Month: August 2023

by Travis Mateer

This will probably be my last weekly review for awhile, so please do enjoy it. I have put myself on assignment for a variety of reasons, but one of them is DEFINITELY the fact a legal cloud has been placed over me by kangaroos, and I find that reality to be absolutely intolerable.

Have you ever received a friendly call from a cop telling you that both direct and indirect references to someone with a fucking BATTLE AXE to grind, even if no names are involved, could get you arrested? I have, and without legal representation to better educate me on where my right to write ends, and the petitioner’s right to not be bothered by shit I write begins, I can’t take the risk. I’ve already taken TOO MANY risks for this person.

I am going on a LONG loop, and will update this virtual space as much as possible because I’ve invested too much money, sweat and tears in building up this audience with my daily writing. Maybe we’ll even learn a thing or two about some other places that could help provide insight into the happenings of Zoom Town.

I picked up the book for this week’s reading, which you can see below, at a little donation-only shop in Darby. Here is the Wikipedia blurb for some quick context on why a Sheriff by the name of Henry Plummer got himself hung dead:

Henry Plummer (1832–1864) was a prospector, lawman, and outlaw in the American West in the 1850s and 1860s, who was known to have killed several men. He was elected sheriff of Bannack, Montana, in 1863 and served until 1864, during which period he was accused of being the leader of a “road agent” gang of outlaws known as the “Innocents,” who preyed on shipments from Virginia City, Montana to other areas. In response some leaders in Virginia City formed the Vigilance Committee of Alder Gulch and began to take action against Plummer’s gang, gaining confessions from a couple of men they arrested in early January 1864. On January 10, 1864, Plummer and two associates were arrested in Bannack by a company of the Vigilantes and summarily hanged. Plummer was given a posthumous trial in 1993 which led to a mistrial. The jury was split 6–6.

My little trip down the Bitterroot was nice, up until that phone call, because out here the effort to control narratives is easier to see.

In fact, if you want to see one of the MOST EFFECTIVE narrative assaults on the west, just watch the tv series, Yellowstone, and you will see how the narrative poison is used to soften up the targets (us) for the physical assault, which comes under the guise of innocuous sounding things, like zoning reform and equity policies.

Over the last week there was one thing I didn’t get a chance to write about, so I’ll do it now, and that’s my surprise that Heidi West articulated some public doubt about the existence of tangible results from Missoula’s equity cult. From the link (emphasis mine):

On Wednesday, Ward 1 representative Heidi West asked for the city’s budget to be amended so that the $147,180 allocated to the JEDI program would instead go to fund after-school recreation programming at Missoula Title I schools, which are federally recognized as having a certain amount of low-income students.

West told her fellow council members that the JEDI program was created in the aftermath of the summer of 2020.”

Several years into JEDI, it is still unclear what needs are being addressed, what this program is intended to do, or how success is defined,” she told the council in her request. “Program accomplishments to date, such as standardizing pay for city staff, should be addressed through existing human resources standards.”

While a little skepticism is refreshing to see, it won’t change anything. No, I don’t think ANYTHING will change until the cracks in the narrative dam widen big enough for the truth to REALLY start flowing. In that spirit, I’m leaving as a trickle with the hopes of returning as a fucking deluge.

Here are the links to last week’s articles:

What This Man Is Sharing Is Serious And Where This Is Going Is Not Good (August 14th, 2023)

On What We Leave Behind (August 15th, 2023)

Don’t Worry, Mr. Freedom, Your Secret Is Safe With Me! (August 16th, 2023)

On Stupidly Dangerous Homeless Ideas And An Irritable Métis As Montana’s New Poet Laureate (August 17th, 2023)

Did Barbie Really Come From Germany, Leaving A Scandalous Life Of Seducing Men Behind? (August 18th, 2023)

And here are the ways to support me: Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF); donation button at my about page.

Thanks you for listening/reading!

by Travis Mateer

If you didn’t already think I was crazy, the title of today’s post might cement that notion in your noggin’. Am I really claiming that Barbie was a German sex doll before a US toy corporation co-opted her to groom little girls into pining for unachievable physical dimensions?

It’s not so much MY theory, but that of Christopher Knowles at the Secret Sun blog, and I’ve come to take Mr Knowles’ interpretations of popular culture very seriously. Here’s an article that backs up what Knowles is claiming, at least in regards to Barbie’s true origins as a “high-end German call girl“.

From the link:

So it turns out Barbie’s original design was based on a German adult gag-gift escort doll named Lilli. That’s right, she wasn’t a dentist or a surgeon, an Olympian gymnast, a pet stylist or an ambassador for world peace. And she certainly wasn’t a toy for little girls…

Unbeknownst to most, Barbie actually started out life in the late 1940s as a German cartoon character created by artist Reinhard Beuthien for the Hamburg-based tabloid, Bild-Zeitung. The comic strip character was known as “Bild Lilli”, a post-war gold-digging buxom broad who got by in life seducing wealthy male suitors.

Isn’t this interesting? And a little disturbing? Certainly makes you reconsider the kind of “play” the boardrooms of corporations are REALLY interested in promoting, doesn’t it?

Poor Tie Dye Barbie, I suspect her German handlers conducted some mind control experiments on her, giving her some new programming, then sending her out in the world. What could Tie Dye Barbie’s skills entail? Drug muling? Intel work? Or maybe this seductress could infiltrate areas of culture, like the Hip Hop scene, and created targeted strife to derail up and coming Rap stars from getting TOO big and influential.

If you think the scenario I just described is an outlandish concept that couldn’t possibly happen in real life, then you clearly haven’t listened to any interviews with Elisa E., like this one with Greg Carlwood, or this one I helped conduct against my better judgement.

Now that I’ve gotten a clearer picture of what doing things against my better judgement produces, my hope is to put enough of my own miserable existence these last few years into a book so that more may be understood about what we’re up against.

If you want ANOTHER toy to help visualize the threat humanity faces, this one is more than appropriate.

Yep, insanely fucking stupid integration with technology is the Transhumanist goal because psychopaths don’t want to die, and they think technology is their ticket to immortality AND a path to achieving the total subjugation of ALL humans on the planet.

If you think this all sounds crazy, that’s probably because you haven’t been examining the achievements of psychopaths like I have over the years, and their achievements are substantial, like passing on their techniques to survivors who haven’t integrated their own trauma.

I’m going to conclude this post with a new acronym I learned about recently, and that acronym is DARVO. Here is some context from the link:

Research shows that between 0.5% to 5% of the general US population have narcissistic personality disorder in the U.S., with a greater prevalence in men than women. However, multitudes are affected by a controlling tactic that many narcissists use called DARVO.

“DARVO is an acronym that stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It describes a manipulative tactic often used by abusers to avoid taking responsibility for their actions and shift the blame onto their victims,” explains Avigail Lev, PsyD, founder of Bay Area CBT Center and CBTonline.

Narcissists and those diagnosed with personality disorders are the ones who most often use DARVO in a psychologically abusive way. It impacts the physical, mental, and emotional health of the family members, friends, and colleagues who are victimized by it. DARVO allows abusers to control the narrative and avoid accountability for their behavior.

I hope this post is educational because that’s the intent–that’s why I write–and I plan on CONTINUING to write, regardless of where I find myself physically on this strange hunk of rock called earth.

If you’d like to assist my writing, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to help, and making a donation at my about page is another.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

While I tell random paramedics at a sandwich shop the story of a black man euthanized in a private hospital room by the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, the man pictured above, Chris La Tray, just took over the Montana Laureate position from Mark Gibbons. Congratulations, La Tray, I’m sure that phone call you got from the Governor was delightful!

If Chris La Tray sported the kind of lower packaging the hair on his face suggests, he WOULD HAVE told Governor Gianforte to go fuck himself. Why? Because La Tray is An Irritable Métis, and telling people who make inaccurate assumptions to fuck themselves is a part of his brand.

Referring to Montana’s Governor as a “creation museum guy”, and implying that his election indicates “people here are dumb”, is also a part of his brand, and that’s how I, myself, got the privilege of being told to go fuck myself by An Irritable Métis. From the link:

No, Chris, I didn’t know shit about your life, which is why I formed that last sentence in my tweet as a question, which you can tell from my use of a question mark at the end of it. Maybe assuming you understood this as a writer is simply a product of my own white privilege.

Anyway, here’s the part from the article where La Tray gets a phone call from the man he once mocked from the safe distance of Twitter:

Chris La Tray didn’t start out wanting to write poetry. He was far more interested in rock n’ roll.

“I was one of those kids who thought I hated poetry because it was incomprehensible, dead white guys. So much is obtuse,” said La Tray, who grew up in Frenchtown and is an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. After graduating high school in 1986, he moved to Seattle, where he began playing in rock bands.

Along the way, La Tray found his way to poetry. A Métis storyteller, he shares his life and observations of the world through writing. He’s been back in Montana since 2005, and on Monday, he received a call from Gov. Greg Gianforte, informing La Tray that he’d been selected as Montana’s next poet laureate.

And here is the part where we learn part of La Tray’s mission will be going to…wait for it…RURAL places to hopefully make those fucking hicks less dumb. Don’t worry, since he ain’t never been to college before, like I had wrongly assumed, we can perhaps RIGHTLY assume La Tray speaks working-class (more of my emphasis):

La Tray’s intention as Montana’s next poet laureate is to bring writing and poetry to rural parts of Montana, reservation communities and tribal colleges around the state, as well as into prisons. This work is an extension of La Tray’s work with elementary students on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Reservation on behalf of the Missoula Writing Collaborative.“One of the problems I have with poetry is that it’s been blindfolded and gagged and dragged off to the ivory tower,” said La Tray, who doesn’t come from academia and didn’t attend college. “If you love something, you can pursue it and set your own framework for how to accomplish it. We shouldn’t have to go into a lifetime of debt to do all the things that we want to do.”

If I’m sounding more than a little annoyed, maybe it’s because I tortured myself earlier in the day (Wednesday) by listening to the dismaying conversation surrounding the Johnson Street shelter and where to let people do drugs.

The harm-reduction people will say do the drugs INSIDE, but the WE DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR THIS SHIT people (paid staff) will say do the fucking drugs somewhere else and let the hilarious joke of a criminal justice system deal with it (it won’t).

Since Poverello Center harm-reduction policies were a contributing factor to Sean Stevenson’s death INSIDE the fucking homeless shelter, I find this conversation absolutely maddening.

How about this: do an IN DEPTH investigation on this ONE suspicious death INSIDE the homeless shelter operating on HARM-REDUCTION policies, then, when that investigation is complete, and we all learn a thing or two, only THEN should we be talking about instituting the same stupid damn policies in a SECOND homeless shelter.

Yes, I’m yelling and swearing a lot, I know, so instead of trudging further up anger mountain, let’s stroll to the verdant valley of poetry where the ivory tower taught this privileged white guy to rhyme his ass off when the going gets as fucking obnoxious as it is right now.

If you’d like to support this white guy, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to do that, and the donation button at my about page is another.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

As someone who wrote under a pseudonym for many years, I respect a person’s right to create as many Facebook accounts as their sad little hearts desire.

For me, I started blogging as a reptile (lizard), then graduated to a more proper name using my middle name (William) and a DIFFERENT word for lizard (Skink).

Thankfully I reached peak-clever after getting tired of telling people the name of my blog out-loud, then having to awkwardly explain how I was an unwitting victim of my own cleverness (Reptile Dysfunction).

This brings us to the Facebook account of “Ty Freedom”, a person who can appreciate a late fall calf (picture above), and a person who is VERY active in accessing court documents to form opinions on developments in the Rebekah Barsotti case.

Here are some comments posted to the Facebook account last April to give you a sense what Mr. Freedom gets fired up about:

Yes, Mr. Freedom, I agree that it is VERY interesting how some people “can’t face the truth”. As a reporter, sussing out truth is my jam, but what kind of reporter am I? Mr. Freedom has some opinions on that.

Before we get to MY reporting skills, let’s take a look at the post Mr. Freedom is commenting on. Here it is:

And here is the comment thread between myself and Mr. Freedom:

Don’t tell Mr. Freedom this, but the more information he provides–like his mocking interest in my ignorance about deer skulls and the holes in the head made when hunters want to harvest antlers–actually gives me MORE insight into OTHER comments that have been made recently, like the ones by “Tannergraysucks”, which I chose to release.

Like Mr. Freedom, this commenter is ALSO interested in my misinterpretation of what that deer skull meant, and this commenter ALSO can’t seem to spell simple words correctly. I’m sure this is all just a coincidence.

This comment, as you can see, was made on one of my articles about the death of Joey Thompson, and that’s important. Why? Because Joey shares some very important things with Rebekah Barsotti. Here are some of those things:

• began as a missing person’s case
• both bodies found in the Clark Fork river
• both bodies located in Mineral County
• jurisdictional confusion
• unresponsiveness of authorities
• Guns???

That last bullet point has some question marks because this connection is still developing, but as it stands, I now have TWO people telling me that Kasen Konop has been selling illegal guns to teens in Missoula. Guns, and the people who fix and sell them (hopefully legally), are also lurking in the Barsotti case.

Is this where we could have some influence coming from a sort of ex-pat community living and possibly expanding in this area? The reason I ask is because of this carefully cropped screenshot from Konop’s list of Facebook friends:

Let me pivot from that name to a name most Americans won’t be familiar with, and that’s the name Alexander Dugin.

If you HAVE heard of this guy, maybe it was last year, when this “Putin ally” narrowly escaped a hit that got his daughter killed instead. I heard about Dugin a few years before that because his name came up in a book by Gary Lachman, titled Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. Here’s an excerpt describing Dugin’s constantly shifting persona from the 90’s onward, and his perception on the geopolitical struggle between Russia and the West (emphasis mine):

Dugin’s occult and esoteric interests were not forgotten during this time. He produced two magazines, Elementy and Dear Angel, which helped fuse the disparate elements of his extremist palette in a weird alchemy of politics and the occult. His Arktogeia publishing house–named after the supposed Arctic home of the solar Aryan race–produced his own books and others and fed a wide new audience, hungry for anything that had until only recently been forbidden. Russians in the 1990s had an immense appetite for the esoteric, the occult, the hidden, for religion, spirituality, magic, everything that had been contraband under the gray dictates of communism. An occult revival took place then, rather like the one the West enjoyed in the 1960s and ’70s. Russian man–and woman–inhibited by Soviet rule, was back. The messianic streak in the Russian soul, always ready for the millennium, had returned.

In “The Great War of the Continents,” written in the early nineties, Dugin talked about an idea that would occupy him for the rest of his career. Fundamentally it argues that with the end of the Cold War, the tensions between the East and the West have not ended, but merely changed their form. What used to be the struggle between capitalism and communism now exists as the struggle between land-based and sea-faring powers, between Russia and the West.

Montana, a land-locked state, is home to lots of different cultures, but some strains of Russian extremism could blend dangerously with home-grown strains of white extremism, and the result could be bad, especially if we have law enforcement agencies getting corrupted by dirty money from drugs, humans, and guns.

I would like to write more about this ideological overlap, and how it might be informing local politics, but I’ll have to back-burner this for a later date, as more pressing matters require my attention.

If you appreciate the work I’m doing, and the risks I’m taking to increase people’s awareness of the craziness lurking just beneath the surface of this beautiful town, then Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to support my work, and the donation button at my about page is another.

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

Say hello to Captain John Mullan, a man who blazed a serious trail through the Pacific Northwest. Here’s a brief account of his achievement:

In the spring of 1859, after five years of study and survey, the U.S. War Department appropriated funds for the construction of a military wagon road between Fort Walla Walla in Washington Territory and Fort Benton on the Missouri River. Lieutenant John Mullan (1830-1909) of the U.S. Army was assigned to get the job done. With the labor of 200 hired men and soldiers, and more than two years of toil, Mullan blazed a 611-mile trail through dense forests, over mountains, and across marshlands and raging rivers. When completed in 1862, the Mullan Military Road became the first wagon road to traverse the Rocky Mountains into the inland Northwest, and Mullan was rewarded with promotion to the rank of captain.

This statute is located on North Higgins and looks like an obelisk from the other side. It got me thinking about what we leave behind, what’s lasting, and how things change over time.

This is John’s midsection, where ACAB and LAND BACK are scrawled on either thigh. What does ACAB mean? I’m pretty sure it means ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS.

With dynamics regarding police and private security changing–something I’m reporting on and providing public comment on whenever possible–it’s particularly galling to be turned away from attending a public meeting of City Council for the SECOND WEEK in a row.

Why is this happening?

It’s happening because I’ve earned the scorn of someone who is desperately trying to manipulate an order of protection (that I can’t find a lawyer to defend myself against) in order to shut me up because I’ve entered the pantheon of supposed abusers she’s at war with. What does this person’s war with abusers mean? It means extra-judicial actions, like secretly recording the County Attorney who refused to prosecute ANOTHER person who wronged her, then playing the recording for me to prove how terrible he is.

While I write this, I’m trying to listen to City Council online, but the technology seems to be malfunctioning on THEIR end, which highlights why I like to go IN PERSON to Council in order to provide comments. Tonight, I was thinking about reading a poem. Here it is:

After I blocked the person who is now using the courts to hurt me as much as possible, the harassment I had been experiencing shifted to my mother. This is how I found out a bullet-pointed list of 16 demands to achieve “peaceful resolution” with this person had been emailed to me. This happened BEFORE the order of protection, because the THREAT of legal action was one of this person’s points of leverage over me. It was DO THIS…OR ELSE!

When I asked what would happen if I didn’t acquiesce to these demands, here were the 4 consequences I was told I would experience:

Despite this incredibly upsetting process that had my mother so stressed out she forgot to pick up my kids one day, I continue to be VERY restrained with describing the risks I’ve exposed myself to by trying to be a collaborating partner with this person, then–and this is my biggest regret–more than that. Those risks include all the political connections she can wield against me.

One stark example of the personal risk I’ve taken over the last year and a half is the following letter some coward sent to the house where I no longer live last October:

I remember spending some time with my now-petitioner discussing who the sender could be. One of the possibilities was the woman who was once this person’s boss and supposed friend for many years, Susan Hay Patrick. My reasoning for SHP being the sender is because an NBC Montana reporter told me SHP tried slandering me as mentally unstable a few years ago as she was looking into something Susan didn’t want her to look into.

Where does this leave me? It leaves me with a lot of worry and anxiety that a person with a legal background, lots of political connections, an employer who used to be my lawyer, and a GIANT axe to grind, has me pinned to a legal cloud I can’t escape without legal representation, and even if I DO find legal representation, it will cost me thousands of dollars I don’t have.

I reached out to a rabble-rouser who I declared the most dangerous woman in Montana to see if she knew any lawyers I could call, but I’m sad to report this brave woman suffered a pretty serious stroke last Thursday and cannot speak.

After sleeping too long too early, I dragged my sorry ass out of bed to bike to the only place open, Pie Hole. While I tried enjoying the night air with my slice, some dude started going through the trash. Was he looking for food? No, he was looking for tinfoil, and when he found some he went straight to the bathroom inside. I told the guy slinging slices what was probably happening in the bathroom, then left in disgust.

I believe time eventually takes care of all things, so I’m going to focus on creating what I will leave behind, which I hope will eventually be an honest documentation of my time in this valley and what I have done to bring some illumination to the darker parts of Zoom Town.

Now, here’s the poem as a song:

And here’s how to support my work: Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF), or the donation button at my about page.

Thanks for reading!