by Travis Mateer

Everything in Missoula would have been just fine if it wasn’t for Republicans and their terrible, horrible, awful, very bad legislation hamstringing our illuminated braintrust from locking us down and mandating jabs and masks.

That’s the gist of Mayor Engen’s interview with CNN’s Don Lemon on Monday, which was reported locally like this (my emphasis):

In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon on Monday, Missoula Mayor John Engen said healthcare strains could have been avoided if Montana lawmakers had not passed legislation earlier this year.

“We really have none of the tools that were at our disposal early in the pandemic, which I think contributed mightily to keeping our numbers low and to keeping our community safe,” Engen said. “Those options aren’t available to use today and it’s tragic, and it’s some of the dumbest politics I’ve experienced in my 16 years as Missoula mayor.”

Actually, John, you DO HAVE A TOOL that wasn’t available to you when this all started and it’s the fucking vaccine.

Of course, Mayor Engen can’t do ANYTHING that would call into question the efficacy of Big Pharma’s ONLY solution offered to end this manipulated pandemic, so instead of dealing with the actual reality of what’s happening on the ground, he goes whining and bitching to Don Lemon like a petulant child told he can’t have his way.

To be fair to Engen, maybe he doesn’t know what’s going on in our hospitals. Is the staffing shortage due to lengthy quarantine policies keeping healthy, asymptomatic workers at home? Are workers leaving their jobs because Biden’s vaccine requirements for large employers are compelling them to leave?

Engen doesn’t want questions like those answered because he’s already got the answer: we are here at this crisis point solely because of Republicans and the unvaxxed and that’s it. Nothing more to see here.

What I’m hearing, though, is staff at hospitals like St. Pats are leaving their jobs in droves and that is driving the staffing shortage. I’m hearing the shortage is so bad that administrative personnel are doing things like changing the sheets on hospital beds.

If I had any trust in our hospitals telling us the straight story I wouldn’t give much credence to the rumors, but I DO NOT TRUST hospitals like St. Pats, especially when they won’t even disclose basic policies, like the process for how someone is removed from life support.

I found out St. Pats won’t release ANY of their policies to the public without a court order last month around the same time I recorded some footage of Michael’s rotting foot as he sat in a wheelchair a few blocks from the hospital.

To answer the question posed in the title of this post, I have a pretty good idea what Engen thinks he can accomplish by going on CNN, but to understand his goal you have to understand we are in an information war.

In this information war, trust and credibility are very important, so it’s not surprising to see new, anonymous commenters coming out of the woodwork to depict me as mentally unwell when I write about things like synchronicities.

As a former insider working with the Mayor’s Downtown Advisory Commission (pdf), I had plenty of access to the inner-workings of the Engen regime. The link goes to a PDF from 2014, just 2 years into Missoula’s 10 Year Plan To End Homelessness. Here are some of the names from back then (including mine) working on things like mitigating the negative DAYTIME antics of homeless people in order to keep downtown safe for tourists to spend money:

In so many ways, those were simpler times.

Or maybe I was just a simpler person with my trust in the stated intentions of our local leaderships still intact.

That trust is long gone. My goal now is exposing what Engen and his enablers have been doing for 16 long years.

If you would like to help my efforts, there are plenty of ways to support me at my about page.

Thanks for reading.