44.1. Come on, North Idaho

Another sad chapter in a very long book

The year is 2024 and this was the news today out of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. From the March 26 edition of The Spokesman-Review:

A group of racists waving confederate flags, revving their truck engines and yelling slurs victimized the University of Utah women’s basketball team Thursday during their stay in Coeur d’Alene for the NCAA Tournament held in Spokane.

“For our players and staff to not feel safe in an NCAA Tournament environment, it’s messed up,” said Utah head coach Lynne Roberts.

The incident led the team to stay in Spokane for the remainder of their schedule.

“It’s getting to the point where people of color can’t even travel anywhere,” Spokane NAACP President Lisa Gardner said. “This is starting to be reminiscent of the ‘60s.”

The latest instance of public hate to stain North Idaho, the episode spurred some to question why the team was assigned to stay there in the first place.

“We should not have been there,” Utah Athletic Director Mark Harlan told KSL.com. “I do appreciate the NCAA and Gonzaga moving us from that situation, but we should never have been there in the first place. So a lot of folks need to get home and heal from the whole matter.”

Read the hate, then read the rest: that the NAACP is saying people of color can’t travel anywhere without experiencing bigotry. Read an athletic director of a major university saying given the history of hate in the region, “what were we thinking having our team stay there in the first place?”

I am chilled by this. I am rattled. I am disturbed as a westerner, as a reporter who has concentrated on the hateful ideologies that have found a home in this region. I am bothered as a person who refuses to become numb or accept that hate can have a home anywhere, that a group of women can’t walk down Sherman Avenue in Coeur d’Alene and not experience hate.

The Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations reiterated that this is an old book of hate that keeps having new chapters added to it: “This is once again a stain on our community that we have worked so hard to erase since the early days of the Aryan Nations.”

In the past when this kind of news broke, I took to Twitter and would post long threads on my reporting on this specific issue. I’d encourage national editors to hire a local reporter to do a story for their publication. My hope was always to show that incidents of hate had a history in this region. And an important part of that history was about the people who stayed committed to fighting hate on the frontlines in Idaho.

Since that horrible billionaire car-man has turned Twitter, or X, into the digital equivalent of an endless stream of pickups flying confederate flags, I’m not interested in having this conversation there. But I will post here. My hope in doing stories like these is that readers around the west can educate themselves on how hate embeds into communities. You may recognize the rhetoric. You may start to see a little bit of your own community in the ones I write about. You may start to see this can happen anywhere.

First: hate does not stop at borders. In fact, sometimes it draws new ones.

One of three brilliant photo illustrations by Ben Jones, for High Country News

Here’s a story I did last year for High Country News about the Greater Idaho Movement. One place to start in understanding why Coeur d’Alene, and the surrounding area, has such a long history with this kind of racist behavior is to understand the decades-long hope of hate groups to turn it and everything around it into an Aryan homeland. A few lines:

In 1986, after migrating from California to North Idaho to build a racist refuge for his group the Aryan Nations, white supremacist Richard Butler hosted his annual Aryan World Congress — a national gathering of neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and members of the Ku Klux Klan. They agreed that, in the not-so-distant future, U.S. cities would become so overrun by minority groups that white people would be forced to flee to an “Aryan homeland” they envisioned in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

Butler died in 2004. Eventually, his compound was fully bulldozed and his acolytes scattered, but his ideas remained and evolved. In 2011, survivalist blogger and New York Times best-selling novelist James Wesley, Rawles floated an idea called “The American Redoubt.” … He encouraged Christians of any race who felt alienated by urban progressive politics to relocate to the Northwest, writing: “I’m inviting people with the same outlook to move to the Redoubt states.” Recently, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a right-wing political think tank, echoed this. “Are you a refugee from California, or some other liberal playground?” it asked on its website, welcoming those newcomers as “true” Idahoans.

Sadly, that very street the University of Utah basketball players were harassed on — Coeur d’Alene’s Sherman Avenue — has long been used as a stage by neo-Nazis to put their beliefs on parade. A clip from 1998:

A page from a July 1998 edition of The Spokesman-Review. A small story about the parade, a large story about the counterprotest.

Just about twenty-four years later, in the summer of 2022, the white supremacist group Patriot Front sent in goons from all over the country to try to pull some shit at the Coeur d’Alene Pride festival. A keen resident saw a bunch of dorks in matching clothes piling into a U-Haul, and made a smart call to the police. Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote for The Washington Post about that incident, and the way far-right figures had been testing their tactics in the West:

The fact [Patriot Front] turned up in Idaho would not have been a shock to many people in the northwestern United States. For years, the region has been a de facto testing ground for the far right to see what it can get away with.

Consider the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, when men with weapons and anti-government views seized a federal property for 41 days, transforming it into a hive buzzing with militant group members, racists and plenty of characters who’d give the so-called QAnon Shaman a run for his money.

The man who led the occupation, Ammon Bundy, grew up on a farm in Nevada hearing anti-government views and fringe religious beliefs from his father, Cliven, who pursued his own grievances with the federal government for decades, before leading an armed standoff in 2014. Following that confrontation, Cliven Bundy mused to reporters about “the Negro,” government “subsidy” and the possibility that Black people were “better off as slaves.”

At both Bundy standoffs, the family summoned help from unofficial militia groups that would, years later, be among those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Long before they hit Washington, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters pointed guns at federal agents in the West. Stewart Rhodes, a Montana man who founded the Oath Keepers, now faces seditious conspiracy charges for the Jan. 6 attack. He has pleaded not guilty; three other Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty to the charges.

Someone else who was trying to pull some shit at the Pride festival in Coeur d’Alene that day? Former Washington State Rep. Matt Shea. He’s from just over the border in Spokane Valley, and after he decided not to run for office again, he became a pastor. He runs a church now. And a school. For children.

One of Shea’s pals from the Bundy standoffs, and the Marble God & Country Festival, North Idaho Rep. Heather Scott has been pretty blunt about her affection for the Confederate flag. She posed with it on a parade float. Then, years later, she really wanted people to stop using that image.

In 2020, I wrote a story for The New York Times Magazine about the extremely-online boogaloo movement — and the story touched on a chilling incident on Sherman Avenue in Coeur d’Alene that was replicated throughout the west. A bit:

That evening, President Trump tweeted that he would be classifying Antifa as a terrorist group (something he does not have the authority to do). The next afternoon, Trump spoke at the White House Rose Garden as the sounds of tear gas and flash grenades echoed, scattering peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square. “Our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa and others,” he said. He vowed to send federal troops to “stop the rioting and looting” and “to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights.”…

Amid the hysteria about nonexistent vans full of Antifa supersoldiers, actual heavily armed militia groups around the country stepped in to provide what they saw as protection to communities, often with the encouragement of lawmakers. In Montana, State Senator Jennifer Fielder took to Facebook on the night of June 1, warning her followers to be on the lookout for Antifa. “There were multiple reports from credible witnesses of five white panel vans filled with people believed to be Antifa,” she wrote. They had been spotted in a grocery-store parking lot in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, she wrote. No one got a photo. Her post went viral.

Soon mobs of armed and angry people came out in force in towns across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. In Snohomish, Wash., Representative Robert Sutherland posed with a semiautomatic weapon among other armed men. In Spokane, groups of armed men roamed downtown, telling business owners they had been hired to be there — but wouldn’t say who hired them. The tiny town of Forks, Wash., along the Pacific coastline, made national headlines when a mixed-race family driving a bus through town on the way to a camping trip was surrounded by people who believed them to be Antifa. Local reports said they later trapped the family in their campsite with felled trees. The campers escaped only when concerned residents brought chain saws to let them go.

In Idaho, in the first week of June, armed men and women lined Coeur d’Alene, standing guard outside restaurants and slugging liquor at crowded bars. Some wore Hawaiian shirts. Most wore tactical gear. Farther north, in Sandpoint, a county commissioner warned on Facebook of a looming threat. “We are hearing from other sources of protesters coming to the county courthouse,” he wrote. “It would be great to have some of the Bonner County folks come out to counter anything that might get out of hand.” A small group of white, teenage Black Lives Matter protesters found themselves being followed and outnumbered by armed men in full tactical gear. A concerned resident shared a video with me of an interaction between the two groups. “Don’t wreck anything in this town,” a white man barked toward a protester’s car. Another said: “We ain’t gonna have it — not in North Idaho.”

I think we can safely say that things like what happened to those University of Utah basketball players will keep happening until something significant changes in the region. Communities around Idaho have been “fighting their asses off,” as Betsy Gaines Quammen put it to me, when far-right figures try to take over their school boards and county governments. It’s about conservative communities drawing a line in the sand, and rejecting bigotry and hate.

A gift given to me by an Idaho reader of When the Moon Turns to Blood.

Last year, after an event I did in Boise for When the Moon Turns to Blood, the organizer of the event handed me a box with this necklace inside: a chain with a charm in the shape of Idaho. I was flabbergasted.

She wanted people to keep paying attention to Idaho — to see what was happening there, to stop shrugging off hate that happens there as not their problem. To know that there are a great many people who care deeply about what happens in their state, who are hanging on by their teeth in a fight they refuse to give up on.

When something like this news happens, I think it’s so important to not drop the story after the cameras are gone. It’s why journalists in Spokane, Coeur d’Alene and the entire Northwest region need your support.

You know I won’t give up on the issue — so you can always get a paid subscription to this newsletter, which helps fund all of the journalism I do. Betsy Gaines Quammen’s book, True West, and David Neiwert’s book, The Age of Insurrection both have so much detail about the things Idaho is facing. Kathleen McLaughlin has also written some brilliant pieces for The Guardian about the far-right influence in Idaho and Montana.

The Spokesman-Review and The Inlander have a long history of going deep on political issues facing the region. Both are family-owned papers, if you can believe it, and both gave me my first bylines — please support them by reading and subscribing.