Whitefish, Mont., fights neo-Nazis with faith, peace and interfaith allies.
Doxxing causes residents to question their relationship with Montana, home to many white supremacist groups
WHITEFISH, Mont. — What do you do when hate lives next door? What do you do when antiSemites, stirred up by a guy you see at the local coffee shop and the gym, send you doctored pictures of your child’s face beneath the gates of Auschwitz? When they clog your phone lines with threats to “finish the job” for Hitler and gas you? When they promise to send an army of anti-Semites marching through your town?
If you live in this small, ski resort town where neo-Nazi Richard Spencer — the alt-right darling who has been called “a kind of professional racist in khakis” — has put down roots, you fight back.
But rather than match the haters slur for slur or descend to their level of filth, you organize a kind of party for peace, one that draws on the faith traditions present all across this town and the Flathead Valley of northwestern Montana — Protestant, Catholic, Native American, and, yes, Jewish — and say, “In the midst of pain, I choose love.”
“In the midst of pain, sorrow falling down like rain, I await the sun again,” about 150 people — Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Mennonites, Baha’is, Unitarians and Jews sang together at a community center in Kalispell, about 17 miles south of Whitefish.
“I choose love,” they sang, one year after the neo-Nazi attacks on Whitefish finally subsided.
That gathering on April 8 grew from an informal support group local clergy formed after the neo-Nazi attacks and was the first of what they hope will be regular interfaith “peace services.” Among the organizers’ goals is to bring together people of faith to say “not in our town” to human evil of any kind.
“In looking back over the past year and the experience of being terrorized I think we made it through because we felt the support of people across the country and of our neighbors here in the Flathead Valley,” said Rabbi Francine Roston, leader of the Glacier Jewish Community/ B’nai Shalom — a “synagogue without walls” — and one of the main targets of the neo-Nazi attacks.
“These ministers felt like if the Jews are being targeted then we are all being targeted and we need to stand up for each other.”
But, as a lawsuit brought by one of the Jewish victims in Whitefish proceeds through federal court — a case that could become a redefining landmark in distinguishing protected free speech from unprotected hate speech — will the opposition forged against hate be enough if the neo-Nazi trolls return?
“I am going to try to say this without crying,” Cherilyn DeVries of Love Lives Here, a local anti-bias group, said as her voice broke on the last word.
“Of course we are worried about another attack. From what we have learned we would be foolish not to think that is a possibility. But in spite of our differences, we know now that we belong to each other and we will not have that driven apart.”
By now, the story of what happened in Whitefish is well known.
In December 2016, Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent who is Jewish, and Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer’s mother and a longtime resident, discussed a piece of property Sherry Spencer owns on Lupfer Avenue in Whitefish. Opponents of her son’s racial ideology had threatened to protest in front of it.
Soon after, someone claiming to be Sherry Spencer wrote a post on Medium saying she felt threatened and harassed by Gersh to sell her property and donate the proceeds to charity as a kind of reparation for her son’s activities. Sherry Spencer has said she disavows her son’s views, which advocate for a whites-only America achieved by what he has called “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”
And Richard Spencer — riding a wave of international notoriety from his “Hail Trump!” one-armed salute just after the 2016 election — took to his video blog to decry what he saw as abuse of his mother.
First to pick up Spencer’s story of Jews harassing his mother was Andrew Anglin, the shadowy founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, which, at the time, had hundreds of thousands of readers. He called his army of “trolls” to an attack on Gersh. That started what neo-Nazis call “doxxing” — extreme attacks, primarily via social media, on Whitefish’s small Jewish community — about 25 families. The doxxing focused on three people in particular: Gersh, her husband, Judah, and Roston.
“Just make your opinions known,” Anglin wrote in one of 30 articles The Daily Stormer carried about the Gershes, Roston and Whitefish’s Jewish community. “Tell them you are sickened by their Jew agenda. … This is very important.” And, Anglin added, “if you’re in the area, maybe you should stop by and tell her (Gersh) in person what you think of her actions.”
The attacks were taken seriously by local and national law enforcement. The FBI and Homeland Security officials spoke with the victims. The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center sent people with experience combating hate. Roston, a reedthin woman with features as delicate as her crocheted yarmulke, obtained a license for a gun.
The attacks culminated in Anglin calling for a neo-Nazi march on Whitefish on Jan. 16, 2017 — Martin Luther King Jr. Day. He promised to bus in “skinheads” to the town of about 7,000 residents.
But pretty quickly, others came to the defense of local Jews — about 180 families spread across the Flathead Valley. Whitefish residents, who passed an anti-discrimination ordinance in December 2014 in response to some of Richard Spencer’s activities, organized an alternative event they called a “block party.”
More than 300 people turned out to stand for three hours in minus-15-degree weather to hear pro-diversity speakers and drink matzo ball soup.
And the neo-Nazis never materialized in downtown Whitefish, with its faux-western storefronts and trendy boutiques. Over the next couple of months, Love Lives Here and other community groups continued their show of support while the neo-Nazi attacks tapered off.
The whole episode caused many in Whitefish — Jewish and otherwise — to question their relationship to Montana, a state that has historically been a home to multiple white supremacist groups and individuals.
“Whitefish has existed with this knowledge that we live amidst some fundamentalists,” said Hilary Shaw, who is Jewish, lives in Whitefish and sits on the board of Montana Human Rights Network. “And we just kind of ignore it and say we are just here to ski and enjoy this gorgeous place. We don’t want to think about how not diverse our town is. So I think that is one good thing — people had to stop and own it. They had to learn about the history of white nationalism in their valley.”
In the middle of the doxxing, a couple of Christian ministers in the Flathead Valley reached out to Roston to ask what they could do to help.
“I was so touched and grateful for their support,” she said. “We talked about the need to have more interfaith community support and our concern that our culture has become so polarized.”
They started meeting once a month as a kind of clergy support group. Other clergy were invited until there were Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal, Unitarian and Mennonite clergy involved along with Roston, the only working rabbi in the Flathead Valley.
“Some of us in the Christian community wanted to be intentional about supporting Francine and her community,” said the Rev. Scott Thompson, leader of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Kalispell. “Humanity in its various religions and expressions of faith is one body and when one part of the body hurts the whole body hurts. So, yeah, what happened in Whitefish didn’t happen to us, but it did happen to us.”
“In the midst of pain, sorrow falling down like rain, I await the sun again.” Lyrics to “I Choose Love”