IDAHO — White nationalist Vincent James Foxx had a brand new video for his nearly 70,000 subscribers on BitChute, one of many few tech platforms that hasn’t banned him. On Feb. 16, he appeared sporting a baseball hat emblazoned with the state’s define tilted on its facet in order that it resembled a pistol.
“We are going to take over this state,” Foxx declared. “We have a great large group of people and that group is growing. A true, actual right-wing takeover is happening right now in the state of Idaho. And there’s nothing that these people can do about it. So if you’re a legislator here, either get in line, or get out of the way.”
Foxx, 36, isn’t from Idaho. He solely lately moved from California to Post Falls. But within the video, he confirmed off photographs of himself posing with a string of distinguished Republican politicians within the state as he defined who he’s supporting within the upcoming primaries, slated for May 17.
He was particularly excited a couple of selfie he’d taken every week prior: It confirmed him and fellow white nationalist Dave Reilly, a current Pennsylvania transplant additionally living in Post Falls, standing alongside Idaho’s lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin. All three have been smiling.
“We’re supporting her,” Foxx mentioned, bragging of his motion’s “deep connections” to McGeachin, whom former President Donald Trump endorsed within the GOP major race for governor. Foxx then defined how his specific model of Christian white nationalism is poised to overcome Idaho, then the nation.
“The solution is local politics: Amassing power in these pockets of the country until it’s time to unify,” he mentioned. “I’ve only been here for a couple of months and I’m tapped in the way that I am. You can do it too.”
Fascists like Foxx are well-known fabulists, specialists at exaggerating their affect and success. But Foxx wasn’t simply speaking shit.
He is one among many far-right activists who’ve flocked to Idaho lately, the place a big and rising radical MAGA faction within the state’s Republican Party has overtly allied itself with extremists to a stunning extent, even for the Trump period. This faction is accruing increasingly more energy in Boise, the state capitol: Imagine a statehouse stuffed with Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Steve Kings. At the native degree, they’ve seized seats on faculty boards and county commissions at a quick clip.
They’ve completed this, partly, by focusing on their opponents with horrifying cruelty and harassment, embracing a method known as “confrontational politics,” which has helped drive extra reasonable officers throughout the state to resign or retire.
Lots has been written about each the radicalization of the Republican Party and the decline of democracy within the U.S. — in regards to the nation being at a precipice. It’s possibly straightforward for these warnings to change into background noise, or to dismiss them as doom-mongering items of clickbait. But in Idaho, the nightmare situation is crossing into actuality, as an authoritarian GOP units about to create a whiter, Christian nation.
These MAGA radicals have gestured on the future they need: no rape and incest exceptions to Idaho’s abortion ban; no emergency contraception; no gender-affirming well being take care of minors; the banning of books; the jailing of librarians; and possibly no public training altogether.
I lately spent every week touring throughout the state, from Sandpoint within the northern panhandle down via the inexperienced slopes and whitewater of Hell’s Canyon to the plains of Ada County, after which throughout lava rock and sagebrush to Blackfoot. In all these locations, Democrats and extra reasonable Republicans view Tuesday’s primaries as an existential affair. Some are contemplating leaving the state if MAGA extremists consolidate extra energy. Others are digging of their heels.
The folks I talked to weren’t all that accustomed to alarmism, which made it hanging to listen to a few of their voices tremble once they talked about what’s occurring to their home. Their message for the remainder of the nation? It’s gonna get unhealthy. The GOP actually will go that far.
A Very Extreme Republican County Committee
Right-wing extremists have lengthy been drawn to Idaho, drawn to its ample land, lack of racial variety (the state is now 93% white) and libertarian model of conservative politics. But in response to longtime residents like Shawn Keenan, an area Democratic activist, the diploma to which extremists are usually not solely flocking right here in the present day however discovering a home within the GOP feels totally different.
I talked to Keenan in Coeur d’Alene — a fast-growing metropolis of 50,000 nestled within the Rockies — at a lakeside park downtown, the identical place he remembers neo-Nazis within the 1990s marching round making an attempt “to recruit blue-eyed blond-haired boys like me to join their Aryan cult.”
Keenan was referring to the Aryan Nations, the white supremacist group that had a big, sprawling compound near right here, up by Hayden Lake. In 1998, members of the group opened fireplace on after which viciously beat Keenan’s aunt and cousin, Victoria and Jason Keenan, each of whom are Native American, after they stopped their automobile near the compound. (A Southern Poverty Law Center-funded lawsuit stemming from the assault ultimately bankrupted the Aryan Nations. Keenan’s aunt, fearing reprisal, fled the realm.)
Back then, Keenan says, he remembers there being some bipartisan opposition to the Aryan Nations, which had terrorized the neighborhood for years.
“It was really easy for the community to organize against that, and you had a lot of buy-in from just about every single business owner downtown, all of the city council, you know, were locked arm in arm on this,” he mentioned. “And it was fairly unified.”
Not a lot anymore, Keenan mentioned. Sure, the Aryan Nations is gone, its 20-acre compound in ruins, however what does that matter when the native GOP is endorsing white supremacists?
On Nov. 2, 2021, Foxx advised his 44,000 followers on Telegram that “If school board races go well in north Idaho, I will be running for something local there soon. And I will win easily.”
Foxx’s dream of public workplace has already been pursued by his pal Dave Reilly, a fellow white nationalist who, regardless of saying “all Jews are dangerous” and having attended the lethal neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, was endorsed final 12 months by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee for a college board seat in Post Falls, a city neighboring the bigger Coeur d’Alene in north Idaho.
Even after the endorsement drew damaging media protection, the KCRCC didn’t again down. “I believe Dave is a good man who will make an excellent Trustee and will resist the Progressive/Marxist indoctrination of our children,” Brent Regan, the committee’s chairman, wrote in a press release. (Reilly didn’t win the college board seat in Post Falls — however he carried out fairly nicely for a man who was in Charlottesville in 2017, successful 47% of nearly 2,000 votes.)
Regan has been on the middle of the Idaho GOP’s radicalization. At his perch atop KCRCC and as chair of the board of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, an influential statewide group, each organizations have staked out far-right positions they then demand that conservatives embrace or else be labeled a RINO (Republican In Name Only).
Regan has additionally repeatedly embraced noxious extremist teams and figures, like in 2019, when he led the KCRCC in passing a decision asking the federal authorities to permit Austrian white nationalist Martin Sellner, who had shut ties to the person who massacred 50 Muslims in New Zealand, to enter the nation in order that he might marry his fiance, a north Idaho-based alt-right influencer.
Last summer season, the KCRCC unanimously handed one other decision, affirming its whole help for the John Birch Society, the conspiratorial anti-communist group that’s, in some ways, the antecedent to QAnon and whose founder as soon as declared that “democracy is a fraud.”
Foxx — who was on the Jan. 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. — has been a giant identify in white supremacist circles for years now. He was the founding father of the alt-right media collective referred to as Red Elephants, labored as a chief propagandist for a violent fascist struggle membership and is a distinguished determine within the America First “groyper” motion.
He’s rubbed shoulders with a who’s-who of distinguished racists, showing on podcasts to speak about Jewish management of the media, deny the Holocaust, or riff in regards to the low IQ scores of non-whites. “The Buffalo shooter did something crazy and immoral but was right about white replacement,” Foxx wrote on Sunday after an 18-year-old white supremacist — who cited the racist “great replacement” conspiracy in an obvious manifesto — massacred 10 folks in a predominantly Black neighborhood.
“They have completely rebranded what it is to be a conservative here in north Idaho, and they have literally excommunicated and cleaned house of any rational, regular conservative from their ranks.”
– Shawn Keenan, native Democratic activist
In a press release to HuffPost, Regan claimed to have by no means met Foxx. “I do not recall him attending any of the KCRCC meetings,” he mentioned. In February, nonetheless, Foxx and Reilly posted photographs of themselves smiling at KCRCC’s annual Lincoln Day Dinner with visitor speaker Dinesh D’Souza. (Regan was additionally a speaker on the occasion.)
In almost anywhere within the nation, Foxx would haven’t any likelihood of being elected to something. But right here, the celebration infrastructure couldn’t solely enable it, however encourage it.
“They have completely rebranded what it is to be a conservative here in north Idaho,” Keenan mentioned of the KCRCC. “And they have literally excommunicated and cleaned house of any rational, regular conservative from their ranks, telling them, ‘You don’t belong here. You have not passed the purity test.’ It’s a bit of a purge. A big purge.”
This radicalization accelerated within the final 5 years, Keenan mentioned, pointing to a collection of occasions — Trump’s election, the pandemic and the nationwide anti-racist uprisings of 2020 — as mobilizing the far proper right here to such a scary extent that he wonders whether or not it’s time get out of Idaho. Some of his buddies have already got.
There was every week when armed militias patrolled the streets with assault rifles searching for Black Lives Matter and antifa activists. Anti-maskers shut down a college board assembly, COVID-19 denialists harassed hospital staff, and bigots — a few of them armed — harangued youngsters at “Rainbow Squad” LGBTQ occasions at an area library.
“Every single day, I wake up and I do this debate in my head: ‘Do I move or do I stay?’” Keenan mentioned, briefly breaking down in tears. “Every day. So I guess maybe that’s an indication of how hopeful I am.”
‘A Deep Desire To Dominate Without Mercy’
On Feb. 25, white nationalists stopped me from coming into the third annual America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida. No reporters allowed, they mentioned. “Hey, the homosexual conference is that way,” quipped one attendee, a YouTuber arrested final 12 months for attacking media in the course of the riot.
Back at my resort, I watched the AFPAC livestream, ready to search out out which GOP politicians would seem, lending the imprimatur of their workplace to this gathering of younger “America First” fascists, who name themselves “groypers.”
Among the 5 Republican officers who spoke was McGeachin (pronounced “Ma-GEE-hin”), Idaho’s lieutenant governor. “Keep up the good work fighting for our country,” she advised the gang in a pre-recorded video. Other audio system at AFPAC then praised Adolf Hitler and known as for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be hanged.
Foxx gave a fiery speech, too. “We must have a deep desire to dominate without mercy,” he howled. “And if you refuse to dominate, then America First will dominate you!”
Responding to backlash over her AFPAC look again in Boise, McGeachin admitted in an interview with KTVB that she’d “heard” of Foxx, and sure, had taken a photograph with him. She then shortly pivoted to accusing the media of taking part in a sport of “guilt by association.”
But she was much less defensive three weeks later when she appeared on a far-right podcast, telling the hosts she was nicely conscious of what AFPAC was all about, including defiantly: “I’m not going to back off from the opportunity to talk to other conservatives across the country.”
This never-punch-right perspective has outlined McGeachin’s chaotic tenure as Idaho’s lieutenant governor. Since her election in 2019, McGeachin — a former state consultant who owns an Irish pub in Idaho Falls — has routinely allied herself with a few of the most excessive right-wing figures in America after which, when pressed about these associations, has refused to apologize. (When I requested McGeachin remark for this story, she responded by posting a screenshot of my e-mail on Twitter. “Sounds like unbiased journalism to me,” she wrote, including a crying-laughing emoji.)
Her extremism has endeared her to the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a robust darkish cash group receiving bundles of donations from out-of-state billionaires. The group’s said mission is “exposing, defeating, and replacing the state’s socialist public policies,” which in apply has meant pushing a imaginative and prescient of presidency so restricted as to make Idaho the Wild West once more.
Since 2009, the IFF has amassed affect largely by a software it calls “The Freedom Index,” a system of scoring and rating lawmakers in response to how they vote on totally different payments. If a GOP legislator’s rating falls too low for IFF’s liking, that legislator can anticipate the muse to wield its appreciable assets to again a major opponent.
This has led to a caucus of IFF sycophants within the capital who fall over themselves to do the group’s bidding, chasing after excessive Freedom Index scores like a 4th grader working towards their subsequent shiny gold star.
There are 24 state representatives and senators in Idaho with Freedom Index scores of 75% and above. The present top-rated legislator is state Rep. Heather Scott, with an FI rating of 100%.
Scott was a part of an anti-government group concerned in two armed conflicts with the federal authorities, together with the 2013 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge standoff in Oregon (the place she glided by the militia codename “greenbean”). She has posed with a Confederate flag and defended white nationalism. A rabid COVID denialist, she as soon as organized a mask-burning occasion and has mentioned stay-at-home measures have been “no different” than Nazis sending Jews to extermination camps.
Republican state Rep. Chad Christensen (FI Score: 99%) lists his membership within the anti-government militia group the Oath Keepers on his official Idaho authorities profile web page.
Further down is Republican state Rep. Ben Adams (FI rating: 78%). Last 12 months, after a viral video confirmed an Idaho man at a conservative rally asking when he might begin killing Democrats — “When do we get to use the guns? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” — Adams wrote on Twitter that it was a “fair” query.
There are solely 14 Democrats within the Idaho state House out of 70 members, and Rep. Chris Mathias (FI Score: 27%) is one among them.
Mathias can be the one Black state legislator in Idaho. I met him at a restaurant in Boise the place he was celebrating the final day of the legislative session with what appeared like a long-awaited cocktail. After we joked round for a couple of minutes about having the identical identify, I requested Mathias about IFF’s Freedom Index.
“As much as I want to point to examples of their adverse impact on the legislative process — and there’s many things to point to — part of me, the social scientist in me, the military veteran in me, wants to, you know, not just hate the player, but hate the game,” mentioned Mathias, who served within the Coast Guard and has a Ph.D. in public coverage.
A grading system just like the Freedom Index makes the customarily inscrutable means of legislating extra accessible to voters, Mathias mentioned, and the IFF is an outrageous arbiter.
Mathias is intimately accustomed to the group. Last spring, he watched state Rep. Ron Nate (FI Score: 97%) and different far-right legislators manufacture a racist ethical panic about Boise State University indoctrinating college students with “critical race theory.” (It was not.) Nate, utilizing speaking factors lifted from an IFF white paper, argued for slicing a part of the college’s price range.
Mathias says he sometimes likes to “keep his powder dry” within the statehouse — Democrats are such a minority there, it’s not definitely worth the fuss to debate each proposal — however on this case, each as the one Black man within the legislature and as a Boise State alumni, he felt compelled to talk.
Going to Boise State on the GI Bill, he advised his colleagues in a speech on the House ground, pausing to struggle again his feelings, “provided opportunities I’d never seen in my life. It changed my life.”
Critical race principle, he continued, merely acknowledges that there are institutional biases — in “housing, health, education, wealth, income,” Mathias mentioned — which have existed since our nation was based. “People of color always come out on the losing end,” he added, his voice breaking. “Always. And I don’t think it’s unfair to acknowledge it.”
The legislature then voted to chop $1.5 million in funding from Boise State with the intention to “remove state support for social justice programming.”
An entire new slate of IFF-backed candidates might be on the poll for Tuesday’s major, which, in a conservative state like Idaho, basically serves as the overall election. Mathias mentioned his largest concern is that if the far proper, together with McGeachin in her bid for governor, wins extra energy in Boise, it received’t hassle with the nuts and bolts of precise governance.
“I think if you dedicate too much of your time to moral panics, just as a matter of displacement effect, you are not talking about other things that you absolutely need to happen,” Mathias mentioned. Like plowing the roads in winter, or determining how the fastest-growing state within the nation can relieve sufficient stress on its electrical grid to actually hold the lights on.
“Summer is coming, and we’re in a real drought right now, and there’s a lot of planning and preparedness that needs to go into getting ready for wildfire season,” Mathias mentioned, “but if you’re only worried about 3-year-olds going into libraries in Idaho without parental supervision and getting their hands on a book that happens to have a picture of women’s breasts on page 38, if that’s what you spend your time worrying about, well, then fire season is going to come bite you in the ass, and it’s probably going to get people killed.”
The Purge
Dr. Ted Epperly, 68, was a doctor within the Army for 21 years, serving within the Gulf War and reaching the rank of colonel. He served within the White House as the private physician to 2 U.S. presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and later was named a president himself, of The American Academy of Family Physicians, overseeing its 150,000 members. He has testified earlier than Congress 18 occasions and has contributed articles to revered medical journals.
But he’s additionally a Democrat who believes that the coronavirus, which has now killed 1 million Americans, is a public well being emergency. For these transgressions, Epperly obtained discover final June from the Ada County Commission that his position because the doctor member of the Central District Health board in Boise — a place he’d held for 15 years — wouldn’t be renewed.
Republican County Commissioner Ryan Davidson made it clear to native press that he’d ousted Epperly over his help of lockdown measures like masks necessities, which he argued have been tantamount to “the suspension of individual liberties.” Two months later, Davidson appointed Epperly’s alternative: Dr. Ryan Cole, an anti-vaccine influencer who had known as the secure and efficient COVID-19 vaccine “needle rape,” and a “poisonous attack on our population.”
“Cole was an absolute COVID-denying, ivermectin-prescribing, hydroxychloroquine-prescribing, right-wing pathologist,” Epperly advised me over beers near his home in Eagle, Idaho. “I mean, public health is a body of knowledge that really is in the realm of a generalist physician … never a pathologist. I mean, a pathologist deals with microscopes, slides and body tissue. I mean, they don’t even deal with living human beings!”
Epperly had really been appointed to the well being board by Republican county commissioners in 2006, again when “public health was bigger than politics,” he mentioned. By all accounts, he did a superb job overseeing the realm’s approach to meals inspection, the opioid epidemic and a bunch of different public well being issues.
Then the coronavirus got here to city, and Epperly, a born-and-bred Idahoan, noticed his neighborhood ripped aside on the seams, regressing from the “collectivism” and esprit de corps of the pandemic’s early days — when he and the native medical neighborhood have been revered as “heroes” — to the ugly “individualism” of COVID denial during which they have been immediately solid as “villains.”
By Dec. 8, 2020, a far-right group known as People’s Rights, based by anti-democracy extremist Ammon Bundy, coordinated a big armed protest exterior the Central District Health constructing because the board was poised to move a masks mandate to ease the pressure on native hospitals, the place ICUs have been nearing capability.
The protesters turned up exterior the houses of well being board members, together with Epperly’s. They blared audio from a violent scene within the film “Scarface” exterior the home of one other board member, Diana Lachiondo, whereas her two youngsters cowered inside. Lachiondo left the vote in tears to return home, and the assembly was ultimately canceled.
“I am sad,” Lachiondo tweeted the subsequent day. “I am tired. I fear that, in my choosing to hold public office, my family has too-often paid the price. Though I was born and raised in Idaho, I increasingly don’t recognize this place.” She resigned the next month.
Epperly knew his time on the board was possible coming to an finish, too. Two Republicans had gained management of the three-person county fee — together with Ryan Davidson, a far-right darling. The different Republican, Rod Beck, was “more of a centrist,” Epperly mentioned, however was possible underneath immense stress.
“We have a particularly strong group here in Idaho called the Idaho Freedom Foundation,” Epperly mentioned. “They’re this very far-right-leaning activist group. They’ve got Republican legislators and county commissioners like puppets on strings. … You toe the line with them, or else they’re looking to replace you with a further right person.”
Cole, Epperly’s far-right alternative, has spent his tenure on the well being board suggesting — together with in a viral video produced by the anti-vaccine group Health Freedom Idaho — that the COVID vaccine was inflicting gynecological cancers, with out sharing proof of his declare. A bombshell investigation this month by the Idaho Capital Sun discovered he had misdiagnosed two folks with most cancers, together with a lady who then underwent a serious surgical procedure eradicating her reproductive organs, all for an sickness she didn’t have.
Across Idaho, the far proper has laid siege to nonpartisan positions, a few of which require particular experience, and made them partisan, putting in loyalists with typically disastrous outcomes.
In Kootenai County, activists endorsed by the KCRCC received a majority of the nonpartisan seats on the board of North Idaho College. These new trustees shortly torpedoed the college, firing its president with out trigger — a move that value the college half one million {dollars} — and mismanaged the place so severely that it was at danger of dropping its accreditation.
The board’s chairman, Todd Banducci, has mentioned he’s battling a “deep state” on the faculty, the place liberals are “quite deeply entrenched.” Banducci is echoing language from a robocall final 12 months from the Idaho Freedom Foundation calling for the state’s schools to be defunded over “leftist indoctrination” and “teaching young people to hate America.”
Laura Tenneson, an area progressive activist and North Idaho College graduate, has watched Banducci’s reign with despair. “They’ve taken over our beloved institution because they think the college was infecting the community with liberalism,” she advised me. “And that’s their sole reason for essentially destroying our college.”
It is just not a secret that many on the arduous proper need to seize public and democratic establishments with the intention to dismantle them. Some of the motion’s shining stars are very clear on this level.
A current Vanity Fair piece, for instance, profiled members of the nationwide neoreactionary motion, acolytes of a thinker named Curtis Yarvin, who’s an in depth ally of billionaire Peter Thiel. This motion, which has buy-in from highly effective GOP figures, is specific about eager to usher ultimately of democracy by purging the present authorities of its enemies and establishing one-party management — or, put one other approach, authoritarianism.
J.D. Vance — the enterprise capitalist and “Hillbilly Elegy” writer who lately received the Ohio Republican major for U.S. Senate — is a follower of Yarvin’s. He positively likened this potential purge to the lethal “de-Baathification of Iraq.”
“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” Vance advised Vanity Fair. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
Vance and Trump would possibly look to north Idaho for inspiration.
In March of this 12 months, the Coeur D’Alene/Post Falls Press obtained a stunning recording of a cellphone name between KCRCC Youth Chair Dan Bell and an area resident during which Bell spelled out a plan to “bum rush” the Kootenai Democrats by recruiting conservatives to pose as liberals after which run for Democratic precinct captain positions. Once elected, they might set up Dave Reilly, the white nationalist who attended the Charlottesville rally, because the native Democratic Party chair.
“Long story short, we want to take over the Democrat Party,” Bell mentioned.
Rob Barrans, vice chair of the KCRCC, has claimed neither he nor Regan, the group’s chair, have been conscious of the plan.
HuffPost has obtained one other recording from an August 2021 KCRCC assembly during which Barrans laid out a plan to take over each — by his depend, 217 — nonpartisan place within the county. Barrans could be heard itemizing off targets: fireplace districts, sewer districts, faculty boards, city councils, water commissions.
“So here’s what I need from you,” Barrans advised the group. “If you know a conservative and — I don’t say this in some places, but I’m gonna say it here — if you know of a conservative Christian candidate or someone that has never thought about running for office, they can go to the KootenaiGOP.org website.”
Barrans then defined how the KCRCC would interview potential candidates and that in the event that they have been appropriate, it might put their names on a pattern poll despatched out to native Republicans.
