by Travis Mateer

Do you struggle to cover your cost of living, like rent?

Are you a Native American who wonders why your people are more represented in jail than they are at the Good Food Store?

Has your family member come to Montana for a fresh start, only to be assaulted and euthanized at Montana’s “best” hospital?

Well, if the answers to any of those questions is YES, then our illuminated political leadership has a PLAN and that plan has an ACRONYM and that acronym is JEDI, which stands for JUSTICE, EQUITY, DIVERSITY and INCLUSION.

Here’s the plan:

Following actions by Missoula County last week, the City of Missoula on Wednesday opened its public hearing for a resolution stating its intent to establish a just, equitable and inclusive community.

Pursuing such goals as part of a select national cohort marks the first step in setting an organizational commitment to begin the work, one that will require a budget commitment from the city to fund a new position.

The bold part might sound like a broken record to Missoula citizens at this point, but that’s probably because they are hateful racists. NON-racist Missoula citizens understand the only way to bring JEDI intentions into fruition is to commit MORE MONEY for MORE GOVERNMENT.

Acronyms are fun, and in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Missoula made up ANOTHER acronym last year powered with public money. What did Missoula LEARN by creating this LISTENING ENGAGING ACTING REFLECTION NETORK?

To begin the work – and in response to the Black Lives Matter movement – the city last year created its LEARN strategy, which seeks to determine the level of implicit and explicit biases and inequities toward BIPOC residents in local government.

The LEARN team (Listening Engaging Acting Reflection Network) has already reviewed the city’s website and made changes and edits to more appropriately reflect the community and its goals, Gaukler said. Some departments have also had their public-facing documents reviewed and edited where necessary.

I wanted to get a better idea of the website work LEARN has done, so I went to the city website and there’s a BIG problem.

The picture being used to represent Missoula is an image of the Farmer’s Market and basically ALL I can see are white people. I scoured the image and the only person of color I could find is this little black girl:

For some reason (and probably because he’s racist), outgoing City Council person Jesse Ramos is not wildly supportive of using MORE government tax dollars to create MORE government in order to hire implicit bias hunters who can’t even do tokenism right.

From the link:

Ward Four Missoula City Councilor Jesse Ramos will not be running for reelection, as he informed KGVO News on Wednesday when asked to comment on the JEDI program update presented to the council during its Committee of the Whole meeting.

Ramos was deeply critical of the entire program.

“What essentially is that we’re going to be hiring more bureaucrats,” said Ramos. “At the end of the day, it’s a way for the government to sneakily grow itself by covering it with the guise of trying to seek this perfect utopia which they seem to always be chasing. But that’s just a ruse. They just care about making it look like they’re doing something to satisfy the voters.”

My first reaction to this clear example of right-wing hatred of minorities is to denounce Jesse Ramos as a hateful white man.

The only problem with that is Jesse Ramos doesn’t actually IDENTIFY as a white man, and he used his non-white heritage to make a political point. Awkward!

Ramos then spoke personally of his own Hispanic heritage.

“It’s really despicable,” he said. “I mean, I’m a Hispanic man. I’m one of two Hispanic people on the City Council, and this is the worst thing that I’ve seen come across my desk because it is discrimination in a package for us. It’s encouraging more and more of it. And it’s really exemplifies to me the soft bigotry of low expectations by saying that minority members in our community can’t get help without the nanny state of the government. They can’t get ahead unless the government is there to babysit them, and I think that’s just disgusting and insulting quite frankly. And I know a lot of minorities in the community agree with me on that.”

Jesse Ramos and other minorities in Missoula should just shut up and let our illuminated white leaders, like Mayor Engen, do what’s best for them.

Because anything less than total subservience to the JEDI virtue-signalers is racism.

Thanks for reading.