Last night, I caught “The Fire Next Time,” a riveting PBS P.O.V. special — about the effect of hate speech on community conflicts — that will reair this weekend. I could not take my eyes off the TV — Kalispell, just outside Glacier National Park, is a lovely small valley community I’ve visited, and I was stunned by the ugly, physically threatening behavior by too many of its citizens. Environmental advocates such as one harassed single mother and her teen daughters — the lug nuts on their car had been loosened, and their tires slashed — bought and learned how to use firearms.
Featured in the documentary, the U.S.’s answer to Rwandan hate radio: John Stokes [PHOTO ABOVE], host of the morning talk show on KGEZ Z-600 “The Edge” in Kalispell, Montana who’s infamous for his hate speech — “someone should burn down a Green Nazi’s house” — and separatist views. More below: “Perhaps someone should burn down a Green Nazi’s house.” (Stokes calls all environmentalists “Green Nazis,” and burns green swastikas on Earth Day [PHOTO].)
“If you’re a greenie and want to protest my snowmobile riding, stand in front of me, so I can get a good target at you when I hit that throttle of that 800cc machine. Because your gonna [sic] be jumpin’ [sic] out of the way or get run over. One of the two.”
“I’m surprised no one’s been shot. I wouldn’t want to be wandering around here if I were with the Department of Ecology or any bureaucrat.”
“Before all the liberals in the city get all uppity about [secessionist campaigns], they ought to remember who controls the water supplies. One little 50-gallon drum of PCP in the reservoir out there and [city residents] are all fu**ed up.”
Sources: Over ten-year record of Stokes’ statements
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Over a stormy two-year period, “The Fire Next Time” follows a deeply divided group of Flathead Valley, Montana citizens caught in a web of conflicts intensified by rapid growth and the power of talk radio.
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FILM SYNOPSIS
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About the origins of the documentary — which is masterfully and fairly composed — aired on PBS’s P.O.V.:
It was the unmistakably rising tension in the town that led ex-police officer Brenda Kitterman to invite The Working Group to bring its grassroots anti-hate program, Not in Our Town, to Flathead Valley. Ever since the broadcast of its 1995 film, Not in Our Town, about the response of Billings, Montana, to a rash of hate crimes, The Working Group has been helping local communities deal with intolerance and violence by holding film screenings and community discussions. When O’Neill and crew got to Kalispell, however, they realized they had landed in the midst of a conflict too complex to be comprehended, much less soothed, by a few community meetings.
Visit a Kalispell, Montana community group’s record of how hate speech has affected the community.
In an update on the lives of the citizens portrayed in the film, the filmmakers talk about the community’s many efforts to resolve differences and to find rational, calm ways to address their conflicting priorities.
KGEZ, which still airs Stokes’ morning show, now features mostly FOX programming. What a fit.
See also: Alternet’s A Community Divided, July 7, 2005:
O’Neill is co-founder of The Working Group, which produced the community-building film “Not in Our Town,” and conducts a national program to help communities deal with intolerance by holding film screenings and community discussions. O’Neill was asked by a citizen of Flathead Valley to bring her program to the town of Kalispell, and “The Fire Next Time” arose out of her two subsequent years spent in the Valley, gaining the trust of locals to discuss their issues on camera.
In 2000, as loggers and mill workers faced lost jobs and rising living costs, right-wing extremist John Stokes bought a local radio station and began broadcasting messages blaming environmentalists and government officials for their woes. He announced the addresses of local environmentalists on his station, leading to death threats against them. In a particularly emotional passage, the daughter of a local activist learns how to shoot a gun after the lug nuts on her wheels were loosened, almost causing her to crash. Local politicians were also targeted; the mayor of Kalispell had three nail-induced flat tires in the period of one month.
Stokes also began broadcasting his own version of hate speech. (“Jewish Holocaust survivors … did nothing about the deeds or the actions that led to the slaughter of your people.”) In the midst of the turmoil, the local anti-government militia group Project 7 was discovered, along with a cache of guns and a hit list that included the police chief and sheriff. The news served to intimidate some activist citizens of the Valley into silence, and furthered the schism between Kalispell’s townspeople.
That’s when O’Neill’s group arrived. …
There’s particular vitriol against the United Nations — the rightwing group burns U.N. flags — which is similar to a small, vocal group’s beliefs here. They’re convinced that the U.N. is going to take over our national parks and bring in “blue-helmeted Nazis.”
Kalispell has also been hti by the same problems we’re facing here. People with money are moving into both areas, and hiking up property prices and taxes.
Can’t this radio shock jock be prosecuted for terroristic threats? He’s inciting violence and giving out people’s names and addresses? Aren’t there laws about this kind of shit?
People are writing to the FCC, and he’s been in a lot of trouble with a variety of legal problems.
See the link to the community record on him above.
…
One thing I’d like to emphasize: This isn’t one of the documentaries that one has to sit dutifully through. It’s very well-done and quite interesting throughout.
Yeah,
where the phuck is the FBI in all this. Crap, this man is a criminal who should be locked up, not given air time.
…for plugging the show. I saw only the preview and was shocked. You hear about all the right-wing hate radio going on around the country, but seeing it destroy communities….
Isn’t this the kind of crap that prompted the Pilgrims to ditch Europe and head to the “new world”?
Is a recent import to Montana from Bellvue, Washington, where he learned much of his wingnuttery and hatred from the likes of Ron Arnold of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprize. He really wanted to be a big talk show blowhard in the small media pond of northwestern Montana, rather than just another wingnut in Washington.
Since the mid-1980s, many west coast conservatives have moved to Montana (although none more toxic than Stokes) and have made this formerly progressive state far more conservative politically. It remains to be seen whether the democratic takeover of state government last November is a real reversal of this disturbing trend.
… even though I hate guns and think they usually do more harm than good, I still think the 2nd Amendment is important:
Let the assholes secede ASAP, and build a wall around them, preferably with bars over the top. It would be worth sacrificing even a national park to not have these throwbacks be part of America any more.
Dave, there’s a highly diverse population of people there.
The show was especially hard for me to watch, being way too familiar with the hate crimes that have been wrought in the intermountain West. I live in Laramie, WY, and in the early 1980s, I saw a woman I knew well, a sexually confused, searching for meaning in her life, aged 50ish, born, raised and bred Wyoming ranch woman get seduced into Robert Mathews The Order, an offshoot of Aryan Nations which was responsible for the execution of Denver radio host (liberal) Alan Berg.
She paid for her sins by spending the rest of her life in federal prison. But her real sin was not knowing how to think for herself and falling under the spell of a sociopath with his own vision of what the nation and world should be.
She was an art teacher, with a recent degree, who couldn’t find a job. Who felt helpless and hopeless and Mathews came to town and flattered her and made her feel important and told her very little about what he was doing.
How many of you know people like that? More to the point, how many people do you know who are looking for meaning in their lives? How many people out there are susceptible to this kind of validation? If you never have, read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. We are historically vulnerable to cults and this is just another kind of cult, one that hates and one which will, almost certainly, eventually, kill.
Of course, about 15 years later, Laramie was again reminded of the ugly face of hate when Matthew Shepard was murdered here. Sigh…..
Kalispell is so gorgeous, I hope they can pull this back from the edge. Maybe there is an upside to how much development Wyoming has been undergoing with coalbed methane and gas and oil. It has made many previously anti-environmentalist types begin to see that the land really is being threatened. We actually have some rancher-green alliances here now. Timber, though, is a tough issue.
BTW, the producer of The Fire Next Time — whose name I’m sorry I don’t know — also did a documentary on the hate crimes against Jews in Billings which, I believe, is called “Not In Our Town.” Also excellent.
What a poignant, powerful story you tell. Matthews was the extremist killed on Whidbey Island in Wash. state, right?
The same thing happened to a lot of activists during the Vietnam years who got seduced by extremist factions and started building up arms and bombing buildings, etc.
It’s a very good documentary.