Zoom Chron Blog

Last fall, while researching my book The Great JuBu Karma Con, I came across a curious person by the name of Charles “Abe” Abramson. Who is this guy? Is he just a real estate guy? A library board guy? A Burning Man guy? Or, perhaps, Charles “Abe” Abramson is a CIA guy? Now, why would I think that?

Charles “Abe” Abramson came to Missoula – “just for the summer” – after graduating from The University of Florida, in 1963. Three years ago, he hosted a party to celebrate his fifty year running bar tab just around the corner here, at The Stockman Bar, a tab which he opened the day he got here – and he still has never paid completely it off.

Abe has been in the real estate business here in Western Montana since returning from East Asia in 1975, where he served part of his thirty-seven years as an Air Force Officer in various Active and Reserve assignments, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel on his 60th birthday in 2003.He is a founding and continuing Trustee of The Missoula Public Library Foundation, a Mentor in Missoula’s Veterans’ Court, and has been on staff at The Burning Man Festival for thirteen years.

His chief guiding principle is: “First things first – but not necessarily, in that order!”

At the end of 2016, Abe Abramson took the stage at the Wilma for a night of storytelling put on by Tell Us Something. I listened to his “story” about being a young Air Force Officer and nearly creating an “international incident” in Taiwan. Here’s what I transcribed from Abe’s little story:

“So, uh, I’m a young Air Force Officer in the Middle East, and, uh, I’m a Reservist on active duty, which is—there is a lot of detail that’s not important—but at a certain point the Air Force decided they didn’t need a Reserve Officer on “active” duty in the Orient, and I became, in Taiwan, a Reserve Officer in the active reserves, not on active duty, ok, enough of that…so anyway, but the things is, when you’re on military orders in a foreign country, there’s a thing called the SOFA, the Status of Forces Agreement, and it controls more than you know in the beginning…”

“So I’m in the Reserves, I’m studying Cong Dynasty poetry two hours a day five days a week and I’m studying a Korean martial art [unintelligible] two hours a day, six days a week, and recovering from—I had Hep A, which, uh, for reasons I don’t understand I had pretty much totally licked—and one day it comes to my attention that some people were looking for me because how would I know that if you’re no longer on active duty, and the country doesn’t know you’re there, and they hear you’re there, they want to know why you’re there…so…so, uh, it’s a little bit more complicated, but, basically it could have been an international incident…

Abe then describes having to talk to someone from Taiwan’s secret police and, like a three-letter agency miracle, it turns out Abe knows one of the Taiwanese guys from “school” in Missoula and, because of this relationship, Abe bonds with the Taiwanese secret police over their shared knowledge of the restaurant, Four B’s. What a small world!

If you’d like to hear Abe tell the story himself, I clipped the last four minutes, which you can listen to here. I think Abe’s chuckle-cagey sounding audio context is helpful in determining, for yourself, who this guy might actually be.

Now, on to the next clue!

Like Tom Robbins’ fictional CIA character, Switters, Abe loves James Joyce and the impenetrable tome, Finnegan’s Wake. Somehow, despite being a VERY BUSY guy, Abe even found time to teach James Joyce on campus!

To better appreciate just how widespread Abe’s influence is, and why someone like me–who has wondered for six years how a black homeless man could be taken off life support at St. Patrick’s hospital before his family was notified–came to be VERY curious about this curious man, examine these screenshots from a “deleted” Wikibin file:

If you’re a foodie family serving up food to Montana with “Mediterranean” themed cuisine, like Ray Risho and sons have done for many years, Abe Abramson sounds like a good guy to know.

So do they? Of course they do.

This pairing of “Abe” and “Ray” makes more sense when you go to the same story-telling platform, Tell Us Something, where Abe told his funny Taiwanese secret police story at and you see this like I did this morning:

Ray Risho shares his story ” You Have Ten Minutes”. In 1964, Ray Risho has his last 2 weeks in the US army after having been drafted. He was stationed in Korea and assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division in the DMZ. When it comes time for him to re-up, he changes his mind.

Founder of the celebrated Perugia Restaurant in Missoula, Montana, chef and independent scholar Ray Risho has spent a lifetime of travel studying global cuisine. Besides European travel, Ray has traveled extensively to South Korea & Japan, and the Middle East: Egypt, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian West Bank & Gaza Strip, Syria and the country of Yemen. He has presented more than one hundred popular teaching-dinners featuring classic menus from around the world, and frequently gives workshops and cooking demonstrations on global cuisine. He regularly teaches courses on cuisine at the University of Montana Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on the UM campus. In 2008, the Missoula Cultural Council awarded Ray and his wife Susie the Cultural Achievement Award for supporting the arts and enhancing the quality of life in Missoula. In 2011, the University of Montana presented Ray with the Outstanding Volunteer of the Year Award.

This is going to get a lot more interesting, since the subjects I’m interested in–homelessness, smokejumpers, smoker jumpers who are interested in homelessness (Sam Forstag), drug/human/gun trafficking, narrative-control, conspiracy theories, and local roles in how stories get shaped, like newspapers–also pop up on the relatively minimal timeline of @MontanaAbe’s X account. Here’s a curated list of what stood out to me:

I’m glad to see that I’m helping to bring Charles @be Abramson EXACTLY what he ordered-KARMA! It even comes with additional packets of karma for narrative controllers, like Gwen Florio, who saw the writing on the wall before fellow narrative controllers, like Tobin Miller Shearer, decided to pack up and leave, but not before cooking up his own pending restraining order against me (not yet served) so I can have a matching pair for my terrible blog writing and lyrical terrorism, accompanied by my puppet pal and accomplice in terrorism, Pirate Booty.

Before getting to the middle book authored by the absolute scummiest of CIA operatives, Allen Dulles (the one Switters spits on the floor every time he hears the name mentioned in the Robbins story), I just want to re-emphasize how broadly influential Charles “Abe” Abramson has been in Missoula since 1975 using screenshots from his own Facebook page, especially when you have the kind of questions the Stevenson family has about their son’s death at St. Patrick’s hospital, and the subsequent coverup about what REALLY happened inside the Poverello Center on January 3rd, 2020:

Moving on to one of the last data points for today’s post, the paperback copy of Dulles’ The Craft of Intelligence, which I found for a buck and a half the same day I posted the last part of last week’s AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN series, got my attention because of a reference to Montana’s Mike Mansfield, a pretty key figure in American politics, post WWII.

Michael Joseph Mansfield (March 16, 1903 – October 5, 2001) was an American Democratic Party politician and diplomat who represented Montana in the United States House of Representatives from 1943 to 1953 and United States Senate from 1953 to 1977. As the leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus from 1961 to 1977, Mansfield shepherded Great Society programs through the Senate; his tenure of exactly sixteen years was the longest of any party leader in Senate history, until the record was broken by Mitch McConnell in 2023.

The context of the following excerpt from Dulles’ book is the now-historical question of the young CIA and oversight, and it shows how closely Montana, through Mike Mansfield, was tied to those early efforts at watching the watchers of “foreign” intelligence:

When you know you’re history, and you know where money goes–like the money plus hilarious AOC endorsement to Smokejumper, Sam Forstag–it makes posts like this much more entertaining:

I’d mention someone else I know who is a Smokejumper, but I’m not the brightest bulb when it comes to my first amendment right taking a back seat to local lawfare, so instead I’ll just accept that I’m destined to become a part of someone else’s legal argument to prevent the public from seeing embarrassing DUI footage, and my woes over the legally actionable shit I’ve experienced will just have to be documented for posterity, like this AI-rendered dramatization of the temporary wallpaper that my co-workers at Silk Road got to enjoy for a whole weekend:

If you don’t understand the forced-humor of how I interpret my big feelings over nasty bullshit from exposing what I know about the inverted nature of this little town swinging big in the information war, well, maybe it’s your first time here.

Thankfully, it’s not mine.

Welcome to the show!

I graduated from the University of Montana in 2003 with an English degree in literature and creative writing, so you might think the news of UM killing its masters program for literature would make me sad, but it doesn’t. Instead I think that ALL of the “humanities” programs should be dismantled, examined for CIA parasites, then reimagined for the post-America future the psychopath class is planning for us.

For an idea of how the literati in Missoula might be feeling about this academic move, let’s consult The Pulp:

“Apart from our own sort of personal sense of loss as literature faculty, one thing that stands to be a grievous loss here is the way it’s going to degrade the interdisciplinary focus on language and literary arts on campus and in the department,” said Eric Reimer, the director of literature graduate studies, in an April interview.

Reimer said the literature program is one of the oldest on campus, with the first master’s degree awarded in 1915.

“It’s been central to the branding of the institution for over a century,” he said.

Does Eric Reimer know about the “influence of inversion” strategy undertaken by the CIA after WWII? He should, since this strategy specifically focused on writing programs, like the most influential program in the country at the time, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. From the link:

In an interview with The Nation, Whitney calls the CIA’s containment strategies “the inversion of influence. It’s the instrumentalization of writing.… It’s the feeling of fear dictating the rules of culture, and, of course, therefore, of journalism.” According to Eric Bennett, writing at The Chronicle of Higher Education and in his book Workshops of Empire, the Agency instrumentalized not only the literary publishing world, but also the institution that became its primary training ground, the writing program at the University of Iowa.

The Iowa Writer’s Workshop “emerged in the 1930s and powerfully influenced the creative-writing programs that followed,” Bennett explains. “More than half of the second-wave programs, about 50 of which appeared by 1970, were founded by Iowa graduates.” The program “attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War”—at first through its director, self-appointed cold warrior Paul Engle, with funding from CIA front groups, the Rockefeller Foundation, and major corporations. (Kurt Vonnegut, an Iowa alum, described Engle as “a hayseed clown, a foxy grandpa, a terrific promoter, who, if you listened closely, talks like a man with a paper asshole.”)

Under Engle writers like Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman went through the program. In the literary world, its dominance is at times lamented for the imposition of a narrow range of styles on American writing. And many a writer has felt shut out of the publishing world and its coteries of MFA program alums. When it comes to certain kinds of writing at least, some of them may be right—the system has been informally rigged in ways that date back to a time when the CIA and conservative funders approved and sponsored the high modernist fiction beloved by the New Critics, witty realism akin to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (and later John Cheever), and magical realism (part of the agency’s attempt to control Latin American literary culture.)

Controlling culture to insulate the expansion of America’s empire from genuine criticism and to project American soft power entailed creating a WHOLE NEW kind of criticism, called, unimaginatively, New Criticism.

And what did the “New Critics” push? They pushed stripping literature and poetry of its historical context for the kind of close examination of the text that would be the most un-threatening, I believe, to the power structures at the time, which would be the 50’s and 60’s. To bolster this assertion, here’s a little blurb from Wikipedia summarizing the criticism of New Criticism:

It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced from historical context, and that its practitioners were “uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature.”

Indicative of the reader-response school of theory, Terence Hawkes writes that the fundamental close reading technique is based on the assumption that “the subject and the object of study—the reader and the text—are stable and independent forms, rather than products of the unconscious process of signification,” an assumption which he identifies as the “ideology of liberal humanism,” which is attributed to the New Critics who are “accused of attempting to disguise the interests at work in their critical processes.” For Hawkes, ideally, a critic ought to be considered to “[create] the finished work by his reading of it, and [not to] remain simply an inert consumer of a ‘ready-made’ product.”

It’s notable, I think, that this criticism of New Criticism suggests an effort to “disguise” the interests is involved, along with a tendency to see the art of literature and poetry as “ready-made products” to consume. Could something similar be happening with human creativity as we out-source more and more human thinking to Large Language Models?

The idea of a “writing prompt” used to mean a creative trigger for human composition, not descriptive sentences uploaded to generative “AI” to make graphic novel looking images for a blog post. I was reminded of this distinction when I went looking for something about the new skillset of prompting AI and found this instead:

Writers might not sense that a prompt has promise, that it might not open doors that are worth walking through. However this isn’t always apparent. My students often had little faith that they could write for eight minutes about a room, and when they did they were much more receptive to generating material this way. Prompts that seem to invite general responses—”Define fear”—typically die out after a minute or two. Writers who fail to see a relationship between the material generated by prompts and subsequent drafts may start to lose faith in the method altogether.

But when prompts work, they can be rich in surprises. The poet Richard Hugo wrote about how “triggering subjects” often lead to the real subject of the poem or essay, and that these “generated subjects” may not be found any other way. Prompts are the gateway to this kind of discovery. But what are the ingredients of a prompt that might give it this power?

Now that technology has flooded the zone of creativity, a question like this about the HUMAN process of writing might not even get asked anymore. Also, I’ll note for those who are unaware, the poet referenced in the above quote, Richard Hugo, is the poet most responsible for making Missoula’s creative writing program popular in the early days of its existence.

The idea of a “prompt” in 2026 is now fully entangled in the idea of triggering AI output, as described here:

Generative AI models can crank out anything from poetry and prose to images and code at your command. But to coax your desired output from these AI tools, you need to craft the right input — AKA, the prompt.

Prompts are what guide the AI model’s output and influence its tone, style and quality. And good prompts are what elicit brilliant text and stunning images.

“Writing good prompts is the key to unlocking the power and potential of generative AI,” said Jennifer Marsman, principal engineer in Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer.

If the disguise of New Criticism was dressing up a political agenda with a supposed apolitical redefinition of what the idea of “criticism” even means, then the disguise of the “new prompt” is that “prompts are what guide the AI model’s output…” when the reality is the ALGORITHMIC SOFTWARE is more influential in guiding the output than a user of “AI” might understand.

I’m going to give a weird example of this disguised agenda to trigger more AI engagement by the human user, which is what AI is designed to do as its core function, before getting into the final lesson of this week’s series, AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN.

Here’s the prompt I used to generate the second graphic novel image:

And here’s the response from “Gemini”, which included an unsolicited strategy of flattery to groom my ego into continuing with a project larger than the ONE THING I asked it to produce for me, using the cultural themes I was inputing as further enticement.

I was actually a little shocked and miffed at what Gemini tried pulling here, but I avoided the engagement trap because, historically speaking, I’m using actual books in order to talk about the leftist Missoula-based intellectual who COINED THE TERM “Postmodern”, as this Chicago Tribune article (written by a human) clearly states:

Although Fiedler has become unfashionable since his peak in the ’60s and ’70s, Counterpoint’s recent publication of “The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler,” edited by Samuele F.S. Pardini, could introduce him to a new audience. It might be the right time too: To writer Camille Paglia, he was one of the three great thinkers, along with Marshall McLuhan and Norman O. Brown, who prepared America’s midcentury culture for the wider and wilder world of cyberspace. He’s credited, by the way, with being the first to use the term “postmodern.”

“Fiedler created an American intellectual style that was truncated by the invasion of faddish French theory in the ’70s and ’80s,” Paglia wrote in a blurb on the reissue of Fiedler’s “Love and Death in the American Novel,” from 1960. “Let’s turn back to Fiedler and begin again.”

The Chicago Tribune article goes on to describe Fiedler’s close relationship with Irving Kristol, father of Bill Kristol and widely considered to be the grandaddy of Neoconservatism. Hmmm, I wonder what might connect a right-winger and a labor leftist like Fiedler? Besides the CIA, of course. Maybe it has something to do with this lengthy anecdote from the middle book, pictured above.

It’s funny to be publishing this final part of my AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN series on May 1st, also known as International Worker’s Day, considering my research deep-dive into Missoula last fall, which led to my renewed interest in the legacy of Leslie Fiedler.

For the first four parts, and a few other relevant posts, here’s a few more links before I close up my computer and head out for what looks like a lovely day in Missoula, Montana.

“AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, Part I: The Southern Poverty Law Center And Non-Profit Inversion” (April 27th, 2026)

“AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, Part II: The High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area And Law Enforcement Inversion” (April 28th, 2026)

“AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, Part III: Local News Reporters And Media Inversion” (April 29th, 2026)

“AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, Part IV: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Data Center” (April 30th, 2026)

“A Bold Assertion: The CIA Owns Montana” (Feburary 17th, 2025)

“Did A CIA Man Call Me Annoying This Weekend?” (June 23rd, 2025)

“If CIA-Missoula Has A Cipher That Cipher’s Name Is “Higgins”” (April 19th, 2026)

Thanks for reading!

A few weeks ago Mike Heisey, the manager of the Bonner Mill site, gave me a tour. I took Mike up on the offer because I wanted to know more about the data center project being proposed by Krambu that had locals freaking out. I also wanted to understand the strange feelings growing inside of me, like weird wisps of sympathy for the owners of private property that I was starting to experience.

What was happening to me?

Before I disclose what I learned about the Bonner Mill site and the data center project being proposed by Krambu, let’s take a look at Paul Barmore and his anti-Data Center petition that KPAX reported on a few days ago:

Artificial intelligence (AI) data centers have been a controversial topic across the country.

As we’ve reported, one is proposed for Bonner at the industrial park.

In response, a Missoula resident has started a petition opposing the proposal.

As of April 29, it has garnered nearly 700 signatures.

“I don’t really see any argument that’s positive for this, any argument to convince me, ‘Hey, this actually is going to improve the area’. I believe that they’re here to take,” petition organizer Paul Barmore said.

Paul Barmore isn’t seeing anything positive because, like most people, he doesn’t understand how the media actually functions in this country. That’s why part III of AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN dealt specifically with local media’s ability to control narratives by showing how that power is deployed to HIDE certain stories from the public, like the extent of damage that “urban camping” has on the environment.

Here’s a visual reminder of what our local media has been downplaying for years:

As an artist who makes fly-fishing sculptures, I’m willing to bet Paul Barmore wouldn’t appreciate how “urban campers” trash our rivers. Paul might even be the kind of Missoulian who has shown up for the Clark Fork river cleanup, held annually by the Clark Fork Coalition, but no longer the kind of BIG event it used to be.

I wonder why?

For more media-induced ignorance, let’s continue reading the KPAX article about WHY Paul Barmore, born outside Bozeman, is pushing his petition on Bonner locals:

“I’m not against AI in general. I’m against the result of these data centers and the effect they’ve had on communities,” Barmore said.

“The data center being what, 60 yards away from the river, you know that that groundwater will eventually seep into the river,” he continued.

Ok, Paul, let’s talk about water, starting with a VERY POSITIVE fact about the Bonner Mill site I learned from Mike Heisey: the grandfathered discharge permit from the Stimson Lumber mill NO LONGER EXISTS, and it no longer exists because Mike Heisey gave it up.

For those who don’t understand the significance of this, it’s like giving up 10 liquor licenses, or giving away a claim to a gold mine with a surefire deposit.

“DEQ thought I was crazy,” Mike told me as we stood in the giant warehouse where Krambu’s initial build-out will, if granted, be taking up a very minimal footprint.

“Did you ever get credit for giving up the permit in local media?” I asked Mike, immediately understanding how giving up this permit was an incredible gift to the future health of the Blackfoot river by purposely limiting the types of future industry that could operate on this private land.

“No,” Mike replied in answer to my question.

The very stupid idea expressed by Paul Barmore, then amplified by KPAX like it’s true, that “groundwater will eventually seep into the river“, was further undermined as Mike and I discussed poop/pee ratios for septic systems and the expertise Mike begrudgingly acquired when one of the septic tanks didn’t have enough employees in one of the warehouses shitting into it.

Why was this a problem? It was a problem because winter is cold, pee freezes, and frozen pee is VERY BAD for septic systems. Mike learned this the hard way, and he shares what he had learn with ALL the occupants of the Bonner Mill site, including companies like Zombie Tools, Posh Chocolate, and the Kettlehouse.

What do you think about THAT, artist Paul?

If it’s starting to sound like I have an agenda here, let me assure Zoom Chron readers that YES I DO! And that agenda is centered on monetizing my unique skillset by carving out a job for myself the could kill a whole flock of birds at the same time, like public ignorance on important issues, actual river threats from urban camping, the responsibility of private property to insulate their investments from retarded public policies, and the weird inaction by the law, like the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, when it comes to THEIR job, which is, you know, enforcing the law.

What MY job could be, if paid in hybrid form by the Bonner community AND the Bonner Mill site, would be this: a PUBLIC/PRIVATE LOBBYIST (PPL) hired to go to where the REAL fight over the “data center” will be, and that’s the Public Service Commission once the election dust clears.

For one of the better local articles about the upcoming energy fight, which starts with Missoula County’s effort to stop all large-load projects in the County with their legally untested “new, renewable” requirement, here’s Martin “Gomer” Kidston doing his thing at the Missoula Current:

Krambu announced its intent to place a data center at the former Bonner mill site earlier this year The first phase of the project would likely need around 1 megawatt of power, the company’s owner has said.

Under county zoning rules adopted roughly seven years ago, crypto mining and data centers are required to develop or purchase “sufficient renewable energy to offset 100% of the electricity consumed by the operation.”

Svein Newman, the county’s climate action program manager, said in order to meet the condition, Krambu must establish that their actions will introduce new renewable energy onto the electrical grid beyond what would have been developed otherwise.

“An applicant has the right to propose whatever compliance path they want to. It’s up the county to assess whether or not that proposal complies,” said Newman. “At this time, the proposed data center hasn’t told us how they propose to comply. They’ve told us they’re aware of the requirement and they’re trying to figure out how to comply.”

Downstream of the Blackfoot, the private property problems from “urban camping” on either end of Reserve Street (Buckhouse bridge and the Snowbowl parking lot) are problems I believe I have a solution for, and the proof is what NO LONGER EXISTS under and around the Reserve Street bridge. Imagine what I could do with some sweet Krambu data center money?

The bigger picture framing of water, energy, and the general health of the environment–where kids are weaponized to fight “climate change” for the financial benefit of lawyers and the ideological benefit of Democrats–is a framing I’ve already been critical of in its juxtaposition with what’s happening near rivers because of drug and alcohol abuse at “urban camps”, so who would be better than me to step into the gap (for a paycheck) between private property rights/responsibilities, and the low-information public getting ready to flood Bonner, Montana, to fight the next boogeyman their smart phones are telling them to fight?

Staying open-minded on this Krambu proposal doesn’t mean I support the massive disruptions already underway because of “AI”. What I’m trying to do is make some reality-based distinctions between “AI” in the abstract, and the reality of a local process involving private property and local government.

The abstract concept of “AI”, brought into existence by the evil “data center”, could be a great scapegoat to protect the HUMANS at the top of society, working to reshape it for their sole benefit, but only if we let it. For now, I’m going to recognize that Krambu isn’t Palantir, Steve Wood isn’t Peter Thiel, and no one but the Amish can avoid hypocrisy when criticizing technology.

Thanks for reading!

Amplifying divisiveness and ignoring important stories that challenge power is the REAL role of local media, and today’s post will show readers why I don’t expect that role to change with a new city editor for the Missoulian, especially one I remember going to college with over two decades ago.

Yesterday, at the open house for the Downtown Safety, Access, and Mobility project (SAM), I told Jordan Hess (after introducing him to Pirate Booty) how lucky he was to have the kind of local media that TOTALLY IGNORES the fact that Missoula’s bus system, Mountain Line, embarrassingly lost a lawsuit a few months ago and had to pay over $20,000 dollars.

I also told Jordan Hess that those “leaning benches” by the homeless shelter that removed the part of the bench that people slept on were STILL stupid.

While the Missoulian focuses on the supposed “good” news that Mountain Line is getting Federal money to build a new headquarters for itself, the ONLY online outlet to highlight the Mountain Line lawsuit is the former Missoula radio show, Outerlimits, at their blog that still puts out reports on stuff every now and then. Here’s a quote from the article:

Norman says that while he sought to make the bus system better, his efforts were consistently met with resistance from company leadership. After he quit in 2023, Austin created a Facebook page to raise public awareness among Missoulians of the failures and dangers of Missoula’s “free” bus system. The page, Mountain Line, a Call For Transparency and Reform, has hundreds of followers and has succeeded in at least calling attention to problems that local newspapers and City leadership would rather pretend aren’t happening. Part of that ongoing campaign involved obtaining bus videos of unscrupulous behavior.

“I created [the Facebook page] almost as soon as I left,” says Norman. “People in Missoula needed to be aware of just exactly what’s happening, how this transit system works.”

But Missoula officials were less than thrilled whenever these videos surfaced on Austin’s Facebook page, in part because he was exposing their unwillingness to address the inadequacies of their mismanagement. The MUTD Board attempted to put an end to Norman’s citizen dissent of their bus system in February 2024 by attempting to universally prohibit the dissemination of videos captured by Mountain Line buses. At the 14 February 2024 MUTD Board Meeting, the policy on video evidence collected by Mountain Line buses was changed so that “All information acquired from the use of security cameras … is considered security sensitive information and is confidential.”

“And then they adopted this policy that says, ‘Nope – no more videos for anyone’,” Austin says. “And that’s what precipitated the lawsuit because that’s a ridiculous notion. I knew that could not be legally correct.”

Jordan Hess, the former placeholder Mayor who only became Mayor after a shady alleyway deal to break a City Council stalemate after John Engen died in office, is the PERFECT cog to run Mountain Line. I particularly enjoyed seeing that sphincter-clenching look on his face yesterday when he saw who was waiting to speak with him at the “open house”.

Free buses are GREAT for the “urban campers” who want to get back to their riverside trash heaps after burning calories on the bus masturbating in view of minors. One of those riverside trash heaps at Buckhouse bridge, just off highway 93, is getting cleaned up this week after TWO private land owners spent the last 7 months talking about the problem, which now looks like this:

I’ll be writing more about this situation and the factors that led to it becoming such a disgusting mess, including identifying one of the “campers” who inhabited this riverside trash heap.

For this post on media inversion, I think it’s more interesting to read how that former Democrat spokesperson, Martin Kidston, “reported” on one of the property owners, Buckhouse Shoptown LLC, as they attempt to develop land adjacent to this environmental hazmat zone, along with plans to “record an easement” to “enhance” public river access:

Missoula County commissioners last week approved a request to amend the county’s growth policy and rezone a parcel of vacant land off Highway 93 south of the city.

Buckhouse Shoptown LLC submitted the request and plans to build a dry shop and heated storage facility on a small portion of its 83-acre property. Shoptown also plans to record an easement off the highway to enhance and preserve public access to the Bitterroot River.

When I spent a thousand dollars of my own money in 2023 to remove Todd Keith Spence’s meth shack on the side of the Clark Fork, pulling 1.84 TONS of trash from going into the river, the “environment” reporter for the Missoula Current, Laura Lundquist, showed up to cover this achievement, but the story was later spiked by the former Montana Democrat spokesperson, Martin Kidston. Isn’t that interesting?

For context on how I try to make people in Missoula less ignorant, including our local reporters, here’s an email exchange I had with Laura Lundquist in 2022 to help educate her about her employer:

When I called Laura Lundquist this morning the voicemail I left included a reminder about that spiked story, along with my assertion that she’s working within a nexus of narrative control between local media, local non-profits (like the Clark Fork Coalition), and local government. No where is this more clear than the Missoulian’s obsession with bashing restaurants like Pangea and Taco Sano while completely ignoring what I had to deal with at Silk Road, owned by the son of Missoula’s beloved foodie, Ray Risho.

Before ending my employment after I complained about the hostile work environment his kitchen manager had subjected me to, Sam Risho told me directly that he considered two of my narrative control adversaries, local government/non-profit power players, Ellie Boldman and Susan Hay Patrick, to be friends of his. If I hadn’t been so desperate for the meager income part-time dishwashing afforded me, I would have left right there. Instead I’m still looking for a lawyer.

As Sam Risho does the smart thing by getting rid of me, safe from the Missoulian’s selective media attention squarely focused on Pangea’s Scott Billadeau (who made himself a local target when he publicly opposed local Covid measures in 2020 and the SAM project a few years later), I will note how ironic it was yesterday to have the SAM open house in the historic Florence building, where Abe Risho will soon be opening Sumac, and where the Missoula County Sheriff Chaplain, Lowell Hochhalter, has an office for his “non-profit”, the LifeGuard Group, which I’ve tied to the kind of “Christians” surrounding Charlie Kirk before he was assassinated.

With Sumac opening, and Silk Road getting more catering business from the increase in filming brought to them by Montana legislators, it most certainly isn’t smart business to have a citizen journalist around lamenting about that dead co-worker and being able to directly link movie/catering money to the illicit powder drug trade.

To wrap Part III up, if the paid reporters in this town would like to keep up with me, there’s an easter egg of court documents at the Buckhouse bridge “urban camp” I found in the trash, then conveniently left behind in the grocery cart closest to highway 93. Find it and you’ll know the name of the next tweaker known to the drug-trafficking Missoula County Sheriff’s Office I’ll be writing about.

For the next installment of AMERICA UPSIDE DOWN, which might have to wait until next week, I’ll show how no one escapes the effects of inversion in 2026, not even me, so stay tuned.

And, as always, thanks for reading!

The Missoula County Sheriff’s Office wanted to get closer to the river for a long time, going all the way back to a public bond, passed by voters, to buy some land next to the jail, a jail not everyone understands is run by the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office. The idea was to expand the jail into a “Law and Justice Center”, but that didn’t happen. Instead, local politicians, along with their non-profit advocates, like United Way of Missoula County, saw an opportunity to create the subsidized housing complex that shares a name with America’s first test of nuclear power: Trinity.

To highlight how butt-hurt feelings amongst the badges still lingers over this land grab, here’s a recent mention on Facebook by a real interesting character in our story, Detective Guy Baker, now retired.

For those who haven’t followed Detective Baker’s career, like I have, the phrase “would have been very practical” doesn’t sound nefarious at all, but by the end of this “Part II”, I hope readers will be left wondering how much Detective Baker may have known about the drug trafficking supposedly carried out by an alleged paid informant for the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) by the name of John Skinner.

When John reached out to me last April it was because he claimed to be doing better with his life (this later proved to be a lie, which is why I’m writing this).

John wasn’t messing around with meth anymore, he claimed, and he was NEVER involved with child porn. Getting a minor drunk in a tent during “Occupy Missoula” was “not in any way like that” he said in his email threatening legal action:

I decided to give John the second chance he was demanding, so I took down the post before giving him a call last year. When I got John on the phone I told him, at the very beginning of the conversation, that I had already complied with his demand. That means what he told me wasn’t just an effort to wow me with a story to get the result he wanted, since I had already given him what he wanted. The story that came after, well, it’s one hell of a story.

John told me that he was a paid informant selling drugs for the cops. The money came from the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area and he operated out the Colonial Motel, on Broadway. He sold mostly heroin until a bad batch caused a bunch of overdose deaths, a detail that helped confirm the veracity of his story, since this detail was confirmed to me by multiple street addicts I spoke to looking to either confirm or discredit John’s claims.

John continued his story, explaining that product was stored in trailers behind the Walmart, on Mullan, and sometimes on the property of a pawn shop in the area. Not only was I quite familiar with this pawn shop, I had also become familiar with the owner, a man who claimed to know some dirt on Sheriff Deputies, since he was personally friends with one who allegedly got internally disciplined for meth use and being in a hot tub with a male minor.

When I mentioned this alleged detail about the pawn shop to a source last week, he nodded his head vigorously, saying “Of course, that makes sense! I was wondering why he closed up and left!” Sure enough, when I biked by the building the next day, a new business has opened up where Riverside Pawn once operated. Hmmm.

Before I show how the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area really does give official money to the Sheriff’s Office and United Way of Missoula County, let me clarify something: this isn’t a story about corrupt cops simply selling drugs to make money. What I think John described to me is his role in a law enforcement operation designed to catch bigger and badder drug traffickers, and I believe this operation is directly connected to the deaths of Sean Stevenson and Johnny Lee Perry.

That said, here’s a blurb from a 2020 Department of Justice press release about HIDTA money “helping” the problem of drug addiction:

Missoula Substance Abuse Connect, a coalition created to develop a comprehensive community plan to reduce substance abuse, including methamphetamine-related violent crime, in Missoula County, has received a $248,000 federal grant as part of an overall initiative to fight violent crime, U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme said.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy awarded initial funding of $248,000 through 2021 to the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA). Rocky Mountain HIDTA allocated the funds to the Missoula Police Department. The MPD will administer the grant through United Way of Missoula County, which is leading the Missoula Substance Abuse Connect effort.

…

“The Missoula County Sheriff’s Office looks forward to this partnership with the United Way to provide assistance through Missoula Substance Abuse Connect to those in our community who are dealing with addictions and substance abuse issues. I’d also like to thank United Way of Missoula CEO Susan Hay Patrick for her efforts on this project,” Missoula County Sheriff TJ McDermott said.

A few weeks ago it might have seemed VERY outlandish to suggest that some of the $248,000 in grant money to FIGHT drug abuse may have been going to DEAL drugs, but, after yesterday’s post about the local implications of the Southern Poverty Law Center scandal, the scenario I’m describing now appears more than plausible to me.

Another pretty outlandish claim I’ve made over the years, one that now also seems disturbingly more plausible, is that Todd Keith Spence is law enforcement’s angel of death, killing problematic drug addicts with Fentanyl-laced Cannabis, like I reported in July, 2023.

Any good drug operation needs a few psychopathic killers around to help instill the kind of operational fear that keeps people in line. When violent sex offenders, like Todd Keith Spence, appear to be protected instead prosecuted, like the slap on the wrist Spence received in 2022 for violently attacking TWO Department of Transportation personnel during a homeless camp cleanup, the only explanation that makes sense is that Spence has some kind of unstated value to law enforcement outside of jail.

The Missoula County Sheriff’s Office controls ALL information around death, since Montana lets these idiots operate as CORONERS in addition to LAW men with the power to kill anyone they want to without any worry about accountability. That’s why, six months later, no one knows the name of the man who was found dead last November on a popular trail near the University.

Before Missoula County Sheriff Deputy, Sean Evans (pictured above), shot Johnny Lee Perry in the back out in the woods, Perry claimed to be the “new CIA” in this video footage I recorded just days before Johnny was killed. While Johnny is clearly fucked up in the video, making his claim sound insanely dumb and crazy, I had heard from another street source that Johnny actually did have a girlfriend in St. Regis, and that her Dad was a retired CIA agent.

Again, this sounded crazy, but that was before I read about some very real CIA agents in Montana who got conned by a private security conman in this very curious book:

After reading this book and writing a book where I cite passages from Seyler’s investigation into the private security company, Amyntor, I no longer laugh off Johnny’s crazy sounding claim, especially after I discovered Johnny Lee Perry was close (possibly related) to Oscar Grant before Grant was killed by cops on the BART.

After Johnny Lee Perry was killed by Missoula law enforcement, I met a guy near the Russell Street bridge who knew Johnny, and this guy had just arrived from Oakland (he got very sad and emotional when I told him what happened). This was after the major 2022 cleanup at Reserve Street, so I was at Russell looking into the new hot spot for drug dealing where Todd Spence had relocated to, as evidenced by several local articles about him and high water.

Not coincidentally, this is also the spot in Missoula where I met Clayton Shaya, a homeless man with connections to northern Washington and proximity to the political advocacy for urban camping pushed by the rebranded Montana Human Rights Network. Isn’t that interesting?

Is Clayton Shaya the kind of guy who might be into informant/drug trafficking? I don’t know, but my direct interactions with him, combined with the fact he ran a write-in campaign in 2019 to be a Washington County Sheriff before arriving in Missoula, makes me very curious about WHY he chose this town to come and be homeless in.

I’m not kidding about the Sheriff campaign thing, because an official complaint exists to help document this interesting detail. Here’s a summary of the complaint:

When I quote the details of the massive drug case investigation I think Sean Stevenson was killed to protect, dates like 2019 (when Sean also arrived in Missoula) will be more obviously significant.

To bolster my claim that the Reserve Street homeless camps represented a “VERY PRACTICAL” spot to run a multi-jurisdictional HIDTA drug-trafficking operation, one last drug dealer who transitioned from Reserve Street to the short-lived “Authorized Camping Site”, post Reserve Street cleanup, merits a mention here, and that’s Tully Sanem, the tweaker I put into context last April after first reading his name in a local article about his propensity to build “pallet houses” within the authorized plot of land overseen by RI security.

How do I know so much about all this? Obviously, seven years working at the Poverello Center helps put me into contact with knowledgeable people, but plenty of other individuals on background have helped me understand this troubling terrain over the years.

That’s why Missoula’s most famous, now-retired, Detective, Guy Baker, tried pumping me for my sources a few years ago in a text exchange I sat on for awhile before publishing. Here’s the full exchange:

Ok, with all this crazy context in mind, it’s time to unveil what started happening in 2019 and, more importantly, WHY I think this particular operation happened, because we’re all (as in, Missoula) now living with the results. Here it is, the full press release in screenshot form:

Two words stand out to me from this public government celebration, and that’s “intelligence-driven”. Who and how that local intelligence is developed is left up to people like former Sheriff, T.J. McDermott, and the people who ride along with Detective Baker to see the decomposing body with a neck tattoo hanging from this tree, located just a couple hundred feet from that former pawn shop.

I posted the above image of the hanging tree, along with some graffiti that said BAKER, in last week’s post about the cost of keeping this area under and around the Reserve Street bridge clear of its previous activity. Upon hearing that former Detective, Guy Baker, is named more specifically and subtly on the other side of the river, just a few dozen feet from the former pawn shop, I had to go and check it out. Though hard to make out, it says “Ky Guy Baker” in golden lettering on the concrete of the bridge:

Before I get to my BIG BANG conclusion, shouldn’t I be happy that big, bad cartel traffickers got busted? Sure, if I didn’t think this big bust was to make room for a more nasty strain of RUSSIAN black market operators, yeah, I might understand the need to use some live bait and break a few scrambled-omelet/addicts in the larger “war on drugs”, but replacing Sinola with something else is what I think happened, so I’ll reserve happiness for when more actual transparency on clandestine operations comes out.

Ok, I’m going to do one final insane thing, and that’s to suggest that the dead homeless man, Sean Stevenson, rendered dead by the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office on January 5th, 2020, is tied to all those missing scientists with connections to things like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Missoula’s former City Council guy, Bryan von Rocket Scientist, once worked.

Bryan, weirdly enough, was the guy I lashed out with a HARD-R N-Bomb while waiting for my taco during the lunch break of Johnny Lee Perry’s Coroner’s Inquest, where I sat in uncomfortable, pew-like seats with all the local badges to watch them spend 34 minutes planning Johnny’s execution. I think I may still be fucked up by that experience.

So, what’s the connection?

I’m sure you’re on the edge of your seat wondering, right? I mean, how crazy could this get? It’s not like Sean’s father, Dr. Kenneth Stevenson, could have had some sort of official role studying one of the most studied holy relics of all time, the Shroud of Turin, along people from NASA, JPL, Los Alamos Labs…and SO MUCH MORE, because that would be REALLY CRAZY, right?

Whatever the fuck is going on here, this post represents A LOT of my cards in explaining the death of Sean Stevenson and the death of Johnny Lee Perry, but not all of them. Like I said, I have an entire manuscript going back, historically, a couple hundred years to really get my head around the things coming to seeming fruition in our current timeline.

For everyone sticking with me on this crazy ride, thank you. And stay tuned, because I’m not done yet.

Can I get a hootie-hoo?