5 Insane Small-Town News Stories You Need To Know About

5

Montana Is Turning Into A Nazi Stronghold

Montana is one of the whitest states in the Union, and Flathead is Montana's most vanilla county, with only 4.8 percent of its population being nonwhite. So while many Americans forgot that Montana existed until Far Cry 5 came out, neo-Nazis have known for quite some time. Those demographics (plus lax gun laws and the ability to live off the grid) encouraged American Nazis to move there, most figuring that the work of creating a whites-only enclave had already been mostly done for them. The official Nazification began small, with acts like sticking propaganda into the pages of children's books or between nice pairs of jeans in stores, but eventually they escalated to screening Holocaust denial films. So Montana isn't merely the whitest state in the Union anymore; it's also the one with the greatest concentration of hate groups.

Noted jackass Richard Spencer moved to the town of Whitefish, hoping to make it the center of a white supremacist, anti-Semitic media empire.

Royalbroil/Wikimedia CommonsYes, Whitefish. The perfect scenic setting to get away, reconnect with nature, and amass a paramilitary militia in the service of Adolf Hitler.

Unsurprisingly, the town's Jewish community wasn't thrilled with the plan and tried to kick him out. That, in turn, led to neo-Nazis harassing and threatening local Jewish citizens and planning (although ultimately failing to hold) an armed rally, with the state's non-awful citizens mounting a counter-protest. The head of Nazi website The Daily Stormer claimed this was all a Jewish conspiracy to make Nazis look bad, just because they said things like "We're going to come cremate you." Yes, because the only way to make Nazis look bad is via massive conspiracy.

Montana's courts are currently trying to figure out where to draw the line between free speech and open threats, and the whole affair is an important reminder that the neo-Nazis you see online aren't abstract. They have to live somewhere, and right now, they're all about big sky country.

4

New Yorkers Who Sent Their Kids To Private School Took Over A Public School Board Solely To Gut It

Even if you don't have kids, or don't send your kids to a public school, you are still required to pay taxes to help fund public schools so that we don't raise a generation of doctors who think that cancer is caused by the vengeful spirits of our ancestors. This is generally accepted as the price we pay for having educated citizens ... but not by a group of Orthodox Jews in East Ramapo, New York.

The overwhelming majority of Hasidic Jews in the district send their kids to private yeshivas, but some of them decided that they were sick of having to pay for two school systems. So Orthodox candidates began running for the public school board.

3

A Tiny Town In Ohio Was Making Nearly A Million Dollars A Year Through Speeding Tickets

Linndale, Ohio, despite having fewer than 200 residents, used to pull in around $866,000 a year from speeding tickets alone -- most given to out-of-towners who sped through their meager 440 yards of interstate. The money was used to pay for almost everything in town, from civic employee healthcare benefits to public garbage cans. Linndale was circling the drain in the modern economy, and while their solution was preferable to starting a cult or getting mad at immigrants, it was still a pretty big dick move.

Google MapsNot a bad haul for a city the size of a mall parking lot.

2

A Washington Town Spent Years (And 10 Percent Of Its Budget) Trying To Keep A Dude From Living In A Shed

Springdale, Washington has a population of just 280 people. Unfortunately for them, one of those 280 people was Dawud Ahmad, an Islamic convert who proclaimed that his religious freedom allowed him to live in a shed with no plumbing. Ahmad's little abode is owned by a nonprofit called Muslim America, which thought it was doing a homeless member a solid. Springdale argued that the building was unfit for human occupation, and that Ahmad was violating their right to enforce their building codes. Beginning in 2009, the dispute erupted into a sprawling, years-long legal battle.

Springdale's annual budget is around $150,000-$170,000, and they were spending 10 percent of that on legal fees each year. Ahmad won (or lost, depending on how you look at it) by dying in 2012 while still occupying the shed, but two of his pupils, as well as his wife, continued to occupy what she called "a cute little place."

1

An Idaho Town Became A Real-Life Infowars

Alex Jones' Infowars constantly hawks ideas that would make a Flat Earther roll their eyes, like the time he interrogated an Amazon Echo to get Alexa to reveal her CIA handlers. It's not exactly highbrow stuff.

We tend to think of reactions to Jones as binary: Either you're crazy enough to believe him, or you're not. But it's really more like a sliding scale, as we can learn from Twin Falls, Idaho. In 2016, two boys from Sudan and Iraq, a seven-year-old and a ten-year-old, attempted some kind of sex act on a five-year-old white American girl. By law, the details are unclear; the police reports are sealed because everyone involved was a minor. But the media was able to piece together that the seven-year-old "touched the girl inappropriately," while the ten-year-old used a phone borrowed from his 14-year-old brother to record it.