Purge– verb, remove (a group of people considered undesirable) from an organization or place in an abrupt or violent way.
Authoritarian regimes across the globe and throughout history have conducted purges to solidify their power. From Stalin’s Great Terror in 1937 to the Chinese Communist Party’s Great Revolution of the 1960s and 1970’s, the end results have always been the same. People and groups have been surveilled, harassed and oppressed. Free expression has been stifled, edicts have been issued, and dissenters have been targeted. Purges start small and build until they assure compliance and consolidate the leader’s power.
The far-right wing of the Montana Republican party has been conducting its own purge. After being rebuked by the State Republican Party, former Republican Governor Marc Racicot published an open letter to Republican leadership warning of the purge mentality. In his letter he said, “Republicans have recently experienced the resignation of a twice-elected, young Republican legislator because of the party’s coercive efforts to control the exercise of her discretion in voting for what she thought was right. You have also censured two Republican members of the Legislature for not voting the way you deemed appropriate and have witnessed the defection of growing numbers of Republicans in your caucus, and across Montana, who feel bound to their conscience and their constitution more than their party”.
The purges within the Republican Party are only part of the takeover by far-right extremists in Montana. They also seek to purge virtually everyone they disagree with from being able to fully participate in society. Sexual minorities, native people, immigrants, and low-income people are all being targeted as lazy, perverted and a threat to “the rest of us.” Creating an environment of us versus them as a mechanism to mobilize hate is as old as humanity itself. Nothing good has ever come from it.
The arrogance of certainty demonstrated by Republican leaders in Montana is in a time-tested play book used by authoritarian leaders everywhere. You may not care that Greg Gianforte believes that men and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time, but he cares and is moving public money to private schools teaching his Fred Flintstone version of history and science.
Education Superintendent Elsie Arntzen is promoting history lessons stripped of facts to promote the far right’s own version of reality. Attorney General Austin Knudsen, the legislature and the Governor have engaged in attacks on the independence of the judiciary to eliminate check and balances and consolidate power.
Congressman Matt Rosendale joined the Freedom Caucus alongside the most extreme right-wing members of congress and is busily organizing his own Freedom Caucus here in Montana. You can almost hear the goose-stepping jackboots coming down the street.
This would not have been possible without the erosion of political and social norms brought on by the rise of Donald Trump and Fox News. The January 6th armed insurrection has become peaceful protest, white people have become “the victims,” desperate people seeking asylum from violence in their own country have become rapists and murders, and caring about your neighbor is now derisively called being “woke.”
In the Republican right, citizens are urged to engage in politics using fear, anger, and hate.
There is an old wives’ tale about a frog sitting still in a heating pan of water despite the increasing temperature until it is so hot the frog dies. It did not notice the slow change in temperature. It is a great metaphor for the political environment here in Montana. Don’t be that frog.
Ken Toole is a former State Senator and former Vice Chairman of the Montana Public Service Commission.
After hearing Sandra Merchant’s lame presentation last Friday, you probably thought things could not possibly get worse in the County Elections Office. Sorry to burst your bubble, but today things did get worse.
If you visited or called the Elections Office today, Jan Wenaas may have greeted you with a friendly smile and twinkle in her eye. She’s happy to have infiltrated the Elections Office camp, working behind the scenes as a self-proclaimed volunteer for Sandra Merchant. So, why is that a problem?
First, Wenaas is the face of Cascade County’s far-right “Election Integrity” committee, those pesky election deniers who believe the 2020 election was stolen, despite nearly 60 lawsuits whose outcomes proved otherwise. Yes, Wenaas believes The Big Lie; the same lie that MyPillow CEO, Mike Lindell, has been spouting and several Montana legislators have bought into – Steve and Lola Galloway, and Steve Gist to name a few.
In fact, Wenaas was instrumental arranging the bogus dog-and-pony show last year bringing State Senator Theresa Manzella of Ravalli County and her entourage of election deniers to Great Falls, including some dude from Colorado who claims he witnessed first-hand election malfeasance in his state. Their presentation contended vote count machines results are intercepted by Venezuelans, and the election outcomes changed at the blink of an eye. Wait, what??
Finally, Wenaas signed onto a petition sent to then County Commissioners Briggs, Larson and Ryan calling for them to immediately do among other things, the following:
Ban mail-in ballots except for overseas military, disabled or other qualified persons
Ballot turn in on election day only, with one day counting
Clean voter roles by requiring all qualified county residents to re-register
OMG, why is a woman who clearly does not believe in the state’s voting process sitting in front of a county computer at a desk in the Elections Office? So what that she’s a volunteer. She has access to the county phones. Does she also have access to voter registrations? Is she going to be handling ballots – those horrible mail ballots she believes the county should discontinue? Why is a volunteer working in the sacred space of the Elections Office, anyway?
Shocked yet? If so, tell your county commissioners:
Don’t waste your time contacting Commissioner Rae Grulkowski, newly dubbed by many county citizens as Sandra Merchant’s handler. Probably not worth your time to question the Elections Office self-proclaimed protector. And what’s up with that?
Maybe let Eric Bryson, Executive Director of the Montana Association of Counties, know you are concerned at: ebryson@mtcounties.org Next thing you know, Merchant will be telling us the vote counting machines don’t work, and everything needs to be hand counted. Stranger things have happened, or shall we say, are happening.
This flyer was distributed when Wenaas brought Manzella and the election denier crowd to Great Falls. Wenaas was one of the signers on this utterly insane petition circulated last year.
Ranked-choice voting (RCV), also known as instant-runoff voting, is a nonpartisan voting system that allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference rather than selecting a single candidate. In a ranked-choice voting system, voters mark their ballot by ranking the candidates in order of preference, such as first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on.
In the first round of vote counting, only the first-choice votes are counted. If one candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, that candidate wins the election. However, if no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and then the second-choice votes on those ballots are counted instead. This process is repeated until one candidate receives a majority of the votes.
In our current plurality system, a candidate could win with a mere 33% of the vote. This leaves nearly 70% of voters not choosing the winner, sometimes feeling unrepresented, and caught in a game of splitting and wasting their vote. The purpose of RCV is to ensure that the winning candidate has broad support among voters. By allowing voters to rank candidates, RCV can reduce the impact of candidates splitting the vote, promote positive campaigning, and it has been shown to reduce the amount of wasted votes by three times.
A noisy minority, who don’t trust the intelligence of voters, testified at the hearing for HB 598 that RCV is complicated and claimed that voters are unhappy with RCV. However, a vast majority of those surveyed have found it very easy to use and want to use it again–between 75% and 94% (depending on the location surveyed).
RCV is used in several countries around the world, including Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. In the United States, several cities have adopted RCV for local elections, including San Francisco, Oakland, Austin, New York City, Minneapolis and twenty-three cities in Utah. Some states have also adopted RCV for statewide elections, including Maine and Alaska, and seven states use RCV for military and overseas voting.
However, in Montana, even though no jurisdiction uses RCV (and some would argue that our constitution does not currently allow it to be used), HB 598 seeks to preemptively ban RCV from being used or even considered in Montana.
When HB 598 reached the floor, State Administration Committee member, Rep. Paul Green, changed his vote. When he realized that this ban would expressly limit local communities from choosing RCV for their local elections, he went from supporting the ban to opposing the ban. Had he considered this before, this bill would have died in committee. Despite this important consideration, the ban passed the House on March 3rd, with fourteen Republicans and all Democrats opposing the ban. You will be happy to know that Great Falls representatives George Nikolakakos (HD26) and Scott Kerns (HD23) were among those opposing this ban.
Eric Buhler is the Executive Director of RCV Montana, a grassroots nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to educate Montana about alternative voting methods such as Ranked-choice Voting.
Last week, I did something that could become a crime in Montana – I raised my hand, rolled up my sleeve and donated lifesaving blood to help a patient in need.
Introduced by Rep. Greg Kmetz, R-Miles City, House Bill 645 would criminalize both blood and organ donation in Montana by anyone who has received a COVID-19 vaccine. It would also make it a crime to receive blood or an organ from a person vaccinated for COVID.
Simply put, this bill would have a devastating impact on our blood supply, our hospitals and patient care across the state. Experts estimate that if it passes, this measure would reduce Montana’s blood supply by 80 percent and have life-and-death consequences for so many who depend on these products being available on hospital shelves. Every two seconds, someone in this country needs lifesaving blood, whether it be a cancer patient, an expecting mom, an accident victim or someone undergoing surgery. Politics shouldn’t get in the way.
Blood can’t be manufactured – the only way to meet patient demand is through the generosity of blood donors. Encouraging people to put a needle in their arm and help someone they don’t know is difficult enough without criminalizing this altruistic act. Blood banks already struggle to meet current needs, and HB645 would have very real and very dire consequences for all of us and our loved ones.
Please let the House Human Services committee know you oppose HB645 by visiting https://leg.mt.gov/web-messaging/ and sending a quick and clear message.
I’ve never done drag—unless you count the floor-length robe and colorful stole I wear every Sunday when I preach. Sometimes I think it could be fun (I’ve even got my drag name picked out: “Pauline Epistle”), but I know it is far more work than I am prepared to commit to. It’s also, apparently, extremely dangerous.
In Montana, as in over a dozen states, legislation is moving forward to ban or severely restrict drag performances. These bills mischaracterize drag as inherently sexual in nature, “appealing to prurient interest.” That’s the language of Representative Mitchell’s HB359, which passed its second reading in the Montana House this week.
I recently got a chance to chat with my senator, who is one of the bill’s co-sponsors, about why he chose to attach his name to it. He gave the usual talking points, saying that the intention was to protect children from “sexualization.” It’s the same impulse that’s behind the recent surge book-banning and educator-muzzling rhetoric and policy. Save the children; protect their innocence from the perversions of our culture.
When I asked my senator if he had ever attended a drag show, he told me that he had not, which I imagine is true of most of the people backing the bill. (Although it’s always possible one of them might have had a past life as a drag performer in South America, I suppose.)
If they had, they might realize that nine times out of ten, particularly in the case of all-ages shows, drag performers have more in common with clowns and ballerinas than with actual adult entertainment performers, which HB359 tries to paint them as.
But, of course, this has never been about protecting children’s innocence. The same people concerned about the psychological damage a child might experience witnessing a man in a colorful dress read a storybook about being kind to people have no problem telling the same child that unless they pledge their eternal servitude to an invisible being who watches their every moment and knows their every thought, they will be tortured for all eternity—out of love.
The real reason they want to ban drag performances from the public sphere is because drag, emblematic of queerness itself, is a threat to entrenched systems of power.
In a recent legislative committee for Montana SB234, discussion about how we define obscenity led to the point being made that the Bible itself could easily fit the category of obscene literature.
Ezekiel contains language more explicit than even the bawdiest drag show I’ve ever seen, and it does so for the purpose of prophetic critique. The prophet uses a graphic analogy of adultery to denounce Israel and Judah for their dalliance with Assyrian and Babylonian empires, respectively. (In a similar manner, today’s prophets have rightly pointed out that much of the American church is ‘in bed’ with White Nationalism).
Likewise Isaiah walked around naked for three years, and Jeremiah paraded around with a pair of dirty underwear, disrupting norms and provoking shock and disgust.
The Hebrew prophets were the original performance artists.
The intersection of artistic expression and social critique terrifies those with vested interests in maintaining authoritarian control. As Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann says in The Prophetic Imagination: “every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”
Drag is dangerous for that very reason. It points out the farce of rigid black-and-white—or rather, pink-and-blue—thinking and imagines a rainbow of possibility for God’s beloveds. We really are all born naked, and the rest—as Mama Ru says—is drag.
We are not so far off from the 1960s, when trans people and drag artists could be arrested just for existing in public, experiencing grotesque violence at the hands of the state. The violence is still happening, emboldened by the increase in hateful legislation and political rhetoric.
It was drag queens and trans people leading the charge in those days, sparking a revolution that would transform the country and make it safe for people like me to be fully myself. Now it is up to the rest of us to stand with them, speak out against the fear and hate, and celebrate the joy and the beauty that queer people bring to our world.
I have little reason to believe those trying to legislate queer and trans people out of existence will have a change of heart and relent from their “slate of hate.” But that just means my calling to speak out on behalf of the marginalized, to imagine a world where everyone has what they need, is as clear as it has ever been.
And if I need a refresher course in the prophetic vocation, I’ll find a big, scary Drag Queen and let her spill the tea.
Rev. Stephen Underwood is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), serving a congregation in Great Falls, MT. The above opinions are exclusively his own.
Image retrieved from Glacier Queer Alliance. Follow their work here: https://www.facebook.com/GlacierQueerAlliance
