I saw the news yesterday about a young man. That young man had stomped a homeless man to death, pulping his face and skull. The homeless man, Scott Bryan, was a Native American who’d been living at a motel in Kalispell. Kalispell was where we’d drive — an hour and ten minutes, up the western shore of exquisitely beautiful Flathead Lake — to get from our small town home to any store that wasn’t a Walmart.
The murder happened in June. The arraignment — and bonding out — happened a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes news comes slow out of Montana.
When I first saw the young man’s face, I said Jesus Christ look at that neo-Nazi. But maybe I was being racist, and using my handy skull-measuring calipers to impute thuggishness based on his wide-set eyes.
But I should always listen to me, of course. Because one of the three people who bailed out young Kaleb Fleck, 19, after he stomped Bryan to death was a known neo-Nazi — and son of a former Montana Senate majority leader — Zachariah Harp.
Harp isn’t a secret neo-Nazi. He’s a loud and proud one, renting out the library to show Holocaust denial films, a “a central player in the Flathead Valley’s white supremacist movement for some time,” per the Montana Human Rights Network’s Travis McAdam.
The movement he’s active in, at least a dozen years ago, when the Southern Poverty Law Center was already tracking him, is the “Creativity Movement”:
a self-styled racist and anti-Semitic religious organization that worships no deity, but proclaims that “what is good for the white race is the highest virtue, and what is bad for the white race is the ultimate sin.” (The Creativity Movement is the new name for what was once known as the World Church of the Creator. Its 1990s leader, Matt Hale, is now serving a 40-year prison sentence for soliciting the murder of a federal judge.)
Yes, of course Matt Hale is the upstanding citizen “civil libertarian” Glenn Greenwald represented pro bono, for the “civil liberties” of the … freedom of speech to order a hit on a judge, I guess.
That’s the Montana where I lived for seven years, where my husband lived for 30. That’s the Montana where you can bond out after stomping a man’s face to dust.
That’s the Montana we finally fled after too many years holding our breath, paranoid, driving past the shut down gas station right at the top of our hill — its perimeter lined with supposedly for sale granite countertops, its parking lot full of Hummers and UPS-sized vans for a business that had no name, no number, no website, and no way to enter it — every time we headed up to Kalispell to shop.
Kalispell is represented by the out-loudest of the fringe Right. It was one of the first places to obstreperously refuse public health orders from Gov. Steve Bullock, the last Democratic governor Montana will see for a while. (And Sen. Jon Tester, the longtime, salt of the earth dirt-farmer Democrat? I mean, by all means send him a hundred dollars, but you heard it here first: Goodbye.) It was one of the first places to hound out its own public health officer. It’s lousy with Nazis and their milder, merely lunatic-fringe companions. How do they always find and infest the most beautiful places?
We left Montana just in time: For our young daughter, and our slightly younger, half-Black granddaughter. Montana’s always been racist, but they used to have the decency to shut up about it in public. Trump gave them permission to let their racist freak flags fly.
Not everyone in Montana is terrible of course: I miss my beloveds there — your typical septuagenarian hippie libs — something awful. But people tell you who they are in the voting booth. And my Montana is gone.
"But people tell you who they are in the voting booth. And my Montana is gone."
< -- sympathizing from Florida
Let us recall that, during the 1990s, some skinheads made a field trip from Idaho to Portland, and in their down time they managed to stomp an Eithiopian immigrant named Mulugeta Seraw to death. There’s now a sign that commemorates the spot where he died. As in dead and ain’t ever coming back.
Portland and Oregon didn’t wring our hands and cry “But there’s nothing we can do!” Rather, we went after an asshole named Tom Metzger who had a neo-Nazi “compound” in Idaho that had ties to the murderers, and Portland held him and his Nazi training camp (where I imagine the trainers had to speak very slowly) liable, and we took every motherfucking penny he had, including his fucking compound. It was awesome.
The thing to remember is that, beyond the urban growth boundary, there be monsters.