Great Falls, Mont.
In our occasional E-City Beat Watch, recently Great Falls City Commissioner Rick Tryon put up a post about a Facebook page called “The Montana Resistance”. In his blog post, Rick tried to conflate the page with the “Hate has no home here” movement, because some local activists liked the FB page’s dark humor memes. According to Rick, that FB page “is inciting violence and hate against folks in our community.”
Below are a few images from the Montana Resistance page that Rick’s blog post highlighted.
Oh, you don’t like “the armed left” Rick? How interesting…
Back in 2019, I organized a rally for some common-sense measures to reduce gun violence. I reserved the band shell at Gibson Park to speak up after a horrific August weekend of gun violence including 20 people murdered at a Walmart in Texas, and nine people killed in Dayton, Ohio. The rally’s focus was calling for strengthening of red flag laws and universal background checks on gun sales.
Well, Mr. “I don’t incite violence” Rick, who was running for the Great Falls City Commission at the time, saw an opportunity to strengthen his gun-humping brand. Rick organized a pro 2nd Amendment protest adjacent to our rally and posted whiny remarks all over his public Facebook wall trying to rally people to join him. How dare people try to reduce deaths and injuries from gun violence!?? The audacity to want less murder! Thanks to Rick’s efforts, dozens of people made intimidating comments about wanting to bring their ARs, and I even saw a comment that said, “We need executions” on one of Rick’s posts. Nice. Really peaceful. Rick, don’t you know that you can delete inappropriate comments like that on your posts? Or were you cool with it? Oh, and sure Rick made some weak ass comments on his posts to not bring firearms to the rally. Seems too little too fucking late. Only in good old Great Falls was the risk of violence enough to have plain clothes security at the event. Thanks Rick!
At the time, someone told me not to worry about Rick, because he is just a bully and a coward. And, yes, that’s accurate. Rick is just a bully and a coward. But he has a platform that he uses to stir people up. I wasn’t worried that Rick would shoot me. I was worried that someone he incited to chant about the 2nd Amendment would try to harm us.
As a public official, Rick should know better.
When you have a platform like that, you have a responsibility to consider the weight of your words. And I haven’t seen any tempering of Rick’s dumbfuckery. Rick is either too stupid to know the effects of his actions OR he doesn’t care and does it any way. So miss me with Rick’s whining about a FB page with some edgy anti-Nazi memes and his laughable efforts to connect it to the “Hate has no home here” crowd. These groups obviously aren’t related, but maybe Rick needs to introduce himself to the Paradox of Tolerance. Why are you so eager to protect Nazis, Rick?