Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 27 minutes (7,641 words)
Part 4 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.
I.
To get to the Kingdom of Heaven, drive a long twisting road that dips in and out of wide green fields dotted with hay bales, skim alongside a crooked river and stop at the sign that says Marble Country. A wooden ranch gate — a tall archway of timber and American flags — marks the spot. Keep going past it for 20 more minutes and you’ll leave the country altogether; drive under that gate, and in a way, you’ll leave America, too.
For nearly 30 years, speculation about what goes on beyond the threshold to Marble Country has confused, scared, and angered folks here in Stevens County — a far-flung region of thick forests and dirt roads, cow pastures and low hills deep in the northeastern corner of Washington state.
Before the first barn wall could be raised on the site of a ghost town, people were already whispering. “Religious Group Says Fear Of Cult Unjustified,” a 1992 Associated Press headline read, “Pentecostal Sect Plans To Move Into Ghost Town.”
That religious group, led by a married couple named Barry and Anne Byrd, intended to create its very own Western-themed shining city on the hill: what they termed a “Christian covenant community.” They called it Marble Country, and they built houses and a church — Marble Community Fellowship — and painted “Holy Ghost Town” on an old barn. They raised families, planted crops. It wasn’t just a new town put down in an old place, but an old place resurrected. A brochure said Marble would get into all levels of politics, offer alternative civil courts and an alternative media.
“We are committed to uniting the generations to labor together to bring the dominion of Christ in every area of life,” the Byrds promised in the brochure.
For most of the time Marble Country has existed, the Byrds have hosted an event each summer called the God and Country Celebration. As the Patriot movement has made more and more headlines — between the standoffs at Bundy Ranch in 2014 and Malheur in 2016, and the subsequent trials — the name Marble kept popping up in my reporting. People who’d once been in the movement told me the festival was a gathering of militia bigwigs, Patriot celebrities, and politicians with extreme beliefs. It sounded like some kind of Patriot Woodstock, but it’s closed to the media, so I couldn’t go see it for myself.
In the summer of 2018, Jeanette Finicum was a “special guest” at the festival, bringing with her the message of her murdered, martyred husband. During the weekend, children in cowboy hats and jeans waved big white flags from the Marble stage bearing her husband’s distinct “LV” cattle brand.
Finicum chose Marble as one of the first places to screen LaVoy: Dead Man Talking, a multipart film about her husband. There she delivered a speech that differed greatly in tone from the one she gave when I saw her speak in Salem, Oregon, just six months later. Someone sent me a recording of her Marble speech: She wasn’t the diminutive chuck-wagon mom I’d seen in Salem, but a pissed-off activist with a message ready for an audience who cheered her on.
“The media is not in the business of telling the truth,” she spat into the microphone.
The Marble crowd murmured approval — yes, yes, that’s right, amen.
“Their job, their motive, their mission is to create an illusion in order to blur our reality. I was label-lynched by them as a sovereign citizen, anti-government terrorist. Profiled as a domestic right-wing extremist and judged by the American public for standing with my husband,” she said. She told them she was on a watch list. The feds monitored her home.
She never used that word — lynching — when I saw her speak in Salem, but here, both she and Mark Herr, the film’s producer, spoke it as if it were a word created for them. They have been lynched, they told the crowd, again and again. Lynched.
The lynch mob, by their estimation, was the media: inflicting extrajudicial punishment to God-fearing freedom lovers. How dare anyone go after them?
“Your political opponents are using labels and the force of government to lynch you out of existence! What can you do?” Finicum asked. “You can make label-lynching a hate crime.” She told the crowd to lobby state legislators to make Patriots a special class.
“We should be a protected class,” she yelled. “After all, everyone else is!”
To that, the crowd cheered so loud it was almost hard to hear her anymore.
***
For decades, Stevens County, where Marble Country is located, has served as somewhat of a wooded, mountainous petri dish for conspiracy theories to grow, flourish, and find new hosts. For most of that time, one daily newspaper reporter was there to document the crimes committed by fringe groups who’ve found haven in the Stevens County’s sparsely populated areas. His name is Bill Morlin, and for decades he worked at the Spokane Daily Chronicle, then The Spokesman-Review. Now in his 70s, I first met him in the federal courtroom during the Bundys’ short-lived trial in Las Vegas.
In the spring of 2019, I called him up to get a crash course on Stevens County’s right-wing extremist history. Something that may come as a surprise to people who aren’t familiar with the Inland Northwest is that the Northwestern United States isn’t all rain showers and mountains and Nirvana records, coffee shops and weed stores on every corner.
In fact, Eastern Washington and North Idaho couldn’t be less in line with that image. It’s a deeply conservative area of the West. It’s hot and dry in the summer, cold as hell in the winter. In the past few years, some people have started to call this region the American Redoubt — the nickname survivalists and preppers have given Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, arguing that it’s a safe haven for libertarians. The term was popularized by James Wesley Rawles, who calls the people who migrated there for that reason “the remnant. Libertarians and preppers from around the country have been encouraged to make a home here. There are even “redoubt realtors” who’ll sell you a house, complete with a bomb shelter.
I came to talk to Morlin about Stevens County, but also about this region as a whole. He came prepared for our meeting with three pages, single-spaced, detailing various murders, robberies, kidnappings, and bombings committed by people from the county.
In the late 1970s, Richard Butler, who would become one of the most famous white supremacists in the country, had set up the swastika-emblazoned compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho, attracting racists from every corner of the country to the Idaho Panhandle. Butler allowed Morlin and a photographer to document the event, which the newspaper had been trying to cover, as a way of attempting to understand who, exactly, was gathering at the compound.
“There was sort of a division, like do we pay these people any attention or do we ignore them?” he recalled of his paper’s coverage of cross burnings. “In fact a columnist at the other newspaper thought we were foolish for writing about the fact that there’d been a cross burning. He was of the school of thought that if you ignore them, they’ll go away, and by writing about them all you’re doing is giving them publicity.
“I have never to this day signed on to that belief system,” Morlin continued. “Neither do major civil rights organizations. They believe that turning the lights on is the only way you can deal with hate groups.”
The cross burning was called the Blessing of the Weapons and was presided over by former Michigan KKK grand dragon Robert Miles. (In 1973, Miles was convicted of conspiring to bomb ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan.)
“It was very uncomfortable,” Morlin said. As the group of 40 to 50 people lit three crosses wrapped in diesel-soaked burlap, “each person in the circle would walk up with with his weapon … knives or handguns or long rifles. And each of them would be blessed by the master of ceremonies. The ceremony was to signify that these people were committing to the white cause and the fight for the white race that they envisioned was coming any day.”
That night, Morlin didn’t know who exactly all those men were that had their guns blessed in the name of a white war — but soon, he would. They would become known as the Order. It was an all-white underground domestic terrorist organization established by an anti-government extremist and racist named Bob Mathews, who had been actively recruiting people to create a “White American Bastion” in the Pacific Northwest and was motivated, in part, by an extremist ideology called Christian Identity.
It’s an ideology that relies on the belief that Jews are descendants of Cain, and people of color are soulless and “beasts of the field,” while whites are the true “House of Israel.” Some Identity adherents believe Jews are the spawn of Eve and Satan. Butler, too, preached Christian Identity from his very own church at the compound. Around the nation, neo-Nazi groups and the Ku Klux Klan also believed in the radical ideology.
Nationwide, as violent white supremacist fires flared, Christian Identity — time and time again — was the pitch wood making it burn hot and constant.
The men of the Order met at a cabin on Mathews’s Northeastern Washington property which was located in the county next to Stevens County. They “stood in a circle secretly and pledged a blood oath to each other to jointly fight this race war that they believed was coming,” Morlin told me.
Morlin believes the men were inspired by a work of racist, apocalyptic fiction, a novel called The Turner Diaries that details a race war, and that, later, compelled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
According to Morlin, the men at the ceremony eventually committed “a litany” of violent acts, most notably the 1984 assassination of a Jewish radio host named Alan Berg, who’d mocked a tenet of Christian Identity — that Jews were evil incarnate — on his Denver talk show. They committed a robbery in Spokane, bombed a synagogue in Boise, and robbed armored cars in Seattle. But investigators were baffled, unable to figure out who was responsible for so much violence.
“This is in an era before the term ‘terrorist’ meant anything to anybody. I mean it’s like ‘Domestic terrorism? What’s that?’” Morlin said.
During a Northern California robbery of several million dollars from an armored car, Mathews left a handgun behind — a mistake that would eventually lead to the downfall of the Order. Mathews died in a shoot-out before the group’s 1985 trial in Seattle, which Morlin covered for the Spokesman-Review.
“A lot of the East Coast networks and newspapers had pretty much ignored the fact that the Order trial had occurred,” he says. “It was really a big deal, but it had happened on the West Coast and it didn’t get the news coverage, in my view, that it would have received if it had been in Florida or New York or Ohio or Pennsylvania.”
In fact, the Order created a new legacy for up-and-coming racists to follow: Today, violent white supremacist groups still cite an adherence to a mission statement called “The 14 Words” — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — which was coined by one of the Order’s members.
The men of the Order weren’t exactly quiet about the ideas that drove them: Mathews and other members of the group were known to convene at a Colorado Christian Identity church led by an anti-Jewish, anti-homosexual, and racist preacher named Pete Peters. Despite its small population, by the 1990s, Stevens County was home to at least two Christian Identity churches: the Ark, near the Canadian border, and another founded by a former Ark acolyte, the Christian Israel Covenant Church. (The Ark is now called Our Place Fellowship; the Christian Israel Covenant Church disbanded in the early 2000s.)
“Those churches taught that white people are the superior race, that Jews are biologically satanic,” Morlin told me.
The churches were small — and though the pastor at the Ark, Dan Henry, told The Spokesman-Review in 1992 that he rejected the “hate mongering” of the Aryan Nations, he also acknowledged preaching antisemitic ideas.
But word had gotten around. People knew who was attending services. So it was common knowledge that the couple trying to start that new Christian covenant community called Marble Country — Barry and Anne Byrd — had attended the Ark for years.
It was like the county knew what was about to happen — that this tiny bastion of hateful ideas was about to cross the rubicon, producing a number of followers who would spill blood in the name of Identity ideology all around the American West.
***
The racist services at The Ark were attended not only by adults who wanted to hear the sermons of Henry and other extremists, but also often by the children of those people, too. Chevie Kehoe fit the profile of one of those kids. Raised in part in Stevens County, his parents, Kirby and Gloria Kehoe, brought their children to services at the Ark, likely around the same time the Byrds attended. As his children grew older, Kirby Kehoe, an adamant racist, grew increasingly skeptical of the government, pulling his kids out of their Colville, Washington, public school, viewing schools “as a threat,” according to his son. In a 1999 New York Times interview, Chevie said his parents were interested in the notion of a whites-only region preached by the Order’s Mathews, and over time Chevie believed that he himself could bring the plan to fruition in the Northwest. He called the region the Aryan People’s Republic, and began committing robberies and acts of violence in devotion to the concept.
In the late 1990s, he launched a cross-country trip to recruit people to his white region — a trip that turned into a spree of murders, shootings, and robberies.
In 1996, Chevie Kehoe robbed and murdered a man, his wife, and her 8-year-old daughter in Arkansas, then tossed their bodies into the Illinois Bayou. The next year, when police officers in Ohio pulled over Kehoe and his brother, Cheyne, and in two subsequent shoot-outs, Kehoe fired 33 bullets, seriously injuring a pedestrian before fleeing. Both were arrested after a brief manhunt, and Chevie was later sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Even decades after Chevie Kehoe’s imprisonment, the whites-only nation idea that invigorated him, Mathews, and the Order before him, would keep surfacing in new ways and in new forms.
Kehoe is now incarcerated at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Fremont County, Colorado, alongside McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols and 1996 Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph, who was inspired by Christian Identity to bomb abortion clinics, a lesbian bar, and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
In 2012, serial killer Israel Keyes, who grew up with the Kehoe brothers and who also occasionally attended the Ark as a child, confessed to committing robberies and murders from coast to coast before reportedly dying by suicide in a jail cell. It’s unclear if his crimes were inspired by any sort of ideology, but during the 1990s, his father wrote a letter of support for both the Byrds and Pete Peters that was published in the local paper.
Keyes wrote that it wasn’t illegal to practice Christian Identity: “It is my understanding that the Marble Community Fellowship has very little to do with the Christian Identity Movement, but so what? Haven’t we as Americans a right to exercise a belief in God and celebrate our white heritage and Christian religion? After all, many Jews consider their race to be God’s chosen people. Is this not racism at its zenith?”
Morlin told me that he reported from a meeting of the Stevens County Assembly — an anti-government militia — in 2012, in which neo-Confederate Pastor John Weaver spoke. Weaver gives racist sermons from the pulpit — sometimes in front of a Confederate flag, sometimes wearing a Confederate flag–printed tie — railing against interracial marriage, and advocating for slavery. By the time of the meeting, he was no stranger to Eastern Washington. In the early 1990s, he appeared at a Spokane conference of white supremacists, during which he promoted his book that urged Americans to break laws should the government become occupied by Jews.
In 2015, Weaver was back in Stevens County to give another speech — this time, he was onstage at Marble Country.
II.
Marble’s God and Country Festival wouldn’t be what it is without a speech from a Washington State House Representative from a district two hours away.
His name is Matt Shea. A clean-cut Army veteran with a law degree, Shea wears thin glasses, dresses in crisply ironed shirts, and smiles tightly. He positions himself as a voice of rural people, but actually represents a district that includes Spokane Valley, a largely suburban city of almost 100,000.
Rep. Matt Shea at a January 2017 gun-rights rally in Olympia, Washington. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)
Shea, over the course of six two-year terms, has become a fixture at the far-right edge of what Washingtonians consider Republican. He rarely speaks to reporters — unless they work for publications that have the words “liberty” or “redoubt” in their name. I know more people who’ve done in-person interviews with President Trump than with State Representative Shea, and for years, I worked at newspapers that covered his district.
In order for Shea’s constituents to get an understanding of his ideas, they need to tune into his podcast. The show always takes the same format: Shea reads off some headlines from right-wing news sites, then interviews a guest, while often piping up in agreement with their outlandish theories.
Those guests tend to hold views reflected in the bills Shea introduces in the Washington House. They’re unflinching Second Amendment advocates. This spring, a woman on the program preached abstinence-only sex education and an anti-vaccine “researcher” claimed that child immunizations are contaminated with aborted fetuses.
Mostly, they’re conspiracy theorists and bigots with views Shea parrots. This spring, the legislator hosted a representative from an anti-abortion and homophobic group that has participated in burnings of the Quran. He interviewed a man who spouted talking points from conspiracists who believe in Agenda 21 — a theory that sustainable development is a shady plan hatched by a “New International Economic Order” to control people and take their freedom. Recently, he hosted a conspiracy theorist who believes the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks were actually a “controlled demolition.”
You could say Shea is a lot like Bill Keebler — except he wears a suit and taxpayers pay him a salary.
Shea, for years, has seemed at home among the creators of fake news and conspiracy theories that turn violent. As early as 2009, he made several appearances on conspiracy king Alex Jones’s InfoWars show, where Jones introduced him with reverence. “Representative,” he says, “good to have you on with us.” In that February 2009 interview, Shea and Jones spoke of their belief that the federal government was setting up camps to imprison Americans.
It seems as though in Shea’s world, the country is on the verge of collapse. People will have to fight for their lives. And he intends to be prepared: “If you do not have 5,000 rounds of .223, 5,000 rounds of .22 and a thousand rounds of handgun ammo as a minimum, you’re wrong!” he called from an Idaho stage in 2013.
“We want to prepare for the inevitable collapse that’s gonna happen. And yes, I said that as a politician here onstage. It’s gonna happen! We all know that! The question is, and I think the question should be for all of us, what are we gonna do afterwards? What are we gonna do with that opportunity?”
Apocalypse, government collapse, anarchy — in his world, these are exciting prospects. Opportunities even. A chance at a fresh start, a time to get society back on track.
In this fantasy apocalypse, perhaps being well-prepared and well-armed will be so necessary that the person you were in the past — in the pre-collapse — won’t matter. Money will be obsolete. Laws won’t be enforced. Maybe a violent past will suddenly be seen as an asset.
This might have special appeal for Shea. His ex-wife, who filed for divorce in 2007, alleged that Shea grabbed her so hard during two arguments that he left bruises on her arms. In those same divorce filings, she told stories of a controlling man; by her account, he commanded her to always walk on his left side because a soldier needs to be able to draw his sword from the right. (Shea was in the Army and served in combat, but his wife said he did not traditionally carry a sword.)
Shea did not respond to requests for comment, but when asked a decade ago about his divorce by the Spokesman-Review, he denied any violence and said, “I love my wife and, when I married, I intended it to be for life. Unfortunately, my former wife didn’t and decided to pursue her third divorce.”
In 2011, Matt Shea was involved in a road rage incident in Spokane, in which another driver alleged Shea pulled a gun. In a police report, Shea told officers that as an Iraq war veteran he had to use “evasive techniques” to avoid hitting the man’s car (which Shea described as engaging in “Baghdad driving”), and proceeded to follow it. Shea admitted to officers that he had a gun in his car, that he produced it from a glovebox during the incident, and that he had an expired concealed carry permit. The other driver said he saw the handgun and was afraid Shea was going to shoot him. Later, Shea’s attorney made a deal with prosecutors that resulted in the charges being dropped.
Even now, in a time he surmises is the end of civil society, all of this has become standard Shea stuff. None of his past did real damage to his standing with voters. But it didn’t mean the things he said didn’t set people on edge.
In the spring of 2014, a woman was eating at a Spokane Valley Mexican restaurant when she overheard a conversation between two men at the next table over. Later, she found out those men were Shea and the head of the Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes.
But sitting there, hearing them, she became so concerned over what they were saying that she took their picture and called the police. According to a police dispatch, the woman overheard “a conversation from a group of males talking about snipers, Clive [sic] Bundy, and public militias.” One of the individuals, she told the police, had “thermal imaging binoculars,” and the group sounded “like they were planning something.”
Still, Shea won the election that year with 57 percent of the vote.
If he could sit in a diner with one of the biggest militia leaders in this country and openly talk about military tactics, it seemed like Shea could be as extreme as he wanted — and it wouldn’t cost him any support. And even some of the most conservative Republicans in Eastern Washington were baffled by how Shea stayed in office.
Two of those people are Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich and a former Republican state legislator from Stevens County, John Smith. In a three-part podcast on white supremacy in the region, the pair suggested that Shea’s involvement at Marble Country was something voters should worry about. It was a part of a deep history of racism and hate that had found a home in this region going way back.
Smith was raised by his grandparents in southern Idaho — and his grandfather was friends with people in the Aryan Nations and in the Order. Their home often had new people coming through the door. He remembered his grandfather laying maps out in the kitchen nook and drawing up plans for “an armed revolt.”
Smith realized on his own the ideology he’d been raised around was rotten and that he had to find a way out of it. He took a job as a ranch hand when he was 16 years old, and as a young adult, he attended church at the Ark. He was later married there, though he says he and his wife have since cut their connections with the church.
But he told me that it’s become something of a mission for him to speak up when he sees ideas rooted in Christian Identity catching on here. Stevens County has a history — he knows it, everyone does, even though racists have always been a fringe minority. And in a podcast with Knezovich, Smith hoped people would hear stories of his childhood as a cautionary tale.
“I grew up in that environment, and that stuff doesn’t wash off you. I acknowledge that darkness might still be inside me,” he told me. He maintains that he’s constantly trying to make sure he’s free of it, that he root out any part of him that might still carry what he learned as a kid — asking friends who aren’t white, who weren’t raised around neo-Nazis, if he’s changed.
“I actively go to them and say, ‘Look at me and tell me, is it still in me? Am I still saying the wrong things? Am I still thinking of this in the wrong way?’ I’m trying to not have that be in there anymore. And maybe part of that is standing up and saying this is not OK.”
Smith, in the video versions of the podcast was small and diminutive next to Knezovich. The latter is a tall, hulking man with a bald head and a sidearm, who shook my hand firmly and didn’t smile once when I interviewed him in a conference room at the Spokane County Sheriff’s office last summer.
He told me he sees Shea’s increasingly conspiratorial rhetoric and the allegations of aggressive behavior against him through a lens of one reality his department deals with regularly: that racism is alive and well in his county. He talked about getting a call one morning that KKK flyers had appeared plastered all over a suburb called Millwood, and about teenagers spouting white nationalist talking points in the hallways of local high schools.
He also talked about threats. Since Knezovich — a member of the local Republican party and a man who twice endorsed Shea — started speaking up about Shea, he has received death threats from people associated with the legislator.
“I’ve got my estate in order. I’ve got my will done. The kids have all been briefed. And don’t take this as me being flippant. Nobody wants to die. I came to grips with death a long, long time ago,” he says. “And there’s been more people than I that have died for this country. And if that’s what it takes for people to wake up to what’s happening around them. All right. I love my nation. And if it takes fighting these people on these terms? Bring it on.”
***
In 2015, Shea was at the God and Country Celebration again, this time next to John Weaver — the neo-Confederate preacher. The next year, many of the legislators from around the West who sympathized with the Bundys in both 2014 and 2016 showed up to Marble, too.
In some years, Anne Byrd posted photos to Facebook of the people who came to Marble. In the caption of a picture of Val Stevens, a former Washington state rep, Byrd wrote that Marble was “blessed” for legislators to be “standing in the gap” for the people.
By the summer of 2018, in the months before the election when many legislators campaign in their districts, Matt Shea appeared alongside Jeanette Finicum at the God and Country Festival. He talked about an idea he’d been shopping for years in the Washington statehouse: He wanted to secede Eastern Washington and create “a safe haven,” a 51st state called Liberty.
Shea insisted people east of the Cascades just didn’t agree with the values of “downtown Seattle,” so why even try to get along? “I would submit, here in Eastern Washington, we believe in the right of self defense. We also believe the constitution means what it says,” he told another crowd. Seattle doesn’t because, he says, it is filled with communists. “And communism, real communism, has killed more people as an ideology than any other ideology in this history of the world — atheist communism.”
All this time Shea spent up here in Stevens County, far from his district, he wasn’t recruiting any new voters. But it did appear he was amassing a following for a political movement, of which he was a leader and visionary.
I wanted to ask him about that, but last summer he didn’t respond to my email requests for an interview. In his personal security detail (having one is atypical for a state rep), Shea is known to employ a man who lives at Marble, and who once tried to bring an AK-47 onto the grounds of the Spokane federal courthouse, but he has no press liaison.
So I figured if I really wanted to ask him a question, and get any kind of an answer, I should show up to a gun rally where he was slated to be a featured speaker.
It was a hot August day — a dry heat, as people in Eastern Washington like to say. The rally was to be held at a large, grassy green park on the northside of Spokane — much closer to his district than Stevens County, but still not in it. A place where people play softball and lay out picnics. On this day, a small crowd gathered. For the most part, they wore shirts emblazoned with proclamations of love for guns and freedom, but several wore militia gear and carried militia flags. Several carried AR-15s.
I listened to Shea give a speech, one that would go on to make headlines around the West, in which he called journalists “dirty, godless, hateful people.” The small crowd — which included leaders and members of the 63rd Lightfoot militia and a local politician who once stomped on the United Nations flag in front of Spokane City Hall — loved it. They cheered Shea on as he yelled, wide-eyed, pumping his fists.
When he was finished, I trudged across the grass, introduced myself, and said I was hoping to ask him some questions: about this 51st State idea and his affinity for speaking at Marble each year. To my surprise, he agreed to talk.
When we spoke — Redoubt News filming it all at Shea’s request — it was hard to track what he was saying. He said a lot of words, but none of them made much sense to me. When I asked about the idea for the state of Liberty, he responded by talking about Irish penal codes. When I asked about the rumors of racism at Marble, he talked about his wife being persecuted for her religion in the Soviet Union.
He said that whatever I’d heard about Marble — that maybe it was a home for Christian Identity believers and white supremacists — was a bunch of lies.
Later, I asked Bill Morlin about Shea’s plan for a 51st state — if that felt similar to what Bob Mathews once wanted, what Chevie Kehoe thought he could bring to life. “Richard Butler wanted a whites-only homeland in the Northwest, which isn’t that much different than a 51st state, because the 51st state that Matt Shea’s talking about, the demographics of it would be mostly white,” he says.
In fact, Morlin says lots of things he heard Butler speak about from the pulpit at the Aryan Nations have become things politicians around the country are now repeating. Butler, he says, talked of “mongol hordes” streaming over the Mexican border.
“What I heard Richard Butler talk about and espouse and preach about 40-some years ago,” he says, “I’m now hearing from the White House.”
***
In October 2018, a couple of months after I talked to Matt Shea in the park in Spokane, he was back in the news again. Some guys who used to work for him leaked a document to the local media: an outline titled “The Biblical Basis for War.” They said Matt Shea wrote it.
“Make an offer of peace before declaring war,” it reads. It says the enemy must “surrender on terms of justice and righteousness: stop all abortions, no same-sex marriage, no idolatry or occultism, no communism, must obey Biblical law.”
It concludes: “If they do not yield, kill all males.”
The man who turned the document loose to reporters is named Tanner Rowe. He’s a big guy who looks like a linebacker, and when I pull up to his mother’s Spokane Valley home to chat, his motorcycle is parked out front and he’s in the garage hammering away at a broken barstool. At one point in our interview, he rolls up his sleeve to show off a “Don’t Tread on Me” tattoo. He says he most identifies with libertarians, but he hates political labels.
Rowe used to be a bouncer, and he was hired by a guy in Shea’s camp — a man named Jay Pounder — to work the door at Shea’s 2016 election night party. He says Shea and his entourage were worried antifa might show up. They were looking for people like Rowe, he says, who were handy with a gun.
In fact, the event went off without incident. But one night of work was enough for Rowe; he says it was “strange” — says the fervor and excitement around the Trump victory bordered on some kind of religiosity. Like a revelation had come true. Like their problems had suddenly turned to vapor. It all left him with a bad feeling.
As it was, Rowe left town soon thereafter — took a job roughnecking in the North Dakota oil fields, splitting his time between there and Spokane. But he’s on Facebook, and he kept seeing chatter about 51st state meetings happening up in Stevens County, where he has friends. Shea, he says, was the guy leading the idea.
Rowe admits: He kind of likes the concept of a new state — at least he used to. Like most Western states, Washington’s politics often sway toward the votes of its few cities. States in the West are big, with tons of wide-open space and sparsely placed cities with large populations. For people in rural counties in Washington or Oregon or Nevada, it can feel like their votes don’t really matter — like, no matter what, the big cities always get their way.
So, initially, Rowe was interested. But then, he says, he started seeing concern among his friends — particularly over a flyer handed out at one 51st state meeting, detailing what “Liberty” would really look like.
“No gay marriage,” the handout read. “No legalized marijuana.” The state would have no department of ecology, no conservation district. The flyer quoted the Old Testament, the Book of Joshua: “Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, to the land which I am giving to them — the Children of Israel.”
“Blessings be upon each of you who are willing to stand in the gap between God and Country,” it concluded.
The religious references bugged Rowe. He and some libertarian friends wondered what all this Bible talk was about, all this exclusion and rollbacks of things when, all along, they’d been thinking a new state would just shelf unnecessary regulations and adopt the rugged culture of Washington’s eastern half.
So Rowe decided to ask some questions. He got on Facebook, posted comments to Shea’s page. “I asked him, ‘Well, so, like, is this going to be like a theocracy?’” he says. “If you’re gonna sit here and tell me it’s for liberty, but it’s only going to be for the liberty of the people you agree with and the lifestyles you agree with, that isn’t liberty. Right?
“His immediate response was I am a part of the ‘deep state,’ I’m an antifa subversive,” Rowe says. Then Shea blocked him.
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Shea’s message — to Rowe and any dissenters — came through loud and clear to Rowe: “If you don’t agree with Liberty State, or if you even have questions about Liberty State, you’re essentially fighting against it,” Rowe says, paraphrasing Shea. “You’re an anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-liberty godless heathen.”
Not long after the online scuffle with Shea, Rowe heard from Jay Pounder again. He’s the guy who recruited him to work security in 2016.
Pounder showed Rowe the “Biblical Basis for War” — that screed about holy war. Rowe agreed to release it to the media while Pounder stayed on the sidelines, concerned about his family. He knew Shea better than most and was concerned how he might react.
But in public, Shea scoffed at the leak: “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 shortly thereafter, where he didn’t back away from the document. “This document, in and of itself, was not a secret,” he said. (When Pounder showed me the document in the summer of 2018, metadata showed “Matthew Shea” as the author.)
Shea says it was notes on “just war theory.” But, I talked to a few theologians at Shea’s alma mater, Gonzaga University, about that, and they said the “Biblical Basis for War” doesn’t even resemble just war theory; it looks more like a scorched-earth war plan. And the Old Testament explanation doesn’t hold up either: There was no communism back when the Bible was written.
People like John Smith saw the document as a reboot of the plans his grandfather and other Aryan Nations acolytes would refer to back when he was a kid. “I know what my grandfather was talking about all those years ago. And when I see other people mimicking or utilizing his same talking points today, that whole violent takeover things, it concerns me,” he told me last fall. “If they’re sharing a few of the same talking points, maybe they share all of them?
“I can tell you that outline? That would have been meat and potatoes at a Christian Identity gathering,” he says. “That document so closely mirrored so much of what my grandfather and his buddies talked about on a regular basis.”
But, ultimately, releasing the document didn’t have any effect. Donors requested the campaign to return a few thousand bucks — but he still won the 2018 election with 57 percent of the votes. That is, by more than 10,000 votes.
“I’ve had death threats, and Tanner’s had death threats,” Pounder tells me, months later, in the winter of 2019, when we meet in the lobby of a downtown Spokane hotel. He’s a bald guy with glasses who dresses sharp and works for a Christian college. By then, he was public about his concern over Shea. “It was hard for me to walk away from those guys. Because yeah, I considered the man a brother. I really did.”
In April, Pounder released a new bombshell to The Guardian: group texts from 2017 with Shea and other far-right figures who also have been featured guests on the Marble stage. In one group chat, some of the men fantasized about violence against liberal protesters: talking of slamming peoples’ faces into concrete barriers and hanging them from flagpoles by their nipple rings. And Shea, amidst that chatter, reportedly chimed in with an offer to background check anyone the men suggested.
In another text thread, in which some of the same men discussed mailing a wolf’s tail and testicles to an environmental activist who showed up at Malheur to protest the occupation, Pounder offered up the man’s home address.
But it was this twisting of religion that got to Pounder. He explains that he’s a devout Christian, and so when he saw Shea using the 51st state idea to advocate for a theocracy, taken in tandem with his frequent appearances at Marble, he felt he couldn’t stay quiet.
“Over time, it almost seems like his belief system has changed,” Pounder tells me. “And it’s become more radical. So the more he has regressed into this dominionist position he’s taking, the more radical he’s become in the way he approaches things.”
That word — dominionism. It’s an evangelical belief system: “More of a world view than a discrete set of tenets,” Sara Diamond wrote in the definitive 1995 book Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. She explains that the idea became more widely appealing to Christians after Pat Robertson, a televangelist, ran a failed campaign for president in 1988.
Illustration by Zoë van Dijk
“Essentially, dominionism revolved around the idea that Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns,” Diamond writes.
One point of origin for dominion theology was a 1981 book called A Christian Manifesto, penned by evangelical philosopher Francis Schaeffer, who argued that America began as a nation rooted in biblical principles, but as the country changed, politics and laws became dominated by humanists — godless people who valued human agency over Christian dogma. Schaeffer argued that abortion and nonreligious teachings in public schools would become the norm if Christians didn’t fix things. Get society back on track. Refound the country.
The ideas pushed by Schaeffer were popular among some Christian Reconstructionists, a group of evangelicals who envisioned a rebuilt America as, essentially, a theocracy ruled by Old Testament law. One Schaeffer acolyte, Jay Grimstead, formed the Coalition on Revival (COR) and created religious-based education curriculum to be used in public schools. Grimstead, later, would briefly live at Marble Country and become close friends with the Byrds.
One preeminent scholar of dominionism was Rousas John Rushdoony, who believed society should be governed by the laws of the Old Testament Israel alone, and by his estimation, a society governed by the Bible would allow for the execution of anyone who violated the Ten Commandments. Dominionism, to him, appeared to be something like a Christian Taliban. The death penalty would be used to kill gay people, adulterers, children who curse a parent, and anyone who committed one of a host of crimes that appeared to violate Bible teachings — not unlike what was spelled out in the “Biblical Basis for War.”
“Death was necessary in these cases because each crime asserted the sovereignty of humanity over God’s law,” writes Michael McVicar in his book on the man, Christian Reconstruction: RJ Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism.
As Rushdoony saw it, humanists had weaponized schools and the government to wage “religious war” against Christians.
These ideas were also appealing to Christian Identity adherents who were already skeptical of schools and government, and who believed there would be a great apocalyptic battle before Christ’s return.
Seeing Shea use Christianity to justify violence was too much for Pounder to stay quiet. It reminded him of what he’d seen at Marble. “As a practicing Christian, I can’t go along with some of these ideas,” he said. “It’s scary.”
When the “Biblical Basis for War” document came out, Shea explained it away, saying it was sermon notes — which made me wonder what kind of preacher was giving sermons advocating for war and death? Killing all males?
If the document was actually the result of Shea jotting down notes he’d heard in church — whoever that preacher was, calling for war from the pulpit, had suddenly found, in Shea, a pipeline into mainstream politics for their far-right, dominionist ideas.
Maybe, all this time, Shea was somebody else’s puppet. Maybe that’s why he wouldn’t talk to the media. The day after Donald Trump was elected president, Shea called a special guest — someone he welcomed onto his podcast with reverence — and asked him how he should process this victory.
“I want to introduce my guest today, who is a very good friend of mine. You have to go kind of far in America to find someone more slandered by the mainstream media than me,” Shea giggled, “and that’s actually my guest today: Pastor Barry Byrd.”
Byrd chuckled too. “It was great to spend that evening with you when we watched America change,” he said.
“It was great to be together on a very historic night,” Byrd said.
“Where do we go from here?” Shea asked the pastor. “How do we get to a refounding? What is it going to take to get us there?”
“Well, we’re gonna have to begin to restore a providential, a Biblical and providential worldview,” Byrd responded.
So if Eastern Washington — under Shea’s Liberty State plan — was to become a Christian homeland populated by members of the Patriot movement, led by Shea, maybe Marble would be its nerve center. The Byrds are supporters of the secession plan, and attended a Liberty State fundraiser in May 2019 during which pies and desserts were auctioned off to fund the new state.
I asked Pounder and Rowe what they thought about me going there, to Marble. Showing up, asking questions, trying to talk to the Byrds face to face, just like I did with Shea. I’d reached out to them for an interview, but never got a response.
“I would not go in unarmed. And I wouldn’t go in without my body armor on,” Pounder said.
Rowe cautioned me further. He asked if I’d watched The Handmaid’s Tale, the TV show inspired by Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, in which women are enslaved in a neo-Puritanical society and forced to give birth.
He says that’s similar to what he’s heard about Marble — though he doesn’t know for certain. It’s just something people have said.
If I go, Rowe said, I shouldn’t assume people I speak to in Stevens County don’t disagree with Marble’s teachings. Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t turn down any side roads.
“There’s weird stuff that happens up in those mountains. I mean, it’s just, there’s nothin’ up there,” he said. “I’d hate to see something happen.”
Up next, Chapter 5: The Remnant
***
Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.
Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk
Fact checker: Matt Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Gross
Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.
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