2/25/23

The American Redoubt has Black Hills connection


James Wesley Rawles coined the phrase American Redoubt in 2011. From his SurvivalBlog.com he supposes Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, eastern Oregon and Washington are survivalist havens for the christian nationalist movement. 

As recently as 2017 he used a post office box in Newcastle, Wyoming as his mailing address and credits the late Susan Callaway as his Black Hills connection. She authored the blog, The Price of Liberty until her passing in 2018. That weblog is maintained by Nathan Barton, a Rapid City Libertarian who ran for governor in 1994 and again in 2002.

Just a few miles from Newcastle and boasting remote off-grid survivable spaces with two deep wells, California-based Vivos xPoint is leasing hardened shelters to doomsday preppers.

Recall that in 2016 a group of armed thugs, including a retired Air Force master sergeant from South Dakota allied with mormon Ammon Bundy, occupied a national wildlife refuge in Harney County, Oregon.
Rawles made an exception for Orthodox Jews and Messianic Jews, saying they would also be welcome in the Redoubt because they “share the same moral framework” as conservative Christians. But the post, which has been updated multiple times since, concludes with a list of “prepper-friendly” congregations in the Reformed Church tradition (Rawles is a Reformed Baptist). The influx has given birth to a phalanx of “Redoubt Realtors” who specialize in resettling transplants. Chris Walsh works for Revolutionary Realty, whose webpage features images of bald eagles, American flags and a banner that welcomes visitors to the “heart of the Great American Redoubt, North Idaho!” A Spokane, Washington-based pastor long associated with the Redoubt is Matt Shea, a former Washington state legislator who has advocated for a “Holy Army.” Shea was expelled from his state’s GOP caucus in 2019 after an investigation concluded he had engaged in domestic terrorism in connection with the 2016 armed takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. [How big Christian nationalism has come courting in North Idaho]
Rawles’ son, Jonathan operates Survival Realty that features off-grid properties including some with bunkers and greenhouses. 

The Black Hills region is a de facto part of the American Redoubt so Spearditch resident and Republican legislator, Scott Odenbach is tapped into the survivalist real estate boom, too.
Jim Elliott, a long-time Democratic former state legislator from Trout Creek, located in Sanders County just outside of the Idaho “island of refuge”, says the remote corners of northwestern Montana and the Inland Northwest have long been a haven for conservative politics, but that the arrival of new residents armed with acute distrust of the government concerns him. [For sale: God, guns and separatism in the American Redoubt]
So-called sovereign citizens are overwhelmingly white christians using a maladapted interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to rationalize their commitment to a pending race war using links to the federal storming of Ruby Ridge, Idaho and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas then culminating in the Oklahoma City bombing. Many are either convicted felons no longer able to vote or have been recruited by those who believe that the democratic process is ineffective and cities especially in blue states will collapse.

In 2022 one of Rawles' brethren was tossed from a Sidney, Montana congregation after committing multitudinous sins of debauchery.

Montana is bracing for civil unrest, christian/anarchist militias armed for the End Days are rattling online newspaper fora and blogs with vitriol for people of color. But, how these bozos expect to take on ATF, FBI, and Homeland Security is the height of ignorance. Think Katrina: if civil order is temporarily suspended these idiots will kill only those innocents by whom they feel threatened. Unarmed people would be preyed upon by these monsters unrelentingly.
In March, Shad Olson of “The Shad Olson Show” (which seeks the defeat of the “long-standing antihuman plot to control mankind covertly through every means necessary”) described “what amounts to an ad hoc state by state version of medical martial law.” Shad Olson’s website referred to it a few days later as “the designed collapse and chaos of the intentional destruction of the globalist totalitarian vision.” [Extremists and Conspiracy Theorists Urge Resistance to ‘Medical Martial Law’]
I read The Fountainhead in 1977 while attending the School of Mines about a month after seeing the first Star Wars in Boise, Idaho — it really appealed to the headstrong, narcissistic man-island i was becoming. I had read Atlas Shrugged while at SDSU three or four years earlier about the time i was reading The Gulag Archipelago. Likely i've passed the anarchy gene to my daughters, too, though their mother thinks of it as mental illness.
In conclusion, many folks are now ready to vote with their feet. Atlas is starting to shrug. [Rawles, The American Redoubt — Move to the Mountain States]

No comments: