by Travis Mateer
If you’ve been around the Montana blogosphere for awhile, the title of this post might surprise you, since I’ve butted heads with Mark over the years, going so far as to use his deceased brother to make a point, which earned me a well-deserved ban at his website, Piece of Mindful.
In December of last year I decided to reach out to Mark and the result is this 90 minute conversation between two conspiracy theorists.
For anyone interested in some Montana blogosphere context, here is one of my earlier posts from 2010 criticizing Missoulian editor, Sherry Devlin and reporter, Gwen Florio, for stirring up controversy and doing an absolutely abominable job moderating online comments at the Missoulian website. And here is a jhwygirl post from 2009 where the comments had to be closed because Mark and Rob (aka Wulfgar) were flaming each other, which was a regular occurrence for many years.
My problem with Mark was selfish. While we both had similar outlooks regarding the controlling dynamics of America’s political duopoly, I wanted to establish a level of credibility in my writing that I felt Mark undermined with his conspiratorial speculation. I wanted to avoid the guilt-by-association attacks that I knew would be directed my way if I got too honest about my own conspiratorial speculation.
The plandemic changed my calculations significantly. It transformed liberals into authoritarians, conservatives into punk rockers, and, thanks to one of the most sophisticated psyops ever deployed, conspiracy theorists are currently being transformed into domestic terrorists.
I now see Mark and the other writers at his site, like Steve Kelly and Stephers, as allies in the effort to understand what is happening to us, and I appreciate the insights I get from checking out their work.