I visited Glasgow, Montana, and discovered it loves guns and Trump

Kelly, as you might expect from someone willing to spill his guts to a stranger who has just walked off the street, is an open and friendly person. He’s the editor of the BS Buzz, a daily freesheet in Glasgow, Montana (pop. 3,192). The Buzz is a remarkable publication - eight A4 pages five days a week, packed with local news, opinions (lots of them), puzzles and classified ads. It’s the work of Kelly, his business partner Zac Garsjo, and staff member Rachel Boese, who blushes when the boss tells me ‘she had two holes-in-one last week at the golf course’. The paper has been going strong for 14 years. The print run is 1,5000-ish.

The town also has a weekly paper, The Glasgow Courier, which has been going for more than 100 years and, not to be unkind, reads like it. By comparison, the BS Buzz reads like a 16-year-old teenager with purple hair and a nose ring, a rebellious upstart who is seriously considering a neck tattoo just to piss off her parents. “We don’t mind if people get upset at some of the things we publish,’’ Kelly said.

We’ll come back to editorial policy later. First, we need to talk about the rifle.

“Sure, it’s real. Of course, it is.”

I talked Kelly into a photograph, not that it required a bribe.

“It’s loaded,’’ he said, pulling back the bolt to show me the chamber. A live bullet falls out and onto the floor.

“For f***’s sake,” I squealed, not unreasonably. “That’s a live bullet.”

Once my heart rate reduced to a life-sustaining level, I asked him why on earth he would have a loaded rifle in the office.

“Just in case,’’ he said. “You never know what could happen. ”

The daily paper (Image: free) I don’t know what could happen, and Kelly doesn’t tell me. But I’ll make an educated guess. Kelly is a Montanan to the core and a Second Amendment guy. Guns are an integral part of his identity like they are for a lot of people in the state. This is cowboy country, after all. He’s also a smart guy so he knows the ominous undertones of “you never know what could happen” are unnecessary.

An armed gang isn’t going to burst into the office of the BS Buzz and steal the photocopier. Nor will the United States Government be coming any time soon to take away his liberty, freedom and laptop computer. Kelly has a loaded rifle by his desk because he can. It’s the way of life for people like him in Montana.

I took a 347-mile detour just to spend a couple of hours in Glasgow, Montana, for no better reason than it was named after Glasgow, Scotland, a place where I spent the biggest chunk of my adult life and love with all my heart.

This will get me into trouble with the locals but Scotland’s Glasgow is miles better. Not to say Montana’s version doesn’t have things going for it. The town is actually named after Glasgow in Scotland, the story being the people who founded it back in the 1880s chose the name randomly off a globe. Its slogan is The Middle of Nowhere.

A decade ago, a journalist from the Washington Post, having nothing useful to do with his time, worked out that of all the towns with more than 1,000 residents in the US, Glasgow is the furthest away - four and a half hours - from any city with a population of 75,000-plus.

Yes, I know. Who cares?

It turns out the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce did. The Middle of Nowhere sounds like an insult to you and me but that’s only because we couldn’t spot a brilliant marketing slogan if it was painted on the inside of our eyelids. The Middle of Nowhere is marketing gold, a lemon ready to be turned into a barrel of lemonade. Get your tickets to the 2024 Middle of Nowhere Music Festival with headliners Chancey Williams and Tigirlilly!

When you arrive in Glasgow, you’ll find a quintessentially small American town with the usual small-town amenities - a cinema, coffee shops, an art gallery, a high street print shop, a pioneer museum, bars, a small hospital, and so on.

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But you won’t find many people, not late on a Monday afternoon. I go for a walk and do my thing, talking to whoever will give me the time of day, chit-chatting about the museum (it was closed) and local high school sports teams - Go Scotties! - before sneakily trying to turn the conversation to politics. But it’s a struggle. People don’t want to talk about politics in Glasgow, Montana, at least not to strangers.

“You say the wrong thing and before you know it you’ve lost most of your customers,’’ explained the owner of The Loaded Toad coffee shop. I changed tack. She’d lived here all her life, apart from a couple of years away for college. What makes this place so great?

“Community,’’ she said. “Everybody looks after each other. If someone gets hurt there’ll always be someone around to help. If anyone gets into financial trouble or something like that people will get together to do something, have a fund-raiser or something.”

I’d heard the same from a couple of other people and that was great as far as it goes. But it’s not much to hang your hat on, is it? Not when you’ve only got a few hours to try and find a flavour of what makes a place tick. I’m not blaming anyone for that. We’re all the same when it comes to our hometown. We know it’s great so we don’t spend much time thinking about why it’s great. If the coffee shop owner (she didn’t want me to use her name) had arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, and asked me the same question I would have been nonplussed, too. Couldn’t she see with her own eyes that she’d just arrived in Nirvana?

No such assumptions were made over at the BS Buzz, where Kelly offered chapter and verse about what made his hometown great. No filter applied. Just the Goddamn Montanan truth.

“I'm glad to live here because we've got so much,’’ he said, searching for the right words. “We’ve got so much … artillery.”

And that makes you happy?

“Yes, it does. It makes me very happy because I feel safer. I mean everybody around here knows how to use a rifle. The only way to wipe Glasgow, Montana out would be with nuke.”

What else?

“There’s no crime here.”

Come on, everywhere has got crime, even Nirvana.

“Well, if you count DUI as a crime, sure,’’ he said.

If we’re talking about crime crime, we’d have to go back about four years.

The town's slogan (Image: Lawrence Donegan)“There was a guy who ran over his girlfriend out on the highway there. And before that, there was a crazy idiot who opened fire at the hospital - a lunatic from who-knows-where? His neighbour said he was a weird one. All he had was a .22 (a small calibre rifle) but he did end up killing a gal,’’ Kelly said.

“But that was such an isolated incident. You know, you get these wackos that move in, people who aren’t local. Everybody in Glasgow gets along because we're not all wackos.”

There's not much mileage in talking politics in Montana. There’s a competitive race for the senate seat between the Democrat Jon Tester, an 18-year incumbent, and the GOP’s Tim Sheehy, a squared-jaw ex-military man who, based on my highly unscientific analysis of voters’ opinions, will win narrowly.

When it comes to the Presidential race, however, there’s no contest. The Republican candidate hasn’t lost Montana since 1992 when Clinton defeated Bush (only because the independent loonball Ross Perot shaved off a quarter of the GOP vote). Trump will win comfortably this time. Everybody knows it.

Strangely, though, I’d seen very few Trump signs on my journey across the state from west to east, in contrast to Arizona, Nevada and even Idaho, where he’s a deity to many. Montana’s size is the obvious explanation. The towns are small and far apart, separated by vast, unpopulated plains where the normal tools of election politics are not required. Cows don’t vote, as someone wise once said.

I pointed this out to the editor of the BS Buzz, who directed me to Glasgow’s main residential area over on the other side of the highway. “You’ll find plenty of Trump flags and posters over there.”

We chatted a while longer. Years ago I worked on a small vagabond local newspaper in Donegal, the mighty Tirconaill Tribune. In many ways, the BS Buzz reminded me of the Tribune. They share the same spirit, the same lack of respect for conventions, which to me is a great thing for a newspaper. Kelly Siefert had echoes of the Tribune’s editor John McAteer, another renegade spirit, albeit minus the gun fetish and love of Donald Trump. McAteer would rather die than vote for “ that feckin’ lunatic”.

Glasgow is typical small town America (Image: Lawrence Donegan) Fortunately for Donald Trump, McAteer doesn’t have a vote. Siefert does, and he wasn’t shy in explaining why it was going to the former president. Not to be dismissive or patronising, but it was the usual litany of grievance and blind loyalty, not all of it grounded in reality. I’ve learned by now there’s no point in pushing back when it comes to talking policy and positions with a diehard Trump fan. They believe what they believe, and that’s fine.

I let Hurricane Kelly blow itself out, thanked him for his hospitality and his truth, and left. It was time to get back on the road again, although there was something I wanted to do before I left.

I drove up to Glasgow’s residential area to take a photo of all the Trump flags Kelly had mentioned. I drove the neighbourhood streets once and then drove around them again. I thought I’d missed something but I hadn’t. There wasn’t a single Trump flag on display. I saw plenty of Stars and Stripes flags and a few street signs, candidates’ names I’d never heard of running in local races. There were a couple of signs for Democrat Senator Jon Tester but that was it. Which was odd.

Made me wish I had more time to hang around and make the effort to find out what’s really going on in Glasgow, Montana.

Follow Lawrence Donegan's American election journey across the US at goodbyeDonald.substack.com