Idaho’s rightward political lurch has immersed the state’s Republicans in a political civil war that now extends all the way from the grassroots to the executive mansion.
In late May, the state’s Republican governor, Brad Little, angrily revoked an executive order banning mask mandates in the state that had been put in place by his own militia-supporting lieutenant governor during a period when she was deputizing for him.
Janice McGeachin had ordered that Idaho cities and counties revoke mask orders, playing into a widespread fear among the far right that basic health measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic are a sign of an over-reaching government. Little then called McGeachin’s action “tyranny” and a “stunt” and scuppered it after it had been in place for just a day.
But observers say the bizarre fight is symptomatic of a much wider problem in Idaho and the rest of America.
They fear that the political dynamics in Idaho – where far-right actors have won recruits and political momentum through uncompromising refusal to comply with public health measures – may presage a worrying direction of conservative politics in the country as a whole.
“Political moderates around the country need to pay more attention to what is happening here,” said Mike Satz, executive director of the Idaho97 project, which was founded last year to combat misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Idaho used to follow broader trends, but now it is in the vanguard of extremist activity,” Satz added.
The mask ban was put in place by McGeachin, a businesswoman who previously spent 10 years as a state representative for a rural district in the state’s far east. Idaho had no statewide mask ban measures in place, but McGeachin’s move was an attempt to prevent cities and counties addressing the pandemic with emergency measures by themselves.
The lieutenant governor won election in 2018 after squeaking through a crowded five-way Republican primary earlier that year. Since then she has won praise from the far right and drawn concern from more moderate Republicans over her associations with the Three Percenter militia movement.
During her vice-gubernatorial run, a member of her security detail sported a Three Percenter tattoo, and McGeachin refused to answer media questions about security staffing. On another occasion in 2019, she posted to Facebook a picture of herself with members of the Real Three Percenters group, who were protesting on behalf of Todd Engel, who was sentenced in the previous year to 14 years in a federal prison over his role in a 2014 armed standoff with federal agents at Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada.
Just weeks later, McGeachin led armed protesters, including Three Percenters, through an impromptu oath which appeared to be intended to swear them in as state militia.
Recently McGeachin, while appearing as a guest on the podcast of Southern Poverty Law Center-listed extremist David Horowitz, said that the federal US government did not rightfully own any public lands in Idaho, which make up about 60% of the state’s total area.
“I don’t view that the federal government owns the land in Idaho, my view is that the land of Idaho belongs to the state of Idaho,” McGeachin told Horowitz, echoing the views expressed by the likes of fellow Idahoan Ammon Bundy, who led the armed occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge in 2016.
Even in a deep red state, until recently such associations and positions may have ruled McGeachin out as a serious contender for the governorship.
But Jaclyn Kettler, a political scientist at Boise State University, located in the state’s capital, said that over the last year, “battles over mask mandates have underlined divisions within the Republican party”.
She says that the divisions are long-standing, and partly related to the party’s lock on statewide offices and the legislature in a state which has not elected a Democratic governor for more than 30 years, and has returned large majorities for every Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon’s run in 1968.
“When you have a majority for so long, it can lead to internal divisions and factions,”, Kettler said, and adds that the recent successes of conservative Republican candidates in winning primaries, elections or re-election has “shifted the legislature and the party to the right”.
Satz, the Idaho97 director, says that this rightward move means that the election of McGeachin, who has positioned herself as the hard right’s tribune, is now a possibility.
“Before 2018, no one thought that there was a realistic chance of her becoming lieutenant governor, but here we are,” Satz added.
In the last year, and particularly in 2021, what has boosted McGeachin’s status among conservatives has been her support of protests against mask and lockdown orders, which have included direct criticisms of Little’s efforts to rein the virus in, and mandates introduced by local governments.
Satz says that a range of far right actors have exploited grassroots angst about Covid measures, including McGeachin, legislators like Heather Scott, Dorothy Moon and Chad Christensen and far-right actors like Bundy, and members of Christ Church, based in the Idaho college town of Moscow.
According to Satz these increasingly “violent and aggressive” protests came about in a slow boil. While there were only sparse, fringe protests at the outset of the pandemic, racial justice protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd brought armed rightwing counter-protesters into the streets. That included in the North Idaho town of Coeur D’Alene, where dozens of heavily armed men began facing off with relatively small Black Lives Matter protest groups in June 2020.
Satz said that these counter-protests began to bleed into anti-mask protests, and later ones against Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, which many Republicans and those on the far right falsely believe was stolen by the Democrats. “It’s all the same people,” he said of the composition of the various rightwing protests movements.
Consistent promoters of protests include Bundy, who began early on in the pandemic to characterize mask mandates and lockdowns as affronts to liberty.
As early as March 2020, Bundy was fronting meetings in his current home city of Emmett, Idaho, calling on people to reject mask orders. By April, he was rallying followers to the defense of arrested anti-vaxxers, and was a prominent participant in anti lockdown marches on the state capitol, some of which were organized in part by the dark money group the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Last August, Bundy was arrested multiple times while leading a maskless protest against Covid measures in the Idaho state house. .
Despite being banned from the state house after his arrests, Bundy himself has now filed to run for governor in Idaho in 2022.
Bundy also had a hand in making the tone of anti-mask protests more aggressive from December 2020 on. In that month, protesters succeeded in shutting down a meeting of public health officials who had convened to discuss a mandate in the Boise region to address then-surging cases of Covid-19.
That protest included members of Bundy’s People’s Rights group. Bundy has reportedly encouraged members, who include a wide range of far-right activists in Idaho and beyond, to engage in weapons and ham radio training sessions in 10-person cells in order to defend themselves in an armed conflict with government, which Bundy has hinted is an inevitability.
Now, People’s Rights-linked farmers have purchased land along the Klamath River in Oregon to protest against drought-related reductions in irrigation allowances to farmers.
Amy Herzfeld-Copple monitors extremism and other threats in Idaho and beyond for progressive non-profit the Western States Center. In an email, she wrote that “both Bundy and McGeachin have exploited pandemic anxiety and instability over the last year to build political power and attract attention for disrupting democratic norms”.
Herzfeld-Copple added that “they each have long histories of engaging with paramilitaries, encouraging political violence, courting bigoted groups”, and that “there’s a real danger that their campaigns will embolden extremist movements”.
In March 2021, again in Coeur D’Alene, protesters, with the support of McGeachin and North Idaho Republican legislators including Scott and Moon, burned masks outside a health center. Statewide, Satz says, different elements of the far right are “working together in ways we haven’t seen before”.
“They’re using Covid and becoming more aggressive and more focused. The extreme right are gaining power in Idaho, but we don’t think it will stop here,” Satz said.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
