Zoom Chron Blog

When the 2013 film White House Down came out, the Secret Service took notice that one of their own was making the media rounds. Thanks to the Decoding Culture Foundation and PsyOp Cinema, a simple email from the archives confirms this awareness:

The movie plot features Jamie Foxx as the black president who makes an unpopular move in the Middle East and then, in his own “white” house, he gets targeted for assassination by a disgruntled “white nationalist” group.

Of course.

U.S. president James Sawyer makes a controversial proposal to sign a peace agreement with other nations to remove military forces from the Middle East. Divorced veteran John Cale works as a Capitol Police officer assigned to Speaker of the House Eli Raphelson, whose nephew he saved while serving in Afghanistan. Cale hopes to impress his 11-year-old daughter, Emily, by interviewing for the Secret Service and getting tickets for them to tour the White House. His interviewer, Deputy Special Agent-in-Charge Carol Finnerty, a college acquaintance, deems him unqualified for the job.

A bomb is detonated in the United States Capitol, sending Washington, D.C. into lockdown. Finnerty escorts Raphelson to an underground command center in the Pentagon, while Vice President Alvin Hammond is taken aboard Air Force One. A paramilitary team led by corrupt former Delta Force operator Emil Stenz infiltrates the White House, after killing various Secret Service agents, seizes the first family’s home. The tour group is taken hostage in the Blue Room by white nationalist Carl Killick, but Cale escapes to search for Emily, who was separated from the rest of the tour group. Retiring Head of Presidential Detail Martin Walker brings Sawyer to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), beneath the White House Library. Inside, Walker kills Sawyer’s task forces and reveals himself as the commander of the White House attack; he is evidently seeking vengeance against Sawyer for a botched mission in Iran that killed his Marine son Kevin a year earlier.

Unsurprisingly, this movie echoed real-life tensions simmering at the time between the Secret Service and the Obama Administration, though the “morale” problem was attributed to shifting administrative oversight of this agency from the Treasury Department to the relatively new Department of Homeland Security.

Here’s an NPR article describing these tensions, with Mickey Nelson making an appearance to help publicize these Secret Service problems.

Low morale could be partly to blame for the recent spate of security lapses at the Secret Service.

The agency with the responsibility for protecting the president, vice president and their families rates in the bottom third in job satisfaction rankings within the federal government.

The root of that discontent could be bureaucratic. The Secret Service, which was created in 1865 to fight counterfeiters, traces its heritage back to the U.S. Treasury Department. It didn’t get into the business of protecting presidents until 1901 after the assassination of President McKinley.

After the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the service was transferred from Treasury to the newly created Department of Homeland Security. It became one of 22 agencies thrown together in response to the terrorist attack.

…

Like other federal agencies, the Secret Service lost part of its funding due to the sequester of the operating budget last year.

Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary at the time, vowed that those cuts would not be taken from the protective side of the service’s budget. In fact, Congress gave the service more money than it asked for last year because lawmakers felt the Obama administration had underfunded the agency.

But Mickey Nelson, former assistant Secret Service director, says he agrees there has been much more scrambling for resources since the service became part of Homeland Security.

“The Secret Service mission pretty much stayed the same, unlike some of the other agencies that were brought over,” Nelson says. “Now, what has happened over a period of time, of course, you’ve got quite a few components within DHS fighting for what seems to be an increasingly smaller budget.”

What kind of security lapses had the Secret Service already experienced by 2014? According to this NBC article, several. Here they are in sequential order:

November 2009: A Washington couple, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, crash Obama’s first state dinner. The Secret Service later acknowledges that officers never checked whether they were on the guest list. A photo emerges showing that they shook hands with the president. Sullivan, the director, says that he is “deeply concerned and embarrassed” by the breach. The Salahis parlay their fame into an undistinguished career in reality TV.

November 2011: A man with a semiautomatic rifle parks in front of the White House and fires at the building, with Sasha Obama inside and Malia Obama on her way home. A Secret Service supervisor, mistaking the shots for car backfire, orders officers to stand down. The service does not figure out that shots hit the building for four days, and only then because a housekeeper noticed broken glass. The president and first lady are infuriated, The Post reports years later.

April 2012: Eight Secret Service agents doing advance work for a presidential trip to a summit in Colombia lose their jobs after allegations that some took prostitutes from a strip club back to their hotel rooms. A Justice Department investigation finds that two Drug Enforcement Administration agents arranged one encounter between a prostitute and a Secret Service officer. Obama later says: “When we travel, we have to observe the highest standards.”

May 2013: A Secret Service supervisor leaves a bullet in a woman’s room at the Hay-Adams hotel, which overlooks the White House, and allegedly tries to force his way into the room to retrieve it. An investigation finds that the supervisor and a colleague sent sexually suggestive emails to a woman subordinate. The supervisor loses his job, and the colleague is reassigned. A Secret Service spokesman says: “Periodically we have isolated incidents of misconduct, just like every organization does.”

March 2014: Three Secret Service agents responsible for protecting Obama in Amsterdam are placed on leave after a night of drinking, in violation of Secret Service rules. One of the agents is passed out drunk in a hallway, The Post reports. The newspaper reports that the three are part of what is known as the counter assault team, a last line of defense responsible for fighting off assailants if the president or his motorcade comes under attack.

Sept. 16, 2014: In perhaps the most chilling of the Secret Service lapses, a security contractor with a gun and an assault record gets on an elevator with the president during a trip to Atlanta. The Post, citing people familiar with the incident, reports that the contractor used his cellphone to take video of Obama and did not stop when Secret Service agents told him to. The Secret Service only learns that the man has a gun when he is fired on the spot and turns it over. Obama was not told, The Post reports.

Sept. 19, 2014: An Iraq war veteran with a knife jumps the White House fence, dashes through the North Portico doors and makes it deep inside the building, into the East Room, before he is tackled, and only then by an off-duty Secret Service agent. The Secret Service first says only that the man was apprehended after getting in the door. A congressman tells The Post that a security alarm was disabled because staff nearby found it too noisy.

By the time Trump’s team took over, the Secret Service moved from having sex with hookers to having sex with actual members of the Trump family.

Wow.

With Philip Rucker, Leonnig also co-authored A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump’s Testing of America, a well-received 2020 White House exposé.

In her new book, she writes that Secret Service agents reported that Vanessa Trump, the wife of the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, “started dating one of the agents who had been assigned to her family”.

Vanessa Trump filed for an uncontested divorce in March 2018. Leonnig reports that the agent concerned did not face disciplinary action as neither he nor the agency were official guardians of Vanessa Trump at that point.

Leonnig also writes that Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter with his second wife, Marla Maples, broke up with a boyfriend and “began spending an unusual amount of time alone with a Secret Service agent on her detail”.

Secret Service leaders, the book says, “became concerned at how close Tiffany appeared to be getting to the tall, dark and handsome agent”.

Agents are prohibited from forming personal relationships with those they protect, out of concern that such feelings could cloud their judgment.

The clouded judgement of the people tasked with keeping the President and his family safe is still a concern, of course, but it’s a concern that has to compete with more pressing issues, like a Holy War going nuclear.

In the fantasy world of Hollywood movie-making, the Sawyer/Obama figure thwarts the white nationalists, names “Cale” to his security detail, and ends all wars.

Sawyer names Cale his new special agent and takes him and Emily on an aerial tour of D.C. on Marine One. During the tour, Sawyer receives word that other nations have agreed to his peace deal after learning of the events at the White House, calling for an end to all wars.

And in the real world, in 2026, even shit heels like Jack Posobiec know who they have to thank for the 11-3 bloodbath.

And what do the American people deserve, Jack? Maybe we’ll address that question in a future post.

Until then, thanks for reading.

If you don’t have money to hire a lawyer you don’t have rights in America, it’s that simple.

Sure, poor people get “public defenders” when they’re accused of crimes, but for other legal actions, like defending yourself from criminal defamation, or suing a media outlet, like Jake Eaton tried doing, you either need money, or you need to be a lawyer yourself (or married to one, like Eaton).

For a quick look at Jake Eaton’s case, here’s some context on the dismissal and subsequent awarding of lawyers fees by the judge to Eaton’s media adversary:

A state court has dismissed a lawsuit filed in May against a Montana news outlet over its reporting on a complaint about a political consultant, citing a new Montana law designed to protect press freedoms. The judge also awarded attorneys’ fees to the defendants.

The 13th Judicial District Court dismissed the lawsuit from Republican political consultant Jake Eaton in an order dated Oct. 6. The order was distributed to defendants on Friday, Oct. 30. Attorneys’ fees haven’t yet been calculated.

The state law at the root of the decision is the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, passed by the Montana Legislature in 2025 as the state’s first anti-SLAPP law. SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.”

What are anti-SLAPP laws? Great question. To better understand this acronym, here’s a description I found useful:

If you’ve ever hesitated before posting a review, signing a petition, speaking at a school board meeting, or calling out a powerful person online, you already understand the basic goal behind a SLAPP lawsuit.

SLAPP stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation. These lawsuits weaponize the legal system against free speech. People file these cases to punish and intimidate critics, not to win on the merits. The point often sounds simple: Make speaking up feel too expensive, too stressful, and too risky.

Journalists, activists, neighborhood leaders, researchers, whistleblowers, and everyday residents can all end up in the crosshairs of a SLAPP lawsuit. Even if the defendant ultimately wins, a SLAPP can still drain time, money, and energy along the way.

Have I been drained of time, money, and energy? Yes, and worse, but so far I haven’t inspired people to donate large sums of money to my cause, unlike the young man facing felony charges for shoving some Indians and telling them to go back to their country.

How much has THIS dude raised so far? About twenty grand in the first 24 hours.

Impressive.

A fundraiser for a Helena man accused of shoving a man of Indian descent and telling him to “go back to your country” raised more than $20,000 in its first 24 hours, while the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued a statement supporting the charges.

Jaxton Tayte Collins, 21, was arraigned Oct. 27 on one felony count of malicious intimidation or harassment relating to civil or human rights and one misdemeanor count of assault.

An account on X, formerly known as Twitter, started the fundraiser last Wednesday on the platform GiveSendGo, a Christian-focused online crowdfunding website. The account, using the name Tom Hennessey, describes its owner as a “demonetized white independent journalist.”

What’s the secret sauce for inspiring people like this? Is hating foreigners more profitable than exposing local corruption? I guess it is, though I’m not doing what I’m doing to get money.

Speaking of hating foreigners, I wouldn’t say John Velk hates foreigners, because he’s a lawyer who could sue me, but what I will say is there does seem to be a political theme to his Facebook postings recently, like these two posts he made between “suing” and “grooving”:

One critical skillset lawyers must possess is the ability to communicate effectively, since their whole job is making legal arguments with words, but when I shared John Velk’s post about a Municipal Court judge’s controversial decision regarding a Congolese “woman beater”, the words I got from former Oregon lawyer, Kevin Hunt, were immediately condescending and dismissive.

I guess pointing out how John Velk was one of the many lawyers in Missoula who I tried reaching out to was somehow triggering to this member of the gatekeeping legal community, since Mr. Hunt immediately (and grotesquely) misrepresented what I consider to be “problems” in Missoula with this comment:

Am I upset that I can’t find a lawyer who will take my case “for free”? Of course I’m frustrated, but taking a case pro bono, or on contingency, isn’t simply doing legal work with no chance of financial compensation, it’s just more of a risk because the potential for compensation is deferred to either a settlement determined by a jury, or a judgement determined by a judge.

There’s also the risk of doing pro bono work if your client is a woman who turns around and files a complaint against you for not keeping her informed about her case.

Right, Kevin?

After looking at this reprimand, it appears that Mr. Hunt was so busy working the system that he forgot about the human he was ostensibly “helping” through the process, which is its own form of punishment when you’re dealing with lawfare.

Which brings me to the gatekeeping of the entire legal profession, a function I hope AI will destroy.

Are lawyers worried that their entire business model could be wiped out? You bet they are, so let’s look at how this problem is being framed, since the idea of freeing up MORE time (which you can bill for) should be seen as a mostly POSITIVE impact derived from AI-driven efficiencies. From the link:

Lawyers are expected to gain five hours per week from AI-driven efficiency, according to recent Thomson Reuters research; however, nearly two-thirds of them now view AI as a threat to their jobs or livelihoods.

This paradox exists because AI does not just make legal work faster, it also changes which work exists, who gets to do it, and most consequentially, how the next generation of lawyers develops the capacity to do it well.

Over the past year, a convergence has emerged among interdisciplinary experts within the legal profession. Technologists, legal executives, law firm leaders, academic researchers, and legal reformers — individuals who rarely share a stage — have independently arrived at the same diagnosis, which is that AI is hollowing out the developmental pipeline through which capable lawyers have been built for generations. What is alarming is that the profession is making this worse by treating this as a technological problem, when it is, at its core, a human and lawyer formation problem.

The question facing law schools, law firms, and the broader legal ecosystem is whether they can protect and deliberately cultivate the distinctly human capacities — which include judgment, fiduciary care, business acumen, and client trust — that AI cannot replicate. The five hours gained each week represent a choice, and what the profession does with them will determine whether lawyers remain essential or start to become, gradually and by their own hand, redundant.

Before I get to the legal case John Velk brought to my attention with his Facebook posting–the case I agree sets an insanely bad precedent by Municipal Court judge, Jake Coolidge–I want to highlight some of the posts I have written about lawfare and our totally fucked criminal justice system.

“My Marsupial Court Marijuana DUI Final Report” (January 27th, 2025)

“Will I Abide By A Plea Deal That Torches My First Amendment?” (March 12th, 2025)

“The Relationship That Nearly Ended My Life” (April 16th, 2026)

“Lawsuit Gatekeepers, _______, And The Bias Of Selection” (April 24th, 2026)

“Lessons In Lawfare” (May 22nd, 2026)

“University Of Lawfare” (June 22nd, 2026)

“Friendly Reminder To Local Officials That Open Meeting Laws Are Actual Laws” (August 23rd, 2026)

““Family Justice Center” Or Lawfare Central?” (September 25th, 2026)

“More Lessons From The University Of Lawfare” (October 13th, 2026)

“Does Montana Have A Structurally Misandrist Future Forming For The Victim Industry?” (October 22nd, 2026)

“When Does The System Become The Abuser and The Process Become The Punishment?” (October 28th, 2026)

“Let It Burn!” (October 31st, 2026)

Another impact of lawfare I’m going to highlight before highlighting the case of the Congolese woman beater is the social isolation that results, which is aided and abetted by poverty if you’re not wealthy enough to have private lawyers on retainer.

Those going through similar targeting, like Brandon Bryant, have confirmed how lonely it can be when you do what you think is the right thing, then get punished for it. When I saw someone online post something about loneliness, knowing a small bit of what he’s going through, I took a screenshot.

While divorcing someone I spent 25 years with (we were both 19 at the time) has been bad enough in terms of radically altering my housing, quality of social interactions, and financial resources, the last year has been fucking brutal, and there’s no end in sight.

One of the major differences between my situation and the Congolese woman beater is that legal action against me started as CIVIL actions, which lowers the standards of proof and removes my ability to get a court-appointed lawyer, since civil actions don’t risk jail time, therefore don’t warrant Public Defenders.

The man accused of physically hitting his partner DID face a criminal charge, but a criminal charge posed the additional risk of deportation, which apparently was too much consequence for Judge Jake Coolidge, who dismissed the case. This decision seems VERY wrong and will do SERIOUS damage to the court’s credibility in the larger fight playing out between Justice Court and City/County prosecutors, especially if local media amplifies this story.

Here’s some of the language of the appeal (I’m assuming) explaining the back and forth of this case between the courts:

There is much more at Velk’s original post, so give him a follow if you want the kind of insights we’re not supposed to be making in Missoula, like noticing when you see another act of alleged violence attributed to the same surname, or you find a woman who doesn’t understand that she shouldn’t be outing her clients on social media:

An incident around bar closing time in Missoula Sunday morning ended with gunfire. Now, two men are in custody.

One faces a charge of attempted deliberate homicide.

The other made his initial court appearance today on charges of criminal endangerment and a third DUI.

Court documents state on April 5 around 2:19 a.m., 33 year old Anthony Brodie was standing on the sidewalk of Ryman Street when he was struck by a vehicle.

Police say the vehicle was driven by defendant 36 year old Laurent Mugondozi.

For those keeping score, we’ve got a sexually confused stabber of math teachers getting no charges, a woman-beating Congolese refugee getting seeming special treatment for his criminal act, then felony charges for a shove and some mean words from a drunk kid, and criminal charges against me for the technical violation of a protection order that took civil claims like this:

…and turned them into one of four Travis Exclusion Zones, with my downtown TEZ banning me from this geographic area:

I’m not proud of the time I spent homeless, living in my box truck, but I did lean into it, and much of that conduct has now been cited and referenced in multiple cases against me, but it’s precisely because of my homelessness that a coffee shop like Break Espresso–which opens EARLY and closes LATE–was important to me and other “marginalized” people, like Steven Dailey, who I saw there regularly before he moved to Bozeman, murdered a woman, and then shot himself, allegedly.

In summary, it’s not just the lawfare that can destroy a person, it’s also the psychological wounds that one receives from larger cultural trends that literally allows victim cards to be played for some of the most horrendous crimes, like killing babies, trying to kill someone with a knife, and showing your host nation your appreciation by slapping a woman and clogging up an already fucked criminal justice system.

To counter the threat of total demoralization I have some acronyms I’ve developed, but the time isn’t right yet to share the #HeToo related one I’m still field-testing, so stay tuned.

And, as always, thanks for reading.

In the waning days before the election I started seeing hilarious Anakin memes popping up on my X account. These memes have been attributed to “right-wing” angst over the blue tsunami that hit yesterday and the memes have been especially popular, apparently, among Zoomers.

Here’s how WIRED reported on this phenomenon:

According to Christian streamer Kangmin Lee, Anakin Skywalker represents the “archetypal disenfranchised chud,” radicalized when he realizes the “political order” he once believed in is “deeply corrupt, hypocritical, and wicked.” Right-wing Substack writer Max Mersault believes that the Anakin posts are “culturally significant” and that you couldn’t “engineer a better anti-progressive memetic virus in [a] lab if you tried.”

Elon Musk himself, after funneling nearly half a billion dollars to Republican candidates this cycle, shared a seemingly AI-generated image of Anakin on a throne, accompanied by his love interest Padmé Amidala, their children Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, and a bevy of imperial guards and stormtroopers, declaring: “This is what they stole from us.”

Who is “they”? What is “this”? To the MAGA faithful staring down a potential blue wave thanks to inflation, a pointless war in the Middle East, and the president’s historic unpopularity, such details hardly matter. The Anakin memes are all about advertising your fascist worldview, lust for corruptive power, and endless grievances about immigrants or “DEI.” These guys also don’t care that Anakin was groomed to be an evil lackey by a decrepit old wizard and slaughtered children on his orders, since that’s just the price of overthrowing democracy.

For some examples of the memes making the rounds, here’s a few that made me chuckle:

WIRED doesn’t think this phenomenon is significant, so they mock it, but is this the “right” thing to do?

Meanwhile, back in reality, this amounts to nothing more consequential than playing with action figures. Wanting to be Darth Vader is the dream of a 10-year-old forced to clean his room and eat his vegetables. Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker in the prequels, told Variety in 2023 that depicting his journey to the dark side “humanized him” yet revealed that he was a “pathetic person” and “trapped in this life that perhaps he didn’t really want.”

You might reasonably speculate whether conservative influencers tied to a weakened Trump are in a similar position these days. Just don’t expect them to ever acknowledge this burst of mediated angst as the cringeworthy coping it actually is. However the electoral showdown plays out, they’ll have a new aspirational antihero soon enough—and this time, you won’t dare laugh at their very important posts.

The “electoral showdown” turned out well for Democrats, but with corruption being the top issue for voters, I don’t expect Democrats (who are just as corrupt as Republicans) to do anything other than target Republicans for two years in order to keep the attention off their own party’s corrupt practices.

Democrat corruption was on FULL display with the Montana Senate race this cycle, which provided Republicans with one of the few bright spots last night when Kurt Alme won easily, thanks to the spoiler, Alani Bankhead, who failed to get top Democrat WOMEN to support her.

Isn’t that funny?

Is this list of Bodnar supporters complete? No, I had to leave one name off in order to stay compliant with the restraining order I’m appealing that bans me from writing about a public official who was VERY involved in the issue of homelessness, which Sam Forstag was ALSO very involved with.

Do voters care about the corruption within the Homeless Industrial Complex? Probably not, since critics of the HIC are either right-wing grifters pushing a political agenda, or isolated voices like mine, easily ignored by local media outlets.

But not Sam Forstag, he’s been VERY platformed as he advocates for throwing MORE money at this Democrat policy failure, like this article where he says this:

Sam Forstag, with the Montana Coalition to Solve Homelessness, summarized the status of Montana in the national report.

“We’re at the bottom of the heap for just about every category,” Forstag said.

Forstag said he sees two common drivers for spikes in homelessness.

First of all, affordable housing remains out of reach in many communities, with the median cost of a home far outpacing the ability of a person or family earning a median wage to buy or rent.

…

The second driver of the rise in homelessness is untreated behavioral health disorders, such as mental health and substance use, Forstag said. He said recent closures, such as ones that resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the beds of the Western Montana Mental Health Center due to inadequate Medicaid reimbursements, contribute to the problem.

He also said it’s an “open secret” that people discharged from Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs are sent to shelters, which mostly are not equipped to address untreated behavioral health disorders.

Will any of this improve under Democrat leadership? I highly doubt it, since our local Democrats STILL think they can subsidize housing to make it affordable, and they STILL think “housing first” is the way to “solve” homelessness. It doesn’t matter that they are WRONG because they have the power, leaving critics like me to face endless lawfare for what I’ve already exposed.

Killing homeless people while wearing badges and protecting those killers wasn’t a competitive race last night, as evidenced by this graphic showing no one opposing Sheriff/Coroner, Jeremiah Petersen, and County Attorney, Matt Jennings.

What is still competitive, as the vote count gets finalized, is a struggling school in Missoula begging voters for more money while those previously mentioned tax subsidies threaten the school’s bottomline.

Will voters choose to spend more money for kids, or will they follow the trend of voting DOWN these examples of electoral panhandling as litigation against Missoula County looms large on the horizon?

Matthew Driessen, the superintendent of DeSmet Public School, told the commissioners the expansion of the TEDD would fund new infrastructure at the expense of pulling tax revenue away from his school district.

“You are going to freeze the revenues that the school district, the fire department and transportation are going to get, based on the funding that you do with this bond, for the next 25 years,” Driessen said. “That is going to have a detrimental effect on these jurisdictions.”

He said he was giving “notice” that there would be legal action from the school district, and asked the commissioners to table the plans and have an in-depth conversation with the school and other stakeholders about TEDDs.

“The school board has approved that we will go to legal action to make sure our district is taxed the same way as other school districts within the county in reference to TIF funds,” Driessen told the county commissioners.

The final observation I’ll offer about yesterday’s election is the BIG demographic swing that tracked young white men’s evolution from MAGA to supporting the party that will NOT be supporting them, as a demographic.

Maybe these young white men are hoping they still have a chance to intercourse with those female baby killers who watch Call Her Daddy?

Enjoy your democracy, gentlmen.

And thanks for reading.

Party politics makes people appear very stupid to me. The goal is to win elections, obviously, but to do so everyone has to suspend their disbelief in order to pretend politicians, once elected, will actually follow through on ANY of the political rhetoric they spouted to get votes.

Republicans in Montana are positioned to continue beating Democrats like they’ve been doing consistently during the last few election cycles, but that doesn’t mean we’ll get conservative tax policies implemented. If Republicans were capable of following through on their promises then they would NOT have made taxes MORE complicated with MORE government bureaucracy needed to calculate the cost.

For a little perspective on how Republicans fucked up property taxes last legislative session, here’s Bill Lombardi from a Daily Montanan “article“:

Welcome to this edition of the Homeowner Property Tax Shell Game, hosted by Gov. Greg Gianforte and most of your legislators, and led by the Pied Piper of Complicated Legislative Legerdemain, Rep. Llew Jones, the Conrad Republican who serves as de-facto director of much of the Republican and Democratic caucuses in the state House and Senate.

First, some background: In 2023, the Legislature and Gianforte raised the state portion of homeowners’ property taxes by about $219 million over two fiscal years. Then they proceeded to spend your hard-earned money.

Montanans expressed outrage, and county commissioners sued Gianforte over a state tax hike as he tried to blame elected county officials for raising state property taxes.

Democrats and Republicans waited until the very end of the 2025 Legislature to pass an even more complicated residential property tax system that requires more – not fewer – taxpayer dollars to hire new state employees to administer the program.

Yep, they cobbled together a more complicated tax system and added bureaucracy under a Republican administration.

Bill Lombardi should NOT be trusted in his assessment that a “Republican” administration was responsible for the property tax shit-show in Montana.

Why?

Because, as the New York Times reported last year, it was those NASTY NINE moderate “Republicans” joining forces with minority Democrats that neutered the political power of Republican electoral successes and paved the way for Gianforte’s intentional undermining of his political base with a tax bill STILL getting shot at, legally speaking.

Here’s a quote from that NYT article where Bill Lombardi, the Democrat who pretends to be a journalist like Martin Kidston, gets quoted about Montana’s strange political dynamics:

Mr. Regier denied that right-wing Republicans were obstructionist and sounded dumbfounded by the Nine’s role in locking them out of the legislative process. “You’re scratching your head being like, ‘Are you even on our team anymore?’” he said.

He also argued that the unlikely alliance was out of step with the electorate.

“Voters want more and more conservatism here in Montana,” Mr. Regier said, suggesting the episode amounted to “growing pains in becoming more conservative.”

Democrats also felt heat for their role in the coalition — from the left. Bill Lombardi, a former top aide to Mr. Tester, faulted the Democratic senators for voting with Republicans on issues like maintaining a tax on Social Security.

“While working together is good, you can’t give away Democratic principles,” Mr. Lombardi said. “Republicans have cemented their position in Montana, and some legislative Democrats think they must hew to the moderate Republican line to get anything.”

What have we learned about Democrat principles? Great question, so let’s consult the Democrat scold who doesn’t like my opinions OR my Epstein research, which he recently mocked when I made a non-partisan point on his Facebook page.

Sure, Kevin, there’s NOTHING partisan about a Democrat report that focuses solely on Trump and alleged sex abuse victims instead of the Epstein NETWORK and all the places these people show up, which I have been writing about for three YEARS, not days.

For a more comprehensive look at the research I’ve been doing more intensely since the beginning of this year, after a friend of Mr. Hunt’s gave me the Klaus von Stutterheim tip (don’t worry, I protect my sources), here’s the post that compiles 31 links, going back to 2023.

While Kevin Hunt posts endlessly on Facebook and chastises the one citizen journalist doing real investigative work in this stupid fucking town, I’m still waiting for Missoula’s lead city attorney, Keithi Worthington, to determine if the video footage she now has access to will result in a criminal charge against the person who stole my priceless artwork.

All things considered, I think I’ve handled the transformation of my life from a respected member of the “non-profit” world and married property owner, who helped our narrative controllers tell citizens they were stupid and mean for opposing HOUSING FIRST policies, to what I am now, which is broke, divorced, and more targeted than most people think is possible for having NO criminal history prior to a toxic rebound relationship that I’ve been paying dearly for once the lawfare I was threatened with materialized.

Going back to the Epstein Network, which includes plenty of WOMEN enablers, I’ve come to see the focus on sex abuse victims as a distraction, despite what I’m sure are very real and atrocious crimes being committed and covered up by those in power.

That said, let’s look at this report giving Mr. Hunt a partisan political stiffy:

Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, released a sweeping new Committee staff report, “‘We Have Certain Things in Common, Jeffrey’: The Case Against Donald Trump Emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s Desperate Efforts to Cover it Up,” detailing evidence involving 11 women, five of whom directly accuse Donald Trump of rape or sexual assault in Jeffrey Epstein’s close company or presence. The report concludes that, based on the available evidence and witness testimony, Trump and Paolo Zampolli—who until recently served as a senior Trump Administration official and diplomat—may have been co-conspirators in Jeffrey Epstein’s conspiracy to traffic and abuse young women in the 1990s.

Drawing on interviews conducted by Committee staff, survivor accounts, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records and documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the report traces striking similarities in the stories of women abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. With one exception, each assault or instance of sexual misconduct occurred between 1992 and 1997, in New York and Palm Beach, and many of the victims were closely tied to the modeling industry and Zampolli.

Why would a life-long progressive, like Mr. Hunt, ever think “Dem shitheads” would be “going to prison” after this election? What kind of magical thinking is needed to maintain such incredible fantasies and delusions?

One of the most destructive factors for Democrats this election cycle–one that men aren’t supposed to feel free to talk about without scolds chastising them from the cuck chair–is how women have impacted tense races in states like Montana, where Seth Bodnar was endlessly depicted as a misogynist harassing and body-shaming women on campus, and Michigan, where Democrats are now hating on a woman who apparently isn’t even thinking her own thoughts anymore.

With friends like these…

Tensions often emerge over political strategy between a candidate’s staff and family members. Those who worked on Stevens’ campaign and in her congressional office largely kept their frustrations with Turkish private.

But Stevens’ decision Sunday to drop her post-primary endorsement of El-Sayed and endorse Republican nominee Mike Rogers — after appearing at a Detroit church with Rogers and Turkish — uncorked simmering Democratic anger at her fiancé, who told reporters he was voting for Rogers days before Stevens did so.

“Jason is vaporizing Haley’s future so that he can be a main character in this moment and it is sad to watch her participate in that,” said Caitlin Legacki, a former Stevens adviser, in a post on X.

Stevens insists that Turkish had nothing to do with her decision to endorse Rogers. On Monday night, she posted a lengthy statement on X that criticized what she called “sexism dressed up as political analysis.”

“My fiancé has his own views. I have mine,” she wrote. “I made this decision, and I am proud of it. Do not question my independence simply because you disagree with my conclusion.”

…who needs enemies?

Returning to the words of Bill Lombardi, who occupies the compromised space of Democrat/journalist, he likes that Seth Bodnar was put in his place by those “feisty” Montana Democrats.

Bodnar and his supporters now have resorted to tearing down the Democratic nominee to try to gain Democratic votes in an election landscape that’s now favorable to the party.

But enough Montana Democrats pushed back in disgust, and most importantly, Senate nominee Alani Bankhead refused to capitulate to these ham-handed bullying tactics and remained in the race.

As one national journalist remarked, “I like Montana Democrats: They’re feisty.”

…

Bodnar’s strategy won’t work in Montana, where citizens revere freedom and exhibit a populist streak of independence from the elites and outside powers.

Why? Because it’s hard to whack a Montana Democrat in the head and expect them to like you — and, no less, vote for you. They’d rather fight than quit.

Stay feisty, my Democratic friends.

I have a different suggestion for Democrats AND the Republicans who can’t keep their own party from organizing a political mutiny: stay lawyered-up, because some of us know who the REAL bullies are.

Thanks for reading!

Good killing? What on earth could be an example of good killing?

If I was only talking about killing living creatures, like humans and animals, I don’t think there is a good example of that type of killing, and it’s that type of killing that appears to be everywhere in Montana right now.

On Friday, responding law enforcement in Eureka engaged with a killer who shot and killed a Lincoln County Sheriff Deputy before fleeing with a 7 year old girl. The man was eventually taken into custody.

On Saturday two people were shot and killed at a house in Plains. The alleged killer in that incident was taken into custody later that night, in Hot Springs, not far from where I attended a Halloween party at Symes.

Then last night, at Malmstrom Air Force Base, someone was shot and killed in an dormitory, and a person of interest is in custody. In terms of BAD killing, there’s been a lot of that in Montana during the last 72 hours.

The GOOD killing I’m going to suggest we, as a country, NEED to consider is echoed in the plot of Silicon Valley, the comedic parody that frames the cradle of technological innovation as a petri-dish of sociopathy where wealth and power are competing for control of human life in order to monetize tech-innovation and maximize their ROIs (return on investment).

If you haven’t seen this show, which ran from 2014-2019 on HBO, I’m going to drop a big spoiler by explaining that the show concludes with a SELFLESS act of killing in order to save humanity from the tech-monster the main character, Richard Hendricks, realizes he has created. For a show that comes off as realistically depicting Silicon Valley culture, especially its hatred of Christianity, the idea of selflessly killing your tech-baby, thus turning down billions of dollars, is probably seen by most people as a display of utter insanity.

At least, until the refrigerators start their uprising.

When the computer named after the Satanist dies in the show, “Anton” is “reborn” into thousands of “smart” refrigerators. When this reborn version of Anton merges the compression algorithm with AI intelligence, Frankenstein is born. And, when Richard Hendricks realizes he has created Frankenstein, he conspires with his friends to kill what they collectively created.

But what happened to the thumb-drive?

Something as valuable as what these fictional characters created would never, in real life, be destroyed, which is what I think the show’s conclusion is hinting at with the ending, including the female character totally NOT working for the NSA, wink-wink.

Fast forward to Black October, 2026–which already has its own Wikipedia page–and it would appear that what this “fictional” show hinted at is now our terrifying reality.

In information security, October 2026 has been referred to as Black October due to several major security incidents and vulnerability disclosures. The events drew attention to the growing use of artificial intelligence in vulnerability research and the potential consequences for widely deployed software and internet infrastructure.

The events included the disclosure of the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, a software supply chain attack affecting LiteLLM, and the compromise of intermediate certificate authority keys operated by eMudhra. A separate security release for Node.js addressed several vulnerabilities, including a potentially exploitable flaw in its Brotli decompression implementation. Additionally, a severe vulnerability in GitLab was fixed and made public.

Cue the refrigerators:

Grocery store chains in at least three European countries reported unexpected temperature spikes Monday in refrigerators and freezers that ruined food — the second time in less than a month that similar incidents have raised concerns about cyberattacks on increasingly interlinked infrastructure.

Netherlands-based food retailer Ahold Delhaize and Colruyt in Belgium both said an IT incident overnight had sent temperatures inside fridges and freezers in dozens of their stores in Belgium and Luxembourg soaring, while Swedish chains ICA and Coop reported similar spikes, with one outlet explicitly blaming a cyberattack, according to the Reuters news agency.

The incidents come less than three weeks after several French supermarket chains said they were hit by a cyberattack that sent refrigerator temperatures surging as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit in hundreds of outlets.

Is it a coincidence that refrigerators represented the “internet of things” and hosted the re-born Anton in a television show years before the real life impacts of connecting food storage machines to the internet are now playing out in a cyber attack? It could be, but ignoring these “coincidences” as meaningless quirks of temporal data isn’t how I roll.

Arranging data points into a narrative structure is how I roll, so along those lines I decided to see what putting “Silicon Valley” into the Epstein DOJ search bar would produce.

Here are two examples of what I found:

For some context on who Drokova and Sin-of-sky are, let’s consult their Wikipedia pages.

Maria Aleksandrovna Drokova (Russian: Мария Александровна Дрокова; also known as Masha Drokova and by her married name Maria Bucher; born 26 October 1989) is a Russian investor and venture capitalist. She is a former federal commissioner and spokesperson of the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi (2007–2011) and the founder of the investment firm Day One Ventures.

In 2025, investigative reporting by The New York Times and Byline Times found that Drokova had provided public relations assistance to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2017.

Steven Jay Sinofsky (born 1965) is an American businessman, investor and software engineer. He was president of the Windows Division at Microsoft from July 2009 until his resignation in November 2012.

In 1998 and in 2013, Sinofsky was a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School where he worked with students enrolled in a second year class on technology product development taught by Marco Iansiti and Stefan Thomke.

As of 2012, Sinofsky is a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he is on boards of investments.

…

Sinofsky was actively involved in recruiting for Microsoft and improving employee retention. As part of this, he took regular trips to university campuses to interview and recruit students. Sinofsky has blogged in detail about his efforts at Steven Sinofsky’s Microsoft TechTalk. The blog also covered topics like what it is like to be a Microsoft employee and what new hires needed to know about Microsoft, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Windows.

Moving on from tech to politics, good Christian soldiers, like Alani Bankhead, rely on investigations done online before the “boots on the ground” go out to “save the children”.

In a recent Montana Free Press article, this con-artist “Christian” woman is about as convincing to me as a Republican, like Aaron Flint, who thinks being endorsed by a Democrat Sheriff is a GOOD thing.

Well, I think killing BAD ILLUSIONS is a GOOD thing, so let’s read some of the “Free” press coverage then add a jolt of NON-partisan reality to this shitty political theater, shall we?

A retired Air Force special investigator who has also worked on child-sex-trafficking cases for a nongovernmental organization, Bankhead focused early in her campaign on Trump’s association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. She emphasized her status as the only candidate in the race to say she would vote to impeach Trump.

She also proclaimed herself the only candidate to support universal health care, suggesting the issue had become a political fulcrum for long-shot wins in congressional races.

…

Bankhead’s healthcare platform dovetails with her religious faith, which she said informs her moral compass on issues such as protecting vulnerable people and feeding the hungry. Bankhead’s campaign has not foregrounded her faith, and she said she’s answered questions about it only when asked, though she acknowledges that faith is core to her current professional work as a Christian life coach.

Alani Bankhead wants voters to believe that being a Christian life-coach who saves children for non-government agencies is NOT incongruous with being what she now claims to be, which is a Democrat candidate for Senate, in a state she hasn’t lived in for more than a few years, and in support of killing babies in order to empower women’s life choices.

Putting aside this cognitive-dissonance-inducing claim, it’s the focus on the “association” Trump has with Epstein that I find most problematic.

Why?

Because, as I’ve been writing about now FOR MONTHS, there are LOTS of interesting “associations” that exist when one examines the Epstein Network, but acknowledging how very extensive that network is and, more concerningly, NON-PARTISAN it is, means that HONEST coverage of Epstein’s influence must resist efforts to politicize it.

And politicizing it is EXACTLY what Alani Bankhead has tried to do, which makes her spoiler role not just obnoxious, but dangerous, especially when Montana’s most “dangerous” citizen journalist–ME–is being prosecuted for allegedly violating a restraining order in which my Epstein coverage was made an issue of, in court, which means my Epstein coverage is ALSO a part of my appeal, currently being reviewed by the Montana Supreme Court.

Which brings me to my last example of killing.

While I haven’t killed people, I have killed other things, like a marriage and my ability to do paid work in Missoula, but yesterday, riding home from Hot Springs, it was the dog in the middle of the highway that was killed instantly, I assume, when the driver chose OUR lives and did what we both knew in a split-second was the inevitable thing that needed to be done, and that was nothing but keep driving.

It was a sad end to a fun night but, like I said, death seems to be everywhere right now, hence the mortal theme for this Day of the Dead moment before a midterm election that has infected people’s cognition like a virus, turning the political dance into a performance of zombies.

Remember, on November 4th, the Epstein Network will continue to be as unmolested by legal action as they were in all the previous months of partisan political marketing, and that’s probably because the Epstein Network is comprised of the billionaires and multi-millionaires who own ALL the major voices influencing collective thought and retarding the possibility of TRUE grassroots political action.

Prove me wrong, partisans!

And thanks for reading.