town that's nearest to the National Wildlife Refuge, a very kind of remote part of Oregon.
You know, and there are ranches out there, and for a really long time ranches in the West have been accustomed to cheap, underpriced even, grazing rights on federal land.
And I think it's worth just kind of highlighting here, not to interrupt, but just to make it clear.
One of the issues that we necessarily on the eastern part of the US and that people in the rest of the world may not understand is that huge chunks of the American West is owned by the federal government.
Like it's like 85% of Nevada, 40% of California, you know, like I was kind of looking at the numbers earlier today just to kind of bone up on it, but huge portions of the American West is literally federal land.
And it's around 50% of Oregon as well.
Right, right, right.
Sorry, so and so when when there is this sort of like sense this kind of rhetoric that's built around like this kind of opposition to federal control of lands, you know, this isn't a sort of trivial matter necessarily, you know, as much as maybe it sounds to the rest of us, but of course, the reason that these lands are like.
It's because it's a very area region.
There's a lot of, like, kind of resource management has to be handled at a larger than local level.
And so, like, there are competing interests here.
And look, initially, you know, the United States, I mean, you know, the United States colonized the West.
Oh, are you going to bring up that whole genocide thing again?
Because that's just, like, that's ancient history.
That happened a hundred years ago already.
Come on, man.
Right.
But during that period of settler colonialism, you know, white men, white ranchers who came to the West, you know, became accustomed to seeing the federal government as a kind of willing partner in the colonization of the West.
You know, that's why the federal government have public lands.
They, you know, the least kind of viable patches of land, effectively, you know, often at high altitude or rough land or less viable land was the land that often became federal land.
And, you know, that land was operated in effect and still is to a great extent to offer a kind of subsidy to these guys, to ranchers and farmers.
So, you know, they were able to maintain much larger herds than they would have been able to just on the land that they owned because they had this kind of land available to them.
The same went for miners, you know, and loggers, you know, who were able to basically go onto public land, get a mining lease or do forestry, you know, for a kind of nominal fee and make lots and lots of money doing that.
Now, eventually, mostly during the latter half of the 20th century, you know, under various kinds of political pressure, Well, you know, you could probably start it with the whole National Parks, the establishment of National Parks from the turn of the 20th century, the turn of the 19th into the 20th century.
And, you know, all these guys are Republicans, but they all hate Teddy Roosevelt because he established the National Parks.
But, you know, increasingly over the 20th century, The federal government under political pressure from social movements and from environmental activists and from native peoples who began increasingly to want to sort of try and assert their treaty rights and reclaim some of their rights to lands.
You know, the federal government had to start taking into account other values in the management of that land.
And so, you know, In Oregon, you know, people still talk about, get mad about the spotted owl.
OK, so the spotted owl stuff in Oregon was a kind of example from the 70s and 80s, you know, of the federal government sort of under pressure.
You know, they never do it just because they want to.
They're always under pressure from other social movements, from environmentalists, you know, from an increasing public environmental consciousness.
So the federal government started closing off certain areas of public land to exploitation in Oregon because they contain this rare threatened bird species.
And, you know, environmentalists in the United States Uh, you know, against the odds of had some success by by by sort of seizing on these symbolic species and arguing that, you know, they're a reason that that.
Public lands should be managed in a different way.
It's kind of putting a face on that, right?
It's just, it's like, you know, you use the spotted owl as sort of the signature species that represents a whole lot of other values that are just kind of wrapped up.
And it's a way, it's a way of kind of making this argument that if you destroy this habitat, you're going to lose the owl as well.
Of course, if you destroy that habitat, you're going to lose a lot of other stuff as well that isn't maybe as charismatic as the owl.
So that's, that's the argument that you still hear from, You know, conservatives in Oregon, that the spotted owl thing was totally cynical and, you know, that this species was used in a kind of manipulative way to change sort of public policy on lands.
And, you know, That's another way of saying that there was some clever politics that happened, you know, amongst their political opponents.
And, you know, yeah, all politics is constantly about the struggle over symbols and the struggle over what's public.
So that's all fine.
We don't have to go over that again.
The main point is that, you know, increasingly other values have been taken into account.
You know, to some extent, also, you know, things like logging old growth timber, the little that is left in the West compared to what used to be there, is just kind of totally, you know, off the cards in most instances.
The remaining old growth forests, which are the most You know, the most lucrative, really, to log are no longer sort of as easily available.
And a lot of logging now happens on private land and not much on public land anymore.
And if there is, it's got to compete with other groups who are wanting to use that land in different ways.
So there's always kind of an argument.
Whereas during the 19th century and much of the 20th century and still now to an extent.
I mean, I don't want you to get in trouble with your listeners who will say that, that ranchers still get ridiculously cheap grazing rights.
You know, that there is still too much logging, that there is still too much mining on public land.
I'm not, I'm not going to, I'm not here to argue with that, but you know, it's, it's different now for those guys than it used to be.
Whereas that sort of white settler colonial privilege, you know, always had the federal government kind of on its side.
I think that, As the federal government has taken other imperatives into account in the West, that anti-government sentiment, and I'll use anti-government as a shorthand, it's usually just anti-federal government specifically, you know, that has ripened and taken hold.
So has the sense of a really deep cultural divide between rural areas of the West and the cities, which tend to be liberal.
The coastal cities, the cities along the I-5 corridor, which kind of runs between, you know, San Diego pretty much and Seattle.
And up into Canada, effectively, but we won't go there.
That highway, along that highway, is most of the population in the West Coast states.
It's the largest cities.
It's the now economically and kind of demographically dominant kind of settlements.
And those settlements tend to be liberal Democrat voting.
They tend to be much more sympathetic to ideas about conservation than necessarily the sort of arguments of rural areas.
So all of that has kind of happened, too, at the same time.
And that kind of gap in sentiment is something that right-wing populist politicians are able to exploit.
And, you know, a lot of state-level conservative politicians in the Western states do little else.
That's just their entire political program is a kind of program of resentment against large states.
But it's also the gap in which various You know, I guess we can call them social movements as well.
Various right-wing or far-right social movements have sort of flourished.
Now, a lot of the roots, I mean, a lot of the histories you'll read, and there are some really excellent histories, and I can Send you some suggested reading on all of this that you could put out to your listeners.
Absolutely.
We love reading material in the show.
And there is really some really excellent work, including from people who are still reading, like David Nyewood, who was really the guy who's seen all this almost from the beginning.
But a lot of historians... Friend of the show, I should say.
So a lot of people will kind of, you can probably tell from my, from what I've said already, that I see this as a kind of in a much longer frame and that's influenced by my
Right down to the genocide, it's like this like fractal process, you know, it's just like a little mini-me, you're right, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
We try to keep this light, you know, we talk about genocide but we kind of laugh at how ridiculous, yeah.
The difference between Australia, the big difference at a national level between Australia and the United States is that Australia never imported a large population of slaves.
Right.
Never imported African-American slaves.
In fact, you know, so on the national level, Australia is very different to the United States.
But what it's really similar to is the Pacific Northwest.
Yeah.
So Australia's founding Act as an independent country in 1901 was basically to pass this Immigration Exclusion Act, which banned like coloured labour, you know, from the country.
And that wound up meaning a lot of people were actually deported.
And so there was a large population in Queensland, my home state, of There was a pretty decently sized Chinese immigrant population.
There were Japanese divers who used to work in the pearl fields up right at the top of Queensland.
And there was a large population of Melanesian workers who were kind of the closest thing Australia had to a sort of situation of slavery.
They all, a lot of them, I mean there are still people descended from that community in Australia and that needs to be acknowledged.
It's not acknowledged often enough.
But lots and lots of those people were deported.
They had been brought over as sort of You know, slavery was formally banned throughout the Empire, so there was a kind of dodge that they did where it was a kind of form of indentured labour, but it was effectively slavery.
And a lot of those people by 1901 had been there for two or three generations, and a lot of them were deported, and some of them were deported to the wrong islands, like islands that their family had never had anything to do with.
Yeah, and that's really similar to the Pacific Northwest.
The Pacific Northwest, like Australia, like California, like British Columbia, you know, but the Pacific Northwest more successfully than those other places I mentioned.
I really made an effort to exclude people of color as potential competitors for white labor.
So Australia created this kind of white working man's paradise or whatever.
Right.
And it was all kind of couched in the language of democracy and anti-imperialism.
And, you know, there was a kind of dialogue across the Pacific, in fact, between the West Coast in the United States And Australia, particularly at the level of the labor movement, but also at an elite level, you know, where people were really talking about how to set these, how to draw the color line, as it were, and how to how to set these places up as white utopias.
And so, you know, it was white nationalism, really.
So I understand the Pacific Northwest.
I think I understood what was going on here.
Kind of immediately.
And you know, like if you hear, again I won't make direct references to stuff here because I'll need to put together a list, but there are scholars of colour here in the Pacific Northwest who talk about
The fact that the Pacific Northwest has remained such an attractive place for fantasies about white ethnostates or just the sort of pragmatic work of recruiting and being active in white supremacist movements because it's already so white.
We covered Harold Covington and the Northwest Independence Movement, the Northwest Front, in a previous episode, and sort of that general white separatist idea.
So we've done a little bit on that, although...
I don't tend to kind of focus too much on that side of things just because I'm focused a little bit elsewhere.
I mean, I'll just finish that thought, which is that, you know, these places were set up, I mean, Oregon legislatively made all kinds of legislative measures to exclude people of colour from the state, you know, from outright bans to additional taxes on black people, black African-American people.
You know, that was on top of a genocide.
And then there was major agitation at about the same time it was happening in Australia, the turn of the 19th century into the early 20th century, which, you know, there were a ton of anti-Chinese riots in Seattle, in Portland, in Vancouver, B.C.
Um, you know, where, where white men, white workers, um, uh, you know, were demanding that there'd be no competition from, from what, you know, the way they thought about, um, Chinese people.
Um.
From, from the, from the quote unquote racial aliens.
Right.
And who, who, who all, you know, who they had all kinds of racist fantasies about, um, Um, you know, that they didn't have to eat as much food, that they would work harder, that they were kind of like these inhuman machines almost, who would sort of cut the legs out from under white workers and their conditions.
And even now, you see, I saw like today there was a like a video that like got kind of posted onto my Twitter, which was, you know, supposedly a bunch of Chinese students working at 11 p.m. in the university library.
And that's why, you know, China is going to eat America's lunch.
Those sorts of ideas like it just like like that hasn't gone away, you know.
No, it hasn't.
And, you know, so I, there's a really good book which I will directly mention that everyone, I think, should read who's interested in this stuff.
It's called Drawing the Global Colour Line.
It's by a pair of Australian historians, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, who is the most, one of the most eminent historians in Australia, who's written about colonisation and the wars, you know, the frontier war that happened that Australians didn't like to talk about for a really long time.
But they wrote, this is a more international view of exactly that process in the late 19th century and early 20th century, where there was a kind of international conversation, which included Teddy Roosevelt, you know, and other American elites, a conversation between white people in Australia, South Africa, Canada,
And the United States, which was about what these new countries would be like and, you know, how they would be white countries and how best to kind of bring that about.
And so there was an exchange of ideas between the South and, you know, which had put Jim Crow into place or the elements of Jim Crow into place.
And, you know, Australia took You know, practices of segregation from that, and then the Pacific Northwest looked at Australia where, you know, the labor movement, it has to be said, you know, one of the key demands of the labor movement was that colored workers would be excluded from Australia.
The labor movement pushed that.
Yeah, I know.
You know, as a sort of socialist demand.
Yeah, no, no, the labor movements of the 20th century are by no means have their hands clean on this.
So, yeah, drawing the global colour line and it's set into dialogue with, you know, with the analysis that was done by, you know, by black scholars of what was going on at the time contemporaneously.
And, you know, Gandhi's kind of politics were formed in that moment as well.
You know, it's a really interesting time.
And so that whole history really, you know, is what I see this coming out of.
I see it as a wrinkle or a development in the history of settler colonialism, I guess.
And a kind of, you know, a crisis, I guess, in settler colonialism, which has happened because, you know, that sort of
colonial race to sort of close the frontier as long since ended and and now you know there's there's a sort of argument there's an argument about that that has been developing due to you know the response of you know the survival and and and the pushback of of indigenous peoples And a broader kind of cultural shift.
So that's where I see it starting.
But we have a local representative in Washington State who is the focal point of all of this, right?
Right.
Well, to keep it proper though, I mean, most people trace the beginnings of that.
That's where we started.
I'm sorry.
That was a long day.
No, no, not at all.
Not at all.
This is absolutely what I think people come to this podcast for.
Specific and the kind of big-picture element.
So yeah, we get to shape personally.
I would like to Yeah, cover briefly the American readout this whole concept because I think without understanding what this is I just might run through the the Patriot movement more more generally just for a second if that's okay No, no, absolutely.
I think most people start that with I think this stuff is important.
Most people start that mostly with the posse commentators movement which was You know, in large part, a response to desegregation.
It started in the Pacific Northwest.
You know, I can offer sort of links to detail considerations of that.
But the posse comitatus...
Zeskin covers this a lot in his Blood and Politics, which I recommend often.
Right, exactly.
The farm crisis of the 70s, you know, kind of plays into the rise of that.
Right, and there was a social rebellion, as it's called in the 70s, where a lot of posse comitatus ideas kind of got injected into, you know, a kind of rural resistance to the federal government's, you know,
changing relationship with rural areas and with that kind of settler colonialist changing relationship with rural areas and with that kind of settler There was a changing relationship there.
And so the Sagebrush Rebellion, you know, and you're going to find that, like, Posse Comitatus is part of the origin story of the Patriot Movement, but also, like, the Sovereign Citizen Movement and stuff like that.
They were a kind of stew, almost, of conspiracy beliefs, anti-government beliefs, you know, racist beliefs, and they also had a relationship with Christian identity Which is also a kind of part of this whole story.
But yeah, then there was the Sagebrush Rebellion, which was, you know, something that happened a little closer to the mainstream, I guess, than Posse Comitatus did.
Posse Comitatus was a kind of, however popular it became and however widely those ideas spread, it was still kind of pretty marginal.
The Sagebrush Rebellion was more of a serious You know, insurrection on the part of farmers and something that happened also in the lead into sort of Reaganism and a more conservative turn in the country as a whole, I think.
So those two things happened.
I think that's During the 1980s, you had a Western conservative who was president.
But, you know, these these folks weren't doing nothing during that period.
And I think that a lot of, you know, if you read Kathleen Bellew's work, a lot of a lot of there was a lot of developments, particularly in white power movements, not necessarily exclusively in the West, but all over the country at that time, as
That whole Vietnam experience shook itself out and as people kind of responded to that and there was, you know, a kind of a lot of cultural work done at that time on the right around ideas about vigilantism, gun culture, survivalism, all these kind of elements that later You know, fed into in the 90s, the development of the militia movement.
But yeah, I think the 80s, you had a new kind of militarism in American culture.
And, you know, as a citizen of a client state at the time, you know, I was very much exposed to that as well.
So you had this resurgence of American Militarism, you know, kind of aggressive patriotism, you know, the Rambo kind of stuff.
Sort of this idea, which is really potent in far-right movements, of an injury or a wound that needed to be redressed, you know, and that was partly Vietnam and partly, you know, what had happened in terms of the counterculture and the broader liberalization of American
society and the gaining of the civil rights movement, the way in which white privilege and white supremacy had been challenged by that movement, feminism, women's rights, the beginnings of serious work on gay rights, and so the 80s You know, there were a lot of sort of things.
It's always a stew, you know, but there are a lot of things going on there that sort of laid the foundations for the future, even if there wasn't.
You also had, sorry.
We need to talk about the order as well in relation to the Pacific Northwest.
And again, we covered we covered a lot of this in that kind of previous episode.
So, you know, not to please feel free to discuss it.
Not everybody has listened to every episode.
And yeah, well, I would refer people back to that, you know, then that episode and just to because the order, you know, as you've probably explained, you know, have have been Claimed and revered, really, within explicit white supremacy.
But the Order's ideas and its networks and its structure, its practices, the things it was reacting to, resonated later, I suppose, in the Patriot Movement.
And there's just Um, you know, I think that hard and fast distinctions are absolutely worth making, and we'll make some later, with respect to Representative Shea, who, um, I don't believe to be a Nazi, or any Nazi.
Right, no, absolutely, you know.
But, but, um, we'll also see that Hard and fast distinctions are worth making, but they are often really difficult to make, especially in the Pacific Northwest, where people with different entry points, different histories, different emphases, you find them frequently collaborating or providing political cover for each other or, you know, moving back and forth between different groups and tendencies.
You know, emphasizing one thing in the 1990s and emphasizing a different thing later, or presenting rhetorically what they're doing in a different way.
One of the things I found interesting, because I grew up kind of in the 90s, I was a teenager in the 90s, kind of talking about, and I was one of those teenage libertarians who was kind of way too deep into Robert Heinlein and various figures like that, so you can understand sort of who that douchebag and I was one of those teenage libertarians who was kind of way too deep into Yeah.
So, and you know, in that kind of early internet age of, you know, kind of reading all the GeoCities websites about from the gold bugs and, you know, that kind of stuff.
So I've been kind of steeped in this at least kind of low key since my teenage years, right?
So the important thing, though, that happens next, I think, in the Pacific Northwest, with understanding the Patriot movement, is the militia movement of the Nadiani's.
That's absolutely key.
So the big thing that happens is Ruby Ridge.
So Ruby Ridge, I've actually been there.
You know, I did a little kind of pilgrimage.
I shouldn't say pilgrimage.
I went there to... And I also went to the town where, in Montana, where Ted Kaczynski spent a lot of time around then.
So Ruby Ridge, You know, is this kind of key moment in the development of the far right in the 1990s.
So, Randy Weaver and his family had gone to live basically off-grid, way up there in North Idaho.
And, you know, he was not alone.
I've talked to a lot of people, sources, friends, you know, whose families did the same thing.
There are a lot of people who went to find, you know, land at that time was cheap.
Idaho is very conservative.
I mean, there's an argument That could be made that Idaho is the reddest state in the country in some ways.
You know, if you look at voting figures and all that kind of stuff.
And you know, they do, it's a constitutional carry state, you know, you don't need to get a license to conceal carry, you know.
It's very liberal with gun laws.
It's very, even now, and it's very kind of hands off.
And you'll find this in remote parts of Washington as well.
You'll find big counties with lots of land where people can, can buy themselves a patch of land and, you know, if they don't sort of disturb anyone around them, they can, they can kind of please themselves because, you know, what are the four sheriff deputies in the, in the county going to do anyway?
Right.
And, you know, so people would move to North Idaho and, you know, live that life.
And, you know, a big attraction, it seems, for Mr Weaver was also the proximate of, you know, the Aryan Nations compound.
And, you know, it seems like that, To the extent that he was subject to kind of entrapment from federal authorities, it was because that they were trying to develop him as an informant about Aryan nations and Richard Butler's activities there.
So they were trying to sort of turn him.
And look, I think there's pretty good evidence that he was a racist and a white supremacist, not perhaps as militant as the Butler crowd.
Right, right.
But you will find a lot of people even now who are moving to that part of the country because they don't want to be in big multicultural cities.
So there's a lot of people moving from California to Idaho now for that reason.
You know, I won't go over the whole story of Ruby Ridge.
I can link you and your readers to an article I wrote about it on the 25th anniversary a couple years back.
Any links you get, we're always happy for that.
Yeah, there's a really good PBS documentary I think that does a really good job.
I'm going to give you my take on Ruby Ridge.
I feel that There's nothing about Randy Weaver's politics I agree with.
Aryan Nations was a nightmare for the entire region and the people who lived around it.
He shouldn't have involved himself with those people but I also think that the Feds absolutely screwed the whole thing up and it was a disaster.
You know, a terrible incident of state violence and completely mishandled and, you know, it effectively lit the fuse on the militia movement.
Well, that's what we've seen over and over again with the Bundys, which I think we'll get to here shortly, and various – that the feds overstep their legal authorities, that they entrap people who, while being bad people, are probably not overtly violent.
Partly as a way of kind of getting credit for going after low-hanging fruit, I think, and partly out of a desire, a genuine desire to, you know, to use them as informants or whatever.
But through these heavy-handed tactics, ultimately end up just sort of like stoking the flames that they're trying to prevent.
This is a recurring pattern over and over again with these, particularly these militia groups.
Right.
And, you know, they're kind of, they're allowed to, I mean, especially since the Patriot Act, they're allowed to interrupt people.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So, you know, Weaver's problems began because A federal agent asked him to make a sawn-off shotgun, you know, an illegally, you know, an illegal sawn-off shotgun for, for them.
So that's something that he maybe wouldn't have done unless there was a guy offering him a big wedge of money to do it, who happened to be a federal agent.
But anyway, I mean, his, his son was killed.
His wife was killed, you know, I mean, it, it was, it was, it was just awful.
And, and, you know, Uh, it was pretty clearly unjust and unwarranted.
Um, and so, you know, it was just perfect.
Uh, now, now during Ruby Ridge, um, you know, you saw how this stuff gets mixed up in the Pacific Northwest, like Nazi skinheads were turning up to picket as well as, as, you know, whatever, like Western libertarian people.
Um, And a little guy named Timothy McVeigh ended up selling copies of the Turner Diaries outside the bridge, right?
Yeah, yeah, the Turner Diaries, gee.
You know, and you also had, you know, Bo Grites got involved, I think, eventually, and that's another thing, you know, that you hit your head against in the West all the time.
Bo Grites is a A Mormon of a particular stripe, like the Bundys, who reads Cleons Gowson and has a kind of set of conspiracy beliefs that are kind of tied into their faith.
And that's something that you will bump up time and time again when you're looking at this stuff in the West for sure.
Mormonism and the The tendency of Mormonism to become fragmented and for people to sort of kind of run up their own versions of Mormonism is something you find, you know, happening in a lot of these situations.
I really don't mean to disparage the LDS Church as a whole.
I mean, I know a lot of people who are in that church and who are perfectly, you know, Whatever, law-abiding citizens, some of them are even liberals, but there is a kind of thing that happens on the fringes of Mormonism that you do find coming up again and again.
The other faith kind of thing that's going on with the Aryan nations at the time is Christian identity, which is a A form of explicitly white supremacist belief that's kind of descended from British Israelism, that thinks that white people are the true nation of Israel, that the Jews are.
You know, literally the spawn of Satan, that black people are a lesser creation.
It's a kind of radical reinterpretation of Genesis, among other things in the Bible.
That was really peaking at that time.
That's fallen off a lot.
There are still people around who profess elements of Christian identity belief.
It's a little bit of a, one of those little viruses that works its way into other churches and stuff.
But yeah, so that was a big thing that was happening at the time.
But anyway, from 92 onwards, You know, and particularly in the Pacific Northwest, but also also in the Midwest.
You know, you had these groups who were becoming more militant, becoming more aggressive in their posture towards the federal government.
And their reason for that was Ruby Ridge.
And people still talk about Ruby Ridge.
And you know what?
I can understand it.
I don't think he's in that part of the state anymore.
He might be down in Boise now I think.
Or down in the southern part of the state.
I don't think he's living off the grid anymore.
No, I've just seen references to him kind of like attending conferences.
Oh yeah, he's still around.
His daughter spoke to PBS as well.
She's quite active.
So yeah, and then Waco happened.
You know, I guess that was 93.
And then, you know, that kind of compounded it all, really.
And you had An active paramilitary movement.
And, you know, Chip Berlay's stuff on this is really worth reading, going back and reading that, because he makes a really good point about them, which is that they were the first social movement in America to successfully create their own alternative media infrastructure.
And this is important with Mr. Shea as well, with Representative Shea as well.
So they were using, you know, phone trees, they were using fax machines, but they were also using message boards.
Yeah, the earliest examples of, like, white supremacist stuff, like, 85, Chip Berlay documented that in 85, that apparently in 83 or 84, and that goes right back to The Order and Tom Metzger and all those people kind of working together to create a network of what was at the time, even in today's dollars, tens of thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment, and then arguably a lot of what The Order was trying to do with their robbing of bank cards was fund, like, the creation of these networks.
Right.
I mean, I had a great conversation with a guy called Tony McAleer, who is now a part of Life After Hate, but was an extremely active sort of masquerade white supremacist in Vancouver, B.C.
back in the 80s and 90s.
He was actually brought to trial by the British Columbia Human Rights Commission for creating this phone service, like an automated push-button phone service, where it was like, you ring the number and it's like, would you like to hear more about the holohoax or whatever?
Would you like to hook up with local people in your area?
Press this button.
And it would take you through this menu.
And that got him into trouble with the British Columbia Human Rights Commission.
And he tried, he sort of tried to bring Metzger to Canada and that created a huge media firestorm at the time.
And, you know, they sent extra people to the border and all this kind of stuff.
And it was all a big troll.
Metzger kind of dialed in, videoconferenced in somehow.
But the thing that Macaulay did also was back in 95, he was in You know, a white supremacist magazine, he sent me the article arguing, you know, you guys need to get online.
Like, it's not censored.
You can say stuff that mainstream media won't let you say.
Yeah, it was absolutely a determined effort.
And, you know, you had these particular activists who got really good at using message boards to sort of – and also the shortwave radio was another big thing at that time, which is less of a thing now.
But you had these shortwave radio broadcasters broadcasting all over the country and the world kind of spreading the message.
So, yeah, that all happened.
And you also had the underground of gun shows, you know, the kinds of things that – the kinds of things that McVeigh was attending.
And, yeah, it was a big, big, big, big social movement, depending on the estimates, Um, uh, you know, you get estimates up, up into the, the high five figures for sure.
Um, uh, and, and, uh, you know, um, bigger than DSA or whatever, let's put it that way.
Um, you know, and, and there were armed guys that were practicing, they were doing paramilitary training and, and, you know, we had several incidents, incidents of standoffs with the federal government, the Freeman in Montana.
Um, uh, you know, I guess, I guess Waco to some extent, um, You know, you had these groups, and there was a, you know, you've probably seen footage of the, you know, the congressional hearings into the militia movement that are out there, really good to watch.
And it was interesting because They're making a lot of the noises they make now.
We're not racist.
There was really famously an African American guy who was a member of a militia maybe in Michigan.
Who was saying, you know, if this is a racist movement, why am I sitting here?
I'm a leader in this movement.
I feel accepted in this movement.
Um, uh, even though, you know, I like it's, it's 99.9% white guys.
Um, uh, and, and, you know, we're not anti-government we're just, um, we're just wanting good government according to the constitution.
They still kind of say stuff like that, but, but, you know, they established this paramilitary paradigm, I guess.
Um, That's kind of still with us in groups like the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, who are very much, I think, a self-conscious attempt to revive the spirit of that movement, but also to try and launder it and make it more respectable.
The 3% of Washington are led by a guy called Matt Marshall.
They've got a 501c4.
He says some pretty inflammatory things online and ultimately, I think, has some pretty extreme beliefs.
But he's also a GOP committeeman in Pierce County, and he's just been elected to a school board.
You know, there was always a desire to mainstream, I suppose, that paramilitary kind of vibe.
And it's kind of largely happened to some extent with three percenters and groups like that.
But in any case, what also came with those those groups was a kind of big, overarching conspiracy theory about
you know, the United Nations, you know, the erosion of American sovereignty and the idea that the United Nations was going to, had either already or was planning to effectively displace American sovereignty.
And ironically, to clear the land of white people and maybe carry out a kind of genocide, which is some kind of projection may be happening there.
But the whole Agenda 21 idea was contemplated then.
You know, and the idea that people were going to be put into FEMA camps, the idea that the UN was going to take over, the black helicopters were coming.
A lot of the work promulgating and popularizing that was done by a really interesting guy called John Trotman.
In fact, do you have the capacity to host PDFs on your website or whatever?
Yeah, I mean I can, yeah, give it to me.
Because I've got a very special gift.
I went out to the University of Washington at Pullman because they have one of the only copies in a public library of John Trachman's so-called blue book.
So the blue book is the kind of thing that he would take around to meetings and it was in a couple of ring binders, blue ring binders, and it was just all of the conspiracy material he collected.
So I went out and made a colour copy of the blue book.
A couple of years back and I've got There's not too many copies floating around online, even, I don't think, so I've got probably one of the only copies, and it's really interesting.
It's a really interesting document.
It's kind of like... Yeah, I mean, I can put a Google Drive link, if nothing else.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's just before the internet, you know.
He's doing it at seminars, he's doing it on shortwave radio.
He led this group, which is called the Militia of Montana, which wasn't really a militia, it was just him and his brother.
his then wife, and really what he was doing, he ran a mail order store basically.
So he would sell things like supplements and instruction manuals for small group tactics and all kinds of stuff.
The catalogs are really fascinating, too.
But yeah, basically, he was a kind of proto Alex Jones in some ways, I guess, with fewer resources, without the infrastructure, I suppose, that Jones has depended on.
And he was the one who nailed down a lot of these conspiracy theories.
So it was always a very conspiracy minded movement.
And that's still very much the case.
I guess the focus then was on this kind of one world government idea.
I think that now in those movements, what you find is a different emphasis.
You know, the federal government is still a problem for these guys, but What you find is them talking more about Islam in particular, Antifa, you know, there's a kind of, and the allegation that Representative Shea makes a lot, of course, which is that Antifa and the Muslim Brotherhood and CARE are all working together to sort of subvert
Subvert the United States.
But yeah, so you had that.
Things kind of went... What happened during the Bush years?
I mean, that's a complicated story.
But really, you know, the way a lot of people explain it to me, what happened with the militia movement, is that McVeigh, basically, that whole thing, You know, which was at the time the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history.
Probably still is, I guess.
Yeah, depending on how you count 9-11.
But, you know.
Yeah, I guess.
You know, that obviously scared a lot of people and peeled off a lot of people who perhaps weren't as committed.
The feds changed their tactics.
So the Montana Freeman engaged in a really long standoff with the federal government, which did not end in bloodshed.
And so they changed up their tactics to sort of take a lot of the pressure out of these situations.
A lot of key figures were discredited or got arrested or, you know, and the millennium bug thing was a big deal.
So a lot of these folks, their last hurrah was telling people that the whole world was going to shut down because of the millennium bug, which Some of your listeners, I guess, are going to be too young to remember, but the idea was that the date settings in computers had not been Um, uh, everything was going to go wrong when the date ticked over to zero, zero, zero, you know, on the YouTube.
They were using two digits instead of four for the, for the date.
So suddenly all the computers are going to think it's January 1st, 1900.
And that was going to wreak chaos because a lot of this old legacy code was in COBOL and Fortran and it never been like updated.
Um, which was true.
And then like software companies spent billions of dollars, like upgrading everything.
And, but.
It went off without a hitch, but then that kind of took a lot of the, there was a lot of like conspiracy mongering around this kind of Y2K thing.
It was a kind of apocalyptic story being told about it.
And, and, you know, people were being encouraged.
I mean, that, that was the period in which I think the Prepper movement really crossed over from You know, I think for full on survivalists and Mormons into something that was more of a mainstream conservative practice, especially in the West, you know, the prepper industry really got off the ground.
But it obviously discredited a lot of people because nothing much happened on 1st of January 2000.
Everything was fine.
So but then during the Bush years, you know, like Well, they didn't have a Democrat in the White House.
And that was, you know, conspiracy theories about the Clintons were always a big part of this and have been ever since.
But also, you know, the way in which the Clintons, the DOJ in the Clinton years handled this situation, especially early on, obviously exacerbated it, but also, you know, provided a focus for any government conspiracy theories.
Yeah, but during the Bush years, the War on Terror happened.
There was a kind of, I don't know, outlet or focus for patriotism, like everything was functioning in a different way.
They were not good years, obviously, as I'm constantly told by the people who lived through them, but there was less space Well, it was like, let's go glass Saudi Arabia was sort of the the big answer there.
You know, instead of like kind of focusing on the enemy within, it was, you know, kind of more focusing on this kind of aspect of imperialism of, you know, this Ra Ra War stuff, even when the war started.
That's a really excellent way of putting it.
Yeah, there was an outward focus.
And, you know, I mean, the other thing is the thing that always Strikes me really forcefully when I go to rural towns in the Pacific Northwest is that, you know, how many guys younger than me are veterans.
So a lot of people in the places that sort of incubated the militia movement, you know, got emptied out during the war on terror because so many young men enlisted.
I mean, it's That's another factor I just come across all the time and no one seems to talk about.
But, you know, like I think that Belou's research kind of kind of plays into this quite a bit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So so I feel like the, you know, the distribution of people who actually fought the war on terror, at least, you know, in terms of, you know, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I feel like that's, you know, Distributed geographically in a really particular way.
Anyway, so yeah, the outward focus is the main thing, though.
But then, of course, the Obama years come along, and that's when these guys really got revived again.
You will find that a lot of the people who are active in the Patriot movement now, as it's been kind of rebranded, and self-consciously rebranded, I think, You know, a lot of them passed through Tea Party politics and Tea Party politics were the kind of most immediate response to the Obama years.
The Tea Party, like a lot of these guys now, made this very self-conscious effort to say, you know, to depict itself as not racist, even though You know, clearly for a lot of people who involve themselves with that, the real affront was a black president.
You know, let's not.
It's astonishing how this completely not racist movement that's built on supplanting the ideals of a coded white supremacy just arrives the second that a black man is the president of the United States.
Also, the explicitly racialized alternative right is formed at the exact same moment.
Funny how that, you know, just coincidence, just complete coincidence, I'm sure.
Right, yeah.
So out of that moment, I mean, also another thing that's not discussed enough is Ron Paul's campaigns, you know, in 2008 and 2012, which put together, you know, and again, you know, there were People who joined in and supported that campaign for principled reasons.
You know, at the time there seemed to be some evidence that there were even leftists who were organizing with Ron Paul because, you know, especially in 2008, because they saw him as a kind of the only viable anti-war candidate.
And I'm not saying there were tons of people who fit that description, but I saw a lot of people who were both sort of Michael Moore fans and Ron Paul fans, certainly.
I mean, he was consistently this sort of anti-war person, and I think most people saw him clearly as sort of an anti-government figure who was going to also like cut social services, you know, and do this horrifying kind of libertarian austerity program.
But I do think his consistent kind of anti-war message was a lot of what Attracted people to him from from lots of stretches of the political spectrum.
Although I think some of it was somewhat Coded by the fact that the wars were going so badly I think if we really kind of gone in and like kicked ass and taken names I don't think anybody would have like particularly cared and I think that's just You know the wars were going badly but they were coming becoming probably less popular for other reasons which is I
That the kind of consequences of war were starting to be felt, you know, in terms of body bags, cripple people, you know, maimed human beings.
Yeah, sure.
Psychologically and physically injured people coming home to these towns.
And, you know, libertarian in the West, I think a lot of the time just You know, it's easy to pass for people as we're going to be able to mine again.
We're going to be able to log again.
We're going to be able to.
Yeah.
And there's no doubt that story I told before, like the end of logging in the Pacific Northwest is is an indescribably Kind of big factor.
People don't always attribute it to the right things.
They wholly attribute it to the federal government, whereas actually a lot of this has got to do with automation, with the fact that the high yield logging of old-growth trees is a one-shot deal.
You don't get to do that again.
With competition from Canada, you know, and gradually the trade liberalisation.
There's a lot of things that have gone into this, but the decline of logging has kind of destroyed a lot of rural economies in the Pacific Northwest.
There's no argument.
And mining similarly.
Ranching always employed fewer people.
Logging is the big one.
But yeah, when you see someone Like Ron Paul come along, you know, a lot of people are able to understand what he's saying.
And I'm not, I didn't look again at his explicit program, his platform in preparation for this, but I wouldn't be There was some explicit stuff in there about about federal land management.
I'm sure I'm sure they at least at least in the coded sense of, you know, reducing federal, you know, regulation, federal burdens of the of the government, etc.
You know, that that's that runs through the entire like ethos of the of the movement ultimately of libertarianism.
So a lot of these people and a lot of the kind of grassroots people around Matt Chey pass through the Ron Paul movement.
And Yeah, and you know Stuart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the Oath Keeper, used to work for Ron Paul.
So the Ron Paul campaigns, I think, Um, I'm sure you've discussed them previously in relation to the override.
Oh yes, absolutely.
The Nazi pipeline.
We haven't done a full episode on that, but certainly, like, there's video of Richard Spencer introducing Ron Paul in 2007 at a Robert Taft Society event.
Right.
There's an absolute connection there.
I mean, this whole anti-war thing, which, to be clear, I don't treat as a legitimate anti-war stance because it's almost entirely based around we shouldn't be A, fighting wars for Israel, or B, American casualties matter and not the other people that get – American casualties matter and not the other people that get – the million brown people who got murdered in Iraq don't really factor into those
But you see a lot of these kind of anti-war sentiments come out of this kind of libertarian ethos and that kind of Ron Paul era.
And then when, you know, Obama comes in and suddenly kind of the anti-war sentiment stops being as overt because Bush isn't in the White House anymore, they started looking for another political home.
I think that's kind of going on.
I think like Ron Paul, you know, is a kind of a complicated figure.
Like he, it's possible to understand what he represents in different ways.
But what he definitely was, was a kind of sign of A rising alienation from what the GOP have become in terms of economic policy, in terms of foreign policy.
And he really was, for a lot of people, easy to understand as a kind of callback To a more explicitly racist, because let's not forget his newsletters and stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, absolutely.
Uncle Ron never kind of said stuff in public during those campaigns that was kind of overtly racist.
But, you know, he had people in his orbit who definitely thought that way.
So so he was a kind of callback to You know, I guess a pre-war conservatism, isolationist, small government and more explicitly racist.
And, you know, Richard Spencer took that in one direction.
But a whole bunch of people in the Pacific Northwest took it in a slightly different direction.
So, a lot of the people who are the closest kind of grassroots network to, they actually run a part of an organization called Grassroots Northwest, who Which has moved.
So his home ground is Spokane Valley.
So it's the sprawl of Spokane that goes to the Idaho border, like east of Spokane proper.
It's newer suburbs.
It's only been, it was unincorporated until relatively recently.
It wasn't a city.
So it's a pretty new city, but it's the bit of Washington, the last bit of Washington before you hit North Idaho.
So it's between Spokane and those parts of North Idaho that have traditionally been an incubator for the right.
And in Spokane Valley, there's a group called Grassroots Northwest.
They are big supporters of Shea.
They're Republican Party activists.
A lot of them passed through the Ron Paul movement.
A lot of them now are.
There's a really close connection between Shea and the John Birch Society.
Would you believe it?
There's a big John Birch Society revival in that part of that part of Washington.
But yeah, and a lot of them passed through Tea Party politics.
And, you know, throughout the Obama years, you know, again, the focus was on the federal government, right?
And the guy who was running the federal government, who none of them kind of liked.
Was he going to grab their guns?
He never really did much on that front, despite talking about it.
Was he going to herd white people off the land?
Was he a Muslim?
Was he a socialist or a communist?
All of that stuff.
was kind of coming up.
And so I guess Shay is elected during Obama's first term.
He's a state-level representative in Washington, in the Spokane Valley.
He represents District 4, which is basically Spokane Valley.
He was elected, I guess, at the same time as Obama.
Well, no, that's at the same time as Obama.
Right.
Yeah, I guess.
I mean, yes, Palin, for sure.
And then he assumed office in January 2009.
So, yeah.
That was the big Tea Party swing.
That was like Sarah Palin's big, you know, moment.
Well, no, that's at the same time as Obama.
Right.
Yeah, I guess.
I mean, yes, Palin for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, Paul Ryan comes in around that time.
I mean, you know, that was a big kind of big, you know, and the Tea Party definitely, you know, I remember it, you know, because I was I was here at the time.
They frame themselves as being sort of against the kind of establishment Republican line as against the sort of George W.
Like George W.
Who?
We don't remember that guy who was president 10 minutes ago.
We're a totally new thing that just believes everything that they believe.
You know, it was always sort of just a rebrand of sort of like the mainstream Republicanism.
Right.
That didn't want to admit that they had voted for George W. Bush twice.
Right.
So.
So, yeah, he's like mid 30s when he was first elected and he was a local guy.
He went to Gonzaga University and eventually got a law degree as an undergraduate.
He was in ROTC there and he went into the army.
Eventually he came back later and got his law degree in 2006, but he served overseas as an officer, a captain, I believe he got to captain, and Um, one of the, um, places he served was, uh, was in, uh, Bosnia in the former Yugoslavia.
Um, uh, and then he kind of came out, came home and then was a reservist and wound up serving in Iraq in around 2003, I think, 2000.
So he's a veteran.
Supposedly some of the guys who are his associates served with him.
I've never been able to confirm that because these are not talkative people.
He never talks to reporters.
I think there's a line in Lea Soteli's Bundyville podcast where she says, I literally know more people who have talked to the president than have talked to Matt Shea.
Right.
Yeah.
I've talked to him in person once.
I went to an event featuring him and Ammon Bundy in Whitefish, Montana last year.
And I just, I just was able to buttonhole him and he didn't, he didn't know much about me at that point.
So, you know, he, he was happy to say a few things.
He's your biggest fan today.
Oh yeah, yeah, nothing consequent.
Well, yeah, he's, uh, I'm directly connected to Antifa, don't you know?
Yeah, yeah.
He and his buddy Jack Robertson, aka Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.
Yeah, yeah.
John Jacob Schmidt, that's what it is.
John Jacob Schmidt.
So, um, you know, you'll find reporting from his early years, um, You know, where he says weird things.
I mean, the other thing to say about the Bush years, of course, is that someone who carried the torch with all this stuff throughout those years and took it in interesting and lucrative directions was Alex Jones, who really kind of refined and monetized The militia movement, you know, the Trockman type thing, their message, and made it very adaptable.
And, you know, was kind of able to do his own kind of political syncretism.
Because, I mean, I know that there were lefties listening to him in those years, because he was anti-Bush, right?
And sort of dragged a lot of people into, you know, a pretty unpleasant kind of political current that way.
But yeah, so I think that Shay wound up going on Infowars for the first time in 2013-2014.
Before that there had been little bits of reporting about him, you know, he said something weird maybe, there were controversies, he was involved in a Uh, he divorced his first wife in 2008.
Um, and there is, there are some allegations in, in his divorce papers that are pretty unpleasant about his behavior towards His first wife.
You know, that's difficult stuff to report on.
It's difficult stuff to confirm.
Allegations up to and including spousal abuse.
We're not alleging that officially, but that's certainly the allegation that was put forward.
Yes.
Yes.
And a kind of long term pattern of bizarre, you know, and sometimes abusive behavior.
There was also an incident in traffic in Spokane where, you know, a guy alleged that Shea pulled a gun on him in traffic during a road rage incident.
Important to say, obviously, because we are legally cautious that Shea's always denied the substance of that allegation as well.
And, you know, he denies everything, though.
So there was stuff like that.
The really important reporting on him I think probably when he goes on InfoWars.
When was that?
2013-2014.
That's when you start.
And you know, he seems to make a more kind of radical turn or to reveal himself as a more radical figure around that time as well.
He definitely was involved in the Tea Party stuff and definitely was quite forthright about that.
He definitely, I think, identified early on with the Ron Paul movement.
He definitely always was not, you know, a moderate Republican.
He was understood as someone whose beliefs were, you know, more in line with kind of Patriot movement type stuff than with sort of Paul Ryan or whatever, you know.
But I think You know, you can kind of, your readers can kind of, your listeners can kind of pick the story up in about 2013-2014.
Shea goes on Infowars and basically articulates a whole bunch of conspiratorial beliefs in the company of Alex Jones.
And then, you know, I think the key guy who was doing this reporting early on was probably Daniel Walters for the Inlander, who still works for the Pacific Northwest Inlander, which is you can read it for free online.
And if you want to know what's happening in the Pacific Northwest, that's a good way to take the pulse, as is the Spokesman Review, which is the daily newspaper in Spokane.
Another really good newspaper people can add to their RSS readers, if people still use those, is the Sandpoint Reader.
They've got a really good series on the American Redoubt, which I guess we'll come to eventually.
I'm sorry if I'm blathering on too much.
People ask me for longer episodes, so they're getting it today.
They're getting it today.
Right.
So, you know, from about 2014, I think Daniel in particular and Leah Satili, Leah, the really great freelance journalist who's done an absolutely fantastic series of podcasts on the Patriot Movement over the last few years.
And has an episode focused on Shay that people should absolutely listen to.
I re-listened to it in preparation for this, actually.
Like an hour before we were doing it, I was re-listening to that episode.
So Leah did a lot of early reporting on him too.
Joseph O'Sullivan, who now works at the Seattle Times, who still kind of covers Shay.
Joseph did a lot of really interesting early reporting on Shay too.
So you get these locals who are going, you know, who are getting these increasingly Radical gestures, I guess, from Representative Shea from kind of 2013, 2014, although even earlier.
I'm sure they'll listen to this and say we were onto it earlier than that.
I'm happy to concede that.
But yeah.
And then I think, you know, he goes from this local kind of curiosity to a more Broadly known figure, I think, with Malheur, with the Malheur occupation.
So, you know, at this time, although there is stuff, there's reporting from 2014, 2015, of him choosing to be a speaker at the Marble Community Fellowship.
Leah's got an episode.
It's the same episode, I guess.
It's the one after that.
I really listened to both of them.
Yeah.
So, you know, Marble Community Fellowship, I think, absolutely listen to Leah's work.
I mean, even Leah's work, though, has not kind of brought out everything that's happened there.
Marble was... This is an explicitly Christian identity sort of identified couple.
They claim to have sort of left that behind when they created this Marble Christian Fellowship, but it was previously something called the Ark, I believe, if I'm kind of getting this?
Yeah, so, you know, I think, again, marble changes over time, I think, and it's a kind of syncretist kind of thing as well, which mixes up a whole lot of different stuff.
Certainly early on.
Barry and Anne Byrd.
Barry Byrd's a pastor.
Anne is his wife.
And they run this marble thing.
Yes.
Like I said, you need to know that they used to travel around the country.
They're musicians, Barry and Anne are musicians.
Anne's brother is still a professional musician, although he got turfed out of Marble at some point in the late 1990s.
Excommunicated.
Anne's other brother is a Mormon prophet who lives in Baja, California.
I think he's only got one or two followers, but he's very active on Twitter and elsewhere.
Yeah, but they used to travel around in a band.
And I don't know if you like country music.
They were a pretty good band.
I mean, they were pretty skilled musicians.
But their message was, you know, effectively they were preaching.
They appeared on Oh, boy.
Pat Robertson Show.
What was it?
700 Club.
700 Club.
Yeah.
So, yes.
And they're actually from the South, originally.
Somewhere, I think, maybe North Carolina.
But yeah, they wound up in the Pacific Northwest.
They were part of the ARC, which was an explicitly Christian identity church.
Barry and Anne's brother both signed this kind of document, which was the outcome of a meeting in the sort of mid to late 1980s, where a bunch of Christian... Christian identity is a very fragmented thing.
It doesn't have a centralized organizational structure.
It's just really just a bunch of different people.
You know, there aren't even churches in a lot of cases, you know, physical locations.
It more describes a network of people preaching a similar message, which I kind of briefly explained before, but is basically a white supremacist reinterpretation of the Bible.
It's descended from things which are weird but less explicitly white supremacist, like British Israelism, which was a kind of thing in the 19th century and also had a sort of influence or impact on Mormonism.
There is a kind of touch of British Israelism in Mormonism or an influence that's detectable there.
But yeah, it was throughout the 19th century, it was this idea that, you know, the real Israelites were Northwest Europeans, that the Jews or the people who presented themselves as the Jews was something else.
And, you know, and in that sense, the Chosen People, the Bible, the Old Testament was explicitly directed at this particular racial group.
You know, a lot of that came up in the context of the British Empire.
There are British Israelist institutions and buildings in Australia and in other parts of the British Empire even now, although it's much dissipated.
But this version of that kind of idea, like I said before, was a really explicitly racially supremacist kind of thing which not only said that Jews weren't really Jews, but that they were a kind of antagonist, a satanic antagonist.
There are, the ARC is that church, I can provide you with more material again, but the ARC has connections with several murderers, you know, white supremacists, you know, white supremacists, you know, domestic terrorists, whatever.
And they were involved with that.
It seems like the best I can tell, because they won't talk to anyone either, and it's sort of a hard community to get inside.
Although that's something I hope to work on this year.
But it seems like the best I can tell there was a kind of power struggle within the ARC.
Barry and Anne kind of wanted to take it over and they failed in that ambition and that's when they started Marble.
The parallel track here, and I'm not exactly sure of the timeline, is that they were involved also in a fairly controversial Pentecostal movement called Shepherding.
So there's a guy called Dennis Peacock, He's out of the Bay Area.
Shepherding was a Pentecostal religious movement that kind of almost had these kind of countercultural origins but became very controversial throughout the 1970s and 1990s as a kind of authoritarian cult.
It was a very rigidly hierarchical and Barry and Ann were kind of pledged to this Dennis Peacock guy and The other story about them is that they went up there to set up this intentional community under his instructions.
And there's some reporting at the time that sort of says that.
But, you know, they've deliberately, I think, tried to obfuscate a lot of their history.
And, you know, they just aren't the kind of people who leave a lot of documents anyway.
So that's something we all need to sort out.
I think, you know, Leah's version would be the most authoritative version at this point, for sure.
Yeah, no, definitely.
We'll put a link to that.
Both seats of that podcast.
And also, she wrote essays that go into even more detail.
So definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kind of checking all that out.
Her work is pretty astonishing.
Yeah.
She's really fantastic.
And, you know, I've got a ton of respect for her and all of those other reporters I've mentioned.
who have worked on this for years.
I mean I've kind of worked hard on it for one year and I'd like to think I've done okay but I couldn't have begun without the sort of years of work that they have laid down and and yeah like I said I mean Leah's work is not only really great on Shea and Marble but it's just a really incredible document of this period in the history of the Patriot movement.
It's just essential.
And you can listen to it in the car if you want to.
So, you know, or walk in the dog.
But yeah, so Shay, you know, we don't know exactly when Shay starts coming into Marble's orbit.
But certainly he speaks there in, I think, 2014 might be the earliest time he speaks there.
They have an annual event up there called, up for 4th of July, called Marble Country.
They don't let reporters into that.
But, you know, the thing about Marble is that really Marble probably peaked, so hundreds of people moved there in the 1990s, throughout the early 1990s.
And then, you know, there was a There was a split, a kind of internal dissension, internal struggle that happened kind of around 97.
So there was a guy called, who was a really important figure in the sort of revival of Dominionist Christianity in the 1980s, called Jay Grimstead, who kind of went up to stay At Babel for a number of months, I guess this was in the early 90s, and he made a fuss when he got back and said that they were running a cult, said that what they were doing was not biblical.
You know, he had good reasons, like, you know, this is a cult, it's very authoritarian, there's no freedom of conscience.
He had bad reasons, like, oh, Anne's preaching, and that's, you know, it should be the man preaching, and that's not biblical.
And, you know, They're not deriving stuff directly out of the Bible.
They're kind of improvising their own doctrine.
So it's almost, what are they, Catholics or something?
You know what I mean?
Like, he ventilated patriarchal and anti-Catholic stuff in his reasons.
But that turned into a big fight and, you know, they kind of won.
Grimstead sort of got censured by his own church.
You know, and I've got the correspondence.
A lot of people have this, but I've got the correspondence that kind of accompanied that between the Byrds and Grimstead and Dennis Peacock.
And Grimstead kind of lost that, but then there was an internal revolt as well, and a lot of people left around 97.
And then they tried to rewrite the Charter of the Church in around 2000, and a lot of people left then as well.
But there are still people up there.
There are a lot of kids who have been raised in the Church.
And, you know, you hear things like that the kids don't have birth certificates or social security numbers sometimes, that there's, you know, they don't look kindly on vaccination.
You know, but it was set up anyways, this compound, this intentional community.
You know, from what I've heard from people who are inside it, If they were still preaching racist doctrine, that was something that it took time to hear from them.
They weren't doing it at the pulpit.
They weren't, you know, they weren't sort of being very open about it.
And it could be that they actually changed their views.
It's really hard to sort that out.
It could be that they did see That Christian identity beliefs were problematic or wrong, or that they were difficult to sell and, and, um, you know, not that attractive to people.
There's, there's always a question of, you know, what do people actually believe versus what are they just trying to sell?
And, you know, did they just kind of, you know, maybe they don't believe any of it.
I mean, we, we can't, we can't say, ultimately.
And if they're, if they don't want to come speak for themselves, you know, all we can do is speculate.
And so, you know, we can be.
Yeah.
I've listened to a lot of recordings of Barry's sermons that I sort of, um, I don't know, apostate, I guess we would say, kind of smuggled out at one point.
And, you know, um, I think it's fair to say that, um, that if they retain their Christian identity beliefs and, and, and I kind of have a feeling that that to at least some extent they have, um, and that that's pretty deeply, that stuff is pretty deeply inscribed. and that that's pretty deeply, that stuff is pretty deeply Um, you know, um, That they certainly don't put it front and centre.
They have seen the wisdom of not foregrounding those beliefs.
And maybe that's something that, you know, the inner circle get.
Right.
That's certainly the impression I've developed from interviews, from documentary materials.
But they're certainly extremely anti-government.
They have anti-vax beliefs.
live on this privately owned compound.
They basically bought a ghost town up there in, it's almost in Canada.
It's right up in Stephens County, so north of Spokane.
It's about 15 miles from the Canadian border on the Columbia River.
Beautiful spot.
Yeah, and you know, there are still people up there.
And yes, particularly in the 90s, it was an extremely kind of authoritarian situation.
They were part of the shepherding movement, which was pretty authoritarian by design.
It seems like there were a lot of... There was a... I've also got documents from a custody dispute between someone who had left and someone who was still in there in the 90s.
And they've got cult experts on record saying it is a cult.
It has the characteristics of a cult.
I'm not an expert.
I will say that they were able to bend people to their will a lot of the time.
Let's put it that way.
And if you're in an isolated authoritarian situation, you know, the dissenting individual doesn't always have a lot of hope of Exercising their agency or changing the situation around them.
So, yeah, and they were kind of part of that wave we talked about before with Weaver, I guess.
I mean, they're kind of part of this movement that's never really adequately been sketched out, I don't think, which, you know, we get the tip of the iceberg, which is Weaver, Aryan Nations, You know, Montana Freeman, you know, we get that kind of tip of the iceberg.
But actually, I think the underlying movement there was much larger, much broader.
And a lot of it happened, you know, in that sort of late 80s, early 90s moment around the end of the Cold War.
And I'm not sure I can explain that.
I'm not sure I can quantify it.
I have a really strong sense from all my reporting and all the work I've done and the people I've talked to that it certainly happened.
There were a lot of people kind of moving to these remote parts of the Pacific Northwest at that time to be left alone, I guess, is the most generous way of putting it.
To be away from prying eyes, to escape the effect of control of various levels of government, you know, and certainly Anne and Barry, remain Dominionists.
And I think that, so Dominionism is a theological kind of current that I guess is not exclusive to any particular denomination.
You know, you would say you would classify them still as Pentecostal, I think.
So not Calvinist, evangelical Calvinist or whatever, they're a bit more freewheeling, I guess is one way of understanding Pentecostalism.
But yeah, it's not exclusive to Pentecostalism.
Probably no denomination is really immune to it.
Forms of dominionism, but the kind that we're talking about has become more prominent in American Protestant fundamentalist Christianity.
It kind of comes through the political movement in the early 80s, the religious right, through Rush Dooney and some other figures like that, start feeding this sort of, you know, idea that government should be run by Christian white males or Christian males.
Right.
Along kind of biblical principles, and by biblical principles I mean this sort of like Amalgam of this sort of like far-right social policy that comes quote-unquote from the Bible and you know kind of low-tax, low-government, low-regulation sort of frontierism almost.
Yeah, and it's rooted in this idea that Christ isn't gonna, I mean all the forms of evangelical, you know, they think that Christ You know, we need to establish this kind of situation on earth before Christ will come.
Earlier evangelicals were kind of political quietists because they just didn't see the point, I guess.
Like, why would you involve yourself in the affairs of the world?
The world's going to end.
And we won't know when, and politics will be irrelevant at that point.
But in the latter half of the 20th century, you had this coming.
And look, they've never backed away from that, nor has Shea.
They really think that, ideally, human government would be run in accordance with biblical principles.
So he gets involved with them, and he starts to, you know, Build this network around him.
And, you know, like Jack Robertson, also known as John Jacob Schmidt, the broadcaster, him and Shay.
And around that time, I think they start, they might have been a little earlier.
Maybe that was 2011, 2012.
They start, they start these, well, we receive them as podcasts, but actually they're, one of Shay's, one of Schmidt's podcast episodes per week, and Shay's podcast are actually recorded as live broadcasts on Christian radio station, a kind of pay-for-play Christian radio station up there in Spokane.
So you know, and then the American Readout idea also kind of lands at about that time.
So if you've talked about the Northwest Territorial Imperative before, I mean, It is different from that.
It's not explicitly racist.
It's not about, you know, they don't talk in terms of an ethnostate.
But the idea is that eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and most of the time Wyoming, can be this place where like-minded, you know, their catchphrase is... Christian patriots!
Right!
Bible-believing, liberty-loving, you know, patriots, liberty-loving Christian patriots, where these like-minded people can all move to the same part of the world and, you know, re-establish or Well, I mean, it's not hard to see it as sort of a state that's sort of built along Marble Christian Fellowship lines, right?
You know, under this, you know, kind of far-right authoritarian government built around this kind of strict quote-unquote Christian principle.
Well, and this is where the reporting this year, you know, has really unearthed a lot of that.
Or since late 2018, you know, with this biblical basis for war document.
Yeah, look, the readout idea is really for public consumption.
You know, the idea that you should buy a patch of land in Idaho where you can prep really effectively because there's fresh water and you can be among like-minded people.
You know, that is an appeal for, you know, a certain kind of right-wing cohort to move to that part of the state.
Now, when they move to that part of the country, when they move to that part of the country, potentially they're going to be part of the power base of politicians like Representative Shea, like Heather Scott, who is in a bit of trouble this week as a result of her also being named in the Shea report.
You know, like the Bonner County Republican Party, which has recently been taken over by readouters.
Like Alex Barron, who runs the Charles Carroll Society podcast, who's running for State Senate there in Northern Idaho and calls himself the bard of the American readout.
You know, these people, once they arrive, they can be organized.
They can be organized along the lines of a political program, which de facto establishes a sort of hegemony of dominionist legislators in a particular region, you know, that crosses state lines.
And so just to be clear, what we're seeing is this, this, again, pretty far right, not explicitly like, you know, Nazi movement or whatever, but this far right anti-government movement is literally installing people who believe in its precepts into state level, you know, high level, but state level political positions.
Yeah.
And like, look, they're not, they're not, they're not Sieg Heiling.
They don't have, they don't, and they don't, they don't express, explicitly express, you know, crude anti-black racism or whatever, for example.
They don't talk about the Jews.
You know, they do talk about Muslims a lot.
Oh yeah.
Deeply Islamophobic.
Deeply anti-feminist.
Deeply anti-Antifa.
You know, certainly that's Jack Robinson, I think.
Every episode he's just kind of spitting those communist, democrat, antifa, journal-a-fa.
Right.
And so the last, I mean, You know, you can find it.
You can probably find it online even now.
You can find on YouTube.
I'll send a link again.
You know, copies of Shay's stump speech, which I've heard in person a couple of times.
But which he's got a version of on YouTube, because the related idea is Liberty State.
So Matt Shea wants Eastern Washington to break off and become its own state.
You know, and he's got a stump speech on that topic.
And, you know, he's got all of these reasons why Eastern Washington is better, you know.
and you know it starts with agricultural stuff i don't know we grow x percent of america's apples you know um that's why we'll we'll be fine and we should break off and one of them is we've got the lowest concentration of mosques in the country you know and and and like i've never heard shay say uh i've never heard shay say flat out
i don't think that islam or muslims are incompatible with American Republican government.
But his associates certainly have, including in chats.
He's said things like, Well, he's constantly beating this drum that Muslims and communists are working together to kind of undermine the Republic.
And that's an idea that he shares with John Guandolo.
I don't know if you've heard about him.
He runs, Guandolo has a website called Understanding the Threat and he runs like, he's an ex-FBI officer.
Oh, I think I've run across him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he's close to Shay as well.
He's been on his podcast a number of times and there's a PDC.
Sorry, that's a Washington term.
There's an electoral expenditure document of Shays that shows that he actually paid out of his campaign funds to attend one of one dollars events.
I mean, they're close.
He's close to, he's close to, you know, he's close to the Bundys.
I think he's close to the John Birch Society and particularly a guy called Alex Newman, who was a younger kind of very energetic, younger writer, probably mid thirties, who's, who's worked for the John Birch Society.
And really writes a lot for their magazine, America.
And, you know, is, you know, fully articulates the sort of old conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds and stuff.
It is a kind of, and as part of this revival, I guess, of John Birch type politics, which is particularly finding itself a home in the Pacific Northwest.
He's close to a group called the, Mark Herr, who runs a group called the Center for Self-Governance, who are a kind of neo-bircherite type of organization as well, who have made a series of films based,
uh which which kind of cut up and re-edit and polish up um the youtube videos of lavoy finnicum who was the occupier who was killed at malheur and the center for self-governance have been closely allied with his widow and trying to push this sort of martyr image um um mark herr is also notable for coming up for the with the with the term label lynching to describe what happens when conservatives are called anti-government
or um you know uh certain terms are used about them and Anyway, so yeah, he developed all of these associations, he's been on Infowars a number of times now, and I guess he became increasingly Strident.
And you know, the associations he was flourishing became increasingly extreme.
He got this Liberty State campaign started a couple of years back.
I see that as an effort to Yeah, it's not going to happen, right?
Yeah, they're not going to vote for this, right?
Like, that's not the idea.
It's like, it's not only the Washington State House has to vote for it.
Both chambers of the Washington State House have to vote.
A British or Congress has to approve it.
I mean, that's in a new state approved since Since just after the Second World War, right?
When did Alaska and Hawaii... Alaska and Hawaii are 1959, but those are, you know, those are two states, you know.
Less controversial.
I mean, West Virginia broke away... That's Civil War era, so... Yeah, so it really doesn't happen.
You know, it hasn't happened since the frontiers closed, you know, in the low 48s, I don't think.
In the West, anyway, you know what I mean?
I don't think that's going to happen.
I don't think that's a feasible political project, but it mobilizes people.
Well, it's almost a rhetorical move, right?
gives them something to campaign for.
And it kind of puts Shea in this position of preeminence on the right in that part of the country.
So, you know...
Well, it's almost a rhetorical move, right?
It's like saying these awful communists in the cities won't let us do the thing that we're supposed to do and to live on our own land and to have our own prosperity.
And so, you know, he raises his profile by essentially casting the boogeyman to the cities.
But then ultimately, because it's never going to actually happen, he never has to deal with the consequences of that.
You know?
It's on this plane as well, which is above where you would normally expect to find a state legislator.
I mean, you know, state legislator in Washington is a part-time job, effectively.
It's not that well paid, even.
You know, and a lot of the stuff that the State House does is pretty mundane.
You know, in a normal legislator's life is probably You know, pretty meat and potatoes, trying to get stuff for your district, you know, and trying to keep a local political coalition together so you get re-elected next time.
You know, there are donations and Shea's had a lot of donors, corporate donors, pull out on him over the last year or so since the Biblical Basis for War came out.
But, you know, it's not really even big money politics at that level.
But suddenly he's got this crusade, right, which is to create a state.
You know, but it's not, I don't think that effort is wholly cynical.
I think he's a kind of a true believer.
And that's evidenced in a lot of those documents where a lot of those were produced.
They've only come out in the last year, but a lot of them actually were produced late in the Obama years.
So where he was effectively, you know, it seems he denies this.
I guess I don't believe him.
And that's my opinion based on having read all this stuff.
But it seems like the Biblical Basis for War document actually is a plan for imposing a kind of provisional government in the wake of some kind of collapse, you know?
Right.
No, absolutely.
I mean, you read the document and it's, you know, he says it's a sermon, right?
Yeah, I feel like I have to acknowledge that there is a difference.
of sort of biblical principles, part of a larger kind of series of sermons.
But you read it and it's literally like, so basically things are going to collapse.
And then this is what we do in order to take charge.
Like, yeah, I feel like I have to acknowledge that there is a different, you know, not only that Shay has a different story about that, like that it's a sermon, but there are reporters I don't know if Daniel from the Inlanders changed his position on this and I would want him to speak for himself, but he he certainly At one point there was sort of saying, well, I don't know, you know, I think it might, it might be a sort of improvisation on a kind of Bible commentary.
But, but, you know, I just feel like it doesn't have to be one or the other, right?
Like you can both be, you know, something like, oh, we use this in a sermon a few times and be something that we're taking a little bit more seriously as, I mean, that's the whole point of like a, Theocratic state.
It's both, you know, the religion and the... And this is, in this fuzziness, this is where these guys live a lot of times is, you know, we're not really being racist, we're just saying we want this kind of person living here, you know, we're not being Islamophobic, we're just saying, you know, you should be the Christian kind of Muslim.
My source, I can't corroborate this, you know, because apart from my source, you know, Shay's little organization and the kind of You know, secrecy is established.
It hasn't really cracked.
But, you know, my source said that he handed that out with a bunch of other documents and told people not to pass it on because this is this is the kind of stuff you go to prison for.
So, you know, again, I can't I can't corroborate that.
But he's he's also said that publicly to other reporters.
So I would know that that according to him, you know, the intention seemed to be this kind of Well, would you say insurrectionary?
Yeah, sure, sure.
And you know, I mean, You know, people should read the report as well.
Yeah, we will definitely link to the report.
And I'd like to talk about a little bit of stuff that we found in the report, because I was skimming it this morning.
Yeah, that's kind of the proximate reason we decided to do this episode.
So I would just finish off by telling the story of Shay first by just saying, like, he's interesting to me because he is this kind of amalgam of a whole bunch of different things.
And he's got this coalition of people around him who are supporters who come from different places.
So the American Readout idea was actually, you know, kind of formulated by a guy called James Wesley Rawls.
I'm pretty sure that's not his real name.
But he's someone who's managed to protect his secrecy quite well.
I think he lives in Montana, but he doesn't tell people.
And he's a former army intelligence guy, I believe, who is a prepper novelist.
And he came up with that idea of – and I actually interviewed him before all the Shay stuff came out.
I've got a telephone interview with him.
I'm sure he wouldn't talk to me now.
But – You know, he said, I put the Northwest Territorial Imperative idea to him and he said, no, you know, it's not racist.
We're anti-racist.
But clearly it echoes or rhymes.
Right.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
But, you know, there's that Prepper movement that's there in Shea, you know, and he goes to Prepper shows and he recruits at Prepper shows.
There's the You know, he was talking in chats that I reported on about reaching out to James Alsup.
There is a kind of preparedness to at least engage with or test or think about talking to people who are white nationalists.
And James Alsup is pretty explicitly a white nationalist figure.
Yeah, well this was, I mean the context of that was that also had just been kind of disowned by the local Republican party because because of Daily Beast reporting on his role at Charlottesville and you know exposing the fact that he'd been elected as a committeeman for oh the county out there in Pullman
you know that county level Republican party and was doing this entryism and you know John Jacob Schmitt was was the one saying, "Oh, well, he's got free speech.
This is just lies from the SPLC and the media.
You know, he's allowed to say what he wants.
What's wrong with, you know, and anyway, and then, and then Shea said, okay, well, you know, he did say if he's not a racist or a plant, we should see if we make an ally.
But most people, I think, with that history presented to them, would not just dismiss that.
So that's in there, you know, and it's not, it's not, there's not enough of a wall between his project and the white nationalists who are out there.
He's got the Dominionist current, which has a kind of Christian identity thing in the background, but has sort of tried to expunge that or launder itself, you know, in marble.
There are militia groups who have done security for him.
There's the sort of Alex Jones, e-celebrity, conspiracy media thing.
He's got a little local ecology of alternative media outlets around him, including Readout News, which is a website, very, very active website.
His podcast, John Jacob Schmidt's podcast, there's a few other little websites and stuff that support him, and he's succeeded in being re-elected, you know, what is it, seven times now?
Without ever really making any kind of rapprochement with the mainstream media, with local media, you know, like he just doesn't talk to reporters.
He just relies on his Facebook page, his podcasts, these websites, and he's sort of been allowed to kind of get away with that.
And look, I would explain what's happened there by saying that Spokane Valley is always going to vote for the guy with the R beside his name.
You know, it's just going to vote Republican.
I don't see much evidence that a Democrat could ever win there.
And a lot of the opposition to him, actually, and my source and other sources are disaffected conservatives or libertarians who just think this guy's going too far.
And the main kind of opposition to him in Spokane Valley is other Republicans who are opposed to him.
He did have a majority on the Spokane Valley Council of people who supported him.
He's definitely got a supporter on the on the Stephens County Commission.
There's an ally of his who was a long-term member of the Spokane City Council.
So he's got a little machine, he's got a little media machine and Until late last year, that was going fine.
He did come to wider notice during Malheur, which we now know much more about, but he inserted himself along with Cowes in that situation.
Um, you know, it was clearly sympathetic to the occupiers and was voicing the same grievances that they had and helped them.
We now know by passing on tactical discussions that might have been had about from law enforcement.
And there's always been this sort of like obviously he draws support from these communities from this like far right.
Yeah, without movement and he's always been kind of affiliated with that and sort of a leadership role, but has until this year, seemingly successfully avoided connections to actual kind of militancy.
And then we get the Biblical Basis for War document, which is, you know, a planning document for how to take over the area once, you know, once the collapse happens.
And then you get the leaked chats where they're talking about, you know, beating up anti-fascists in incredibly violent ways, and like, what, mailing wolf testicles to a local activist, environmental activist, right?
That was a pro-wolf guy.
Yeah, and talking about Um, you know, they, I mean, they just, um, um, uh, the other thing is that they just, um, completely conflate groups like Indivisible with, with Communism.
Indivisible, as I understand it, is like Democrat moms, right?
Anti-Trump.
Yeah, these are like, these are like hashtag resistance moms, basically.
Who don't like Trump, but really like Hillary Clinton, effectively.
I don't think anyone, um, who's involved in anti-fascist activism, will remind me saying that that just isn't a huge factor in Spokane at this point.
You know, there isn't a really big organized anti-fascist presence in Spokane.
And, you know, as tiresome as it is, I have to say that that's me speaking from my observations as a reporter.
I am not directly connected to Antifa.
You should ask some anti-fascist accounts what they think of me if you want to confirm that.
But yeah, I mean there isn't a really, I mean there are community organisations, I mean I know that the Western State Centre has Has a presence out there.
You know, there are progressive organizations with a mission of fighting against white supremacy and all that kind of stuff.
And the far right have a presence there, but there's not, you know, there's not like... We're not seeing like organized black bloc in Spokane.
No, there's not a Red Rose City anti-fire equivalent out there, really.
Nothing like that.
Which, you know, I mean, Spokane is much wilder than Portland, so it's kind of strange, but there isn't.
And so he's just conflating these groups and, you know, really, I mean, I think the thing that you can see in the chats is bracketing the question of whether he's a true believer or not.
I think he is.
What you can see is him constantly bringing these things to the attention of his followers.
This was sort of around this conspiracy theory on the right that there was going to be this big anti-fascist day of reckoning on November 4th, 2018, I think it was.
Yeah, those guys worked really hard for that.
It was 2017, I think.
November 4th, 2017.
I think, November 4th, 2017. - Oh yeah, I can, yeah, so. - Yeah, and yeah, they fell really hard for that.
Like they were, you know, carrying out surveillance in, you know, in Spokane and cities in Idaho looking for the anti-file militants to kind of come out.
And the whole thing was bullshit from top to bottom.
I mean, I wrote about it before it happened, saying that this is bullshit.
And it didn't matter.
I mean, and that, you know, I mean, that That thing is something we need to look back at at some point, too, because, you know, I've seen evidence of law enforcement officers taking that seriously in public records requests, you know, because it went it went through conservative media, including Fox and, you know, They take that stuff seriously and it was just, it was just all made up.
It basically, you know, went from a YouTube, a viral YouTube video to Gateway Pundit and then kind of exploded from there.
So it was all nonsense.
The slender, the slender basis it had in reality was that Oh, you know, there are... I forget, there was some figure who was like not even taken seriously by anybody who was like trying to push this idea that like... Yeah, it's resistance.
There's gonna be some resistance action on that day and... It's fascism.
So, which is a front of, you know, the Avakian... Right, right, yeah.
I forget the exact history of it, but... Yeah, but it was just, it was just nonsense and You know, Shea was really mobilising people around that and, you know, explicitly wanting to carry out surveillance, talking about violence, planning violence.
So, yeah, that was a lot of the reporting I did.
I got those leaks.
I also got leaked.
Well, some of the stuff wasn't leaks, you know.
Some of it I just followed up with actually listening to some of the stuff that he's willingly put out in public on his podcast and other people's podcasts.
I just wrote some of that up.
It's amazing what they say when they think no one's listening.
I have no context for that whatsoever.
I mean, and there is echoes.
You know, sometimes people talk about groups like The Bass is bulk, right?
Because they're looking forward to a kind of balkanization.
I mean, that's part of...
You know, again, I'm not saying that he's an accelerationist neo-Nazi.
I don't think he is.
But I think that it seems to me like that he thinks that the United States is going to fall apart.
And he thinks that there is a possibility that You know, that that wave can be written, put it that way, in a way that establishes a regionally specific Theocratic, you know, state.
In the chat, in the reporting in this document that I was reading, you know, at one point Shay posts a link to presumably like just a Wikipedia page or something similar to Atomwaffen, like it says like, you know, a reference and to this, you know, and with no real context or commentary.
It's just sort of around this idea.
So the idea that he's kind of not aware of these groups is ludicrous.
I mean, I don't think he allies with them, but certainly Schmidt, on his show on a regular basis, when you see red flag laws used to take guns away from some of these figures, will kind of say, you know, these are Nazis, I don't agree with them, but, you know, they have their these are Nazis, I don't agree with them, but, you know, they have their Second Amendment rights, and we'll use them as sort of To do it to the Nazis, you'll be next.
I mean, and look...
I mean and you know these are complicated situations and like I'm not against gun rights at all you know that's not that's not where this goes and I think red flag logs get really complicated but you know the there's there's there's an awareness at the very least yeah and and and I mean he's had the he's had Simon Roche on his show Oh yeah, I didn't know that.
And that's a white nationalist group.
They've had really, each of them have had really radical figures on their shows.
You know, Gondola is a pretty radical figure and he's been on Shea's show a number of times.
There are all kinds of conspiracy theorists.
Uh, that they've had on there.
Anti-vax is a big thing with these guys.
Um, you know, so they've had anti-vax activists on there.
Um, you know, so, um, it's kind of a, it's kind of a gumbo.
It's kind of a soup, the ideology, but it is syncretistic and pulls in from a lot of different directions.
I mean, I think the main thing is, or the main currents are, you know, this kind of,
Christian nationalism, Dominionist Christian nationalism, plus this sort of neo-Bircher Islamophobia, flavoured red-baiting type, or anti-communist flavoured Islamophobia, however you want to put it, which kind of adapts the sort of Bircher tradition to the current moment.
There is the territorial stuff, which is really You know, really bears more than passing resemblance to white nationalist territorial ideas, but You know, has been laundered in various ways and isn't read in that way largely by a lot of media outlets.
And probably isn't, to be fair, isn't thought of as a kind of neo-Nazi idea for a percentage of the people who... One of the things that we are pretty comfortable with on the show is the implicit versus explicit white supremacy thing.
I think we can just kind of take it as given that there is an implicit white supremacy here, even though they sort of avow a sort of anti-racist view publicly.
Right, I think that is, there's a kind of implicit, you know, people can argue with me about this, that's fine, but I think there's a kind of implicit white supremacy and the nostalgic attachment to that kind of unlimited You know, the unlimited privilege and
You know, that attached itself to white men in the era of settler colonialism.
I mean, that, you know, he's turned up at any Indian stuff.
You know, that thing in Whitefish was the main topic there was pushing back on tribal water rights.
Oh, yeah, that's interesting.
That's really interesting.
So, I mean, horrifying, but interesting in a sort of an abstract sense.
So it's about establishing white patriarchal authority, you know, in a way that they think You know, it has been.
Well, a white patriarchal authority, I think, has been diminished and probably, you know, has in some ways.
But, you know, I mean, obviously there's a there's a kind of element of fantasy in what that was actually like.
So you've got that, you've got the Patriot movement stuff and the sort of resistance to the federal government, you know, the suspicion of federal government.
Islamophobia, red-baiting, the neo-Bircher stuff, the Christian dominionism, the Christian nationalism, and also the attachment to survivalism, prepping, and a kind of militaristic, paramilitary type culture.
You know, and actual, you know, as a counterweight or as a contrast with their conspiracy theorizing about what everyone else is doing, you know, actual conspiracies.
It's secretive, you know, plans within their own organization.
So it's literally mystery religions.
I mean, you know, to some degree, you know, like secretive churches with, you know, hidden doctrines and such like, yeah, no.
So the thing is, too, that Another thing that leaked out that I wrote up was the Team Rugged stuff.
So he was encouraging, offering help to this young guy who was trying to establish a kind of Christian nationalist militia in Stephens County.
And, you know, Barry Bird, the pastor of Marble, was one of the directors of the LLC that this kid set up.
So it was all kind of connected with Marble and the kids involved, a lot of them were involved with Marble.
And, you know, that was presented to Shea by this guy as a result of him having heard John Weaver speak at Marble, and he was saying he was going to try and get John Weaver involved with this.
Now, John Weaver is a neo-confederate pastor from, I think he's from Alabama, maybe from Georgia.
Georgia sounds right.
He's also a firearms instructor and has given firearms instructions to the League of the South, who shot up Charlottesville.
So, and you know, he's like, at the very, very best, he's a lost cause guy.
At the very, very worst in his sermons, you can also hear echoes of Christian identity type stuff sometimes.
But certainly, I would say he's a white supremacist.
If of a slightly less vociferous variety.
But yeah, I mean, so it's different to the South, but then you've got like weaver as well.
It's a very regionally kind of specific thing.
But yeah, I mean it kind of Yes.
mixes a whole lot of things into the pot.
So that's how you would see him.
I mean, and the report, I mean, the report I think is the best document of that. - Oh, it's phenomenal.
I skimmed it this morning and I need to go in in more detail.
- Yes. - I was just like tweeting little segments of it.
And it's just like, you know, this is pretty amazing, a pretty amazing document.
And it really, so this is a rampart investigation, like an independent investigator kind of looking at all the evidence they had about Shay's activities.
And like he's always kind of maintained a distance from, like he said, like he visited Mal here during the standoff.
And he says, you know, oh I was going on a fact-finding mission.
And like what this report alleges, you know, pretty conclusively is that That's not he was he was taking information from Federal or from law enforcement from the local law enforcement and then like feeding it to these guys So they can more effectively, you know counter whatever action they're taking so he's literally kind of engaging in sedition against his own Government using his position as a government official in that way, right?
I mean, I mean the the most I The allegation that the report made that no one has made in their reporting, and no one has kind of gone so far as to say this, is that he helped to plan the Malheur occupation.
Right.
They claim to have three witnesses that confirm that.
He's pushed back on that a lot, as has Amman Bundy.
Both of them have reasons to push back on that, obviously.
But yeah, I mean, that's that's what they say.
They say three witnesses told them.
And that's the part of the report that's most heavily redacted, too.
And they're obviously concerned about the safety of those witnesses.
And I'm glad that they're concerned about that, because there are some people in that orbit who are who are dangerous people.
So, yeah, that's that's the thing that the report that's the really new thing in the report.
The other new thing is they probably spend a bit more time on the situation out in Priest River, Idaho, where he also involved himself in a confrontation with federal authorities.
You know, ATF, we're going to take guns, guns off a veteran.
Was it ATF or was it Veterans Affairs who were going to take his guns?
Anyway, the feds were going to take this guy's guns because You know, a medical practitioner had sort of said that he shouldn't have them.
And, you know, Shay and a bunch of other people, including the county sheriff, as Shay points out, kind of put themselves between the feds and this guy.
He also involved himself in, I mean, you know, his his transition into direct anti-government action began with the first Bundy occupation or the first Bundy standoff, which was down at their at climbing bunnies ranch in in 2014 So in Nevada, that's like it's in that tri-state area where Nevada meets Arizona meets What's the other one
utah I guess because I think I Think they all go to church in st.
George, Utah, or at least that's where Lavoie Finnegan got buried.
He was their near neighbor, and I think he was actually in Utah.
But that part of the country has long been a place where you know you find more radical norman currents like they're not actually that far from where um uh the flds polygamist uh it was um you know it's a it's a it's a fair way from salt lake city yeah and again uh bundyville season one you can
you can uh right to a great degree um so so So that's when you first involve yourself in direct action.
They also mention Sugar Pine Mine, which was a public lands dispute in Oregon, in Southern Oregon.
Then, you know, Priest River, and then Mount Huor.
And all of this is in, I guess, the latter part of Obama's second term, when things are kind of really getting to a fever pitch.
So yeah, and you know, I mean it's just so valuable because as reporters we're not really in a position to collate and summarise the work of other reporters.
The closest thing that's a product of journalism I think is Leah's work.
I'm rarely in a position to do that kind of work.
There's really just not much of a call for it, you know.
Newspapers want news.
So, you know, my contribution to this has been a series of sort of 1000 word investigative stories, I guess.
Right, right.
But with the report and, you know, the local guys also are really in a position to, you know, write a big feature about Matt Shea.
You know, there's probably only so much Matt Shea that their readers can take.
Right.
But, you know, I think the report is really mostly valuable for that.
It kind of puts everything together in a document in a timeline.
You know, it's probably hasn't Didn't go as deeply into the sort of origins and context of this stuff as Leah did or as we have here today.
But that's fine.
I mean, the basic narrative it sets out of him is really good.
It also connects into a lot of the like larger movements that he's kind of a part of.
I mean, one of the things that we do here is to both sort of like understand these groups that we cover as individuals and kind of groups, but also some of the like Yeah.
some of the connections with the webs that surround them to where they kind of officially get to deny involvement, but have, you know, very clear, you know, real, real world connections like this, this cows concept.
This is what is the coalition of Western states.
Yeah.
So it's a series of what maybe, maybe a dozen or two state level representatives across four states who are all sort of matchés in disguise.
Some of them are representatives, so the main ones would have been Shay and Michelle Fiore was really, really prominent at that time.
She was an Assemblywoman, so a state-level representative in Nevada.
She lost a subsequent election, but she's now on the Las Vegas City Council.
Scott in North Idaho.
And you know, there was another North Idaho representative who since, I don't know if she died or retired.
Anyway, yeah, and there was another Washington State representative.
He has, you know, he clearly had a relationship with Dallas Heard here in Oregon, who was the one who managed to get him into the, into the compound, who Shahid claimed to have been invited by, even though the actual representative in that area told, told Heard to stay the hell away.
Yeah, but there are also people who, There's a guy called Steve McLaughlin, who was in some of Shea's chats, who was more like an aspiring politician.
He ran unsuccessfully to be, I think, Water Commissioner in Washington State.
And he lives on the West Side.
Ann and Barry Bird were in Cowes.
John Jacob Schmidt, Jack Robertson was in Cowes.
So it was a kind of network of like-minded people who I suppose were in positions of political, cultural, within that, and you know, he spells it out.
It was also one of the main aims he spelled out in those documents was to, he wanted to establish legitimate leadership over the Patriot movement.
He says that sort of out loud or in print, you know.
So that was part of it as well.
This network was intended to promote and legitimise some of the claims of the Patriot movement, but it was also an attempt to establish leadership over the Patriot movement.
And that was clearly part of Che's ambition.
You know, and that's a really good contribution the report makes as well.
Like the analysis at the end is really worth reading as well because it's not often that you get to... I think the paradigm that they use is kind of characteristic of law enforcement.
We don't often get to read investigative documents from law enforcement.
And they make the really good point that in each of these situations, Shay was using it to grow his network and to enhance his own status as someone who is prepared to stand up to government and, you know, to sharpen The conflicts that were happening.
So he was kind of, at least according to them, really astutely trying to manage these conflicts in order to build up his own, his own power, his own power base, and to position himself as a leader of this movement, which, you know, at that time, You know, everything changed with Trump, obviously.
Yeah.
You know, and and Shea's a really pro-Trump, obviously, as are all his allies.
I love that Jack Robertson on his show refers to Obama as the president who shall not be named.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He refuses to name him.
I think actually Shea might have been a Cruz supporter during the primary, from memory.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But and, you know, I think more questions have to be asked about Senator Cruz's position in relation to Dominionism as well.
But, yeah, so and, you know, unfortunately, this is just the way things go.
We should be grateful, I suppose, for the insight we do have.
But my source, and the source actually, you know, he wound up giving stuff to other reporters too.
It was exclusively to me for a little while, but all good things come to an end.
He left, you know, he really kind of drifted away from, you know, the way he talks about it is that his crisis was election night, actually.
Like you saw their response to the election, Um, uh, and you know, the plans that we're making on the basis of that election and, uh, you know, he had been drifting away for a while, but he kind of freaked out.
So we kind of, I think the latest stuff that he's got that I've seen that, you know, I've written about, uh, you know, it took him some time to, to, to kind of drift away.
Um, but I think the latest he was involved in any of those chats was sort of like mid to late 2018.
Um, And so we don't know, I guess, what's been going on internally in that network since then, and how the sort of, we certainly don't know how they've been reacting to the stories that have been published on them.
The public reaction has been very, you know, he's attacked me, and other reporters personally. - We'll see if he finds his podcast.
- Yeah, and he's, none of those people have ever denied the factual nature of anything I've written.
You know, they just go after the messenger in a way that's potentially quite dangerous, but you know, that's life.
- I know nothing about that. - But yeah, well, yeah, he hasn't come to my house yet.
Although he did allege that the source had slept in my house and I don't even know what that allegation is meant to be about.
Is he trying to say that we're like sexually involved or something?
I kind of took it as like a like a like a reading of like like the closeness of the relationship that this was that you were like financially supporting him or like he was like like or some you know that he had a financial incentive or something like friendship.
The rich journalists.
Yeah yeah yeah.
Raking in those millions of dollars from George Soros or whatever.
Yeah, I think that I was really surprised by the immediate response from the House Republicans and the leadership there to the report.
You know, your listeners will probably know that Shea has been kicked out of the Republican caucus now.
He can still run as a Republican, of course, and run in the primary and all that kind of stuff, but I don't know what the practicalities are given that The caucus aren't going to let him with the resources.
So, yeah, so that's that's kind of been the aftermath so far.
You know, I think that I don't know what's going to happen.
I think he's probably going to struggle to be reelected.
You know, it is possible, at least, that, you know, the investigators said they've handed off this material to the FBI.
I would be surprised if the FBI, well, you know, Robertson said on his podcast that he's received visits from the FBI.
You know, the FBI clearly have been looking at Shay's network, I think.
You know, and so then the question, well, Why haven't, if what the investigators say is true, why haven't they brought charges, why haven't the feds brought charges before?
And there could be all kinds of reasons for that.
Good reasons and bad reasons.
But, you know, sometimes I think I've noticed in covering this stuff that they like, they do like to wait, you know, especially if there's not, they don't think there's an immediate threat to sort of public safety.
They like to wait and Get a full sense of what the network's doing, and maybe sometimes they wait too long.
I don't know.
But they've clearly been looking at him.
Will he be charged?
I'm not a lawyer.
Is there an entirely new crime here in the alleged conspiracy between Shea and Amman Bundy that could see Ammon charged again?
I don't know.
I doubt it.
I doubt a prosecutor would go for that but I don't know if it's technically possible.
But certainly Shea's never been tried or charged with anything and it seems like that's at least possible now.
If he's not he's going to have a lot of political difficulties and you know he may choose to pivot in something else.
He's actually a really talented and charismatic Speaker, it has to be said.
He's a really good speaker and that's why he has been so successful in putting himself at the forefront of this movement.
So I think it's possible that he could pivot into preaching or something like that.
He's going to need some kind of platform.
I don't see him changing his beliefs.
I don't see him not engaging in this kind of activism.
I don't know what other prospects he has.
He's still an attorney, but obviously, you know, certain kinds of legal difficulties could put an end to that pretty quickly.
And I don't have a great sense, a detailed sense of how much business he actually does as an attorney.
You know, I mean, As I understand it, he's a kind of litigation attorney, like personal injury type stuff.
And I, you know, I just don't, I just don't know the details of his business affairs and whether that's a kind of, you know, an option for him to just sort of Immerse himself in that.
He started getting into emergency services and like kind of survivalism just to engage further in ambulance chasing, I'm sure.
And then he became radicalized.
I do know that he settled a defamation case where he was the defendant and the plaintiff was a Spokane County deputy.
He had made allegations about, um, um, well, what was it that this guy maybe had sold a weapon that was later used in a murder or something like that.
And it just wasn't true.
Um, you know, uh, and, and so, um, yeah, that guy commenced legal action and that, uh, action was settled, uh, and no one's allowed to talk about that.
I don't know how much that cost him, but I don't get the sense that he is a guy who has a ton of money.
You know, and people, you know what people always say to reporters because they think, you know, follow the money.
That's all everyone knows about journalism.
And I think there has been some follow the money reporting, Shay, like the SPLC did something about his election funding.
And, you know, it was worth doing.
It seemed like he had been There were questions to be asked about the way he had spent his campaign fund, you know, the way he had spent the money he had raised for campaign purposes that were worth asking.
But even that suggests that, you know, someone with tons of money to spare doesn't sort of have a great motivation to do penny ante sort of stuff like that with campaign funding.
I just don't think he has a ton of money.
I don't think there is a ton of money in this movement.
I don't think, you know, except what guys spend on gear, I don't think it needs a ton of money.
I mean, I think that's what people don't understand about a lot of the time about this stuff.
I've lost count of the times that people have asked me to Look at Joey Gibson's funding, like as if there's a secret pipeline of money.
And look, maybe there is.
I've never found one.
But what people don't get is that if you're a true believer, you know, and not just simply a grifter, you don't actually need a ton of money.
You know, you don't need heaps of money.
And if someone decides to fund you because you're politically useful to them, Even that might not be a ton of money.
Especially at state level legislature.
I mean, you could you could you go a long way with, you know, 20 grand.
Right.
You know, or even less.
I mean, it doesn't take much to buy a state legislature.
That's that's just kind of the reality of it.
I just don't see.
I just don't see.
I just don't see the evidence that Matt Chase has spent a lot of money.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, no, no.
Yeah, I get it completely.
Yeah.
So, you know, there may be more to see there, and I'm not stopping this story.
I think mostly what I'm interested in, though, is the rest of that network that he's in.
And, you know, I guess the connections to other legislators in other states.
Yeah.
But, I mean, Yeah, I think the other thing is that, you know, like we've been saying for a number of hours now, sorry.
No, no, I think it's time to wrap up.
This episode will be two and a half hours long.
Yeah, well, just the last thing I'd say is that that's part of the country.
I mean, we've been talking about it for a number of hours and it is, despite the really amazing efforts of the reporters who are out there, You know, it's undercover.
There aren't enough journalists there.
And this stuff keeps happening there.
You know, in that little patch, you know, you can look on a map between Spokane and, you know, I don't know, maybe Kalispell, Montana, you know, just in there.
You know, that's across three states.
There's a little ribbon of Idaho.
And Yeah, it keeps happening there, and there are just, especially now, there just aren't enough eyes on it.
And, you know, it has a kind of ripple effect if stuff is allowed to run on there.
You know, if stuff is allowed to run on there, you get the Aryan Nations, or you get the Bundy Occupation, and then the knock-on effects of that are that, you know, people are able to create sympathy for a politics that is Um, anti-federal government, um, that is, um, anti-environmentalists.
Um, and, and, you know, then you get a situation where Trump gets elected and does everything, almost everything the Bundys could have asked for.
Dismantles monuments.
Um, you know, um, uh, hamstrings the BLM, um, and other agencies who are charged with managing this land properly.
Um, pardons the Hammonds.
Um, You know, and really starts to starts to take the whole public land system that actually a majority of people in the West value, you know, like national parks and national monuments.
But, you know, on behalf of this movement or, you know, in line with the desires of this movement.
Yeah, Trump's done almost and he's appointed he's appointed people who share this ideology, you know.
So, you know, it has big knock-on effects in terms of, you know, the United States' management of natural resources, the United States' capacity to respond to climate change, to protect its biological diversity, to reach some sort of just settlement with its dispossessed Indigenous peoples, you know.
You know, it's easy to say that this guy maybe doesn't matter because he's just a state-level legislator in Washington, but he's used that as leverage to achieve much, much more.
And I can't be confident in saying that we're never going to get another president who's as much of a right-wing populist as Donald Trump is.
I mean, I think there might be another Another politician or two like that in the pipeline.
Absolutely.
And, you know, just beyond that, I mean, these are people that kind of pushing for violence.
I mean, it was from this movement that Timothy McVeigh, I mentioned earlier, comes out of.
You know, an earlier version of this.
There's absolutely, you know, violence connected to this.
And not just that, but a politicized violence, a state violence, you know, that, you know, cutting regulations is, you know, environmental racism and all this, you know, all these sorts of things.
And so, you know, it's the fact that he's a state legislature, the fact that he's a state representative matters to the degree that it gives him a platform for sort of pushing this ideology even more into the mainstream.
It gives him prestige.
It gives him a certain amount of resources.
It gives him, You know, an infrastructure that just makes it much, much easier for him to galvanize this movement and lead it in particular directions.
And yeah, and I've got to say, man, it's hard.
You know, I know that you don't live in New York City either.
It's hard in the United States to get people Editors, my editors at the Guardian have been great, but in general, it's hard to get editors and outlets to pay attention to the West at all.
I mean, it's hard to get them to pay attention when LA is on fire.
It's harder still to get them to pay attention to, you know, You know, even smaller places.
Some weirdo, some weirdo state representative is saying, like, really bizarre religious things on a podcast.
And, you know, it is, you know, it's hard to kind of summarize that in 10 seconds as to why that matters.
Right.
You know, like, well, there's an entire history of white supremacy that this guy is baking, you know, baking into.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And but we can absolutely.
And I would, you know, that would be the last thing I'd say.
I would just.
Encourage your listeners to draw that line.
Draw that line between this guy who kind of seems like a marginal figure in the grand scheme of things, and a fringe, certainly a fringe figure in terms of his politics.
To kind of draw the line between the politics he articulates, the pretty sophisticated measures he's taken to put those politics in the national spotlight, and then what's happened
Uh, in the areas he's most concerned about, you know, the management of public lands, um, the treatment of Muslims, um, you know, um, the, um, uh, the, the, the treatment, uh, you know, the, the, the treatment of anti-fascists of the left, um, you know, to draw a line between, between this apparently somewhat marginal guy and, and, and what's happened with Trump.
I mean, the, the Bundys, the Bundys would not.
Yeah, I can't think of what more they could have wanted from Trump, in terms of public lands at least.
He's been about as reactionary as it's possible to be on those issues.
The only criticism they've made is, weirdly, when Ammon briefly got upset about the way the southern border was being managed.
Which was kind of a weird moment for most of the people.
And I kind of saw that and went, yeah, that makes sense.
He's not explicitly racist.
He's just, you know, like, come over here and as long as you work hard and do your, you know, and obey Christian theocracy rules, you know, everything's going to be fine for all of us.
And also, I mean, the Southern border.
You know, I would relate it to his religion as well.
Like the southern border and the capacity to come back and forth across the southern border is something that has a particular value for particular tendencies in Mormonism.
You know, it was in the news recently.
There's a bunch of white Mormons across the border there.
A lot of people went there.
A long time ago to maintain polygamy.
I'm not saying that that's what those folks are doing, but they're living in a way that's difficult to do in the United States.
And so, you know, there's that.
And, you know, who knows?
There's probably also a genuine, maybe, maybe there's a genuine kind of empathy in there somewhere.
And just a kind of basic opposition to anything the federal government might choose to do.
Except for give them loads of cash and free land.
They're perfectly fine with that.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, the Bundys still haven't paid their grazing fees.
Of course not!
No, and the Hammonds are back on their land.
You know, um, with a pardon in hand.
Um, there was a development on that front last week and I've forgotten what it was.
Some kind of legal development.
I'll, I'll, I'll let you know.
Um, sure.
Um, yeah.
Um, they all got acquitted in, in, in Oregon and Nevada.
Um, you don't know, well, people went to jail, but, but the leaders, the bunnies got acquitted.
Um, and you know, um, Now, as a result of all that effort that has been made over the last year, and including in the report, we know a little bit more about Shea's role in that, in those situations.
So, you know, that's, that's good.
But, but yeah, like I said, it would be good if people drew, drew the line that's there to be drawn between, between that and stuff that is more, you know, happens, happens at a national level or has national implications.
Cause, cause the link is absolutely there.
No, no, absolutely.
I agree.
So, let's drop it.
Let's leave it here.
We will eventually do that episode on Patriot Prayer.
I know you mentioned Joey Gibson, and I was tempted to just gallivant off into that topic, but that's a very different kind of group, and I'd like to do a full episode on that, and I don't want to take any more of your time.
All right.
I mean, I was happy to talk, but yeah, I probably need to go do some chores now.
So, tell us where we can find you on the internet, Jason Wilson.
Yeah, you can find me on Twitter at Jason underscore A underscore W. A handle that I have regretted for 10 years.
It was just my handle for everything and I used it for Twitter and not really realizing what Twitter would become.
But yeah, Jason underscore A underscore W.
If you Google Jason Wilson, the Guardian, you'll find most of my recent reporting.
I haven't really worked with anyone else for a little while now, although I have done some stuff on Portland related stuff for local media here.
And in the new year, I am happy to say that I will be launching a newsletter with Corey Pine, who also used to work here in Portland.
And we're going to be covering the kind of stuff that we have covered, the kind of stuff that we have talked about.
And you know, including stuff that doesn't quite fit You know, in terms of my relationship with The Guardian, you know, more local stuff, more in-depth stuff, longer form stuff.
And yeah, so we're setting that up as a kind of venue for both of us.
So that's going to be called The End and it's a Substack newsletter and it'll be launched really soon.
Let us know when that launches and I'll definitely tweet it out.
You can find me at Daniel Lee Harper.
You can find all our episodes at honestlycharman.lipson.com.
Thanks again to Jason.
This was episode 39 and the longest one yet.
So let us know if you like these longer episodes.
Please, you're welcome back anytime Jason.
It was wonderful having you.
Thanks for having me, Daniel.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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