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A local podcast about dead people is getting some more media hype because Apple named it one of the best new podcasts of 2026.

A podcast borne out of a journalism classroom at the University of Montana has been named to Apple Podcasts’ “Best So Far” list for 2026.

In an arena full of thousands upon thousands of programs, what was it that made this one stand out? UM News Service tells us that Apple’s “Best-So-Far” List for 2026 has recognized this Griz endeavor as one of the year’s standout new shows.

As a podcast failure and financial loser who never got any of the important people to care about the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office killing of Sean Stevenson, maybe I should take some notes about how a professor at the University of Montana managed to get important people, like Jad Abumrad, to take her dead-person storytelling to the next level.

Abumrad was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow; the foundation cited his “engaging audio explorations of scientific and philosophical questions” which “captivate listeners and bring to broadcast journalism a distinctive new aesthetic”, while using “his background as a composer to orchestrate dialogue, music, and sound effects into compelling documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics.”

…

In 2018 Abumrad hosted the four-part podcast series “UnErased,” which tells the stories of survivors of gay conversion therapy.

One clue about how Jule Banville managed to get a successful podcast up and running about dead people is that she knows where NOT to tread when it comes to certain stories, like a young Native man who allegedly shot himself after local law enforcement pulled him over.

To show you what I’m talking about, here’s a screenshot from The Obit Project’s website with the part of the narrative summary stating what this story is NOT about highlighted for emphasis:

Since my interest in dead people tends to focus on HOW they became dead, especially when the facilitators of death wear badges and act cagey about disclosing information to family members in a timely manner, I’m still curious about what transpired in THIS case with Galbreath’s family, according to the reporting at the time from Montana Free Press:

The early description of the incident began with Galbreath being pulled over on Missoula’s Great Northern Avenue shortly after midnight. While details of the stop and any interaction between the police officer and Galbreath remain undisclosed, police scanner audio first published by the Missoulian depicts an officer saying “he’s taken off on me,” apparently referring to Galbreath driving away.

Officers communicated over radio as they pursued Galbreath in their vehicles with sirens blaring until police brought the chase to an end on Stephens Avenue close to 1 a.m. Soon after, shots were fired.

The police department has said that officers on the scene provided medical assistance and called for Emergency Medical Services. Galbreath was transported to St. Patrick Hospital, where he later died.

Even after Monday’s announcement, many details of the incident remain publicly unknown. In a Friday interview with Montana Free Press, LaFromboise said Galbreath’s parents were not aware of their son’s hospital admission until medical staff called to tell them he had died. LaFromboise said that call came in around 5:20 a.m., roughly three hours after Galbreath had reportedly been admitted to the intensive care unit.

Missoula EMS and the Missoula Police Department have declined to say when Galbreath was transported to the hospital.

In this case, and others like it, the investigating agency that helps clear law enforcement 99% of the time is the Department of Criminal Investigation, or DCI.

Here’s how that path was laid out by Brian Lockerby for Galbreath’s family:

Lockerby announced that DCI will not be making any additional public statements as the investigation continues.

“Our agency makes no assumptions and draws no conclusions. We gather facts and produce a comprehensive investigative report,” Lockerby said, adding that the division’s final report will be delivered to the Missoula County attorney. After that, he said, the case will “likely” become a coroner’s inquest.

When the “likely” coroner’s inquest eventually materialized, it produced the predicable conclusion of NOTHING TO SEE HERE, which is what every coroner’s inquest I’ve seen and/or researched has concluded. And larger media platforms just let those narratives solidify without challenge, like Banville did in this case.

Is this a relevant factor in her podcast’s success?

Another episode of The Obit Project covers the death of Wayne Boyes, the late farmer/husband of a bad-ass woman I recently chatted with, since her family helped end Ryan Funke’s embarrassing tenure as Sheriff of Mineral County.

Part of this effort to fire Ryan Funke from his Sheriff position entailed publicly sharing painful details of a personal tragedy for the Boyes family that Ryan Funke made WORSE by bringing DCI in to cover his ass, directly referencing the heat he got for his role in mishandling the Rebekah Barsotti case (a case I wish I had never gotten involved with) as his justification.

The episode that really drove home for me how a successful podcast operates is the dead homeless man Banville curated for her NPR-loving audience.

Ok, I think I’m starting to understand now. This gnome-looking homeless man from Billings, who notably lived “off-grid” by choice, is definitely a safer and therefore smarter “obit” story to document than what I chose to dive head-first into.

For additional context, the homeless obit story I stupidly decided to give a shit about examines this weird idea–one that’s apparently a foreign concept to authorities in Big Sky country–and that’s the idea that a family should get a say in WHEN authorities pull the life-support plug on a beloved family member.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen for Sean Stevenson and his family.

A member of Sean’s family did finally come to Missoula this year, though only briefly, to survey the geography where Sean lived before the coroner killed him, but I’m saving the details of that story for another time, since to tell it the way I’d like to tell it would put me in further legal jeopardy right now.

If you sympathize with how loudly I’ve failed over the years with my unique and costly shit-giving about the wrong kind of dead people, please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps.

Thanks for reading!

Dave Stalling is a gay Veteran with PTSD and he wants you to feel bad that he wasn’t treated like a prince at a local grocery, so he wrote an op-ed about what happened.

Dave Stalling didn’t approach Yolks to shop for food, it was to beg for help after this Veteran left his house with no shoes, no wallet, and a barely-charged phone that ran out of power shortly after his car ran out of gas. It was in this sorry state of total retardation that Dave Stalling tried to get help from some local working stiffs on West Broadway:

I’m the guy who runs out of gas. The guy who forgets his wallet. The guy who somehow ends up barefoot in places where shoes are apparently required. My son once told me that hanging out with me was like living inside a Seinfeld episode.

He’s not wrong.

Yet somehow I’ve managed to build a pretty good life. I’ve become a successful writer. I’ve led wildlife conservation organizations. I’ve become a popular public speaker on grizzlies, wolves, and other wildlife. I’ve met with senators and members of Congress. I’ve testified before the U.S. Senate about climate change and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

People know I’m a little crazy, and mostly they laugh with me.

Lately, though, something feels different.

Maybe the world has changed. Maybe people have become less patient. Less willing to see the human being standing in front of them. Maybe I’m becoming more crazy. I don’t know. But something feels different.

I also have PTSD.

With this introduction, Dave Stalling is setting up the reader to sympathize with his sad plight, when the reality is he expected to be treated like a special little toddler who should get the red carpet rollout by a grocery store manager who has to deal with dangerous insanity and real violence every day, since Yolks is in the homeless war-zone near the location where someone was literally stabbed to death in the early morning hours yesterday.

Despite this harsh cultural reality, here’s how Dave goes on to describe his sad plight of being a retarded gay Veteran with PTSD who ran out of gas and found himself on West Broadway with no wallet, shoes, or a functioning phone:

So there I was.
No gas.
No money.
No phone.
No shoes.

Just another day in the life of Dave.

I decided the first priority was getting my phone charged so I could call someone for help.

I walked across the street to the gas station connected to the nearby grocery store, Yolks (formally a Safeway). Before I even went inside, I stood in the doorway and called out,

“Sir, I know I’m not supposed to come in without shoes, but I’m in a real jam.”

The employee couldn’t have been kinder.

He listened.
He understood.
He had empathy.
He wanted to help.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have a phone charger. He suggested I try the grocery store.

Dave walks directly to the main store, burning his feet because he’s retarded, and almost gets compassion until the mean upholder of rules arrives to explain to Dave something the military should have drummed into his retarded head years ago: rules are rules, and you are NOT a special snowflake, Dave.

I guess he didn’t the memo.

Inside, another employee listened while I explained that I knew I shouldn’t be in the store barefoot but I was in a real bind and just needed to charge my phone long enough to call for help.

He was incredibly kind.

He found a charger and even let me sit near the entrance while my phone charged.

Then the manager walked over. His name is Rich Thornock.
Before I could explain anything, he told me to leave.

I tried.

“Sir, I’m in a jam…”

“I don’t care. Rules are rules. Out!”

“I’m a Marine Corps veteran…”

“I don’t care. Rules are rules. Out!”

“One of your employees was kind enough to…”

“I don’t care. Rules are rules. Out!”

Over and over.

He wouldn’t let me finish a sentence. He wouldn’t let me say a word. Nothing mattered but the rules.

At one point I even joked,
“I suppose that’s why they call them rules… because they’re rules?”

It must have been REALLY TOUGH for Dave Stalling to use the phrase “I’m a Marine Corps Veteran…” and STILL not get special treatment, but that’s what happened. Then, after his smart-ass joke routine also fell flat, Dave eventually resorted to a verbal assault like a toddler throwing a tantrum:

I was exhausted.
My feet were burned.
I had no gas.
No money.
No phone.
I wasn’t asking for money.
I wasn’t asking for special treatment.
I was asking another human being for help.
Instead, all I got was,
“Rules are rules.”

Someone later told me the store is near the homeless shelter and store employees deal with people experiencing mental illness every day.

So what?
If the manager thought I was homeless, so what?
If he thought I had a mental illness, so what?
Is that a reason not to listen?
Is homelessness a crime?
Is mental illness?
Is desperation?

Because if that’s the standard we’ve adopted, we’re in deeper trouble than my dead phone, empty gas tank and shoeless feet.

Eventually Rich threatened to call the police. I told him to go ahead.

Yes, I got angry. But my anger didn’t come first. It came after being given absolutely no opportunity to explain my situation.

I knew the rules.
I even knew that the rules are rules.
I wasn’t asking him to pretend the rules didn’t exist.
I wasn’t asking him to let me shop barefoot.
I wasn’t asking for special treatment.

I was asking him to listen.
For thirty seconds.
He wouldn’t.

Actually, Dave, you WERE asking for special treatment because apparently you think you ARE such a special guy that the rules SHOULD HAVE BEEN suspended for you, and, when that didn’t happen, you put a grocery store manager into the position of calling the police.

If you’re worried about how the cops treated Dave, don’t be, because we’re NOT talking about Brandon Bryant here and the violence visited upon HIM last August after he didn’t make those cowardly Missoula cops who beat him up on the sidewalk feel safe by putting his big stick down fast enough so they could assault him.

No, since Dave Stalling really does appear to be a special case, this is how our fine law enforcement officers put the kid gloves on and dealt with him after he lost his temper and started verbally assaulting the grocery store manager:

After a while it became obvious that he wasn’t responding to me as a person anymore. I had become a problem to remove instead of a human being standing in front of him.

That was frustrating.
That was humiliating.
And yes, it made me angry.

By then my Marine Corps vocabulary had returned in full force. I told him exactly what I thought of him. It included a lot of profanity.

I’m not proud of that. Losing my temper didn’t help anything.
But pretending it came out of nowhere wouldn’t be honest either.

The police arrived cautiously. I don’t blame them. But here’s what happened next.

They listened.
They asked questions.
One officer smiled.
“What rank were you
In the Marine Corps?”
“Sergeant.”
“I can see that,” he said.

The police understood.
The police had empathy.
The police helped me.
They asked me to leave the property, which was perfectly fair.
Then they called the crisis response team.

Isn’t this nice? Instead of killing him, like the cops did to Ross Robertson, or beating him up, like they did to Brandon Bryant, they called some crisis ladies to pat Dave Stalling on his retarded little head.

Two wonderful women showed up.
They listened.
They understood.
They had empathy.
They helped me.
They gave me a gas card.
They got me back on the road.
They wished me well.

Imagine that. Human beings helping another human being.
That’s all I’d been looking for.

Dave finally got what he had been looking for in the paid response of crisis ladies arriving on-scene once the paid response of cops was no longer required, and once the crisis ladies were able to deal with this grown adult man incapable of putting some flip-flops on his fucking feet before leaving the house, Dave was able to calm down and start reflecting on the larger societal ramifications of his retarded plight:

This story isn’t really about one grocery store manager. It’s about a society that says it supports veterans, people with PTSD, people experiencing mental illness, and people in crisis—until those people actually show up.

We put “Support Our Veterans” magnets on our cars. We hold mental health awareness campaigns. We tell people to ask for help. Then, when someone actually needs help, we hide behind policies.

Rules matter. But compassion matters more. Rules exist to serve people. People were never meant to serve rules.

What Dave might not understand, since he appears to be quite retarded, is that rules derive from taboos, and taboos derive from observing and adjusting behavior based on seeing and understanding undesirable outcomes, like how fucking members of your own family makes retarded babies. That’s why, Dave, in order to AVOID producing retarded babies, we turned taboos into rules and laws, and we did this to improve society. Based on your story it’s obviously more needs to be done.

Is Dave done bemoaning his treatment and what this means for Missoula and for America? Nope. He’s got a few more rounds left in the chamber to fire off before hopefully packing a go-bag in preparation for his next excursion into the wilds of West Broadway:

No one was asking Rich to abandon the store’s policy.
He could have asked me to step outside while my phone continued charging.
He could have spent thirty seconds listening.
He could have found any number of ways to enforce the rules while still treating another human being with dignity.

Instead, the rule became more important than the person.

Maybe I am a little crazy. Maybe I always will be. But I believe the measure of a community isn’t how it treats people who have everything together. It’s how it treats the people who show up with burned feet, a dead phone, no wallet, no gas, and nowhere else to turn.

Because someday that person might be you.

And when that day comes, I hope you meet someone who understands that sometimes the most important rule isn’t written in a policy manual. It’s simply this:

Listen first.
Help if you can.
Remember the person standing in front of you is a fellow human being.

Show some understanding.
Show some empathy.
Show some kindness.

Since Dave doesn’t get it, let me explain what he’s missing.

West Broadway is the ugly transportation corridor in Missoula that really showcases what TOXIC empathy has done, and it was done to this town by some very toxic people who have been exploiting Missoula’s kindness for many years.

To better help Dave have some understanding, this is the part of town where drug addicts burrowed beneath the literal road and cost the Department of Transportation $20,000 dollars to patch up the hole.

It’s also the part of town where a CITIZEN was arrested for picking up trash because picking up trash angered those hole-burrowing drug addicts in their natural, meth-fueled environment.

And, last but not least, it’s where I got down and dirty with a like-minded friend to do a homeless camp cleanup and found a fully functional and disgusting homeless sex swing, which I dismantled and eventually got arrested for myself during the state of the community event where I tried making this retarded community LESS retarded through education (but instead got schooled by the University of Lawfare).

One final note before I conclude this rhetorical dismantling of Dave. Since he likes Grizzly bears, and nature, and is pictured wearing a “Trout Unlimited” hat, I’ll offer Dave an opportunity: help me (a fellow retarded person) understand why the Buckhouse bridge landfill isn’t being fully cleaned up, because it’s really stumping me, and doing the research I need to do is a lot more difficult when you’re forbidden from going downtown without permission from your ankle-monitor professional.

Anyway, if you, dear reader, appreciate someone dumb enough to say what others just walk around thinking, please consider donating to my citizen journalist mental health fund. Any little bit helps as I try to mitigate the costs of taking classes at the University of Lawfare.

Thanks for reading!

Krambu killer, Jennie Dixon, really wanted the process to play out. In fact, according to Dixon, she encouraged Krambu to stay the course because Missoula County could have been the first county in ALL OF AMERICA to show the country how to do this data center thing the RIGHT way.

“I was surprised they decided to withdraw their application,” said county planner Jennie Dixon. “I was encouraging them to stay the course because, wouldn’t it be fantastic if Missoula could be the poster child for how to do a data center the right way? That’s our goal with this interim pause, to figure out how to be the example for the country on how to do these the right way.”

The “interim pause” being proposed allows local officials to “study” this issue. Part of this process includes sending a lame-duck County Commissioner to the National Association of Counties to assess that the data centers of 2023 are NOT the data centers of 2026. Amazing insight, Josh!

Commissioner Josh Slotnick attended a meeting with the National Association of Counties earlier this year where data centers were a point of conversation, he said.

“This was the biggest topic,” Slotnick said. “The data centers of 2023 aren’t the data centers of 2026.”

Another person who should be celebrating this data center development is the guy who did a petition. YOU REALLY CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE the NBC Montana headline shouted! All you need is a COMPUTER (the irony) and the gumption to say NOT IN MY BACKYARD!

NBC Montana caught up with Paul Barmore, who started the petition “Reject permits for the AI data center in Bonner, MT.” The petition has garnered over 48,000 signatures throughout the process.

When asked if he thought he’d be interviewed on Monday without the petition, Barmore said, “I don’t believe so, no.”

Change.org, the internet petition website that NBC Montana points out is the only reason they gave a shit about interviewing Paul Barmore, received financial backing from Reid Hoffman, according to Wikipedia:

Change.org makes revenue through a subscription membership model and people promoting petitions on the site. In 2013 the organization’s CEO stated its mission: “Our role is to empower people everywhere to create the change they want to see.”

Change.org is a for-profit, “venture-backed company that hosts activist petitions written by members of the public, gathers email addresses from signees, and encourages people to circulate the petitions heavily on social media. While for-profit, Change.org is a public benefit company with B Corp status.” It has raised US $72 million from backers, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

And Reid Hoffman, for those who don’t know, is heavily connected to Jeffrey Epstein.

Reid Hoffman has defended his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as limited to “fundraising,” via a handful of calls, emails and in-person meetings that ended in March 2018. But documents recently released by the US Justice Department suggest a longer and more personal relationship that’s drawing scrutiny to a major Democratic Party donor.

The LinkedIn Corp. co-founder and venture capitalist first met Epstein through fundraising work with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, five years after Epstein pled guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution and served time in jail. Over the years they exchanged gifts — dumbbells for Hoffman, a metal surfer statue for Epstein — with Hoffman staying at both Epstein’s Caribbean island and his townhouse on New York’s Upper East Side.

And in May 2018, emails show Hoffman reaching out to Epstein about investing in a new fund being raised by entrepreneur Joi Ito, then the director of the MIT Media Lab. Billionaire Hoffman was putting his own money into the fund, which was unrelated to the university.

“Joi says that you’re on the fence around investing in the fund — worth scheduling a skype call for that? OK if no,” Hoffman wrote.

“Always can make time for a Reid skype :)” Epstein replied.

I hope these uncomfortable facts about Epstein and his investor pal sinking money into the same online protest infrastructure used by 48,000 idiots doesn’t dampen the celebratory mood because people really do need to feel like they have some control left in a world run by billionaire child-fuckers.

So HOORAY! You killed the data center, kids! Now go make an Instagram reel about it and maybe you’ll go viral.

If you appreciate my local reporting on this data center freak-out, like how I was the ONLY ONE to report that this former mill site no longer has a discharge permit, then consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps as I defend myself against the latest round of lawfare that no paid reporter in Missoula appears motivated to report on (yet).

Thanks for reading!

Today’s post is about figuring out who you are and choosing the correct path.

Are you a CJP (Criminal Justice Professional) being investigated for your role as Missoula’s chief city prosecutor? If so, then Kirsten Pabst’s “Thriving Through Chaos” might be the perfect thing to help you navigate the scrutiny of your alleged professionalism.

Maybe you’re worried about being an NPC (Non-Player Character) who lacks autonomy in this chaotic world. For a better model on NOT being a powerless little bitch, the late Gordon White might have some insights worth considering in his book, titled “The Chaos Protocols”. Let’s begin.

After reading Kirsten Pabst describe a scenario where a cop gets morally injured after removing an illegal homeless encampment (versus removing his life, which is more the style of the Sheriff’s Office), I am now VERY WORRIED about how morally injured our Sheriff’s Office might be, collectively, after the coroner killed Sean Stevenson in a private hospital room six years ago. I’m especially worried about Bob Franke, who was apparently in that room watching Sean Stevenson die.

According to Kirsten Pabst, the poorly-managed stress of her colleagues means that a lot of her fellow lawyers are increasingly fucked up on drugs and alcohol as they become, in her words, mentally ill from doing their very difficult jobs. There was even a report in 2017, cited in Pabst’s book, warning us how fucked up lawyers were getting nearly a decade ago!

The National Task Force on Lawyer Wellbeing issued a report, The Path to Lawyer Wellbeing: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change, after conducting an extensive survey of the well-being or, not-so-wellbeing, of the legal profession in 2017. That report documented the reality that the legal profession is suffering in almost every aspect of wellbeing, with more lawyers than ever struggling with alcohol abuse, drug use, mental illness, ambivalence toward work, heightened risk of physical ailments and even suicide. A recent survey found that early-career lawyers are suffering even more. The ABA’s Women in Criminal Justice Task Force, recently concluded that current hiring, retention and promotion of women in criminal justice is a problem and noted that women–particularly women of color–were leaving the field at higher than usual rates.

One of my favorite pages in Kirsten Pabst’s book is the page that couldn’t have been included if Kirsten Pabst had a penis instead of a vagina, since it implies that fat people aren’t healthy and might need to exercise if they want to be good CJPs. There’s even an image of a fit women about to some YOGA!

Obviously, without a vagina or official role in the world of Criminal Justice Professionals, Kirsten Pabst’s book is not for me. Gordon’s book, on the other hand, references Philip K. Dick and quotes occultists, like Aleister Crowley, so perhaps THIS approach is more apt to my knowledge and skillset?

You could say I adopted a “chaos magic headspace” six years ago after I stopped flooding my brain with box wine and started actively fighting back against the local narrative controllers who helped the psychopath class drag us into the cognitive meat-grinder of weaponized deception around the same time the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office thought they could euthanize a homeless man in this liberal college town and no one would be paying enough attention to care.

Caring about deep corruption is one thing, but doing something about it is quite another. Despite what I might look like on paper, I’m encouraged by the fact it’s taken the CJPs so much bandwidth to maintain their myriad deceptions. If it takes this much to shut up just one persistent blogger with a computer and sense of purpose derived from alcohol abstention, imagine what could be accomplished if I had actual resources!

For now it’s up to individual donors, like YOU, to support my citizen journalism, which anyone can do here. Any little bit helps.

Thanks for reading!

No, Garrison Courtney was NEVER an CIA agent.

After being raised in Great Falls, and educated at the University of Montana, Garrison Courtney was A LOT of things, like a weatherman for a local news station in Missoula, and a spokesperson for the DEA, but a CIA agent?

Nope, that was just something Garrison Courtney claimed to be in order to steal money from suckers in schemes that sound A LOT like what Matt Marshall did to Montana’s billionaire transplant , Mike Goguen.

After Courtney graduated from UM in 2000, his charm offensive continued, now as a weatherman for KPAX-TV, the CBS affiliate in Missoula. The Missoula Independent named him 2000’s best forecaster, and he was the “celebrity cameo” at a local ballet performance of Cinderella.

Then it was off to the CBS station in Eugene, Oregon, where a former colleague remembers him as “more interested in being funny than doing the weather.” At KVAL, Courtney was on a one-year contract requiring that he clear any changes to his appearance with management. So it was a shock when he showed up to work one day with white-blonde hair.

“He said it was some charity thing… but anyone in TV knows if you change your appearance, they can fire you,” the former co-worker said. “[The news director] didn’t know about it until he was already on the air. When she found out, she came out and said, ‘You go home and do not come back until you look like you did before.’”

A station manager who worked with Courtney said he remembered him as “a good-natured, big lug kind of a guy.”

“When I heard about the [case], I thought, ‘That guy pulled this off?’ It just didn’t seem possible,” the station manager said. “My impression wouldn’t have been that he was diabolical or clever enough to dupe anybody out of $4 million.”

I only just heard about this guy a few days ago thanks to the Instagram algorithm showing me a reel, but when I dug into the story a little more this morning, the name Bill Foley popped up. Yes, the same Bill Foley who just used his daughter’s college experience to bash Seth Bodnar for not keeping her safe from a serial public masturbator.

What a small world!

The documentary shows me laughing at some of Garrison’s cons. I don’t think he was a third-degree black belt, but I’m sure he knew enough about martial arts to get by.

I also don’t think he taught a self-defense class at UM simply to meet women. Those women probably learned some valuable lessons from Garrison. But I bet he charmed a few of them into dates.

It was also funny that he was voted the best weatherman in Missoula, even though he had zero meteorologic training.

While this story gives people like Bill Foley a chance to yuck it up for tv, it’s actually quite troubling to read how con artists, like Garrison Courtney and Matt Marshall, wormed their way into the confidence of allegedly discerning government officials and private sector corporate business men.

Maybe it was Courtney’s actual membership with the Freemasons that helped him sell his con:

For K.B., the first inkling that something was amiss came in the fall of 2012 as he was putting together a business plan for a cybersecurity startup focusing on national security issues. K.B., who was still on the payroll at his defense contractor job, asked Courtney to review the documents for his new venture.

After a month or so, Courtney texted with good news. He said he wanted to introduce K.B. to Curtin Winsor Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, whom Courtney claimed to know from the Freemasons, where he had been active for years. (The Daily Beast has seen the texts and emails between Courtney and K.B.)

…

Despite the progress, K.B. had a nagging feeling about the situation. Instead of offering a $1 million equity investment, the ambassador wanted to give K.B. a $10 million loan at a 1 percent interest rate, which didn’t make sense for someone looking for a tax shelter.

Plus, K.B. and the ambassador had not yet met in person. Winsor explained that he believed in Courtney, and since Freemason rules forbade him to give money directly to other members, he figured he would do the “next best thing” and invest in one of his friends.

I’m not sure what it is about Big Sky country that seems to make this state a target-rich environment for grifters and conmen, but I’ve written about a handful of them over the years, like Jason Stevens who ran Glacier Hope Homes, Surajit Khanna’s weird presence in the Bitterroot, and Aaron Wagner’s alpha-con BEFORE he was arrested by the FBI. I guess I’ll add Garrison Courtney’s name to this distinguished list.

While local media has helped many of these conmen establish their false credibility by giving uncritical attention to them in the beginning, as they’re selling the public their bullshit, my track record is one of EXPOSING this kind of bullshit, not perpetrating it, so if you’re inclined to support a citizen journalist with proven results, consider donating to my new GoFundMe page.

And, as always, thanks for reading!