The more we learn about Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, the greater the question becomes: Why does this man still hold elected office? And when will the Washington state Republican Party finally do the right thing and eject him from its ranks?
A recent deep dive into Shea’s online conversations with fellow “Patriot”/militia movement members by Jason Wilson of The Guardian recently revealed the disturbing depth and breadth of Shea’s extremist beliefs, including talk about violent retribution against their critics and an embrace of a notorious white nationalist who already had been ejected from the state GOP.
Shea, a legislator from Spokane Valley, has already lost his position as a leader in the state GOP caucus despite his status as the state’s second-most senior Republican House member, due primarily to the revelations that emerged surrounding his associations with a far-right “Patriot” community based primarily in the small Stevens County town of Marble.
These included Shea’s authorship of a document outlining the kind of “Christian” society he and his cohorts envisioned after the collapse of civilization—one in which, among other things, non-believers would be put to death. Shea’s response, rather than disavowing the work and the communications, has been to attack his accusers.
His involvement in a scheme to break eastern Washington off into a new state called “Liberty,” apparently organized along similar lines, continues apace with a recruitment campaign in other eastern Washington counties.
According to Wilson’s latest report, Shea and his cohorts—which include another legislator, Idaho Republican state Rep. Heather Scott—regularly indulged in idle chatter joking about the use of lethal violence against their critics.
The most unhinged of these participants was Anthony Bosworth, a Spokane-area “Patriot” renowned for his confrontational antics (such as carrying a gun into a courthouse) and his personal legal problems. Bosworth and Shea have been frequent collaborators on political issues, including a protest in Olympia in February 2015 in which a group of gun owners attempted to bring their firearms into the House gallery at the Capitol in Olympia (they failed because they held their protest on a Saturday, when the chambers were closed).
Bosworth, according to The Guardian, often fantasized about shooting leftists. “The communist bastards need to be shot,” Bosworth wrote at one point.
“Communist Islam,” Shea responded.
Bosworth responded happily to reports of a confrontation between leftist protesters and guards protecting an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Tacoma. “I don’t agree with federal agents clubbing them. I think they should let the people club the commies,” he wrote.
Bosworth also eagerly anticipated a civil war between rural conservatives and urban liberals. “Every day shows more and more we are sitting on the edge of civil war between two governmental factions. I don’t think we’re going to make six years before we see shots fired,” he wrote.
One participant observed that “skull-stomping godless communists does have a very strong appeal.”
Rep. Scott replied: “Sounds like the name of a rock band.”
Bosworth added: “I’m all for Christians doing some skull stomping in defense of their faith.”
One of the subjects of their conversation was young alt-right figure James Allsup, the erstwhile College Republicans leader at Washington State University who eventually joined the Unite the Right marchers in the deadly August 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. Allsup was later ejected from both the WSU Republicans and the Whitman County GOP for his neo-Nazi activism, which led eventually to his ban from YouTube as well. In recent months he has been co-hosting an explicitly fascist podcast titled Fash the Nation.
Following prolonged conversation in which most of the forum members defended Allsup after local Republicans “threw this guy under the bus,” as one member put it, Shea suggested having Bosworth act as the group’s contact with Allsup: “Here’s my two cents. Anthony I think you should reach out to him and if he is legit (not racist or a plant) make an ally.”