The Flathead Beacon is reporting on the arrest of an Alaska man for plotting to kill judges and police officers.

This story has an important Montana angle.  Shaeffer Cox was “warmly received” at the Liberty Convention (read: Wingnut Convention) last May in Missoula, where numerous Montana Republicans were in attendance and where a long list of hate-filled speakers took the podium including known anti semites, militia figures and white-supremacist types.  The Beacon has posted videos of Cox’s remarks from Missoula,a sequence of which are also on YouTube.

Among the 200 attendees at the event, held at UM, were candidates and elected legislators.  We have a right to know who they were.

I visited the it the Ravalli Bell website at www.ravalli-bell.com (which is the website for Celebrating Conservatives, the group that organized the conference) and found this racist mission statement:

“It is characteristic of the conservative temperament to value established identities, to praise habit and to respect prejudice, not because it is irrational, but because such things anchor the darting impulses of human beings in solidities of custom which we do not often begin to value until we are already losing them.”

I don’t know what a “solidity” is, but these guys are saying prejudice is normal, natural and should be encouraged and nurtured. They also tout

a 1996 study on the relationship between racism and conservatism [that] found that the correlation was stronger among more educated individuals, though specifically anti-Black racism did not increase.