White nationalist conservatives, the”National Park Patrol,” named themselves after 2000-era Neo-Nazis charged with felonies after beating up minorities in what they dubbed “Park Patrols.”
Early Sunday morning around 2 a.m., I laid down, exhausted from a long week of outdoor work, but looking forward to a day off and a breakfast date at 9 a.m.
As I plugged my phone in to charge before I planned to sleep, a Facebook messenger notification came via a name I didn’t recognize.
A Good Samaritan had just seen a flier with my name on it, appalled by its disgustingly hateful intent, and they were not sure if they should go back and take it down or leave it for potential law enforcement evidence.
They sent a pic of it. Based on how it was placed with a type of spray glue, I knew the culprits were likely a collective of white natiobalist conservatives who also put out a lot of Nazi propoganda across the state in recent years.
In fact, one of their associates, Trenin Bayless, had gotten a shocking number of votes as a Montana Republican candidate in Butte despite local media denoting his links to extremists.
I told the Good Samaitan if there was one flier, and knowing these people, there would be a lot more in the area. I would go pull them down.
So pull them down I did.
In a 10 block long stretch from the main road areas of Grand Avenue to Broadwater from 7th Street West to at least 18th Street West. I walked the silent streets of Billings from 3 a.m.til 5:30 a.m. Thus is the duty of an Antifascists.
The first snows broke the bitter cold air about 4 a.m., my feet scrunching the only noise as I pulled down some 40-ish colored-ink fliers on dumpsters, lightposts, and on all 4 corners of traffic lights.
I woke up, and pulled down a bunch more.
Around the block I live, the fliers were particularly dense, denoting this was not only targeted intimidation at someone they deemed a “left wing extremist” (i.e. “we know where you live”) but also a coordinated team effort based on the sheer number of fliers spread out.
The fliers themselves read like tired, typical boomer-tier scare propoganda. It calls me a “groomer” of children with libelous and ridiculous implications I am a danger to children because of drag queen story hour.
It also has two pics of me, one selfie I randomly took while at Walmart the other week where I thought I looked cute, and one pic—designed to scare normies, no doubt—where I am in “goth attire” attending an rave/EDM event.
The logic—or lack thereof—children are not safe around because I am transgender, was used as an anti-First Amendment reason to ban me from doing an Indigenous history lecture at a local Butte library.
City officials cowered to the demand of white nationalist republicans like the GOP’s Bayless and other Nazis who took credit for canceling my speech. In fact, an alias account of Bayless was the first to reply—and as this flier says—and they called me a “child groomer.”
The republicans and outright Hitler-worshiping Nazis who promote violence (one of their main leaders has done felony time for violence) must have put in some serious time and effort all to target and try intimidate a single, Indigenous trans woman. They must have ran through a few pricey colored ink cartridges, as well.
But as one of the rare people in Montana who dares speaks out against their toxic, ruinous white supremacist antisemitic ideology that promotes—as according to their own “white lives matter’ handbook—genocide of non-whites and LGBTQ folks, I get why they think my free speech is a threat that must be silenced with proposed violence at me based on their bland implications I am a pedophile.
The so-called “Nationalist Park Patrol” took credit for this targeted terroristic action as they took to social media bragging of their terroristic action, and they say you should contact them so they can presumably confront/assualt me or whatever they plan on doing.
This newly formed group seems to be a coaltion of local republicans, the Big Sky Active Club, and White Lives Matter Nazis who also seem fond of the Patriot Front Nazis whom protested a Livingston Pride event earlier this year.
Patriot Front, who have an infamous instance of them all being arrested after being pulled out of a Uhaul truck for conspiracy to riot at a North Idaho Pride event, have tried to make inroads in recruiting in Montana lately.
Much of the NPPs “actions” thus far—beyond obsessing over a Billings trans woman for daring to have the “hot take” in Montana that being a hateful racist and bigot against queers is bad—seem to be finding random migrant workers in Bozeman to bully as they record them and bizarrely accuse all of them of trying to photograph white children for sexual purposes.
Not wanting to start trouble, the migrant workers usually leave the area due to this creepy harassment.
The name Nationalist Park Patrol, seems to stem from their admiration of early-2000s neo Nazis skinheads known to roam Pioneer Park (located near where many recent fliers were placed) doing “Park Patrols” which basically consisted of beating up people of color.
Their leaders had large visible swastika tattoos, and recruits ‘earned’ things like red suspenders and shoelaces if they jumped minorities.
These violent, terroristic actions resulted in eight of them eventually convicted of federal hate crimes.
I wrote about the rise of Nazi groups a few years ago in the Daily Montanan, and “Active Club” Montana Nazis took note with great amusement of the name and idea of”park patrols”—and even they wanted to scare me and put me in “danger” for daring to call attention to their violent ideology.
Fascism is an accerationist ideology, and its flames of must constantly be fueled with a steady supply of hate.
It was never going to just be about banning books that mention LGBTQ people. Or drag queens. It was about making the dehumanization of entire groups of people like migrants or trans women acceptable, so that way when violence inevitably happens to us, they hope their fellow theocratic conservatives will cheer, and other Montanans become afraid to speak out, and thus condone these actions with silence as hatred becomes synonymous as an accepted “Montana Value.”
Source: Adria L. Jawort Publication
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