Lessons In Lawfare – by Travis Mateer

Today’s post is a little lesson in lawfare for those trying to shut me up, including a former friend who thought establishing a fake religious organization would protect the “artists” who perform free music at the XXXXs from harassment by law enforcement.

This deceptive layer of contrived legal protection didn’t work, which a few people found out the hard way last summer when cops descended on the XXXXs and handed out tickets for violating Missoula’s noise ordinance. Did our saxophone player get ticketed? No, he fled, because people on probation are actually very cop-averse, no matter how tough they talk.

Back in January, when an actual friend told me that accusations were circulating that I had vandalized cars, I went straight to the cop shop to address these false claims directly. Five months later those same false claims, with a few new ones added to the pile, were referenced in civil processes that don’t require proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” because the legal “preponderance” standard for civil processes is different.

What does this mean? It means that a video supposedly depicting me vandalizing multiple cars can be cited as evidence in a restraining order hearing WITHOUT any opportunity for me to get what’s called “discovery”, which, in this case, would have meant allowing me to see this supposed evidence being used against me in the civil process to compel a district judge to formally restrain my behavior, both in physical meat space and online.

Without a lawyer to help me navigate the legal gauntlet I’m in, I attempted to see this video evidence by formally filing a request with the CIVIL side of Missoula’s City Attorney Office. I also filed an order for a later hearing in District Court, citing my effort to obtain and view the evidence being used against me in a coordinated restraining order campaign. The district judge denied that request.

Earlier this week, I finally got the formal response from the Missoula City Attorney Office that I cannot see the video because the investigation into me is NOT active. Did anyone think to tell the people claiming I’m stalking them that the investigation was inactive?

One of the most critically important things to do when fighting back against lawfare is also the most difficult: don’t get angry.

Getting angry might be one of the most natural emotions to experience when inside the judicial bowels of deceivers and paid manipulators, but, if you allow it to take over, then you will derail any chance of thinking clearly about what you’re up against, which usually includes false narratives that exhibiting anger will then seem to justify to the casual observer.

If a target of lawfare can prioritize understanding over righteous indignation at the experience of being targeted, then accusers can become the best teachers, like Mr. Saxophone, who’s absolute favorite book in my extensive library is this one:

One of the things people need to understand about where we’re at on this “Fourth Turning” timeline is that those who were willing to do the things that better people weren’t willing to do in order to get ahead have done just that, and no institution, organization, or private entity is immune from the result.

When you PERSIST in refusing to stoop to their level, or react in the ways they want, their tactics will escalate. This is happening on an individual level, with people, and it’s happening on the societal level, with a general attitude of get yours while the getting is good and fuck everyone else!

One of my strategies to avoid the local mud pit is to look at the historical arc of meta-narrative control, which I’ll pick up doing Sunday or Monday with a component of the Cold War I don’t think Ken Robison is hip to.

Thanks for reading!

Introducing New Goose-Stepping City Planning Commission – by Travis Mateer

A new city planning commission has taken form and I’m impressed with how the gentrifiers have co-opted the anti-gentrifiers to make this commission a performative rubber stamp for Missoula’s pro-develop-everything-mono-party.

To accomplish this, a couple of things had to take place over the last year, starting with the re-branding of the North Missoula Community Development Corporation, which I witnessed happen alongside the re-branding of the Montanan Human Rights Network into Catalyst Montana.

From the first link:

Having outgrown its original name and mission, a Missoula-based community land trust has rebranded to align with its next phase of growth.

The North Missoula Community Development Corporation on Monday said it was now the Front Step Community Land Trust – a move that better reflects “the growth and evolution of our work.”

The organization began in 1996 in an effort to revitalize Missoula’s North and Westside neighborhoods. At the time, the two districts were viewed as the city’s lowest income and most neglected areas.

But over the past 25 years, the city’s growth and housing costs have risen, making affordability a challenge for many families. The organization believes gentrification and displacement represent a growing risk.

Yes, I agree, gentrification is a risk, as is driving under the influence of alcohol, something that seems to be plaguing a particular type of Democrat in Montana. Know what I mean, Pam Walzer?

And Rep. Sootkis?

And _________?

Why am I suddenly talking about alcohol? Great question. Let me answer it this way.

Now that Missoula’s new City Planning Commission has the Executive Director of Front Step on it, Brittany Palmer, I went scrolling through Front Step’s “Meet Our Team” page and I found they employ a storyteller who, I assume, has been hired to tell stories.

Kate Whittle also tells stories at The Pulp, like this one about fancy alcohol sold at Plonk, a restaurant that once employed ________.

“Your body tends to recognize bitterness as a toxin, so it wants to purge, so amaros stimulate digestion,” Hibbard explains. “It’s a very common drink for service industry staff because at the end of the night, you’ve been around sweet things and your palate is worn out, and fernet cuts through that — all the sugar and citrus.”

Bartenders would seem to agree. At Plonk, Ryan Cole describes fernet as “the bartender’s bran muffin.”

Closer to where I live, at an address the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office has NO RECORD of me refusing to update with them, The Pulp ran this piece about a dive bar people like to drink and drive home from. Behold the power of narrative control!

“I’ve only had to break up a handful of fights,” she says. “It’s just not the kind of place where we really have to worry about that.”

The bartenders agree that the No. 1 cause of banishment is repeated drunk driving. People get told. They get warned. They keep doing it anyway, perhaps overestimating their ability to mask their inebriation while skulking out to their cars. Eventually they get banned.

“Sometimes we’ll give people a 30-day suspension and kind of say, ‘Hey, if getting hammered and driving the four blocks to your house is that important to you, you won’t be with us,’” Lindsey says. “But the thing is, when we give somebody 30 days and then those 30 days are up? I’d say 90 percent of the time they end up on the fucking wall.”

Implying goose-stepping is particularly poignant for our next housing all-star, Danny Tenenbaum, another one of these non-player players who tells me they aren’t really doing local politics anymore, but then pop up like Jason Wiener did Tuesday offering AI soothsaying services for the Data Center worriers.

Does this look like not doing local politics?

For more context on Tenenbaum’s passion for housing, here’s the bio info from whatever the “Sightline Institute” is.

When I gave Sightline, based in Seattle, just a little more scrutiny, the triple-threat focus on “Climate + Energy”, “Democracy + Elections”, and “Housing + Cities” definitely piqued my interest.

Finally Front Step, along with other organizations that know it’s essential to bow to Missoula’s new UNIFIED CODE, have joined up at Pro Missoula Housing.

Yes, it’s as nauseating as you would expect it to be.

And it features all the right players.

As told by all the right “storytellers”.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the narrative goose gets cooked.

Before the City Planning Commission met yesterday I got a chance to address the Climate, Conservation and Parks Committee with my poetic skills. It was a lot of fun being in chambers because I got a chance to see how those who attempt to control narratives around their use of public money couldn’t even control the thermostat, which had everyone feeling pretty hot before I read my poem. Considering my poem addresses an increasingly hot climate, I felt the need to deny responsibility for the temperature in the room.

Thanks for reading!

Do Data Center Drama Queens Understand What’s Actually Happening? – by Travis Mateer

Yesterday I attended a panel presentation on Data Centers where I was the only one who knew that the Bonner Mill Site no longer has the discharge permit for the long-shuttered Stimson lumber mill because Mike Heisey gave it up years ago. Why didn’t Anne Hedges know this? Or the “Climate Smart” lady? Or Barbara, the water expert?

The panelists yesterday did appear to be somewhat informed about the topic they’ve been traveling around Montana discussing with local communities. They even had slides, like this one!

And this one!

And this one!

I’m going to make a prediction based on the observations and lived experience that informs my cynicism: when these three liberal female panelists say this is NON-PARTISAN, and go so far as to praise Rick DiSantis and Montana’s Dr. Al as anti-Data Center allies, it’s clear to me they actually DO NOT KNOW what is going on.

It’s easy to shit-talk “Tech Bros” and bash corporate greed. The audience eats it up, like they did yesterday. It’s also easy to champion your side of the political divide, which I heard endlessly last night. Saint Monica Tranel, for example, apparently spoke for the public in front of the Public Service Commission’s rubber stamp for that billion dollar energy deal, and I’m supposed to, what, be excited about that?

What’s next, expecting me to believe the Sierra Club has my interests in mind when they perform the kind of liberal virtue signaling that our local media will actually report on?

Montana utility regulators heard arguments over whether NorthWestern Energy should be allowed to merge with South Dakota-based Black Hills Electric.

The proposed deal would expand the utility across eight states. That possibility drew concern from people including Caitlin Piserchia of the Montana Sierra Club.

She said the commission should keep strong oversight of major utilities in Montana.

“We believe that Montana Public, the Montana Public Service Commission, should continue to have real power in assessing and holding Montana’s largest monopoly utilities accountable for reliable, affordable power that’s in the in the public interest of Montanans,” said Caitlin Piserchia.

The “real power” that should be getting scrutiny, but never will, is the power to control narratives. Why was I, for example, the ONLY person in a lecture hall full of smart people last night who had the answer about a discharge permit that no longer exists? I’m just an unpaid blogger with restraining orders and an active investigation into claims that I serially vandalize vehicles all over town. Pretty impressive that I still find the time to educate myself about what reality looks like outside the spaces where the smart dumb people meet to freak out.

One of the people I gave a heavy dose of reality to last night was the Climate Smart woman fresh off panhandling Missoulians for $20K during Missoula Gives.

I challenged her non-partisan platitudes with the uncomfortable reality that the class of “Tech Bros” the crowd was getting riled up about includes members of the Epstein network and their friendly bankers, like Steve Elkman and Klaus von Stutterheim.

Had she heard of old Klaus? Yep, she’s a liberal Missoula woman, so she was definitely familiar with his name and role (before he died) with Missoula Democrats, but when I suggested his proximity to the Epstein network, I saw her wheels of cognition come to screeching halt.

Just for fun I put “Sierra Club” into the Epstein DOJ search bar to see what came up and what I found was a newsletter from Greg Brown, who I believe is this guy:

Gregory Q. Brown (born 1960) is an American businessman. He has been chairman and chief executive officer of Motorola Solutions since 2008.

Brown joined Motorola in January 2003 as head of the communications, government, and industrial solutions sector. In this role, he led the acquisition of Symbol Technologies for $3.9 billion. In 2007 he was promoted to chief operating officer and, in 2008, was named CEO. In 2011 he was named Chairman of the Board.

In March 2008, with the company losing money, Brown announced that Motorola would split in two. Motorola became Motorola Mobility (the cellphone side of the company), and Motorola Solutions. Brown continued to run the new Motorola Solutions, which began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011. The company’s three business areas are land-mobile-radio communications (LMR), video security and the command center.

Further down in Brown’s Wikipedia info, a discerning reader can see what “bipartisanship” really looks like:

When I perused Brown’s newsletter, this excerpt stood out to me:

If you don’t think there’s a connection between our “health care” system and data centers, you probably weren’t present and listening closely, like I was, at the first Krambu Data Center meeting in Bonner where Steve Wood speculated that potential clients of their data center could very likely be working with medical data.

Unfortunately, because of how effectively narratives can be controlled, I have my own “friends” on Facebook publicly shaming me for wrong-think on my choice to NOT jab Big Pharma products into my body and the bodies of my own children amidst the most insane global pressure campaign ever seen.

No, Kevin, next I’m going to put up a slide from another Missoula luminary who quietly sits on the Mountain Line board and pretends to not be involved in local politics anymore. Weird, then, that Jason Wiener got his own slide last night:

After bumming out Mrs. Climate Smart, I chatted with Jason. Does he read my shit, I asked him? No, he chuckled in reply. Well, I said, ___________, who you helped elect, really doesn’t like what I’ve exposed, and ____ now has ten years of protection from my words, I explained to this New Hampshire transplant who came to Missoula in 2003 to study philosophy, and who is another one of those story tellers who strategically takes the stage when the venue is right.

Jason Wiener is doing things more often than he is buying things and he is always looking for an excuse to go somewhere new. He recently returned from a walkabout and is still unpacking from that trip. He grew up in Concord, New Hampshire. He arrived in Missoula in 2003 to earn his Master’s in philosophy from the University of Montana. He’s worked at The Missoula Independent, served on the City Council and formed a computer consulting company called The Techxorcist. He’s a Ranger in Black Rock City every year at Burning Man.

Oh, look at that, another Ranger who likes to take rides to Black Rock City! Cool, man. Hopefully Jason has done his part to help save the world by carpooling with Ranger Abe.

Thanks for reading!

My Buckhouse Bridge Urban Camp Reporting Vs. Discovery Institute Grifters Doing Lawfare Fundraising – by Travis Mateer

The cleanup at Buckhouse bridge began on May 7th and is still ongoing. The nastiest camp closest to highway 93 is only partially cleaned up, with the largest trash pile now getting submerged by rising river water. Some of the land where trash has accumulated belongs to IMEG, a company that wants to develop a small portion of this parcel for heated dry storage.

Another piece of this problematic patchwork of land is owned by the University of Montana. That’s why I reached out to University police last week after finding a couple stacks of fake cash in a blue backpack at the camp site.

There are often two competing narratives about urban camps that figuratively fight each other for attention. One narrative, generally promoted by the non-profits who get grants and solicit donations to perpetuate this crisis, frames every homeless person as a blameless victim of circumstance. This narrative gets amplified by liberal politicians for easy empathy votes.

The other narrative allows the reality of addiction, depravity, and insanity to shine through, so it’s easier for the information consumer to believe that they’re getting the unvarnished truth about what’s REALLY going on, but are they?

If information consumers are getting their subversive homeless camp content from the Kev and Choe Show, then I would say NO, instead of truth they’re getting Discovery Institute rage-bait from a couple of aura-farmers willing to take selfies with a drug addict for clicks.

For more context on why I call this Dumb and Dumber duo nothing but a couple of grifters, check these articles out:

Astroturf Organizing Or Organic-Fed Grass, You Decide!” (March 10th, 2025)

Life Under Two-Tier Information Occupation As The Homeless Content War Heats Up” (July 31st, 2025)

On Stopping Operation Humans Suck” (August 18th, 2025)

Real Independent Journalists Are Unicorns” (December 29th, 2025)

If you read the articles I’ve written about the Kev and Choe Show you will better understand how narrative control functions, including why it’s important to stop people like me from doing awful things, like dropping links to my work in the comments of Kev’s X account.

Intent is very important to discern when it comes to consuming information about sensitive, controversial topics with wide-ranging national policy consequences. That’s what people should ask themselves questions, like…WHO is paying someone to do the work of exposing the consequences of homeless policies, and the different ways in which communities react? Are they local? How long have they been doing this work? What were they doing before? And why chill with a crazy-ass nigga in a trap house for a selfie?

As a broke-ass blogger posting content specific to Missoula for the last 16 years, and with a previous work history of 10 years in the non-profit sector (including 7 at the local homeless shelter) I can say (and you can verify) that my intent is to find actual, collaborative solutions to the status quo of allowing a meth-fueled bicycle chop-shop to thrive next to one of our exemplary rivers.

When I say this camp was a chop-shop I bring receipts. When I say “Missoula Works” got the bid to do the cleanup I bring receipts. Why? Because I make calls, I go on-site, and I talk to ANYONE willing to talk to me, with a few caveats of the individuals who have been able to manipulate the restraining order protections, a form of insidious lawfare that the Kev and Choe Show are now making a public showing of having to go through.

Screenshot

If you would like to support this grifter, there’s a whole website now dedicated to helping Choe navigate his trials and tribulations. Great work, Johnny!

While the Kev and Choe Show fundraise on their lawfare LARP, I’m hoping my Buckhouse bridge final report can include how much money Missoula Works charged to provide homeless camp cleanup services, whether or not the University of Montana contributed to the cost of the cleanup, and what the plan is moving forward to ACTUALLY do the kind of work non-profits, like the Clark Fork Coalition, strategically stay away from.

Now excuse me while I get ready for traffic court from the Marijuana DUI and subsequent suspended license charge I caught after the city dropped the DUI charge by not showing up to court and getting the initial charges dismissed. Sadly, thanks to a local judge, my method of warning locals about the dangers of DUIs has been declared 50% illegal for me to show in public.

Thanks for reading!

A Very Curious Montana Cold War Book, Part I – by Travis Mateer

“The Unseempers” is just an AI hallucination, so ignore it

I found a book yesterday at the Book Exchange in Missoula and it’s blowing my mind. Published in 2021 by Ken Robinson, Montana Cold War contains some very interesting historical context relevant to my research into Missoula being a CIA town where narratives are highly controlled. Here are some highlights that leapt from the book like a Minutemen missile, starting with the “Lend-Lease” program that provided the Soviet Union with a pipeline for war machinery AND secrets related to nuclear weapons.

That last part about the reputation of Russian officers not paying bar tabs is interesting to me in light of what I wrote about C.E. “Abe” Abramson in this post. Why? Because, in the biographical information at the Tell Us Something page, Abe makes a big joke about not paying HIS bar tab for years. Did Abe pick up this trait from the Russians, or do ALL fly boys resist paying their bar tabs?

Using drugged-out counter-cultures like Burning Man and the Rainbow Family to subvert American culture can be seen as one part of a long-term plan to demoralize Americans. This concept of long-term cultural subversion was clearly articulated in a 1984 interview with a former KGB agent by the name of Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov. Here’s an excerpt from an article about that interview:

Across the world, the KGB did whatever it could to thwart pro-Western and anti-Soviet political movements and figures. The group would assassinate political leaders with cyanide and other weapons. It would fund and arm leftist groups, especially those in developing nations. And the KGB successfully established moles in U.S. intelligence agencies, though the exact number still isn’t — and may never be — known for sure.

Also unclear were the group’s long-term plans involving the U.S. One glimpse, however, comes from a former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, who defected to Canada in 1970. He claimed to know details of a Soviet plan to undermine the U.S., not on the battlefield but in the psyche of the American public.

In 1984, Bezmenov gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin from which much can be learned today. His most chilling point was that there’s a long-term plan put in play by Russia to defeat America through psychological warfare and “demoralization.” It’s a long game that takes decades to achieve but it may already be bearing fruit.

I mention the Rainbow Gathering because one of the elders, Barry “Plunker” Adams, has lived in Missoula for many years after he helped co-found this “Rainbow” branch of the inaccurately mythologized “Woodstock” origins of the hippie movement.

The Rainbow Family was created out of the Vortex I gathering at Milo McIver State Park in Estacada, Oregon (30 miles south of Portland, Oregon), from August 28 to September 3, 1970. Inspired in large part by the first Woodstock Festival, two attendees at Vortex, Barry “Plunker” Adams and Garrick Beck, are both considered among the founders of the Rainbow Family.[citation needed] Adams emerged from the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco and is the author of Where Have All the Flower Children Gone? Beck is the son of Julian Beck, founder of The Living Theatre, known for their production Paradise Now!

The first official Rainbow Family Gathering was held at the Strawberry Lake, Colorado, on the Continental Divide, in 1972. A week before the festival was to begin, local authorities banned the event and state police blocked the road to the lake. A film of the 1972 Gathering states that Paul Geisendorfer, a local landowner, offered his land as a temporary site as over 10,000 attendees gathered behind police barriers. While there were hundreds of arrests, the huge number of attendees caused authorities to stand down and let them pass through the barriers.

When I moved to Missoula in 2000 I was in my early 20’s and a total dupe for American counter-culture. I read Beatnik poets, had dropped acid, and generally agreed with assessments that mainstream culture deployed authoritarian crackdowns because they feared the peaceful, loving utopias that organically sprung up to show that another way was possible. For a good example of this line of thinking, this interview is indicative of the vibe I’m talking about:

Montana was the location of the Rainbow Gathering in 2000 and again in 2013, where the same location in Montana’s Beaverhead National Forrest was used. By 2013, though, my outlook had changed from 5 long years working at the western Montana’s largest homeless shelter, the Poverello Center. What I saw on the streets of Missoula that summer (and heard from attendees of the gathering) turned out to be a trend of hard drug abuse and violence that made subsequent gatherings much more problematic, which even the Wikipedia page acknowledges:

There were three non-fatal stabbings at a gathering in Colorado in 2014. The same year, a woman was found dead at a Rainbow Gathering in Utah. In early 2015, there was a fatal shooting at a gathering in Florida.

In 2015, a group of Native American academics and writers issued a statement against the Rainbow Family members who are “appropriating and practicing faux Native ceremonies and beliefs. These actions, although Rainbows may not realize, dehumanize us as an indigenous Nation because they imply our culture and humanity, like our land, is anyone’s for the taking.” The signatories specifically named this misappropriation as “cultural exploitation.”

Burning Man has followed a similar trajectory, culminating in a Russian national getting his throat slit last summer. Are these isolated incidents of violence or examples of America losing the Psychological War we were warned about over 40 years ago?

If the connection between WWII ratlines to deliver military equipment to Russia, and the modern day scourge of drug trafficking seemingly destroying America from within, isn’t obvious yet, let me return to Cold War Montana for a fascinating story of America, the CIA, and Canada collaborating last century as the Cold War was heating up:

A Missoula-born Air Force Captain dropping propaganda in North Korea for the CIA? How curious. And of course I couldn’t help noticing the name of the Air Force Base they returned to in California.

Later this week, in part II, I’ll share some new insights into Missoula’s role in the Manhattan Project, along with a surprising mention of two names I really didn’t expect to run across in this 2021 publication written by Ken Robison, so stay tuned!

And, as always, thanks for reading.