What’s the cost of NOT being a sellout and choosing a political team? What’s the cost of putting REAL justice ahead of a grant-grift? As a VERY broke artist who spent the summer living in his box truck, I’d say the cost is steep.
The band formerly known as War Pony found out what I found out years ago, and that’s the fact that REAL financial consequences follow when you offend and/or threaten the bottomline of certain influencers in this town, like Nick and Robin Checota.
My method was making a documentary about the 16 million dollar grift Nick Checota and our then-Mayor, John Engen, was trying to convince our community to take without scrutiny, but the opposite happened, and the only thing that finally stopped the ensuing uprising was the Covid shutdown and a pathetic felony charge directed at Brandon Bryant, which he was acquitted of.
Nick Checota and his political enablers only managed to get through those dark times–which squeezed EVERYONE financially–with copious amounts of Federal money. While politically connected state politicians, like Ellie Boldman, double-dipped in limited local relief funds to the tune of $50,000, other grifters used academia and the hilarious BLACK LIVES MATTER con-job to make money.
I’ve written previously about Tobin I LOVE THE BLACKS Shearer–like this post, and this one, and this one–but this race-baiting “academic” deserves MORE attention because I just read an article about him getting MORE grant money, this time it’s through the Mellon Foundation, which is particularly galling.
Why?
Because, when you do history like I do history, the patterns become VERY significant, like how Andrew Mellon got his start in the same city where the black man euthanized by the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office was born: Pittsburgh.
Andrew began working at his father’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bank, T. Mellon & Sons, in the early 1870s, eventually becoming the leading figure in the institution. He later renamed T. Mellon & Sons as Mellon National Bank and established another financial institution, the Union Trust Company in Pittsburgh in 1889. By the end of 1913, Mellon National Bank held more money in deposits than any other bank in Pittsburgh, and the second-largest bank in the region was controlled by Union Trust. In the course of his business career, Mellon owned or helped finance large companies including Alcoa, the New York Shipbuilding Corporation, Old Overholt whiskey, Standard Steel Car Company, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Koppers, the Pittsburgh Coal Company, the Carborundum Company, Union Steel Company, the McClintic-Marshall Construction Company, Gulf Oil, and numerous others. He was also an influential donor to the Republican Party during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.
With this context in mind, here’s how a little loose change from a DEEP pocket like Mellon dribbles down to a grifter like Tobin:
For more of a laugh, this is how the article frames the funding (emphasis mine):
The University of Montana recently received a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support a new Democracy Studies Program.
Led by history professors Claire Arcenas, Kyle Volk, and Jeff Wiltse, the grant seeks to foster democratic values and revitalize the humanities while also supporting faculty research over the next three years.
Giving money to someone like Tobin in order to “revitalize the humanities” is like trying to help heroin addicts with methadone–it DOES NOT FUCKING WORK.
While money continues to flow to people like Tobin so that he can exploit marginalize populations for a paycheck, I’m getting ready to sign a consignment contract in order to sell some shit. Here’s the shit that will be hitting the auction block soon:
The main reason I must continue to liquidate segments of my art collection is because I didn’t choose the sellout path when I had the opportunity after making my documentary, which was to join TEAM CONSERVATIVE by taking a job with Americans For Prosperity.
If I had decided to take Koch money, like one of the subjects of my documentary did, then I wouldn’t have the ability to speculate on a brewing political takeover of Montana by “Constitutional” Sheriffs, among other topics I continue to investigate.
While I continue plugging away with post after FREE post, it’s long been clear my efforts are not financially sustainable, though that doesn’t stop me from promoting Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF). Eventually, when there’s no more art to sell and other things of value to pawn away, I’ll have to decide how to do more than scrape by as the grifters enjoy the fruits of their grift.
That is, until Trump and DOGE take it all away from them!
Thanks for reading!