Just when you think the Hardin Jail story couldn't get weirder...it gets weirder. Check it out:
Shay mentioned the attorney general's request almost as a two-minute side note in a news conference that revealed that the former Billings Gazette reporter and new face of American Police Force fears for her safety.
"A lot of work I've done has been to calm down or at least try to counteract comments from people I consider to be fearmongers," Shay said. "What has happened in the interim, however, is those people's friends around the nation have been in contact with me or tried to access me. I realize I'm being pretty vague so that we don't support or incite these people. I don't want my words to be taken out of context to further inflame the tensions that I'm working under."
At that point, Shay began to cry. She asked TV media at the conference to turn their cameras off because, she said, "it's important to me that I do not appear as vulnerable as I feel."
Apparently, "Shay mentioned Internet radio personality Alex Jones." Jones is a radio talkshow host, runs a site called, "Info Wars," and - worst of both worlds - is a right-wing Truther. Jones has been whipping up his audience with the Hardin Jail story and seems to be responsible, at least in part, for a spate of weird rumors cropping up around this story. APF "was stopping motorists in Big Horn County and ticketing them for not wearing seat belts," is one mentioned in Tom Lutey's report.
Here's an example of what Jones and his callers are saying about the APF and Hardin:
DAVE: And now, a week ago it was reported to us that it was going to be an international police training facility, and later on, that they're taking prisoners there.
ALEX: Yeah! You're gonna have foreign mercenaries training, I've got...more than five newscasts, where there's, where the group is saying that. Weirdos with foreign accents going, {altering voice} "yes, we will not tell you the specifics of it, but it will be ours now! Training for anti-terror personnel, and we will be your police department! And we will hold prisoners here! And we get an additional 5,000 acres, as I did {unintelligeble} Transylvania!" And people were in denial about this.
DAVE: The biggest pig bait, I think, is credit cards, man. They got everybody thinking they can't live without them. And, uh, Iran is the biggest bank that doesn't use interest, so you wonder why we want them out of the picture. We won't be able to make no money going through there, because they don't use the interest.
ALEX: Going back to Hardin, Montana, what are locals saying about this? And what are they saying about American Police Force, which is anything but American, driving around with its double eagle Illuminati insignia - it's not just a Serbian symbol - uh, with, saying they're the local police.
DAVE: You know, it's on an Indian reservation, and so that, that, supersedes, you know, a lot of different kind of laws, you know, so it's on the Indian reservation that Little Bighorn was fought on -
ALEX: Yeah, the Little Bighorn is 15 miles away, according to the maps I have. So it borders the reservation and the town of Hardin. Are you saying Hardin is in the reservation?
DAVE: It's in the reservation according to my map, it's got the lines here -
ALEX: Well that's why I say -
DAVE: In the northwest corner of the Indian Reservation.
ALEX: Well, that's why CNN said they're looking in, because it's like Guantanamo, in Cuba, it's kind of like a no man's land.
DAVE: It's a different nation, right? They're under, you know -
ALEX: Well, they want, what do the tribal police say? I know the sheriff of Bighorn won't talk about it.
DAVE: It's about 500 miles away from me. I'm up in the northwest corner of Montana by Canada, by Glacier National Park.
In one call, Jones brings in the Illuminati, Transylvanian mercenaries, and implicates the Crow nation in the "plot."
Obviously, the rumors can only spiral downwards. Here's a report on those rumors by TPM Muckraker's Zachary Roth:
A Hardin Montana official is trying to quell rumors that the town is "becoming a police state, having private paramilitary security forces, building gates at the town entrances, taking residents to the detention center that refuse to get swine flu shots, registering your firearms, and blocking off our main street," among other fears.
And Becky Shay, former Billings Gazette reporter and now APF spokesperson, has been receiving death threats.
Crazy. You know, the Hardin Jail story is definitely weird. And APF's involvement in this thing is unknown - they might, after all, really be a subsidiary of Blackwater, say, and saw Hardin as an ideal location to do some of their crazy private security force stuff. But it's also true Hilton could just be a con man playing some elaborate con on an easy mark. Who knows?
What I do know is that stoking up paranoid, extremist anti-government fear is a bit excessive and maybe even irresponsible. And is it me, or do I see rhetorical parallels here with the way the Teabaggers were stoked up this summer? |
