Town roiled by white supremacists

Associated Press

The email to a group that promotes diversity in northwestern Montana warned that white supremacists would encircle the advocacy organization’s office and end with someone “swinging by a rope from the nearest lamp post.”

“Those days are not far off Jew,” wrote the author, identified only as Rudolf, to the group Love Lives Here in the Flathead Valley.

The ski resort town of Whitefish, 6,600 people strong in a valley just west of Glacier National Park, is an unlikely flashpoint between white-supremacist groups and residents trying to preserve the town’s reputation as a welcoming vacation destination.

But white supremacists have also been drawn or actively recruited over the years to the libertarian-leaning Flathead Valley in their search of a haven where they can preach and practice their views unmolested. Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the so-called “alt-right” movement, an offshoot of conservatism mixing racism, white nationalism and populism, is a part-time resident and his National Policy Institute is headquartered there.

Spencer, who moved to Montana in 2011, claims to have coined the term “alt-right.” The presidential election, and the anti-immigration stance taken by Trump, has only heightened the divisiveness in western Montana, leading Whitefish city leaders and groups like Love Lives Here to renew their past condemnations of Spencer.

Last week, Spencer’s mother, Sherry Spencer, posted an article on the website Medium titled “Does Love Really Live Here?”

She wrote that a local real-estate agent tried to force her to sell her downtown Whitefish building, which houses two retail stores and four vacation apartments for rent, and donate some of the money to the Montana Human Rights Network and make a public statement denouncing her son.

That sparked a white-supremacist website called The Daily Stormer, to post a call for action the next day against “Jews targeting Richard Spencer’s mother for harassment and extortion.” The website called for “an old fashioned troll storm” and posted the phone numbers, addresses, email addresses and social media addresses of the real-estate agent and two women involved in the group, Love Lives Here, all three of whom are Jewish, and their family members.

Since the Daily Stormer’s post last week, the three Whitefish women, their families and about a dozen businesses whose owners have “Love Lives Here” signs in their windows or have supported the group in the past have received anti-Semitic messages and threats. Some trollers have gone online to target Whitefish businesses with negative reviews, prompting people within the community to launch a counter-effort to boost the online reviews and call out the negative comments as fakes.

The individuals targeted, who are all Jewish, have declined to talk to the media because they don’t feel safe, Carroll Rivas said.