Something’s Brewing in the Deep Red WestRep. Matt Shea has been trying to create a libertarian utopia in the Pacific Northwest, a 51st state called Liberty. And he keeps getting re-elected.By LEAH SOTTILE 
Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, center, poses for a group photo with gun owners, inside the Capitol in Olympia, Wash., following a gun-rights rally.“I don’t think that the extent of [Shea’s] connections are widely known,” says Rep. Marcus Riccelli, a three-term Democrat in the state legislature who represents Spokane. “It’s a real statement of the Republican Party that someone with his extreme views has risen in the ranks of leadership.”
Long before President Trump deemed the press the “enemy of the people,” Matt Shea was refusing to speak with the media and airing his concern over conspiracy theories like FEMA camps with InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Shea also organized the Spokane chapter of the anti-Muslim ACT for America, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. And for the past few summers, Shea has spoken at a secretive religious community run by a man who was a foundational figure in the Christian Identity movement, which, according to the Anti-Defamation League, believes white Europeans to be the lost tribes of Israel and considers Jews to be the offspring of Eve and Satan.
Then there are the accusations about Shea’s temper. His first wife accused him of abuse, saying in divorce filings that she “belonged to him as a possession,” “could not get out of bed before him,” and that during two arguments “he grabbed me hard enough to leave bruises on my arms.”
She also said Shea believed he would one day be president of the United States, that he would be assassinated and that he “predicts a civil war.”
In 2012, Shea faced a firearms charge after he allegedly pulled a loaded gun from his glove compartment during a road-rage altercation. He was charged for having an expired concealed-weapons permit (it was later dropped; he reportedly made a deal with prosecutors for it to be dismissed if he went a year without breaking the law). Later, when his Democratic opponent reminded voters of the incident in campaign mailers, Shea retaliated by posting pictures of himself to Facebook in front of her home, listing the nearest intersection.
And yet he was re-elected that year with 56 percent of the vote; in 2016, he won with an even bigger margin, 64 percent.
“What I hear from people is, ‘We don’t care about his character, he votes the way we want him to,’ ” Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich tells Rolling Stone the afternoon before the park rally. Knezovich endorsed Shea in 2008 and 2010, but hasn’t since. “I should have stuck with my gut,” he says. “When I first met him I had this bad vibe about him.” Shea and Knezovich have feuded in the ensuing years, most notably when Shea alleged a local sheriff’s deputy’s gun was used in a triple murder. (Shea is being sued for defamation for those remarks.)
But the Spokane County GOP still endorses Shea (the group did not return e-mail requests for comment), and even U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers — the highest-ranking Republican woman in the House who is in a neck-and-neck race this fall — has accepted his endorsement.
Riccelli says Shea’s constituents might simply not know about his history, though the weekly paper here has been covering him for years. But “no one takes left-leaning sectors of the media very seriously here,” Knezovich explains. “Matter of fact, you’re kind of viewed as the enemy.”
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For several years, Shea has proposed the same initiative in the Statehouse: A place named “Liberty” — a 51st state that would sever the rural, arid and deep-red eastern half of Washington from the urban, forested, blue coastal region. A place where God and guns won’t be regulated. A place where Shea says, consequently, there will be more freedom.
It might come as a surprise that a legislator in the famously progressive Northwest could have a career espousing far-right fringe ideas. But that image of the region is partially driven by media coverage, says Cornell Clayton, director at Washington State University’s Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service. “Within the state there’s what we call the Cascade Curtain. Everything on the west side of the state votes blue, and the east side of the state tends to vote red,” Clayton says.
The big exception is Spokane, a city that in the 2016 election was a bright island of blue in a field of red. Spokane has become a haven for people priced out of the Northwest’s larger cities, a place where artists, writers and musicians can live comfortable lives. Even so, all over the Northwest, it’s regarded as a backwater bastion of right-wingers and members of the Patriot movement, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as a set of groups “whose ideologies center on anti-government conspiracy theories.” Shea represents nearby Spokane Valley, a 98,000-person city with no discernible downtown — whiter, richer and more educated than the state average — extending almost all the way to the Idaho border.
People have been talking about hacking off the eastern part of Washington — from the Cascades to Idaho — since at least 1915. But recently, creating a bastion of God-fearing, gun-toting, canned-food eating whiteness where conservatives can survive the End Times has been embraced by survivalists and dubbed the American Redoubt — an idea that’s gained enough interested parties to demand an actual corner of the real estate market. Though Shea’s Liberty idea hasn’t gained much traction in the Statehouse, it’s red meat for anti-government extremists at a time when some Americans really are viewing this area of the country as the last remaining holdout for the type of America they think can be great again.
Knezovich, who recently produced a three-part podcast about white supremacy in Eastern Washington and North Idaho (no one calls it Northern), reminded me that there’s an old strain of hate that runs through the veins of this region. A big part of his job as sheriff, he says, is dealing with white nationalist groups — Identity Evropa, the Ku Klux Klan, militias and holdouts from when Aryan Nations was headquartered over the border in Hayden, Idaho.
In 2011, authorities discovered a bomb planted by a white supremacist on the route of Spokane’s Martin Luther King Day parade. At the time, I was the Spokane weekly paper’s music editor — but stories about white hate groups would seep into that world, too. Punks told me about shows in the ’90s flooded with skinheads dressed in their trademark red suspenders and combat boots tied with red laces. Spokane is where I first learned about Ruby Ridge, a 1992 Idaho standoff between the Weaver family — separatists with Christian Identity beliefs — and U.S. Marshals. It ended in three deaths and further fueled anti-government ideas in the region.
“There’s a deep divide within the Spokane County Republican Party between its mainstream wing and its more constitutionalist wing,” Clayton says. “The constitutionalist wing is heavily influenced by Christian nationalists and some white-supremacist elements…they have a particular view of the Constitution and it’s all steeped in this idea of liberty. It’s anti-statism. It’s anti-government.”
Even if Shea is representative of that extremist arm of the local GOP, he must be effective if he keeps getting voted in, right?
“There’s a difference between being successful as a legislator and creating policy,” Clayton says, “versus being a successful politician who is symbolic of certain issues and represents policies a minority wants.”
I ask Rep. Riccelli, and he says Shea isn’t touting Liberty in the hallways of the Statehouse. “He’s not this person 24-7,” he says. Riccelli has worked with Shea on some issues, but he emphasizes that Shea’s personality in the capitol and his personality at rallies is very different. “Who is Matt Shea, really?” he asks.
