by Travis Mateer

The Montana Human Rights Network and Daily Kos would like you to be aware of the scary white conspiracy theorists who recently gathered at a festival held in St. Regis called THE RED PILL FESTIVAL.

This terrifying group of people inspired a MHRN tweet storm yesterday where their dastardly plans to make PUBLIC COMMENTS was courageously exposed:

Yes, you read that right, these people are going to ATTACK WITH PUBLIC COMMENTS!

Now, before we get to the Daily Kos piece, I should be straight with readers: I am white AND I entertain MANY conspiracy theories, like the one that posits Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas is not what he appears to be.

That said, let’s see how his glorified blog frames the Red Pill event, starting with the title of the piece, Montana ‘Red Pill Festival’ manifests how far-right conspiracism is mainstreamed in rural U.S.. From the link:

The gathering of 200 or so people Saturday at this small timber town’s community park spent the day reveling in a familiar array of far-right conspiracy theories and disinformation: America is now under the control of a “communist coup,” Donald Trump was cheated out of the presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic is a “Deep State” operation intended to enslave the world, vaccines are “poison,” public schools indoctrinate children into Marxist beliefs, and the U.S. is not a democracy, but simply a republic.

What a great promotion for this event. Now I’m sad I missed it.

Reading further, staff writer David Neiwert has some fantastic observations that captures how insidiously LEISURELY these people were, and how that leisure NORMALIZES the crazy:

The spread-out, leisurely feel to the gathering helped emphasize the sense of normalcy. About 20 booths set up around the lawn hawked conspiracy theories, let you take a photo with a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump (“Our leader in exile” and “The real president”), or buy T-shirts from the far-right street-brawling group Patriot Prayer, whose founder, Joey Gibson, was one of the day’s featured speakers.

Another excellent part of this coverage focused on media, and these red-pilled crazies who say RADICAL things, like the media covering them are PROPAGANDISTS, not reporters.

Montana legislator Derek Skees of Kalispell, who acted as the day’s master of ceremonies, seemed particularly obsessed with the presence of a crew from Vice News led by reporter Vegas Tenold. Referring sneeringly to them as a pack of hapless New Yorkers, he told the audience that they planned to go back to their offices and paint a portrait of the festival as a gathering of violent racists—and then repeatedly asked the audience if a previous speaker had encouraged them to be violent or racist.

Skees also coached the audience: “So when they pull you aside and they interview you and they talk to, have one of your friends take their phone and film them. Because they have a guy that works for them called an editor, and that guy’s gonna weed out everything you said that was truthful, and include things like “battle” and “freedom” and thing that they think is against freedom.”

I’m glad VICE was there to cover this event, especially considering VICE had those problems a few years ago with their co-founder, Shane Smith, an alleged sexual harasser who VICE replaced with a vagina (since genitals are so important to virtue signalers, I specified the body part instead of the person).

The featured speaker, Matt Shea, also brought attention to the media coverage:

Later on, Shea made a point of encouraging people to confront journalists. “We need to ask these reporters. I want everybody, when we’re done here, I want everybody to go up to those reporters, turn your phone on, and I want you to ask them that question,” he said. “I want you to ask them, do you denounce antifa? Will they denounce critical race theory? I want you to go down the list. Ask them. I’ve gotta tell you something, they’re not reporters. They’re propagandists. And they need to be held accountable for it.”

I agree that propagandists should be held accountable. That’s why I write posts like this one pointing out how the Missoula Current will write a story on the RISK of fires started by fireworks, while completely ignoring ACTUAL fires being started regularly by homeless people at the Reserve street camps.

Because propagandists like Martin Kidston don’t actually inform readers about what’s happening in certain parts of Missoula, I do things like pair video footage of homeless camps with virtue-signaling inclusivity statements:

I’ve got some more projects in the works, and I’m feeling VERY POSITIVE about the great people I am meeting along the way.

So, as I like to say, stay tuned…