Caring About Dead People Awards – by Travis Mateer

The first award in this one-off post honoring the ability to care about dead people goes to Gwen Florio, the reporter/crime-fiction writer who noticed the death of Sean Stevenson then congratulated herself and her employer for noticing. Let’s call this award BEST VIRTUE-SIGNALING PERFORMANCE BY A WOMAN

When I saw that Florio had inserted a homeless character into one of her shitty fiction books, I thought I couldn’t be more disgusted with this virtue-signaling “reporter” who lit up Missoula with her rape culture stories before leaving this town to return to the east coast. Then I found this:

Emotions ran high in the university town of Missoula, Montana, on April 12, 2010.

Police termed it “a night of chaos,” with rowdy demonstrators and counter-protesters clogging the streets around City Hall. Within, a tense debate ran well past midnight over what would become Montana’s first nondiscrimination ordinance against LGBTQ+ people.

The surrounding hubbub might explain why it took far too long for the man slumped in a nearby alley to rate a second glance. The alley was within sight of both City Hall and the Oxford Saloon, a hangout for the Missoula’s transients. A passed-out drunk near the Ox was par for the course.

By the time Johnny Joe Belmarez rated that second look, he was dead.

Yet more time passed before the reason – initially listed as due to natural causes – was ruled a homicide, after a coroner found the head injury overlooked at a hospital.

This article, published on the exact day Sean Stevenson was assaulted inside the Poverello Center in 2020, is the kind of bullshit our local narrative-controllers appreciate because it frames violence as an aberration of Missoula’s utopia status. This line of deceptive framing is emphasized a few paragraphs later, when Florio, fresh on the “cops and courts” beat, says this:

Murder is so rare in Missoula that the homicide charges against the pair were the first in three years. At the time, I was still new to what we called the “cops and courts” beat at the Missoulian newspaper, and theirs would be the first homicide trials I covered for the paper.

If you don’t understand how reality functions in a college town like Missoula, let me explain what the phrase “covered for the paper” really means. It means “controlled for the community”, because college towns, like Missoula, can’t have the impression that street violence has become so ubiquitous that, in Florio’s own words, Johnny’s brutal beating wasn’t even initially noticed by St. Pats–the same hospital where the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office murdered Sean Stevenson.

If Gwen Florio was more curious than her paycheck required, maybe she would have wondered how a hospital could have listed Johnny’s death as a death due to “natural causes” in the first place. If that had stood, there would have been no murder, right? Is it possible the hospital had done this before? That would be the question I would be asking myself, and that is the reason I was dishes and Gwen publishes books with titles like “The Least Among Us”.

Since Gwen Florio had just arrived in Missoula, how the fuck would she know about the rarity of murder? There is a distinction this “reporter” purposefully isn’t making, and that’s the distinction murders that a County Attorney charges vs. the murders that get swept under the rug as “naturally caused”, or “accidental”, if it’s a woman in a body of water.

I gave Gwen a call and left a voicemail message giving her a chance to comment on my inclusion of her role in my book, but so far I haven’t heard back. Oh well. I guess she’s too busy preparing her next trip to Italy.

Moving on, the next award–let’s call this one the BEST TDS ASS-COVERING PERFORMANCE–goes to Dave Budge, someone who used to ply comment threads in the Montana blogosphere with his seeming well-reasoned thinking. That is, until the TDS took hold (Trump Derangement Syndrome).

Since the “left” and funny Never-Trumpers, like Dave, are strategically sad about blown up narco-boats, there’s some ass-covering required as Obama’s drone legacy is being used by the people who LOVE those blown up narco-boats.

Here’s an example of this thinking from Jim Bovard:

The Trump administration’s killings of scores of Venezuelans are justifiably provoking outrage. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently proclaimed, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.” Donald Trump and Hegseth are cashing a blank check for carnage that was written years earlier by President Barack Obama.

In his 2017 farewell address, Obama boasted, “We have taken out tens of thousands of terrorists.” Drone strikes increased tenfold under Obama, helping fuel anti-US backlashes in several nations.

With this in mind, here’s the ass-covering I found on Dave’s X account that nearly made me LOL:

I’m sure Dave believes his disapproval at the time was “loudly voiced”, but here’s the thing: I remember blogging about this very topic at 4&20 Blackbirds at the time, like this post about Jeremy Scahill getting shade from Obama supporters for calling Obama’s murderous actions murderous. For an example of my framing of this issue, here’s a screenshot:

And here’s Dave, being oh so reasonable in his deflection to Congress for allowing Obama to become the DRONE KING:

I don’t disagree with Dave here, but, for contrast, let’s see what TDS has done to his cognition in 2025:

No deflection to Congress, Dave? This is why I finally muted Mr. Budge on X, and it’s why Dave gets the “TDS ass-covering” award.

The last award I’ll give is to a local supporter of Zoom Chron who asked me if the body found on November 14th by a hiker on the Kim Williams trail has been identified yet. As far as I can tell, no, so I emailed the narrative control gate keeper for the Sheriff’s Office, Jeannette, to remind her that caring about dead people is not always a performance or political posture, sometimes regular people get curious about who is dying and how in our community. Weird, I know.

Thanks for reading!