Dear Group,
On Tuesday, September 24, I with a politically mixed crowd of about 400, attended the Republicans of Spokane County presentation of “The Threats We Face” at the Center Place Regional Event Center in Spokane Valley. Presenters were former state Senator John Smith (who recently and briefly represented NE WA, LD7); Jay Pounder, former bodyguard of current state representative Matt Shea (LD4, Spokane Valley and north); and Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich.
The Republicans of Spokane County (RSC), the sponsoring entity for this “town hall,” is the smaller and, I strongly suspect, the more moderate of the two Spokane County Republican organizations. The other, bigger group is the SpokaneGOP (aka the Spokane County Republican Party).
The meeting opened with an announcement something close to “Law enforcement is present. If you exit through the side doors you will need to re-enter through the main door.” There were a number of openly armed civilians in the room.
The opening prayers were refreshingly ecumenical. They were offered by several women representing different faiths (and different political leanings). Afterward I understand there were a number of complaints to the chairwoman that the opening prayers were insufficiently Christian. During the Pledge of Allegiance a woman I believe to be the wife of the Spokane Prosecutor, Larry Haskel, screamed the words UNDER GOD when those words came up in the recitation. (Lesley Haskel is known for such commentary.) She or another woman in the audience shouted “You lie!” in response to some of the allegations of violent intent that Sheriff Knezovich presented.
The tension and fear in the room were palpable, a remarkable contrast to the openness of, for example, a FUSE or Lisa Brown event. The three speakers made the following points: the groups linked with Rep Shea are armed and threatening, they are extensively linked with other local and national Christian Identity groups, and they are actively engaging in planning and training sessions that lay the ideological and practical groundwork for armed revolution and a separate theocratic state. All three speakers corroborated the material presented by Leah Sottlle in Bundyville and Bundyville, The Remnant. This information is difficult for mainstream Republicans to acknowledge and this is the same information the right most wing of the local GOP wants kept quiet and wish to deny.
I left the event more than ever convinced that Sheriff Knezovich was right all along about the threat of domestic terrorism coming from groups festering in northeastern Washington and north Idaho. But there was a subtext: At the opening of the meeting, Beva Miles, the chairwoman of the Republicans of Spokane County, made a show of solidarity with The SpokaneGOP, the larger Republican group. Despite that show, there was an elephant in the room: Two, maybe three times, Ozzie mentioned Cecily Wright. (Ms. Wright is the former chairwoman of the SpokaneGOP and, with her husband, the hostess of Northwest Grassroots in Greenbluff, the group that welcomed the white supremacist James Allsup). Each time Ozzie suggested life would have been easier if he had “just listened to Cecily Wright in 2010.”
So, what to make of the sense of fear and heightened security at this gathering and of Ozzie’s oblique comments about Cecily Wright, Christian Identity, and white supremacy? Ozzie cannot possibly be deluded into fearing an attack from armed leftists. There is absolutely zero evidence for such fear in Spokane, regardless of Ozzie’s mention of ISIS training camps and the “threat” of Antifa. I have to conclude he is legitimately fearful of the right wing extremists who make up part of his own Republican Party, hateful, in-your-face extremists who were on display at this meeting itself and extremists, like Cecily Wright, Rod Higgins (mayor of Spokane Valley and darling of NW Grassroots), and Matt Shea (above all) who have infiltrated the SpokaneGOP’s hierarchy and, through the SpokaneGOP, local and state government. Sheriff Knezovich, I have to conclude, is legitimately fearful of the rot in his own local Party apparatus.
James Wavada, a friend and frequent reader of this column, also attended. He offered the following assessment follows:
I attended Ozzie Knezovich’s “Threat We Face” presentation at the Discovery Park Event Center in Spokane Valley earlier this week. The setup was interesting as they repeatedly stressed security measures in place at the event. The first two speakers were “deserters” from the white power cause, a former state legislator and a former Matt Shea aide.
Then came Ozzie’s review of the link between the Christian Identity Movement and Matt Shea and his friends in the Marble Community in northern Stevens County. I’ve heard this presentation before. Lots of slides with a lot of news clips with lots of text nobody has time to read before he changes slides.
But Ozzie did the same thing I chastised him for doing when he gave this presentation to the Retired Public Employees Council (RPEC) group that I belong to almost a year ago. False equivalence. He always prefaces and repeats throughout his presentation that “both sides” are culpable for the increasing violence we are seeing. He runs on about Antifa and the New Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movements.
I’m sure this is something he does to hold his Republican audiences while he tries to persuade them about the real threats from right wing extremists.
At the RPEC meeting, I had the opportunity to challenge him on this absurd equivalence assertion. I asked him if in all his deep research on this issue, he had bothered to compile the relative body counts between Antifa and the White Power movements. That would be ZERO for Antifa, and well into the HUNDREDS for the White Power champions like Timothy McVeigh.
I noted that Antifa has not to anyone’s knowledge developed a plan to blow up federal buildings or execute public servants after the pending apocalypse. They seem to only surface at white power rallies to physically, and I conceded, sometimes violently, refute the right wing extremists’ messages.
My point was not to excuse Antifa’s methods, but to point out that there is no equivalence in their purpose, tactics or consequences.
Of course, Ozzie’s response was to deflect and dissemble and repeat the “pox on all their houses,” mantra, and shift to blaming the mainstream media for fomenting violence against police through their inaccurate reporting of public confrontations.
What was missing in both presentations was any outline or suggestion about what he and his department are doing to protect us from white power violence. It’s all on us to reject their bigotry as if that would prevent violence from a future Timothy McVeigh, Denver Parmenter, Bruce Pierce or Bob Matthews, all with links to North Idaho’s Aryan Nations.
Maybe it’s a good thing that he’s not running again. It would be great to hear from a candidate who might actually have a plan to prevent the next Murrah Building [Oklahoma City] style attack.
We, and the good people of the local Republican Party(s) can start by rejecting the rot that is eating at our local politics by voting knowledgeably in this November’s general election and the elections upcoming in 2020. This is like modern treatment of many cancers: the rot represented by Matt Shea and his fellow travelers can never be totally cured, but, with diligence, it can be contained and extirpated from our governance.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry