Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/tag/whitefish/)
Many of us breathed a collective sigh of relief after the dust settled in Whitefish at the end of Dr. King Day last year. It’s been a year of intense upheaval, including the murder of a civil rights activist at a White Nationalist march in Charlottesville, Va. That scene could have been in Montana’s beautiful mountain town, but it wasn’t, and there are lessons that we must carry forward. (more…) Continue Reading →
Gov. Steve Bullock on Monday welcomed governors from across the West to Montana for the annual Western Governors Association meeting, one that will cover everything from cyber security to childhood hunger. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke is also slated to deliver a keynote address on Tuesday. Several outdoors groups have scheduled a simultaneous rally to encourage Zinke to protect public lands and national monuments. (more…) Continue Reading →
“VICE News Tonight” has produced an eight-minute segment on the mess up in Whitefish, where a local real estate agent became the target of “troll storm” by white nationalists. We reported last month how the South Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of Tanya Gersh, who was subjected to a “repulsive, threatening campaign of anti-Semitic harassment” directed by Andrew Anglin, proprietor of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. Its own story on the lawsuit was headlined, “The Daily Stormer is being sued by Jewish terrorists. In order to survive, we need shekels.” The VICE report, with you can watch on YouTube, doesn’t add much to the story, but it includes some good interviews with Gersh, who continues to be harassed, and whose phone is still full of vile, obscene attacks on her and her Jewish heritage. Continue Reading →
The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday against the founder of a neo-Nazi website who led a campaign of harassment against a Jewish woman in Whitefish. Filed in U.S. District Court in Missoula, the lawsuit says Andrew Anglin coordinated a “repulsive, threatening campaign of anti-Semitic harassment directed at Tanya Gersh, a Jewish real estate agent living in Whitefish, Montana.” (more…) Continue Reading →
Molly Priddy, a reporter for the Flathead Beacon who did an internship at the Billings Gazette when I still worked there, recently summoned her inner cowboy to stand up to a homophobic man at a Whitefish restaurant. Writing in The Guardian, Priddy tells of how she and her wife, out to dinner with two other women who had just gotten engaged, overheard the anti-gay mutterings of the man at the next table. At first she wasn’t sure how to respond. But within seconds, I settled on the answer I already knew I would, the one I’d learned from my Montana upbringing: I was going to stand up to this guy. Framed in the blush of my face, my eyes caught his. Continue Reading →
Richard Spencer is stirring up trouble in both my native and adopted states. Spencer, who created the term alt-right, is a resident of Whitefish. On Tuesday, he gave a speech in the Texas town where I used to live, at the university where I both taught and studied. Spencer has been spouting the virtues of the white race for years, but last month he gained a dubious national reputation for shouting “Hail Trump” at a conference in Washington, drawing Nazi-like salutes from his white supremacist fans. Even for many hardcore racists, invoking Hitler was going too far. Continue Reading →
