by Travis Mateer
When HuHot burned to the ground last week my first thought was whether or not the likely arsonist would be identified as homeless. An arsonist WAS arrested, but so far there’s no indication if Amy Birk is a housed alleged firebug, or a homeless alleged firebug, a distinction I’ll probably get flak for even suggesting is important.
Firefighters’ work is supposed to be all about controlling fires, not narratives, but in the geographic locations where the cultural retardation of liberalism has taken root, stories like this are slowly emerging (emphasis mine):
Gigi Graciette, a reporter for Fox 11 television, says fire officials have been advised to evade questions about homeless fires from local journalists. “Even when [high-ranking fire officials] know for a fact how a fire … was indeed connected to an encampment or to an unhoused individual, they are not to say that,” Graciette said during a February 21 broadcast. “They are just to say it’s under investigation,” she continued.
Graciette noted that “many chiefs, many battalion chiefs, many captains are extremely frustrated to see their men and their women risking their lives on fires” at the same encampments repeatedly, including one whose squatters have taken over an abandoned office building in the working class neighborhood of Van Nuys. “It was there that a battalion chief told me ‘we’ve been to this one building ten times and I’m not allowed to speak about it,’” Graciette said. “That’s just the politics at play here.”
When fires repeatedly broke out at the Reserve Street encampments, I not only reported on it (December, 2019), I identified a person of interest (August, 2021) who I knew law enforcement was familiar with. When fires broke out at the California Street/West Broadway Island encampments, blowing up some propane tanks and sending shrapnel flying, I identified a person who was actually arrested for negligent arson and known to frequent this encampment.
The earlier quote I highlighted from the California fire chief references an abandoned building that was taken over by squatters, leading to multiple calls for first responders. Did you know a building in Missoula was briefly occupied for awhile? Yep, and the hilarious irony is that the building I heard was being occupied by squatters is the same building once occupied by LEE ENTERPRISES, the newspaper company making a blogger like ME look good by sucking so bad. Even MORE hilarious is how I correctly speculated on the current owner’s shady business partner months before he was arrested by the FBI.
Another sub-population I’ve been asking unpopular questions about since 2017 is the refugee population Mary Poole has been crusading for in order to transform Missoula into a more diverse community for her children. A recent piece at Western Montana News shows that my unpopular perspective has the potential to get MORE unpopular if the numbers of relocated refugees–or alien migrants, as they are referred to in the opinion piece–are true.
Seventeen illegal aliens were arrested at a construction site in Bigfork earlier this month. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported on X they were “found to be inadmissible to the United States,” a bureaucratic phrase that masks a stark truth: they should not have been here in the first place.
Just weeks before the raid, Missoula Mayor Andrea Davis acknowledged in a meeting with the Montana Veterans Association that over 3,000 alien migrants had been placed in Missoula over the last four years. The MVA, with eyes on the ground and firsthand exposure to the crisis, estimates the true number is closer to 4,000.
In a city the size of Missoula, those numbers are not incidental. They are transformational. They represent thousands of non-citizens competing directly with Montanans for housing, public services, and jobs. And yet, this pressure point is all but ignored in the dominant narrative about Montana’s housing crisis. Instead, we are offered endless sermons about zoning reform, density, and the supposed evils of single-family homes.
When I started raising my concerns about relocating refugees in Missoula I had just come off a 7 year stint working at the local homeless shelter, so I knew quite well the difficulty that existed BACK THEN to get certain types of AMERICANS into housing. Since the pandemic, Montana has garnered national headlines for our dramatic spike in the cost of housing, and the incompetent morons on BOTH sides of the political aisle in Helena are too busy fucking around with transgender bullshit right now instead of helping the vast amount of financially struggling regular people in this state who lack an astro-turfed movement to advocate for them.
While the fire-bombing-left is busy torching Teslas and circle-jerking over the Sheepdog again, I’m wondering what Montana’s fire season will look like this year. Remember last year when a woman connected to the shelters torched a bush outside the postal office? Here’s a part of the report from KGVO at the time (emphasis mine):
Another officer responded who is also familiar with Tarango. He knows she frequents homeless shelters in the area. He drove towards one of the nearby shelters and observed Tarango heading west on North Avenue. He and another officer placed Tarango under arrest.
During a search incident to arrest, officers located a “tooter” straw and used tin foil with residue on Tarango. A clear plastic bag containing a used syringe was found in the shopping cart Tarango was pushing. An officer observed a red Bic lighter inside the cart as well.
For political twats, like Pete Talbot, who advocate for retarded, self-destructive, drug-enabling approaches to drug addiction, they better hope nothing happens to my kids at the drug den known as the public library, where I recently cleaned up drug powder and a tooter straw, because then the gloves REALLY come off in this war for the future of our local communities.
If you’d like to make a donation, like the generous one I received recently which was VERY needed, then Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to do it. Stay tuned later this week for another method I’m getting close to installing.
Thanks for reading!