Zoom Chron Blog

I’ve been thinking about traveling lately, but not because I have the money to travel. Instead, I’ve been thinking about WHY people travel, like Todd Frank’s recent visit to Cuba, where Nick Shirley recently did his citizen journalist LARP claiming he was almost kidnapped by “Cuban spies” or some shit. LOL.

The Cuba/Missoula connection wasn’t something even remotely on my radar at the start of the week, but after including the Cuba detail in Tuesday’s post about dark money, TIF money, and Todd Frank media quotes, I had two separate conversations that gave me two separate leads to try and understand the relationship between a land-locked mountain town and a politically contentious island nation, starting with an adventure travel company.

Lewis and Clark Trail Adventures, a Missoula company owned by Wayne and Gia Fairchild, offers an annual trip to Cuba if you have the money, and it isn’t cheap. Also, it isn’t the trip Todd Frank is on, since this annual trip happens during winter. For an idea of the cost, and what you get, here’s a screenshot:

When I called Lewis and Clark Trail Adventures a woman I assume was Gia answered the phone. She was confused about why I was calling and, frankly, so was I. Obama had thawed relations with Cuba in 2016, professional adventurers like Wayne and Gia saw opportunity, and now I was calling about it. Why?

When I saw the Time magazine article featuring Wayne Fairchild, and who wrote it, I got more curious about this adventurer and his interest in traveling to Cuba once a year. Here’s how the Time article, titled “Why the Lolo is Legend“, written by Terry McCarthy, begins:

Gray clouds move as low as smoke over the treetops at Lolo Pass. The ground is white. The day is June 10. It has been snowing for the past four days in the Bitterroot Mountains. Wayne Fairchild is getting worried about our trek over the Lolo Trail–95 miles from Lolo, Mont., to Weippe in Idaho, across some of the most rugged country in the West. Lewis and Clark were nearly defeated 200 years ago by snowstorms on the Lolo–the name apparently comes from Lawrence, a French-Canadian trapper killed by a grizzly in the area in the 1850s. Today Fairchild is nervously checking the weather reports. He has agreed to take me across the toughest, middle section of the trail–“but with this weather?”

When Lewis surmounted Lemhi Pass, 140 miles south of Missoula, on Aug. 12, he was flabbergasted by what was in front of him: “immence ranges of high mountains still to the West of us with their tops partially covered with snow.” Nobody in what was then the U.S. knew the Rocky Mountains existed, with peaks twice as high as anything in the Appalachians back East. Lewis and Clark weren’t merely off the map; they were traveling outside the American imagination.

To better understand what’s going on here you have to know the history of the Time-Life empire, established by Henry Luce, and his very close relationship with John Foster Dulles.

With Allen ensconced in Bern, John Foster started his own comeback toward the end of World War II. He had become close friends with the Time magazine publisher Henry Luce, who was busy championing the idea of an American Century. Both were pro-business, internationalist Republicans shaped by Calvinist principles—Luce, born in China, was himself the son of a Presbyterian missionary. Despite Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s initial misgivings, he ended up appointing John Foster to the American delegation to the negotiations in San Francisco in 1945, where fifty countries met, including the Soviet Union, to establish the United Nations. John Foster, who had begun to espouse a militantly anticommunist line, clashed with Andrei Vishinsky, the Soviet deputy foreign minister and former chief prosecutor at Stalin’s purge trials.

It also helps to understand the type of people who worked for Henry Luce at Time-Life, like C.D. Jackson. Here’s a page from The Cultural Cold War, by Frances Saunders:

With this context in mind, let’s consult the Wikipedia entry for Terry McCarthy to see if anything jumps out.

During his tenure at TIME (1998-2005), McCarthy served as the Los Angeles Bureau Chief and East Asia Correspondent in Shanghai. He wrote about China’s internet and car industries, the fall of Indonesian dictator Suharto and the death of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. From LA he did in-depth stories about the Green River serial killer in Seattle, the fight over new oil drilling in Alaska and the science of sharks. Immediately after 9/11 McCarthy went to Afghanistan to cover the ousting of the Taliban from Kabul, and in 2003 he covered the US invasion of Iraq. He set up TIME’s bureaus in Kabul and Baghdad. In both 2004 and 2005, McCarthy received an Emmy award for a joint ABC-Times News Series on Iraq.

McCarthy was foreign correspondent for ABC News in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America from 2006 to 2009. He was the Principal Baghdad Correspondent during the US surge in Iraq and covered the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein. He traveled down the Yangtze River in China, focusing on the economic, political and environmental impact of the man-made waterway. He covered life in Mexico City during the swine flu epidemic of 2009, and filmed inside the eye of a category 4 hurricane off Florida in a C 130 hurricane hunter. In 2008, he won an Emmy for the series Iraq: Where Things Stand for ABC World News with Charlie Gibson.

If you didn’t think floating rivers could be political, or tied to intelligence work, this context might make you think twice about the politics of travel and the value of reporting back what you see.

What did Big Sky High School kids hope to see when their teacher, Jay Bostrom, helped set up a Cuban adventure for Missoula teens? Did they hope to see things that would “challenge perceptions“?

We at Reality Tours love sending high school aged groups to countries all over the world- it’s an incredible opportunity for young people to learn more about our global neighbors, themselves, and the issues shaping global society today. Recently, a high school group from Missoula, MT traveled to Cuba under a People-to-People license with Global Exchange as a Travel Service Provider. Below, a student and chaperone share their insights as they challenged their perceptions about the island nation and gained new ones.

To see how Cuba made an impression on one young, malleable mind, here’s one of the quotes from one of the students:

Later in the trip we had the opportunity to visit the Che Guevara Mausoleum. Che’s face was everywhere we went, plastered on buildings, clothing, books, and other souvenirs. Che valued education and his ideas were reflected by the Cuban people. All of the young people in Cuba were very aware of their history and had pride in their roots. I think that’s something that’s lacking in the United States. History, government, and current issues are not a priority in education.

That’s right, youngster, public education in America (using Robert Maxwell’s text books) isn’t designed to teach you truth, it’s designed to indoctrinate you as a peasant.

If the idea for local educators is to use the privilege of movement to spend money in a Communist country in order to weaponize kids to then righteously push collectivist propaganda at home, then these Cuban youth trips appear to VERY successful, and if you don’t think this is the case, then FUCC you!

What the hell is this? It’s the fruits of indoctrinating kids, as documented by Sociologist, John Foran, under the title, “Five Days that Shook My World, Part One: The Making of a Critical Thinking Community“. Here’s some context:

I spent five days in June at a most unusual gathering. Unusual, because unlike the many academic conferences, the workshops, the handful of “symposia” I’ve attended, this one seemed right on the mark, existentially and politically, for our moment.

Dubbed B.Y.O.B., for “Bring Your Own Brain,” and put on by a collective of students from Big Sky High School in Missoula, Montana who go by the hashtag #freeusfromclimatechaos (FUCC, in case you don’t get the biting but playful humor at the heart of their critique), this had been nine months in the making, assisted by their Spanish teacher, Jay Bostrom and a crew of adult allies from their school and mentors from the local activist community affinity group the ZooTown Zaps.

It was, in fact, a pretty credible incarnation of a North American, youth-led experiment with Zapatismo; recall that to the thousands of queries the Zapatistas have received from activists over the past twenty-three years about what they should be doing, the consistent answer has been: “Go and do what we do, but in your own way, in your own place of origin, your own home, your own community.”

Let me interpret what I think the Zapatistas are really trying to say here: STOP your privileged poverty porn visits like we’re zoo animals you can pet for a few Pesos and go fix your own shit, which, I will add, includes understanding that, in 2026, quoting Chomsky is quoting a member of the child-fucking class.

In 2017, Brianna Canning, like the rest of us, had no clue that Noam Chomsky was connected to a psychopath who would rape her in a second, then let his pals, like the daughter of that text book guy, Robert, cover it all up. But it’s not 2017, and now we need to know how close and casual that relationship was.

With all this talk about Cuba, including what might happen to Americans at any moment with their money, what’s up with Alberta? We’re almost there.

Just like the attention drawn south by blowing up “Narco boats”, I’ve been thinking about America’s northern border, and Trump’s declaration of Fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction“, since December, when the Executive Order was declared. With known Fentanyl super labs getting busted in Vancouver, I’m pretty sure there’s a long-run I-15 ratline between Montana and Alberta, with the added benefit of having an Air Force Base in the neighborhood, knowing what’s now known thanks to Seth Harp and his book, The Fort Bragg Cartel.

It should also be noted (before I finish this virtual travelogue) that Alberta is in the midst of a political resurgence of a historic urge toward independence. For an overly-simplified explanation from Wikipedia, this is worth considering:

In the lead up to the 2025 federal election, politicians and activists in Alberta voiced that a win for the Liberal Party, which by then had been in power for almost 10 years, would considerably increase support for Alberta independence. The rise in support for the Liberal Party was in part a response to the call by United States President Donald Trump for all of Canada to be annexed into the United States. While still opposed by the majority of Canadians, support for annexation is greater in Alberta, as some residents see greater cultural and economic connections with the United States than they do with Eastern Canada.

The final data-point is just a picture of a map of Montana, but there are place-names I now find interesting, like Dutton, Dunkirk, and Santa Rita, the Patroness of Impossible Causes.

And thus ends our educational trip, boys and girls! Thanks for allowing me to be your cynical guide, and don’t forget to tip.

I see a bright future for Todd Frank and his outdoor business, the Trail Head. What started in 2019 with a six-figure, interest-free infusion of public money from the Missoula Redevelopment Agency could bloom into anything this money-quote maker can dream of, and I’m sure he’s dreaming BIG while visiting Cuba, a funny detail I got from speaking with one of his employees yesterday.

To better understand how Todd Frank acquired public TIF money, and what his building actually looks like, here’s a screenshot from the Missoula Redevelopment Agency’s own records (PDF):

And here’s the image I used to prompt Gemini with:

Since relocating and expanding his business with the help of public money, Todd Frank has gotten a bit worried from time to time. First, there was Putin attacking Ukraine and the disruption to his ski sales.

Next came the dirty little secret of the “pro-deal” third-party discount threat to his bottomline:

“Fifteen years ago, pro-dealing was a marketing tool. A handful of store employees got pro deals, and that was it. Now anyone can get a pro deal and it’s become a full-on sales channel,” says Immersion Research president John Weld. “It’s one of the key reasons why the retailer-manufacturer relationship is falling apart.”

The typical pro-deal discount ranges from about 30 to 60 percent, which pencils out to a sales price that is comparable—and in many cases higher—than wholesale. As the number of people with access to pro deals has continued to grow, retailers and some manufacturers say the programs have become a way for brands to sell direct-to-consumer at a discount, without violating MAP [minimum advertised price] policies.

The reason I’m writing this post, though, is possibly the most galling reason yet for Todd Frank to get quoted, and that’s because, for some weird reason, The Nation quoted our humble little Missoula business owner about “dark money” in Montana politics.

Huh?

What is the “Montana Transparent Election Initiative“? It appears to be just another Helena-based, Democrat astro-turfed effort at shoveling bullshit to get political dollars, and it’s being amplified by a reporter connected to the Montana Free Press, the media platform in Montana most obsessed with defining what “dark money” is, and who should be shamed for getting it.

When you see that McLaughlin is based in Butte, and you see that the “Montana Transparent Election Initiative” will soon have its most recent Democrat champion, Pete Buttigieg, visiting Butte later this month, it all starts making more sense.

Transparent Election Initiative announced this week that former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has endorsed the “Montana Plan” which seeks to keep corporate money out of politics through a ballot measure.

Buttigieg will come to Butte for a town hall on May 17, the release from the Transparent Election Initiative said. The event will start at 1 p.m. and the location will be announced later, the release said.

Initiative I-194 needs 30,000 signatures by June 19 to be on the November ballot. It started as a state Constitutional initiative, but now is a statutory initiative, which would change Montana state law – not the Constitution.

Meanwhile, in Missoula, the money Todd Frank will NEVER criticize–Tax Increment Financing–is having the predictable effect on the general fund, leading to the same, predictable people panhandling the public for MORE money.

While an out-going non-profit influencer holds her panhandling sign for a school levy, a new critical voice is emerging to sound the alarm about what using TIF money from newly formed Missoula County TEDDs (Targeted Economic Development District) could mean (spoiler: litigation!)

A top official for DeSmet School west of Missoula told the Board of County Commissioners last week the school district plans to take legal action if the county continues its plans related to Tax Increment Financing in the Wye area.

The comment came during a public hearing where the commissioners voted to expand the life of a Targeted Economic Development District, or TEDD, near the Wye through a long-term loan to finance a new water system to allow for more housing development in the area as Missoula grows.

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.

Is Matthew Driessen for real? Does he know what he’s up against and how they will come after him in any way they can? And, has he seen the documentary, Engen’s Missoula? (Have YOU?)

For those who HAVE been a part of the TIF conversation, a school superintendent is quite an ally to have, especially one who seems to have real lawyers and the means to pay them at his disposal:

“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.

Hell yeah, Matt! Go get ’em!

If sanity doesn’t return to local budgets, schools could be harmed, but isn’t harming schools kind of what liberal users of public money enjoy doing?

I was reminded of 2020 recently (and the kind of pressure I felt to jab my kids from my own family) when I read this hollow lament from Dan Brooks on X. For those who don’t know this free-lance writer based in Missoula, just wait.

If you think this is tone-deaf, it’s important to understand that it’s coming from this guy:

The insistence, among the Republican leadership in the spring of 2020, that Covid-19 was a glorified version of the flu guaranteed that responses to the pandemic would shake out along political and, therefore, cultural lines. In places such as Alabama, not getting the vaccine has more to do with socio-economic identity than with scientific literacy. This is a fatal flaw in the reasoning of unvaccinated people, who are absolutely wrong in a way that endangers not only themselves but also others.

But given the haughty reaction of many liberals, can you blame them? Even as the cost of their obstinacy has become grimly clear, the cost of admitting they were wrong has risen; to get the vaccine now would be to kowtow to a class that holds them in contempt.

The notion that a vocal minority of our fellow citizens threaten to undo us with their ignorance has become something of a master narrative in anglophone democracies over the past five years. Trump did it for a lot of American Democrats in 2016, and Brexit – which, unlike Trump, won popular support at the polls but, like Trump, was overwhelmingly opposed by the urban and higher-educated – had a similar effect in the UK. The current Republican mania for making voting more difficult seems to be a product of Trump’s loss in November. Last week, a Pew Research Center poll found that 42% of respondents agreed with the statement: “Voting is a privilege that comes with responsibilities and can be limited.” This attitude is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

In summary, this is an information war, so try to understand what’s NOT being said by conventional media outlets (and their preferred parrots), why it’s not being said, then act accordingly (donate some money to me!)

Thanks for reading!

I can easily foresee a near-future where encampments like the exaggerated scene above exist, festering in toxic sludge as “campers” administer chemical lobotomies to themselves. If what’s being depicted in this scene is not desirable, then maybe it’s worth determining WHY the marginally less disgusting encampment near the Buckhouse bridge has been allowed to exist since last October.

I know contact with campers at this site first began in October because a nice woman at the Missoula County Health Department read me out the notes over the phone after finding the complaint filed under “solid waste”. Two private landowners–Buckhouse Shoptown LLC and the University of Montana–were identified and notified, then, at some point, law enforcement made contact.

What happened next?

Nothing. Fall became winter, winter became spring, and now, seasonal snowmelt will be swelling the rivers soon. While legal responsibility to clean up this mess and foot the bill lands on the landowners, the legal question of WHO was essentially trespassing, and WHY they weren’t evicted sooner, remains.

Since the County notes didn’t specific who was living at the encampment, I biked out to the bridge again (before my bike was stolen Friday night) to see what else I could find. What I found was pretty interesting.

Before the felony burglary charge in Cascade County, Justin Julian was hanging out with a shitty mom who got arrested for driving around a youth gang to steal shit. Justin Julian was just 18 year old at the time.

A 37-year-old Great Falls woman is accused of driving her son and his friends around the city as the teens stole items from cars.

Police learned about the case Saturday morning when the woman’s husband called authorities to report he found a pile of stuff in his back yard that he suspected had been stolen. Court records say over $3,000 in items were stolen, including a set of golf clubs and power tools.

Lisa Dilley is charged with accountability to theft and accountability to criminal trespass to a vehicle, along with endangering the welfare of children.

Two 18-year-olds, Justin Julian and Julie Surratt, also face the accountability charges. Five juveniles were arrested in the case, including Dilley’s 16-year-old son.

This interaction with law enforcement occurred in 2009 and involved several minors. Knowing this background helps put pictures like this into perspective:

When I learned that law enforcement has known about this illegal encampment since last fall, and when I learned the name of one of the campers, Justin Julian, combined with what I wrote last week regarding drug dealing being allegedly done BY law enforcement, the arrest of Justin Julian outside the Poverello Center in March of this year for alleged meth possession is something I find VERY interesting, especially the part about “previous professional contacts”:

On March 17, 2026, a Missoula Police Department Officer was driving behind the Poverello Center and observed 35-year-old Justin Julian, whom the officer was familiar with through previous professional contacts. The officer was further aware that Julian had an active felony arrest warrant.

The officer approached Julian and asked him to identify himself. Julian was placed under arrest and then stated he wanted his bicycle, backpack, and coat to remain in the care of his friend. The officer informed Julian that they would address his property after the arrest process.

Julian was then escorted to the officer’s patrol car. The officer asked Julian if he had anything on his person, such as weapons, needles, or drugs. Julian stated that he had two empty syringes in the right front pocket of his jeans and denied possessing any drugs.

I also find it interesting, though probably just coincidental, that my bike got stolen the same day Justin Julian got out of jail. Since Missoula County no longer allows mugshots to be posted along with criminal charges, I’ll include an image from Facebook instead.

To bolster my assertion that Justin Julian is one of Missoula’s many transient bike thieves who enjoys slamming meth and trashing the river under the noses of the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, here are some more images from his urban campsite:

Last Friday I got to see some encouraging before/after pictures of the Reserve Street homeless encampments from the major 2022 cleanup. I took screenshots during the presentation but, without permission from the photographer, I won’t be sharing them. I will share one of the many images I found at the blog, Big Sky Words, and suggest clicking this link for an insightful look at the Reserve Street camps in 2018, when high water caught many campers off guard.

I’ll also share the word of caution I gave the Facebook group rightfully proud of their 2022 achievement at Reserve Street, and that word of caution was, and is, this: think twice before going gung-ho on making educational material, like a book, describing what it took to remove 80 tons of trash from this long-problematic spot along the Clark Fork river because part of that story includes the political opposition that existed at the time, and that opposition hasn’t just disappeared because a non-profit leader is retiring.

One interesting quote I caught from the Big Sky Words post came from that retiring non-profit leader’s favorite Sheriff, T.J. McDermott. I especially like his use of the word “hide”:

Bloggers like Greg Strandberg, who ran Big Sky Words for little-to-no compensation like I’ve been doing for over a decade, have done the kind of work that local narrative controllers DO NOT WANT us to do, and that’s because it preserves evidence of their failure, especially as it relates to controversial topics, like homelessness. This 2018 post is a great example because it preserves a Sheriff McDermott quote I can no longer find by clicking the KPAX link.

One of the posts I’ll be writing this week will be about a pattern of hiding information I’ve seen emerge from local and state authorities recently, particularly as it relates to Confidential Criminal Justice Information (CCJI). In light of this pattern, I’m wondering if scaling back the publishing of mugshots might not be a part of something more ominous forming on the horizon, something like pairing victimhood with the idea of online digital harassment in order to push for mandatory digital IDs.

If you appreciate what you read for free at Zoom Chron, please consider donating to my GoFundMe. With legal attacks mounting, and my tendency to bite the paternal hand feeding me (resulting in new threats of punishment where it hurts me most) now would be a GREAT time to give a REAL citizen journalist some digital dollars.

Thanks for reading!

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!