Who is Richard Manning? And why is he throwing a tantrum over the independent candidacy of Seth Bodnar? Today’s post will contextualize Dick’s tears and MAYBE, if you’re lucky, I’ll share a song I’ve been working on, since Dick LOVES music so much!
Manning is the author of 11 books and has worked as a journalist, reporter and editor for more than 40 years, including four years at the Missoulian. In 1995 he was the recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship from Stanford University. He is a three-time winner of the Seattle Times C.B. Blethen Award for Investigative Journalism, and also won the Audubon Society Journalism Award and the inaugural Richard J. Margolis Award in 1992.
He writes frequently about the environment, neuroscience and music. He was a senior research associate at the National Native Children’s Trauma Center based at the University of Montana, where he wrote about trauma and poverty. In addition to his eleven books, his articles have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Audubon and The Bloomsbury Review.
To understand Richard Manning and the political tribe he represents, you have to understand how Democrats in Montana have slowly abandoned working class voters, especially white ones, as a parallel economic trend shifted economic influence from extractive industry, like timber and mining, to chasing tourist dollars.
Since first winning his Senate seat in 2006, Jon Tester has had to manage the uppity expectations of his environmentalist supporters, since they’ve been claiming for 20 years that Jon Tester only won in 2006 because the environmentalist’s candidate, John Morrison, bowed out and threw his support behind Tester (they aren’t wrong).
To STAY in power after getting elected in 2006, Jon Tester exploited the political cult of public lands by deploying anonymous dark money to support the Libertarian candidate, Dan Cox. And it worked!
Now Jim Messina’s friend, Seth Bodnar, is breaking poor Dick’s heart by NOT choosing a side like that political Kentucky song sings about, the same song dumb Dick references in his tantrum op-ed:
I have a song to sing to Seth Bodnar. It’s a time-tested tune steeped in a deep history of troubles much like the troubles of our own time. If Bodnar can’t hear it, this song still might prove useful to the voters of Montana. It frames a vitally important question specific to Bodnar’s candidacy..
The song itself arose in the heat of Harlan County, Kentucky’s long, bloody battles to unionize the coal mines, but from there it spread and endured, rang out as anthem for subsequent progressive battles for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, for universal education, decent wages, all those long Democratic fights for human dignity.
In its origins it arose at the apex of a generations-long struggle of common people against the greed of Gilded Age oligarchs, of billionaires, of plutocrats. They called them “plutes” then, but it was the same deal then as now.
This Dick Manning op-ed is one of the most amusingly hollow complaints I’ve ever read. Why? Because, just two years ago, Dick lent his name and Big Sky bonafides to the “Montana Independent”, an astro-turfed effort that hurt BOTH local politics AND local media by being neither. From the link:
A national progressive media organization with ties to a Democratic Party-aligned super PAC has launched a self-described news outlet in Montana ahead of the state’s slate of high-profile elections, most prominently the race for incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester’s seat in the U.S. Senate.
Veteran political journalist Joe Conason, who oversees editorial operations for the nonprofit American Independent Foundation, told Montana Free Press via email that the Montana Independent, one of four state-level affiliates of the American Independent, was launched earlier this year. News outlets in three other political battleground states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, are also being published under the American Independent umbrella.
…
But Montana Independent writers are almost all out-of-state journalists well-established in the progressive media sphere. (One apparent exception is Montana’s Richard Manning, a former Missoulian reporter and book author married to current U.S. Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning.) Some of the officers of the foundation that funds the American Independent are also connected to American Bridge 21st Century, a Democrat-aligned political action committee that receives substantial contributions from a dark money nonprofit of the same name founded by national Democratic operative and media figure David Brock. Former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, is co-chair of the American Bridge 21st Century PAC.
The Dick Manning connection to Steve Bullock, who ran for president in 2020, is very important for reasons that will hopefully be clear by the end of this post.
Before I expound on WHY that connection screams out at me, let’s first appreciate that Dick’s wife, Tracy Stone-Manning, was selected by Joe Biden to be the director of BLM, and I’m not talking about Black Lives Mattering. Quite the opposite, as you soon will see.
Tracy Stone-Manning’s legacy among hardcore environmentalists is her role as a snitch to the Feds back in the day. For conservatives, they argued in 2021 the other side–that Stone-Manning was a key instigator in planning “eco-terrorism”:
Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) issued the following statement in response to receiving a letter from the retired special agent who was in charge of investigating the spiking of trees that were part of the Post Office Timber Sale in the Clearwater National Forest in 1989.
In the letter, the retired special agent criminal investigator for the Forest Service provided the facts of the entire case. He made clear that Tracy Stone-Manning, President Biden’s nominee to be director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), was a target of the investigation, did not cooperate with investigators until she received immunity, and helped plan the 1989 tree spiking.
Barrasso is ranking member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (ENR).
“I am grateful to the lead investigator for providing the committee with all of the facts of the case,” said Barrasso. “Not only did Tracy Stone-Manning collaborate with eco-terrorists, she also helped plan the tree spiking in Clearwater National Forest. She has been covering up these actions for decades, including on her sworn affidavit to the committee. This new information confirms that Tracy Stone-Manning lied to the committee that she was never a target of an investigation. The nominee has no business leading the Bureau of Land Management. President Biden must withdraw her nomination and if he does not, the Senate must vote it down.”
Before Biden got his turn at the presidential grift spigot, Richard Manning was helping position national Democrats at the start of Trump’s first turn. That’s why he wrote this long piece for Harper’s Magazine, titled “Political Climbers: Environmentalist momentum in the West“.
Here’s what an optimistic Manning wrote back then about Colorado’s Hickenlooper and other states around the west:
Conservation, support for the arts — these are key platforms for a politician in his position. In 2014, though Colorado voters chose the G.O.P. for the Senate, they delivered Hickenlooper, a Democrat, to a second term as governor. The state has historically leaned Republican, but in recent years its constituency has changed, and the same has been true across the West, as hiker-progressives have turned districts blue. Last November, Hillary Clinton lost Montana, my home state, to Donald Trump by 20.5 points, but in the governor’s race the nature-loving Democrat Steve Bullock beat a superrich archconservative by 4. The states along the Pacific Coast — California, Oregon, Washington — have long been dependably Democratic; now Nevada and New Mexico are trending that way, too. These states, along with Colorado, all went for Clinton last fall.
Directly after this quote Dick writes, almost casually, about a curious call Hicklenlooper received while they drove across town:
Hickenlooper and I left his office and shuttled off to an SUV for a ride across town. In the back seat, as he pored over a speech, he took a call concerning meetings he’d had a week before, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He talked for twenty minutes or so, a monologue of arcane details about computer chips on bank cards and surgical joint replacements in livestock — the minutiae of Colorado business. Then we pulled up to a suburban conference center, a bit late.
Yes, you are reading this correctly–a phone call about computer chips on bank cards from someone who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos got causally explained away by Dick Manning (along for the ride) as simply “the minutia of Colorado business”. Amazing.
Also, total horseshit.
For more horseshit, here’s Manning talking about some “hired gun” fresh from the failed Banjo-Op of Rob Quist. I really wish I was making this horseshit up.
From the far end of the table came the voice of a guy in a Patagonia vest. He was Aaron Browning, who had been working in Montana, first as a hired gun on Bullock’s gubernatorial race and then on the congressional campaign of Rob Quist, a banjo-playing Democrat from Glacier County. In the spring, Quist ran to fill the House vacancy left by Ryan Zinke, whom President Trump had chosen as his secretary of the interior; the G.O.P. had long held the seat. The Democrats appeared to have a decent shot, but Quist would ultimately lose to Greg Gianforte, a Republican multimillionaire, in a vote that was split sharply between progressive cities and the rest of the state. In the abbreviated race, public-lands politics became a factor, but so did unprecedented campaign spending, health care, and Gianforte’s body-slamming a reporter after at least two thirds of the votes had been cast. In the end, the margin was 6 points among the same voters Trump had carried by more than three times that. The possibility of such a shift, Browning believed, implied a clear strategy for conservationists: “Make our issues the signature issues in a particular election and defeat people who are outside the mainstream of the consensus.” Of politicians who fail to sign on to environmental protections, he added, “It’s our imperative to make sure they are punished for that.”
Punished, Dick? You mean, like what the clique of von Klaus did to Bernie supporters in Montana?
Steve’s righteous disgust and disavowal of Democrats is precisely the sentiment Seth Bodnar is trying to side-step in this election cycle. Will it work?
Here’s my hot-take: I don’t give a fuck if it will work because I have a different focus, and part of that focus stems from Steve Bullock’s role as the Montana Attorney General who looked the other way during the Coyote Club law enforcement scandal.
Have I asserted that the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office has essentially gotten away with murder in the case of Sean Stevenson? Yes, and this murder–which occurred on January 5th, 2020, at St. Pat’s hospital–occurred while Steve Bullock was running for president. Curious.
But it gets even MORE curious when you consider the role of Josh Manning, the guy who officially investigated Missoula’s Sheriff at the time, T.J. McDermott, for post-campaign work place retaliation. And yes, there a Manning family connection. Hmmm.
Again, I wish was making this all up, but these curated screenshots from behind the Missoulian paywall are pretty eye-opening for me, considering what I now know about this town:
Here’s more biographical context on Josh Manning:
Pattern recognition is an affliction, and I do repeatedly remind myself that correlation is NOT causation, but sometimes the thing you see quacking in front of you REALLY IS a duck, so, in that spirit, here’s Josh throwing his support behind a Smokejumper for Congress, followed by some suggested summer reading titles:
There’s more I could say, but my pattern-recognition abilities are pretty controversial these days, as are my poems, which Pete Talbot once encouraged me to publicly share with local online audiences at the blog we both contributed to, 4&20 Blackbirds. Pete’s Daddy, John Talbot, retired from the CIA in ’57 then, 30 years later, stepped away from his work for Lee Enterprises, which owns the Missoulian.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Dick Manning worked at the Missoulian around the same time Talbot retired, ’85-’87 I believe (Pete will correct me if I’m wrong).
Yeah, I totally vibe with the sentiment of I GUESS IT’S UP TO ME. Too bad I broke the leash.
Ah, what fond memories of less complicated days, before I knew how devious, despicable, and truly dangerous some of the people I’ve been exposing truly are.
Now, how about a song for ALL the dicks and pussies out there! America’s 250th birthday is SO CLOSE, yet the founding principles of this Republic have never seemed so further away. Here’s how I cope (song link):
Benny Franklin what a shock
penis key fits pussy lock
ignore for now the skull, the bones
kites fly high like planes and drones
honest, Abe, the highway sings
unlike chink and clack of rail
bifurcate then stitch back boldly
Frankenstein your holy grail
let us think about Chicago
back to eighteen ninety three
Grover Cleveland pushed the button
to make a chair of the lynching tree
Benny Franklin, bones get found
because the dead can still make sounds
but your dead dick cannot rape
and I never trusted honest Abe
Thanks for reading!