Q: Are things coming to a head, even in Big Sky Country?
A: Yes. Yes, they are.
There’s Gonna be a War in Montana
An analysis of visible propaganda in Bozeman, Big Sky, and Three ForksIn popular culture, protagonists and antagonists battle eternally for Montana’s precious land. Country folk fight off city folk in Yellowstone and the podcast Land Grab: A Podcast About the Place We Call Montana. Long before that Montana (1950) pit sheep farmers against cattle farmers. In Last of the Dogmen (1995) cowboys faced Cheyenne Indians. Of the 14 major film/TV projects scheduled to be shot in Montana, every single one involves some take on the battle for Montana’s soul. And Montana’s soul is in its land.
Land conflicts have led to at least one recent murder, but despite Yellowstone’s depiction of ranchers (our heroes) massacring greedy real estate developers with machine guns, so far Montana hot wars have been relegated to fiction.
My wife, toddler, and I attended a family reunion on a ranch in Tom Miner Basin—one of the most beautifully preserved parts of the state—for a week. Six years ago I attended the same event at the same ranch. There is indeed something special about the land and particularly the sky in Tom Miner Basin. Rural Montana is astonishing. I won’t bore you with more cringey descriptions because that’s all there is to say. Jockeying for Montana’s land provides great stakes for drama because the prize is priceless.
More interesting to me were the parts of Montana I saw by accident. A new coldness grips the relationship between visitors and locals. I first noticed it at the ranch. Six years ago the kitchen helpers were a happy mix. The chef was known for his thoughtful local cuisine, elk with au jus, beef burgers from ranch cattle, loaded baked potatoes, hearty mac and cheese. The servers wore big smiles. The progressive boomers attending the reunion were comfortable with this type of staff, the same hodgepodge they interacted with at home. Much backslapping occurred.
This time, the help had clearly experienced a vibe shift. They were all white, and distant. The food was awful—boiled carrots and reheated pork steaks, the result of some Aramark-type lowest-bidder supply chain. The new staff had been mostly hired on Coolworks, a website for low paid service jobs on ranches, resorts, and other “great places.” They came from the surrounding towns, forgotten about, left behind, bright red Trump country. Young women with sloped posture and heavy eyeshadow, barely 18. Their clothes don’t fit, they looked impoverished, hungry, skittering. The young chef who had once proudly presented his take on local food was gone. The guests no longer chatted with servants. There was separation and silence.
Then my wife tested positive for COVID so we fled to Bozeman. Throughout the subsequent week, I explored Bozeman and Big Sky, ultra-hot destinations (and now homes) for the woke bourgeoisie, and Three Forks, the polar opposite, a totally different world a razor thin distance away. I saw two groups of people, an overclass and an underclass, pressed up against each other, spoiling for a fight, just waiting for the littlest spark to set their fury ablaze.
Over what? The soul of Montana of course. One-of-a-kind land. That’s nothing new. What’s new is the character of the warring factions. They aren’t who you see on TV. On one side you have global interests imputing their values, importing cheaper labor, hollowing out Montana’s attractions and selling them to an international bourgeoisie for maximum profits. On the other you have the new underclass. Not the friendly Christian country folk of times past. And not Cowboy Hat Republican Rancher Dad either. No, these are a new kind of country person. Angry, exasperated, poor, Trump-loving service-workers—the Oxy takers, the meth cookers, the eaters of Chick-Fil-A. This group is acutely aware of just who controls Bozeman and Big Sky, and believe that the same people are coming for their territory. And they’re right.
If you listen, you can hear the two groups screaming at each other in silence, waiting for their very own Gavrilo Princip to spark this thing off.
You can at that, and not just in Montana, either. Then again, when shitlibs are screaming at the top of their lungs exactly what they intend to do to you, it probably behooves you to listen. Because if you don’t think they’ll really do it—not they themselves necessarily, but through their Wokester governments; their Wokester banks and other corporate entities; their Wokester cultural mafia; their monolithic Wokester “education” edifices from pre-K to post-grad; their grim, whey-faced Wokester bureacrats—then you probaby aren’t paying attention anything like closely enough. Divemedic knows:
So if the leaders of the Democrat party calling for your imprisonment and death aren’t real, the people burning and destroying property aren’t real, just what will it take for you to advocate defending yourself? When is it enough to say “no more, I will not be made a target?”
— Divemedic (@DMAreaOcho)
Indeed so.
(Via WRSA)
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Here’s what’s going on – there are a combination of rich Californians and New Yorkers moving in and paying high, high prices for real estate – and real estate speculators with out-of-state weaponized piles of money selling it to them. They drive up property taxes and housing costs, and they bring their odious politics with them – and they will destroy any place they settle in, like a plague of locusts. Here’s a typical entry ob Reddit: “People who come to Bozeman with out of state money are buying these houses, in many cases after retirement. I don’t know of anyone in my age range (30’s) who has stayed in Montana and has any hope of buying a place like that. Montana wages vs cost of living just do not make it possible for most of us.” https://www.reddit.com/r/Bozeman/comments/jovj2p/are_real_people_actually_buying_expensive_homes/
So the real people who made the place what it was are being replaced by these “pod people”… and greed speaks louder than tradition, sense of place, or common sense as to what a community is. The result is California-clones. Maybe it will take a war to stop it.
Tell Montanans to call the Waaaaahmbulance.
Hawaii, California, Florida, Colorado, Hilton Head, Sedona, Key West, and Long Island all send their hilariously-amused condolences.
Don’t want people to buy it?
Don’t sell it.
Next “problem”…