Tag: montana

FCC Deals Blow to Montana Residents Fighting 260-Foot Cell Tower

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday ruled against a group of Montana residents seeking to prevent construction of a 260-foot cell tower that they say would harm nearby wildlife, including nesting eagles, and the environment.

The FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau sided with Harmoni Towers, concluding the company isn’t required to do any further research on how the proposed tower might negatively impact the local environment — even though the company’s “environmental assessment” contained errors and overlooked key information, according to W. Scott McCollough, lead attorney for Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) & Wireless cases.

Members of the nonprofit Stewards of the Swan Valley, who opposed the tower, allege that if built, the tower would harm a host of non-human species, including mammals, birds, insects, amphibians, reptiles and flora.

The proposed tower site is near Condon, Montana, in the state’s Swan Valley, prized for its spectacular wilderness views.

“This is a horrible place for a cell tower with a strobe light on it,” resident Peter Guynn told The Defender. “It announces to the world that this is no longer a natural place.” Guynn called the FCC’s decision “egregious.”

In February, opponents of the tower filed comments, pointing out that Harmoni Towers failed to consider the published evidence on how the radiofrequency (RF) radiation emitted by cell towers affects non-human species.

The FCC said the company’s environmental assessment wasn’t required to address the effect on non-human species, arguing that the agency’s RF radiation exposure limits pertain only to the human environment.

“We find that the tower will not have a significant impact on the quality of the human environment,” the FCC wrote.

McCollough told The Defender, “Essentially, the FCC covered both its eyes so that it couldn’t see an impact.”

The residents are considering next steps, McCollough said. The FCC’s decision becomes final in 30 days, unless the residents submit an application asking for it to be reviewed.

Miriam Eckenfels, director of CHD’s EMR & Wireless Program, said that the FCC’s decision shows yet again that communities dealing with unwanted cell towers cannot rely on the FCC to help them.

“The FCC is the poster child of a captured government agency. It serves industry alone, and people are left to fend for themselves,” Eckenfels said. “This decision also highlights the importance of CHD’s 704NoMore initiative and its goal to change the federal framework towards consideration of health effects of RF radiation.”

The 704NoMore campaign is raising money to legally challenge Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which prohibits local and state governments from considering possible health impacts from RF radiation when making cell tower decisions.

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Montana Puts Behavioral Health Reform in China‑Linked Hands and a Boy Ends Up with Traumatic Brain Injury

Montana’s lawmakers promised a historic fix. With a $300 million behavioral health investment and a high‑priced consulting firm, the State’s lawmakers said they would “transform” and “mend” a system that had failed vulnerable people for years. Behind that language was a decision AbleChild flagged from the start: the state handed the redesign of its behavioral health system to Alvarez & Marsal, a private firm with business ties in China, instead of building transparent, accountable capacity in Montana. That choice was not a technical detail. It was the blueprint for what would count as “reform.”

A $300 Million “Mend” That Left a 13‑Year‑Old in a Hospital Bed

While consultants and state lawmakers talked about strategy and transformation, the state continued quietly sending children to Provo Canyon School in Utah, for-profit residential psychiatric and behavioral facility with a long history of complaints and abuse allegations. Montana has paid Provo Canyon roughly $26 million over the last decade, proving this was a pipeline, not a one‑off placement.

Then a 13‑year‑old Montana boy allegedly suffered a traumatic brain injury at Provo Canyon. Families, backed by Paris Hilton, have now taken the facility to court, alleging delays and failures in his care. Only after that catastrophic harm did Montana officials suspend new referrals to the facility.  This is what “mend” looks like in practice: a child badly injured in a facility the state has patronized for years, and reform arriving only after the fact.

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The China Question No One in Power Wants to Ask

The China connection is not about Provo Canyon being a Chinese institution. It is about who Montana chose to trust with redesigning its behavioral health system and how it impacts national security and vulnerable children.

Alvarez & Marsal is a global consulting firm that does business in and with China. Montana’s decision was to pay that firm, at hundreds of dollars an hour, help steer how a $300 million “Future Generations” behavioral health investment would be structured and spent. That included advising on the overall continuum of care, financing strategies, and the shape of state services.

At a minimum, the choice raises a basic question the public deserves answered: why would any American state outsource the redesign of its already failing behavioral health system to a consulting firm tied to China, instead of building transparent, accountable capacity at home? If the result of that choice is a polished reform narrative on paper and a child with a brain injury in real life, then the outsourcing model—not just its implementation—has to be on trial.

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I-194 Could Cost Montana Millions Without Fixing Campaign Finance

During this election cycle, you will likely be asked to sign petitions to place various proposals on the November ballot. Before signing, it is important to understand exactly what you are supporting. That is especially true for I-194, a proposed ballot initiative aimed at restricting “dark money” in elections.

I-194, known as The Montana Plan, is designed to sharply limit the role of corporations, nonprofits, LLCs, trade associations, and other “artificial persons” in Montana elections. Supporters argue it would reduce dark money in politics by preventing Montana entities, and possibly some out-of-state organizations, from contributing to or spending money on state and local campaigns. But even if this five-page law passes, major loopholes and legal problems would remain.

One of the biggest loopholes is that the proposal targets organizations, not individuals. Wealthy business owners, executives, and nonprofit leaders could still spend large sums of money personally, simply shifting political influence from corporate accounts to billionaire donors rather than reducing money in politics.

Another concern involves PACs and political committees. Depending on how courts interpret the law, organizations could still influence elections indirectly through layered committees or pass-through funding arrangements that hide the original source of the money, much like dark-money systems currently operate.

Out-of-state groups could also restructure themselves to avoid Montana’s definitions. National organizations may create affiliated entities, use contractors, or avoid technically “doing business” in Montana while still influencing public opinion and elections here.

The distinction between direct campaigning and issue advocacy creates another major loophole. Even if an organization cannot explicitly say “Vote for Candidate X,” it may still spend heavily on advertising campaigns criticizing policies, shaping public opinion, or mobilizing voters around political issues tied to an election.

Federal elections present another limitation. Montana may regulate state and local races more easily than federal campaigns for Congress or the presidency, which are governed largely by federal law and constitutional protections. Organizations could still spend heavily on federal races that influence Montana voters indirectly.

I-194 is also vulnerable politically because it is a statutory initiative rather than a constitutional amendment. Future legislatures could weaken, narrow, or partially repeal the law.

Finally, the measure would almost certainly face years of expensive litigation centered on Citizens United and First Amendment protections for political speech. Courts could strike down parts of the law while leaving others intact, creating confusion and weak enforcement. Defending I-194 could cost Montana taxpayers millions of dollars, with a strong possibility that the law would ultimately be ruled partially or wholly unconstitutional.

At first blush, I-194 may sound like a good solution, but as the saying goes, “The devil is in the details.”

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White Coat Waste Bombshell: Deadly Pathogen ‘Released, Lost or Stolen’ from Fauci’s Montana Lab — Senators Sheehy, Ernst, Scott & Rep. Gosar Demand Full Investigation

A new White Coat Waste Project exposé has triggered immediate outrage on Capitol Hill after revealing that NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, suffered yet another major biosafety failure — this time, a deadly pathogen was “released, lost, or stolen” from the high-security facility.

The revelation marks the second serious lab incident exposed by WCW at RML in just the past few months and has prompted several prominent Republican senators to demand answers and accountability.

White Coat wrote in a post on X:

We just exposed another recent bioagent accident at one of Fauci’s most dangerous animal labs.

And it’s the second accident we exposed at this NIH lab just this year!

We uncovered documents revealing the NIH quietly admitted that an unspecified deadly pathogen was “released, lost, or stolen” from its Rocky Mountain Lab in Montana in February.

In January, we broke the viral news about another NIH lab accident at RML that exposed a staffer to Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, a deadly foreign virus with a 40% fatality rate.

Just last week, we released a shocking whistleblower letter that revealed the alleged details of that dangerous animal lab breach:

An NIH lab staffer was allegedly “bitten by an infected monkey (macaque) that was being tortured (infected and sickened with no pain mitigation).”

The anonymous sources claimed the NIH was in “full coverup mode” about the monkey bite.

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Biden-Released Illegal Alien Accused of Raping Deceased Girlfriend’s Underage Daughter in Montana

An illegal alien, released into the United States by former President Joe Biden’s administration, is accused of raping his deceased girlfriend’s underage daughter, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials revealed.

Wualter Jesus Travieso Soto, an illegal alien from Venezuela, was arrested in Flathead County, Montana, in February and charged with felony sexual intercourse without consent with a child under 16 years old as well as strangulation of a partner or family member.

According to police, Soto’s girlfriend died in a car crash in 2024 and her three children were subsequently left in his care despite his having no relation to them. In May 2025, police received a tip from the deceased woman’s sister, who allegedly found photos and videos on Soto’s phone of him kissing the eldest daughter.

The deceased woman’s aunt got custody of the three children and that is when the girl told police Soto had raped her on several occasions and, at one point, choked her.

Soto was only able to go to Montana because of the Biden administration’s catch and release policy, carried out by Alejandro Mayorkas. Under that policy, Soto was released into the United States interior after illegally crossing the border in 2023.

“This monster repeatedly raped the child of his dead girlfriend,” the Department of Homeland Security’s Lauren Bis said in a statement:

He now faces felony charges of sexual intercourse without consent with a child under 16. He would not be in this country in the first place if it weren’t for the Biden Administration’s disastrous catch and release policies that allowed him into our country. ICE is asking officials in Montana to turn this perverted criminal over to ICE custody so that we can get him off our streets and out of our country. With cooperation from our local partners, we will ensure this predator never harms another innocent child. [Emphasis added]

Soto remains in Flathead County custody and ICE agents have lodged a detainer against him so that if he is released from local custody, he will be turned over to federal custody.

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Communitarianism: The Evil Unleashed on America PT 2 the Montana Water Rights Protection Act

There is a myriad of ways to take our property – and the “powers-that-be are using them and more that they just make up on the spot.

We’ve written about many in our Workbook, in Tom DeWeese’s Sustainable, and in scores of articles. And in more ways than most of us could ever conceive of an act being pulled-off, for instance killing hundreds of ostriches because a couple of years earlier two had been ill but recovered. In fact, the government of Canada had them shot! Another example is capturing” CO2 from atmosphere and compressing and storing it in geological formations. I won’t even get into what could go wrong or, even more, how absurd it is to take CO2 from the atmosphere where we and plants thrive on it.

Many people do not realize that “property” is more than land or a house. Your clothes, your written words, the food in your house and the gas in your car are your property. And your children. Don’t think those taking other forms of your property won’t touch your children.

The U.S. Supreme Court defines property:

“As protected from being taken for public uses, is such property as belongs absolutely to an individual, and of which he has the exclusive right of disposition. Property of a specific, fixed and tangible nature, capable of being in possession and transmitted to another, such as houses, lands, and chattels. Scranton v. Wheeler, 179 U.S. 141, 21 S.Ct. 48, 45 L.Ed. 126.

Note: Chattel represents physical, transferable items like furniture, jewelry, cars, or livestock. It is used to distinguish personal belongings from real property.

Keep in mind that if you have nothing, you are chattel – you are property.

So, let’s look at the Columbia River Basin and the “New Compact”. I am using Catherine Vandemoer, Ph.D.’s report “Meet the New Compact, Same as the Old” to give you the background of the Columbia River Basin project introduced to Montana in 1993.

At that time we were told that the project was to take the area back to pre-Columbian times. Note:Dr. Vandemoer’s words will be in Times New Roman.

Dr. Vandemoer has been following this issue for years, and her writings on it are invaluable. She points out that Senator Daines “put forth the same bill that Senator Tester had done earlier – the CSKT Compact in full, ‘wrapped” it into the “new” Daines Compact and then added ‘new’ and more ‘goodies’ than even the Democrat did,” in addressing the Western Montana portion of the Columbia River Basin Project.

“As with the Tester bill, the intent of the Dains Compact is to have us all now be distracted by the “goodies” and forget about the documented problems with and substance of the provision of The original CSKT Compact whose true economic, environmental, and nation-wide legal precedent-setting impacts have never been examined.

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Montana Tech professor teaches class that takes serious look at UFO phenomenon

Here on the campus of Montana Tech, you can study science, mathematics, engineering, biology, even nursing, but here in the Chemistry Biology Building in this classroom, you can learn about UFOs. Yeah, I’m serious, and so is Dr. Michael Masters, so let’s go check out his class.

“Fiber optics technology may have come from reverse engineering these craft,” Montana Tech Professor Michael Masters told his class Thursday morning.

The Butte university is one of only a handful of colleges around the country with a class on unidentified flying objects.

“One of my students was very honest and said that she saw the posters and thought it was a joke and registered to see if it was actually a joke,” Masters said.

It’s no joke. The anthropology class studies the history and science behind the UFO phenomenon.

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NIH Lab Studying Deadly Pathogens Reported Biological Incident In November: Federal Records

The White Coat Waste Project – which you may remember for exposing Dr. Anthony Fauci’s sick experiments on beagles in 2024 – has obtained a document revealing that the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) in Hamilton, Montana reported a biological incident in November 2025. 

RML, which operates BSL-2, BSL-3, and BSL-4 ‘full suit’ laboratories notably studies viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola, Marburg and Lassa virus, as well as coronaviruses, dangerous bacteria, tuberculosis, tick-borne pathogens (Rocky Mountain spotted fever, for example), West Nile virus, Prion diseases, and others. 

According to a November 2025 biosafety report obtained by WCWP, a ‘Form 3’ was reported to the Federal Select Agent Program on Nov. 13, 2025. Form 3 is a mandatory notification form used to alert the Federal Select Agent Program of any ‘theft, loss, or release’ involving select agents or toxins, Infowars’ Breanna Morello reports after interviewing WCWP’s Justin Goodman – who called Rocky Mountain Laboratories ‘one of the most dangerous biolabs in the country.‘

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Montana’s Supreme Court dismisses misconduct case against the state’s attorney general

Montana’s Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a misconduct case against the state’s attorney general after he defied court orders in a dispute over a law that gave the governor more power over the judiciary.

A court-appointed panel last year found that Attorney General Austin Knudsen repeatedly attacked the integrity of the justices in his defense of a 2021 law permitting the state’s Republican governor to directly fill judicial vacancies.

The panel had recommended that his license to practice law be suspended for 90 days.

Knudsen had urged the high court to dismiss the case against him.

Justices ruled Wednesday that Knudsen had violated rules of conduct for attorneys but said a state panel violated his due process rights by excluding his expert witness from the case.

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14 Montana animal shelter workers hospitalized after FBI meth burn goes wrong

Fourteen workers at a Montana animal shelter were rushed to the hospital after breathing in meth-laced smoke from a botched FBI drug incineration in the same building, officials said. 

Staffers at the Yellowstone Valley Animal Shelter in Billings fell ill Wednesday when fumes from an FBI meth burn seeped through a shared ventilation system, according to city officials. 

The employees were treated in hyperbaric oxygen chambers at Billings Clinic after reporting dizziness, headaches and coughing, authorities told KRTV-TV. 

Shelter director Triniti Halverson said the smoke poured in within minutes of the crematorium fire, forcing workers to evacuate dozens of animals. 

“Then the little bit longer that I could smell it, I knew that it was something burning in the crematorium, like the incinerary,” Halverson told the outlet.

“Several of my staff were coughing, sweating, just dizzy, physically feeling ill.”

Izzy Zalenski, the community engagement coordinator, said the shelter’s HVAC system was not designed to handle chemical burns and quickly pulled contaminated air inside. 

“It’s never smelled like that before,” said Zalenski. “The HVAC system is the exact same as a typical office. It’s not made for an animal shelter.”

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