JXIndivisible

Dear Group,

On October 26, twelve days before the November election deadline, an article by Chad Sokol was published in the Spokesman. It was entitled “Rep. Matt Shea takes credit, criticism for document titled ‘Biblical Basis for War.’” Mr. Sokol followed this with several articles detailing corporate sponsors who wanted their money back from the Shea campaign.

How did this article take shape? How did Chad Sokol come upon Shea’s manifesto? It did not happen in a vacuum. The leads came from local people. With Mr. Sokol’s writing the story spread. There are lessons here.

Some credit is due Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich. For years he has gotten local media attention over his running feud with Matt Shea over Shea’s ties to white supremacists and far right “Christian” groups. Sheriff Knezovich has never shied away from the threat he feels the Matt Shea wing of the local Republican Party represents [from The Inlander on August 2]:

“I’ve grown tired of the media going, ‘Oh, this is just a fight between Matt [Shea] and Ozzie,” Knezovich says. “No. This is a fight between this ideology. This ideology is dangerous, and if we do not address it, it will eventually hurt this community and this nation.”

But it wasn’t Ozzie who acquired and brought attention to Shea’s now infamous manifesto. It was a young man with a long goatee named Tanner Rowe of Nine Mile Falls. Rowe was mentioned as the source in Chad Sokol’s article in the Spokesman on October 26 I referred to above. Tanner Rowe posted Shea’s “Biblical Basis for War” in a video on Facebook three days earlier. Facebook posts are frustratingly ephemeral. At this writing one can still see Mr. Rowe’s post by visiting his page (here) and scrolling way down to October 23. Based on his other Facebook posts, Tanner Rowe appears to be right of center himself. Nonetheless, in his video Mr. Rowe presents his disgust with Shea’s theocratic bent. Rowe likes the idea of a 51st State, but he’s very leery of theocracy under a man like Shea. (That said, I wonder for whom Mr. Rowe would have voted if he lived in the 4th District, Shea, Cummings, or “none of the above”?)

What prompted Chad Sokol to write his Spokesman article on Matt Shea October 26? He had written an article critical of Shea and mildly complementary or Cummings on October 8th. How did Mr. Sokol become aware of Tanner Rowe’s Facebook post of Shea’s manifesto? Was Mr. Sokol monitoring Facebook or did someone bring Rowe’s Facebook video to his attention? Or was he further tuned to Shea’s extremism after reading an article in Rolling Stone on October 23, the same day as Rowe’s post? That article, “Something’s Brewing in the Deep Red West” was written by Leah Sotille, an excellent Portland-based freelance writer who once covered Spokane’s music scene for The Inlander. Does Chad Sokol know Leah Settle and/or follow her writing? [BTW, check out Ms. Sottile’s other writing at Rolling Stone. It’s well researched and exemplary.]

From Mr. Sokol’s October 26th article on Shea’s “Biblical Basis for War” the story catapulted to the national media scene. It was covered by Rachel Maddow, the Associated Press (AP), Newsweek, the New York Daily News, and U.S. News and World Report. The story rattled around the internet for a few days, no doubt buffing up readers’ memories of the Inland Northwest hosting the odious Aryan Nations for several decades in the recent past.

Several contributors to Shea’s campaign funds, presumably embarrassed by the national media coverage made local news by withdrawing their support. (More about that in a later post.) Matt Shea did not lose the election but he lost some votes and his infamy is growing. His time will come…

The larger point is this material doesn’t appear out of thin air. Writers and broadcasters in the local and national media need leads. Leads are provided by local observers, by email, telephone, and through personal relationships. I cannot connect every one of the dots in this story, but I am aware the the leap from a local Spokesman article to Rachel Maddow and Associated Press was aided by local people who were paying attention and passing the story along.

Get to know your local media people. Interact. Send them ideas and stories. They cannot possibly keep tabs on everything by themselves. Like us, they depend on human interaction for the material with which they work…and without their work (and ours) we have no democracy.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. With a brief nod to the AP article, even Fox News mentioned Shea’s manifesto on November 1. But with the exception of that article, stories covering the “Biblical Basis for War” are notably absent from the right wing media silo. Searching two of my favorites, Brietbart and the Daily Caller, draws “No Results.” They appear thoroughly immunized against criticism of their own kind. 

Dear Group, In the November 2018 Issue of The Atlantic is an article entitled: The Man Who Broke Politics; Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements. I encourage you to read it. Gingrich was elected to Congress for the first time from the 6th Congressional District of the State of Georgia in 1978, after unsuccessful runs for the same seat in 1974 and 1976. Before Gingrich’s success  in 1978, the incumbent Democrat, Jack Flynt, decided to retire. Gingrich beat the Democratic candidate for Flynt’s seat, Virginia Shapard, by 7500 votes.  From the Atlantic article:  During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence. The Gingrich story intersects with the story of eastern Washington, specifically, Congressional District 5. In 1994 Tom Foley was both the WA CD5 Representative to Congress and the Speaker of the House. In November of that year George Nethercutt beat Foley at the ballot box by a tiny margin, ending much of eastern Washington’s influence on the national stage. In that election Republicans acquired the majority of seats in the House for the first time since 1954. Newt Gingrich was instrumental in this takeover with his in-your-face tactics. As part of the strategy Gingrich and Dick Armey wrote and popularized the Contract with America,” a document that helped focus the 1994 election on a national Republican agenda and minimize regional and local issues. Newt became Speaker of the House partly because of his militant bluster and Republican’s electoral success. In 1994, Gingrich was only fifty-one years old.  After stamping his brand of pugilistic politics on the Republican Party in the 1994 election, Gingrich lasted in Congress, and as Speaker, only four years. In late 1998, after the Republicans lost five House seats (the worst showing in 64 years for a Party not holding the Presidency) and facing a rebellious Republican Caucus, Gingrich resigned the Speakership and announced he would resign his House seat, less than a month into the term for which he had just been re-electied. In an interview after his resignation he said, “I’m willing to lead but I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals. My only fear would be that if I tried to stay, it would just overshadow whoever my successor is. Frankly, Marianne and I could use a break.” [Marianne was the second of three wives.] Gingrich hasn’t held an elected public office since January 1999, but his name re-appears frequently in Republican politics. He appears on Fox News as a commentator. At age 75 he is enjoying the good life in Rome, while his third wife, Callista, serves as ambassador to the Vatican, courtesy of Trump’s nomination and the Republican Senate’s approval. Gingrich keeps sending me emails praising Trump and fundraising for him.. He lives in style on money he makes giving speeches, and revels in the form of militarized politics with which he has afflicted the nation. Gingrich started out in Congress in January 1979, age 35. He was already an assistant professor of history. He was already a man with high aspirations and an inflated opinion of himself and of his place in history. To me he is an example of intelligence gone awry. He and his brand of politics rank right up there with Mitch McConnell and Steve Bannon. Fix Gingrich in your understanding of U.S. political history. I strongly recommend reading both the Atlantic article and the Gingrich article in wikipedia.  Contrast the lasting influence of a Newt Gingrich to that of our Representative McMorris Rodgers. She rode in on George Nethercutt’s coattails in 2004 with hardly a fight, no three attempts for her. Her supposed expertise is in communicating the national Republican message, not shaping it, and, now, post election, even her pretense of leadership as chairwoman of the Republican caucus is gone. Keep to the high ground, Jerry P.S. Gingrich, as revealed in the Atlantic article, is fascinated by dinosaurs and with his Darwinian concept of struggle in the natural (and political) world. It is no stretch to assume that Gingrich understands and appreciates the science around geologic time and biological evolution. Nonetheless,from Wikipedia: “As Speaker, Gingrich sought to increasingly tie Christian conservatism to the Republican Party. According to a 2018 study, Christian conservatism had become firmly ingrained in the Republican Party’s policy platforms by 2000.” Note the irony of his courting a segment of the voting public many of whom strongly reject concepts central to Newt’s understanding of the world. Politics makes odd bedfellows… * Many of the policy ideas in the Contract with America originated at the Heritage Foundation, an institution heavily supported by funds from the Koch donor group of libertarian leaning business people and one of the first institutions to pop up in response to the Powell Memorandum.

Dear Group,

Each Monday morning I look forward to reading The Weekly Sift written by Doug Muder. His Monday emails (two of them nearly every Monday) is a marvelously rational roundup of news from the past week. The article from the Weekly Sift from which I lifted the title of the Indivisible email today can be found here. I urge you to click on that link, read his article, and then add your email address in the left hand column under “Subscribe by email.” Then click “Sign me up!”  You will not regret it. [You will likely receive a confirmation email to which you must respond to complete the loop. That’s to prevent someone else from signing up your email address.]

This last Monday’s Weekly Sift’s “featured post” email is a summary of a new book, “Network Propaganda.”  I have not yet read the book, but Mr. Muder’s summary and the quotes he offers strike me as essential to understanding the gravity of our current situation. For me the single most chilling thing about Trump is his denigration and demonization of all media with which he does not agree. Having put all mainstream media and the entire fact base in which the mainstream media work into a box, he proceeds to belittle and demean. “Don’t listen to them. They are fake news. They represent the agenda of the ‘deep state,’ the grand conspiracy against me and against you, MY people.” 

Once he has his chanting followers in thrall, isolated from any and all opposing views, he can take them anywhere. Fox News and others who are part of this far right media ecosystem laid the groundwork before Trump was even part of the picture, but he, in synergy with those media, has assembled a core group worthy of a Jim Jones, people subscribing to an ideology divorced from any reality many of us even recognize. 

There are core crazinesses of this ecosystem, like the conspiracies of Infowars with pedophile operations run out of pizza parlors near D.C., but not so far from that are ideas taken up by McMorris Rodgers and Sue Lani Madsen when they solemnly cite George Soros as the liberal bogeyman, the evil name that lights up a whole construct in the minds of the faithful. 

But enough of my rambling. Click on this link here (or the one above–they go to the same place), read Doug Muder’s article and sign up for his email. I will try to get back to a more local focus.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Dear Group,

The news we consume both nationally and locally is written by someone, and no one writes without some point of view. All news offers a story, a story based at some level on facts, numbers, and quotes, but always facts, numbers, and quotes selected and presented by a writer. I used to read newspaper articles without paying attention to the byline. That was naive. 

I have not met Daniel Walters personally, but I have read a lot of his writing…and I like it. Daniel Walters is a staff writer with The Inlander, the Spokane weekly free newspaper. Mr. Walters is in his early thirties. He is Spokane through and through, North Central High School, Whitworth University, to staff writer with the Inlander starting in 2009 (all that comes from Facebook). Pay attention to his byline. He is worth reading. 

I offer an extended quote below Daniel Walters’ November 9 Inlander article, McMorris Rodgers wins the battle, but her House Republicans lose the war. Was it worth it? . The first part of the article was a little jarring as it pointed out the result of the CMR/Brown contest “wasn’t even close.” You might be forgiven if, in the election aftermath, you had quit reading there–but it got a lot better. I like the way Daniel Walters thinks. I will pay more attention to the Inlander and a bit less to the Spokesman:

But in McMorris Rodgers’ speech, at least, there’s no trace of regret over the night’s events. Instead, she reminisces about the time she was called to give the State of the Union response in 2014, the one where she promised that Republicans were the ones with the solutions to “affordable health care.” 

“No, we shouldn’t go back to the way things were, but this law is not working,” McMorris Rodgers said back then. “Republicans believe health care choices should be yours, not the government’s.” 

But that just underscores McMorris Rodgers’ mixed legacy in leadership: Today, Obamacare remains the law of the land. In fact, McMorris Rodgers spent the last phase of the campaign arguing, dubiously, that she had been a champion of the defense of one Obamacare’s crucial tenets — the pre-existing condition guarantee. 

McMorris Rodgers’ House Republicans spent eight years in power — the last two with control of every branch. But they haven’t funded the wall. They didn’t pass comprehensive immigration reform. They didn’t successfully pass a bill to protect DACA recipients. This year, in fact, they haven’t even been able to successfully pass a Farm Bill.

Instead, I wait patiently as a scrum of TV reporters lob mostly softballs at McMorris Rodgers for a few minutes. Then, as the small press conference looks to be ending, I jump in:

“Would you rather have lost and the Republicans keep the House—” 

But then, like a Secret Service agent leaping in front of a bullet, McMorris Rodgers’ campaign manager, Patrick Bell, shuts me down. 

“Sorry that was the last question,” Bell says, maneuvering in front of me. “Thanks, Daniel. Thanks, everybody.” 

At the encouragement of another McMorris Rodgers campaign staffer, I spend the rest of the party trying to catch McMorris Rodgers as she shakes hands and takes selfies with her supporters. 

“Do you have a moment for print?” I ask as she walks out of the party. “All the TV guys got to ask questions? Print doesn’t get anything?” 

Again, Bell shuts me down. 

“We did it! We did it! We did it!” McMorris Rodgers cheers as she readies to leave. “56 percent and counting.” 

I try one last time as McMorris Rodgers stands in the door to the Davenport Grand Hotel, and get the closest thing to an answer. 

“We won right here tonight in Eastern Washington,” she says. “Focus on tonight, Daniel.”

And then, like that, she’s gone. 

To be sure, during the Obama years, the House Republicans made for fearsome opposition: They shut down the government in 2014. They successfully pushed back against federal government spending. Yet the House’s biggest legislative legacy from the past two years of Republican control is the major tax cut bill — a bill that is anticipated to keep sending the deficit soaring. Few, if any, vulnerable House Republicans based their campaigns on the effectiveness of the tax cuts.

And for all that? Democrats look like they’re going to be picking up about 37-40 House seats, despite the booming economy. It’s the best Democratic performance since Watergate. In the end, it wasn’t even close. 

Asked by a TV reporter about the changing landscape in the House, McMorris Rodgers stresses her ability to be bipartisan: “I have great relationships. I can work across the aisle,” she says, talking about her successes in areas like hydropower and forestry. 

But by Thursday, CNN reports that Cathy McMorris Rodgers will not run again for House conference chair. Rep. Liz Cheney is running for that spot instead. 

So here’s my final question: If you were Lisa or Cathy, which would you rather have: A personal victory? Or control of the House for your party? 

Would McMorris Rodgers have rather lost on Tuesday night if the House Republicans won? Would Lisa Brown prefer to have been elected if it meant Republicans had maintained control of the House? 

When I asked Lisa Brown that question, she doesn’t hesitate: She’d rather Democrats have control of the House than for her to be elected personally.  

“That’s really what motivated me to get into it,” Brown says about her race. In fact, Brown believes that she played a small role in the Democrats’ victory. 

In years past, McMorris Rodgers has been flying all around the country, working to fundraise and stump for her fellow House Republicans. 

“I believe she would have been doing the same thing during the campaign if she hadn’t had a competitive race,” Brown says. 

Instead, she was spending money and holding events in her district, fighting Lisa Brown. I intended to ask McMorris Rodgers the same question. I assumed I’d have a chance. During the campaign, McMorris Rodgers has spoken with the Inlander for lengthy, challenging in-depth interviews on multiple occasions. 

But on election night, neither the Inlander nor the Spokesman-Review get their questions answered by McMorris Rodgers.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Biblical Basis For War Matt Shea

(click to see the pdf of the document)

Dear Group,

The belief systems, the worldview, of the people who claim to represent us at all levels of government deserve close examination. These belief systems reflect on their constituents. Check this out: on November 14, the Spokesman published a letter to the editor by Stevan Alburty of Liberty Lake:

Now that Matt Shea and his Biblical babble have enabled him to be re-elected, I am even more encouraged to proceed with my imaginary plan to hire about 100 bulldozers and raze the entire Spokane Valley from Freya to Barker in one cold swoop.

Start over, I say. It’s physically and intellectually a wasteland, a strip mall of gargantuan proportions. Its allegiance to a fanatic such as Mattt Shea is justification enough for my fantasy of its demolition.

Matt should spend less time trying to fulfill his prophecy about “killing all males,” and spend a little more time on urban planning.

Hmmm. That might be a little overblown. I did quite a lot of canvassing in the City of Spokane Valley in the two weeks leading up to the November election. I followed the national and local coverage of Matt Shea and his worrisome manifesto, “Biblical Basis for War,” a tract I first encountered in a Spokesman article on October 31st, just six days before the election. Regardless of the national news coverage of Mr. Shea’s extremism, many I spoke with in the City of Spokane Valley barely recognized the name, Matt Shea, much less any detail of his ideology.

I smiled reading Mr. Alburty’s letter to the editor, but his way of thinking is a trap. The re-election of an incumbent is more a matter of name recognition and party affiliation than a test of the incumbent’s belief system. We tend to imagine everyone is paying as much attention to these things as we are. We need to get over that. 

When Matt Shea was confronted with his manifesto (reproduced above) his response was: 

“First of all, it was a summary of a series of sermons on biblical war in the Old Testament as part of a larger discussion on the history of warfare,” Shea said in a Facebook Live video on Wednesday. “This document, in and of itself, was not a secret. I’ve actually talked about portions of this document publicly.”

Well, today I bring you the document itself. If you haven’t already read it where it is posted above, I urge you to do so. There is no question of it’s authenticity. I downloaded it from the link in the October 31st article in the Spokesman. Here is the direct link to the online pdf. Read it for the full effect. Shea’s defense of his outline as an academic exercise, one part of a series of sermons, is absurd. Sections “10 Rules of War” and “11 Organizational Structure for War” are not academic or sermonic, they are a modern day prescription with modern day issues and terminology,

The controversy over this document broke only in the last days of the election. It had a modest effect on the voting I will address in a later post, but the document did not have enough time or promotion to sink into the consciousness of the average voter. That will take time…and it will only happen if we absorb its contents and spread them. 

Mr. Alburty’s letter to the editor is premature. His bulldozer fantasy neglects the nearly 30,000 LD4 voters who cast ballots for Ted Cummings, and others who voted for Shea only because he “Prefers Republican Party,” voters blissfully ignorant of Shea’s extremism. Even some staunch local Republicans have denounced the man, notably Sheriff Knezovich and Bob McCaslin Sr. (McCaslin Jr.’s father and a former Senator from LD4, now deceased.) Others have accepted Shea’s endorsement (McMorris Rodgers, for example) or even defended Shea’s document (Rob Chase). One hopes McMorris Rodgers’ lack of discrimination will eventually catch up with her, but for now she is too much a chicken to repudiate Shea risk losing the votes of his extremist followers. (Or does she agree with Shea while she remains careful not to be too open about it?) 

Read “Biblical Basis for War.” Talk it up. Spread it around. [Download from here.] This document is no dry exercise in Biblical interpretation or academic discussion of the history of armed conflict. It is a prescription for modern day religious warfare. No denial from Shea should change that plain fact.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

P.S. On a picky note, Mr Alburty’s bulldozers had better start at Havana St, not Freya. If they start pushing east from Freya they will plow up part of the City of Spokane and part of Legislative District 3 before entering LD4 and the City of Spokane Valley, the territory he says he wants to level. Review the LD boundaries using this interactive map. Orient yourself!