In Montana, An Unease Over Extremist Views Moving Out Of The Woods

[mahatmakanejeeves]

In Montana, An Unease Over Extremist Views Moving Out Of The Woods

November 29, 2016·4:56 AM ET

Heard on Morning Edition

The day after the election, Jen Stebbins-Han's kids came home from school and posed a question that before this year, she says, she might have laughed off. ... "My kids came home and asked us if their dad was going to be deported," she says. "I don't know where they heard that because it wasn't from us."

Stebbins-Han's husband is Korean-American. Jen is white. The couple has three young biracial kids. ... "There is a part of me that's afraid because I don't know what somebody's going to do because they feel emboldened to be able to," she says.

Stebbins-Han grew up in northwest Montana's Flathead Valley, a pristine area wedged between the snow-capped mountains of Glacier National Park and the glacier-fed Flathead Lake.

Like a lot of people here with the means, she moved away as a young adult. Five years ago, she returned with her husband so he could take over her dad's orthodontist practice. The couple's kids go to the same little country school Jen and her father and grandfather attended. ... But she says the valley she came back to seems different now. ... "What I've noticed is ... I didn't realize how OK with blatant racism so many people are," Stebbins-Han says.

I am sure I saw a DVD years ago about hate groups around Whitefish and Kalispell. I'll ask the librarian what its name was.

I'll bet it was about this:

A move to the right

Long before the 2016 election, rural northwest Montana had a reputation as a haven for anti-government extremists and white supremacists. According to numerous interviews with longtime locals, this used to get shrugged off. These were the fringe types, the locals said, holed up in remote cabins in the woods of northwest Montana and the Idaho panhandle.

Then things started bubbling up to the surface. Controversy erupted in 2010 when a group calling itself Kalispell Pioneer Little Europe began screening Holocaust denial films at the library in Kalispell, Flathead Valley's largest city. Then, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer moved to the lakeside resort town of Whitefish.