On Tuesday, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol held a hearing delving into the role of far-right paramilitary organizations in the attempt to stop certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Focusing on groups, including the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and Three Percenters, who were involved in the 2021 attempted insurrection, the hearings presented compelling evidence of significant coordination between these groups, as well as awareness within the Trump administration of their plans.
They didn’t just attack police, or a building. They didn’t just disrupt elected officials. They assaulted the simple, but crucial, principle of American democracy outlined by committee chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi: “We settle our differences at the ballot box.”
“This could have been the spark that started a new civil war,” testified former Oathkeepers spokesman Jason Van Tatenhove.
The danger of such violence around the country is high and has risen ever since Trump was elected. The danger in Idaho, including from many of the same groups who organized to attack the Capitol, is particularly acute.
Idaho was famously the home of the Aryan Nations. Then we kicked them out. But the same soil that allowed them to take root has allowed a second resurgence of the far-right in Idaho.
This has been an obvious and escalating problem for years. Examples abound.
• Far-right lawmakers inviting lunatics to give unhinged, Islamophobic rants in Statehouse hearing rooms in 2016.
• Three Percenters badgering lawmakers while armed in the state Capitol in 2018.
• Armed protests outside the homes of public officials throughout 2020 and 2021.
• Anti-lockdown protestors shattering a state Capitol door in 2020.
• Proud Boys and members of the white nationalist Patriot Front showing up to intimidate gay pride celebrants in June.
Far-right extremism has attempted, and sometimes made successful inroads into the halls of the Idaho Legislature.
• Rep. Chad Christensen, R-Iona, still proudly lists his membership in the Oathkeepers — which Van Tatenhove called “a violent militia” — in his legislative biography.
• Eric Parker, a leader of Idaho’s Three Percenter militia who is known nationally as the “Bundy Ranch Sniper” for aiming a rifle at federal law enforcement during Cliven Bundy’s Bunkerville standoff, has twice sought legislative office.
• Todd Engel, another participant at Bunkerville, sought office this year.
Thankfully, GOP primary voters gave Christensen the boot this year, and neither of the other two has succeeded in winning a majority — though Engel came uncomfortably close.
Still more members of the Legislature have stood ready to offer support for their causes, as when Reps. Heather Scott, Sage Dixon and Judy Boyle traveled to the 2016 standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon staged by Ammon Bundy and assorted miscreants.
With actions like these, it’s no surprise most people in the Mountain West expect further violence. A survey of the Intermountain West commissioned by the Frank Church Institute at Boise State University last year found that 59% of Idahoans expect to see more political violence similar to what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. And about one in six Idahoans said political violence is justified under certain circumstances.
This is a situation that can’t be allowed to persist, nationally or in Idaho. Idaho needs the same kind of work that led to the ouster of the Aryan Nations — the kind of work that many in Idaho are already undertaking to reaffirm the commitment to settling our differences at the ballot box.
