“I’ll tell you why these neo-Nazis and fascists move here,” a man named Phil, who’d moved up to Glacier National Park after graduating from a liberal arts college, told me over dinner. “During the summer, I’d work at this place that rented all sorts of stuff to tourists in the park. So this woman comes in with a Southern accent, I ask where she’s from, she says Georgia. She rents one of those infant backpacks — the kind you put your kid in. And then she says, ‘This place is just so great — did you move here because there’s no black people?’
“I pause, look at her, and say, ‘Well, Kalispell has the most black people in Montana.’ This isn’t true, but I wanted to throw her. Then she says, ‘Well, what about Whitefish?’ And I say, ‘Well, it’s just all gay people.’ Again, not true. ‘Columbia Falls?’ she asks, and I say ‘Filled with Hispanics.’”
“‘Well, we just want to get away from some of the, well, drama down there,’ this woman said, referring, you know, to Georgia.
“So she takes off with her husband and her baby, and I don’t see her again — until, months later, she comes back for a 9 mm unmarked pistol they’d forgotten in the little pouch on that infant backpack. ‘We moved here!’ she exclaimed. ‘We’re homeschooling our kids!’”
The woman in Phil’s story may not be a neo-Nazi, but she arrived in the Flathead Valley for the same reason that so many neo-Nazis, “Patriots,” and other fascists have: Flathead County, population 96,000, is one of the whitest places in the nation (95.2%).
There are other allures for people at odds with mainstream American culture: the large pockets of open space, the ability to live off the grid, the lack of restriction when it comes to gun ownership. The Montana political ethos — some mix of libertarian, conservative, and “don’t fuck with me” — is inviting that way. As a local pastor put it, “It’s a place where people can feel safe when they say outrageous things.”
The winters are frigid and last forever, but the summers are exquisite. Any direction you look, there are mountains. You can get a big house in the backwoods for under $100,000. For decades, tourists have come to town and asked shop owners the same thing: “How can I live here?” Starting in the early 2000s, white supremacists wanted in too.
Gradually, Montana became home to the highest concentration of hate groups in the nation. In the Flathead — which includes Kalispell (more industrial, more sprawling, population 22,000), Whitefish (a quaint grid of a resort town, population 7,000), and Columbia Falls (a former timber town, now filling with those priced out of Whitefish, population 5,000) — they mostly keep to themselves. Sometimes there’ll be a piece of Nazi propaganda slipped between pairs of expensive jeans in clothing boutiques; other times there’ll be flyers for “A Nature-Based, Race-Centered Religion for White People” folded in children’s books at the local bookstore. “Every place in town has a story like that,” one business owner told me.
But some things can’t be ignored. Like in 2010, when April Gaede — better known as the “Nazi stage mom” to twin girl group Prussian Blue and a member of Pioneer Little Europe, an organization of whites-only intentional communities — began showing Holocaust denial films at the Whitefish library. Or this past December, when a neo-Nazi site, theDaily Stormer, launched a campaign to troll local Jews as revenge for perceived attacks on the mother of “academic racist” (and Whitefish resident) Richard Spencer.
In the post-election tumult, the story of the troll storm quickly made the national news. A neo-Nazi march was threatened. Counterprotests were declared. Residents of Whitefish had to decide: How could they fight hate, and definitively declare their town infertile to the messages of these groups, without defining the town in the public imagination by that fight?
These questions concern more than just the residents of this rural corner of Montana. The online trolls who threatened Whitefish may have been terrifying in their anonymity, but like other fascists and neo-Nazis, they were easy to decry. Meanwhile, other forms of hate — more subtle, and more culturally normalized — flourish, virtually unassailed, across the nation. Moving forward, Whitefish and other towns will have to ask themselves: When does hate cross a line, and what responsibility does a community, and the nation that witnesses it, have to react when it happens?
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| Anti-fascist groups march in downtown Whitefish, Montana, Jan. 16, 2017 |
Hate can gather in the most banal of places. Like a conference room at the Kalispell Hilton Garden Inn, outfitted with about a hundred chairs, a simple podium, and bad ’90s carpet. That’s where Chuck Baldwin’s church, Liberty Fellowship, gathers every Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m., and where his message is livestreamed to hundreds of loyal followers across the country. On a Sunday in January, the service started with a haunting hymn, sung in harmony by several women, before Baldwin took the pulpit to preach, without notes, for two hours.
Baldwin looks like a mix of a church dad and a real estate agent: He has a thick head of golden hair and a Mona Lisa smile that looks kind from one vantage point, scheming from another. For 35 years, he helmed a church in Pensacola, Florida, where his anti-gay, anti-abortion, fundamentalist preaching drew thousands.
Baldwin believes the South should’ve won the Civil War. He believes that the “castrated churches” of America are terrified of “Judaizers” and hamstrung by political correctness. For his various explicitly homophobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim preachings, Baldwin and his church have been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But Baldwin believes he is not a racist, and he declares as much on his website. A section entitled “Is Chuck Baldwin a Racist?” features a single video testimony from a black man who, according to Baldwin’s caption, grew up in the church. When I visited, there were more people of color (at least eight) than I’d seen elsewhere in the valley. A Hispanic family had driven an hour to visit the church for the first time. “I didn’t know you all were so close by,” the father told a greeter. “I’ve been listening for months.”
In 2010, Baldwin decided he and his extended family needed to relocate to a place that truly understood the meaning of freedom, and where he and his flock could ready themselves for the fight to come. “America is headed for an almost certain cataclysm,” hewrote. “We believe that this cataclysm will most certainly include a fight between Big-Government globalists and freedom-loving, independent-minded patriots.”
True liberty, Baldwin believed, could be found in the Flathead Valley — where he could stockpile arms, proselytize that “there is no liberty without the semi-automatic rifle,” and preach against the evils of gay people, Islam, Israel, moderate Republicans, and abortion. Inside the two entrances to the conference room, two large men positioned themselves for the duration of the service. Call them ushers, call them bouncers, call them people who wanted to make sure no one came and took issue with what Baldwin was preaching. The parking lot was filled with four-wheel-drive vehicles plastered with bumper stickers for Liberty Fellowship and “The Trump Train.”
Still, most people in Kalispell haven’t heard of Baldwin. They might have heard of church attendees like Randy Weaver (made infamous by the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff in Northern Idaho) or Gaede, who has taken to online neo-Nazi forums to encourage readers to flock to the area. But that sort of anonymity is part of the point: Baldwin aims to build a mini civilization, free from any oversight other than his own — and God’s.
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