Tuned to the Far Right of the Dial

In a tour of Montana’s landmarks of the far right, one stop would be a squat black building outside of Kalispell, with an American flag painted on the side. From the Z-600 radio studio each morning, John Stokes straps on his headset for “The Edge,” and the Flathead Valley gets ready to get riled.

It is talk radio for people who think Rush Limbaugh has gone soft. In the Flathead, deep in the heart of the country’s militia belt, Stokes outdraws Limbaugh when they go head to head in the mornings. He is one of the best-known radio figures in northwest Montana--and the most vilified.

Of a Holocaust survivor who visited Montana recently, Stokes had this to say: “Too bad, so sad. Get over it.” Environmentalists, he said, “should all be rounded up and put in an internment campground.” On Martin Luther King Day this year, he wondered why retailers weren’t celebrating. “I mean, can’t they have, like, sheet specials?”

Stokes’ program has become a lightning rod for the anger that has fueled anti-government militancy, tapping widespread resentment about declining logging, grazing restrictions, controls on private property, mine closures and aluminum smelters being shuttered.

“Rural America is screaming right now, and people who can’t hear that roar have to basically be deaf,” says Stokes, 50, who was a real estate broker in San Diego and Seattle before settling in Montana. “I don’t distrust the government at all. I’m not anti-government. But we are anti-stupidity. And the left and the right both have a lot of stupidity.”

Last month, when police uncovered a large weapon cache and a list purportedly targeting local police, judges and prosecutors for assassination, an occasional caller to Stokes’ radio program, 38-year-old businessman David Burgert, was identified as the ringleader.

Police say the group, known as Project 7, hoped to arm a citizens’ militia that would face off against the National Guard and, eventually, troops sent in by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations.

But reaction to the arrests has been nearly eclipsed by the mounting outcry about Stokes, who is accused of pouring gasoline on the fire of the militant right.

“He’s a high-voltage welcome wagon for right-wing extremism,” said Ben Long, an activist in the local chapter of the Montana Human Rights Network. “His style, his rhetoric, has permeated the debate on natural resource issues all over the valley.”

The sheriff, the police chief, the local Chamber of Commerce and the school superintendent all have repudiated Stokes’ description of environmentalists as “green Nazis.” The Republican governor, Judy Martz, has refused to appear on his show.

In recent months, the controversy has brought this tranquil valley, home to the scenic splendors of Glacier National Park and Flathead Lake, to open hostility. Environmentalists have had their cars vandalized. They report mysterious pickups parked outside their homes and offices, abusive late-night telephone calls and threatening mail.

“You desirve [sic] everything your [sic] going to recieve [sic], such as a train ride, like the Jews got to take,” said one e-mail sent to Keith Hammer, chairman of the Swan View Coalition, a conservation group.

“Take your group of green Nazis to hell with you,” another said. “We are watching you very closely, know your every move, and we will get you out of this state you can count on it.”

Some of Stokes’ critics, apparently, have been willing to dish back. A flier with a photo of Stokes’ house was distributed all over town recently, with the words, “Meet your neighbors, John and Pam Stokes. . . . Stop by and give them a Montana welcome for what they bring to our community.”

The word “hater” was spray-painted on the radio station building. Two months ago, Stokes got an unsigned letter: “It’s over between you and Judy [most likely referring to the governor]. Too bad, so sad. Get over it. . . . You’re going to be as welcome around here as a Ku Klux Klan member in Harlem.”

Police didn’t take the acrimony too seriously at first. The Kalispell man who sent Hammer the threatening e-mails was contacted by the sheriff and told to “knock it off.”

Elizabeth Kitterman, a Kalispell high school junior, said police paid little attention when she and her mother, Brenda Kitterman, were harassed last spring after being targeted on Stokes’ radio show.

Kitterman had written an article in the school newspaper about Holocaust survivor Klaus Stern, who spoke to Kalispell community groups in May. She quoted Stern denouncing Stokes for using the phrase “green Nazis.” Stokes criticized the article on the air, saying Kitterman had been “brainwashed” and admonished Stern, as well.

“Don’t come preaching to me or trying to get sympathy . . . and say, ‘I’m a victim because the Nazis killed my family,’ ” Stokes said. “Well, you should’ve stood up for yourself when you had the time.”

Shortly after that, Elizabeth Kitterman was followed home one night after getting off work at the Sizzler. On one occasion, an old green pickup trailed her to the bowling alley, and the driver aimed a shotgun out the window at her.

The police began to take the issue more seriously when Project 7 surfaced. At the home of Burgert’s girlfriend, Tracy Brockway, police found assault weapons, thousands of rounds of ammunition, explosives mixture, survival equipment--and the list of names.

Burgert says there is no murder plot. “Murder is unacceptable,” he told the local paper, the Daily Inter Lake, in a telephone call from the county jail. The weapons, he said, were to enable citizens to come to the nation’s defense in case a foreign country invaded.

Stokes, who regularly reins in callers to his show who talk about violence, said police are overreacting.

“From the time I met [Burgert], he’s all talk. And now he’s the leader of what? Him and his girlfriend? To me, it was just like ‘Spanky and Our Gang.’ ‘OK, guys, what should we do?’ ”

He is equally perplexed about the letters that poured in when he led demonstrators in burning a green swastika in April on Earth Day to protest “the eco-fascists.”

“I called them green Nazis and they went freakin’ crazy!” Stokes said. “But you look at the events that led up to the Third Reich. You see the parallels today, and it’s uncanny. The way they went after the youth. ‘Save the whales.’ ‘Save the forests.’. . . Anybody they want to vilify, they call them a Nazi, and I think they’re really [mad] I beat them to the punch on this one.”

For Stokes, moving to Montana was the culmination of a lifetime of searching for a place he could consider home. He lived for several years in Seattle, then moved to San Diego in the late 1970s, where he sold real estate and piloted a commercial hot air balloon. By the 1980s, he was back in Seattle, trying to develop a lakefront residential project in Snohomish County.

The project ran into regulations limiting development in wetlands, costing Stokes millions of dollars. In the end, he felt so abused he launched a move to secede from Snohomish County and form a new county, “Freedom County,” an enterprise that inspired secessionist movements across the country.

By the early 1990s, Stokes was fed up with Washington. He settled on Kalispell--a town of 13,000 in the timbered hills of northwest Montana, about 125 miles north of Missoula.

“I went all around America looking for some place that looked like the place I wanted to raise my kids and retire in,” he said. “Kalispell is what Washington used to be 30 years ago.”

He made the move in 1992. Almost immediately, Stokes got into the thick of things. A major land use plan was being drafted to control huge growth rates in Flathead County, and Stokes helped organize Montanans for Property Rights, which took credit for defeating the measure at the polls.

A frequent guest on the local radio talk show, Stokes bought the AM station in May 2000 and began co-hosting “The Edge” every morning with his wife, Pamela. He changed the music format to hard-core alternative rock. The station’s ratings have been only so-so, though “The Edge” has outpaced Limbaugh in its time slot and garnered a strong following among young and middle-age men.

There is a natural audience here. In a county where the federal government owns 82% of the land, many get impatient at new restrictions on mining, the closure of forest roads and logging cutbacks. Most of those ideas, many feel, come from environmentalists who aren’t originally from around here.

Logger Donna Thornton said Stokes speaks to people who see a way of life disappearing.

“The majority of folks around here are people who are fed up with being controlled from some place like Washington, D.C.,” she said.

“I don’t always agree with everything John Stokes says on the air, but John is providing three hours a day for people to get their issues out and for people to present their frustrations.”

Hammer said people like Stokes shout down legitimate debate.

“Part of the Montana tradition is neighbor helping neighbor. You don’t let politics come between neighbors,” Hammer said. “But Stokes had been here less than three months, and the place started coming unglued. Immediately.”

With Stokes and his supporters, he said, “it’s people who feel like they have the ultimately correct view of the world, and people who disagree with them ought to be run out or shot. And not necessarily in that order.”