Posts published in July 2023

It was entirely predictable that Ammon Bundy, the native alt right radical of the American West, would, after terrorizing and threatening health care workers and judges in Idaho, and after being assessed millions for his behavior, would cloak himself in martyr clothes and play the victim.

An Idaho jury recently awarded the state’s largest hospital – St. Luke’s – and several harassed members of its leadership $52.5 million in actual and punitive damages owing to the domestic terrorism tactics of Bundy and his followers in 2022.

As NPR’s Kirk Siegler summarized the case: “The drama goes back to March of 2022 when Bundy led a series of tense protests against the hospitalization of one of his associate’s infant grandkids who state social workers said was malnourished. According to court documents, protesters, some armed, tried to force their way into the hospital’s locked exits. Some held ‘wanted’ signs naming individual doctors and nurses and even blocked an ambulance entrance as car horns blared.”

The antics of Bundy and his followers caused St. Luke’s to effectively shut down for a period of time and the hospital spent a bucket load on increased security. As Kyle Pfannenstiel reported in the Idaho Capital Sun, St. Luke’s hospitals in Boise and Meridian, Idaho “saw 667 more appointments canceled than usual during the week around the protests” and the health system spent “$4.6 million hiring about 74 full time security staff."

Bundy, of course, thumbed his nose at the legal process that finally held him to account by refusing to offer a defense or even show up in court. And after posting a photo online of the female judge who presided over his case Bundy, not man enough to show up in the judge’s court, threatened the jurist.

“Please do not sanction a war that may end in innocent blood and require others to bring justice upon those who are responsible for shedding it,” Bundy wrote.

Bundy is a symptom and not a cause of a much bigger problem, namely the studied willingness of many rightwing politicians to enable our Bundys at the same time they ignore them.

Idaho’s Governor Brad Little, as he cruised to re-election in 2022, winning an election where Bundy won 101,000 votes running as a Republican turned independent, might have made Bundy a central issue for Idaho voters. But Little never mentioned the man with the big hat and even bigger threats. The same can said for every member of Idaho’s congressional delegation and most members of the overwhelmingly right leaning state legislature.

Even worse, some Idaho lawmakers have supported Bundy and his rhetoric, part of a long tendency of too many on the far right to delegitimize government, intimidate the courts and trash the Constitution while proclaiming to defend it.

Truth be told the elected leaders of what was once the party of Lincoln are caught in the right’s doom loop of anti-government rhetoric that stretches at least back to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 declaration that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Rightwing voters, fed a decades-long diet of nonsense and fables about a “deep state” with IRS agents ready to ambush you in the driveway or armies of pedophiles grooming the nation’s children, have washed down this warped political ideology with the refreshing Kool-Aid of blind and ignorant hatred.

About the only things the far right stands for today are the conspiracy theories Bundy invoked in his attack on the Idaho hospital and a profound hatred for our government that, thanks to an Idaho jury, can still hold these radicals accountable.

For Americans who tend to forget – or ignore – their history, it bares mentioning that the radicalization of the American right, the radicalization epitomized by characters like Bundy, has been a long time in coming.

As historian Sean Wilentz wrote recently in the New York Review of Books rightwing talk radio poured accelerant on the politics of hatred after the disastrous siege of the armed Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas in 1993. “Go for a head shot,” Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy shouted to a radio audience, “instructing listeners on how to kill federal firearms officials.”

“The second violent American revolution,” Rush Limbaugh declared around the same time, “is just about – I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart – is just about that far away.”

Jeffrey Toobin documents in a new book – Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism – the long arc of this radicalization.

McVeigh, the Oklahoma City mass murderer, was a Limbaugh fan who used a copy of The Turner Diaries, a dystopian 1978 novel that features an attack on the U.S. Capitol and became a how-to guide for a generation of domestic terrorists, to implement his fantasy of a white supremacist revolution.

The bomb McVeigh ignited inside a rented Ryder truck destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 people, including 19 children. McVeigh, it should be noted, obtained his copy of The Turner Diaries thanks to an ad in The American Hunter, the magazine of the National Rifle Association.

McVeigh went to his just rewards never expressing remorse for the slaughter he manufactured, sorry apparently only that his actions didn’t spark the revolution he sought. It takes little imagination to connect the dots to January 6, the Proud Boys and the conspiracies theories of Q-Anon.

And now we must wonder what else an Ammon Bundy and his crowd are capable of. Start the wonder by heeding his words about “a war that may end in innocent blood.”

Bundy, even more importantly, is the current case study of the tendency on the right to condone what they refuse to condemn. Bundy’s been huffing and threatening for years, somehow evading the law by the ignoring the law, leading an armed takeover of an Oregon bird refuge and causing a near riot in the Idaho capitol building. Threatening a hospital and its staff is for him all in a day’s work.

Taking on Bundy would, of course, require courage, a quality hard to find among a political class who can’t find the guts to reject as their likely presidential candidate a guy who incited an insurrection after failing to steal an election. An effective response to Bundy would also require a willingness to call out the shocking number of people who support him, clearly too much to ask of politicians who think no farther than their next primary.

Thank goodness a hospital CEO – St. Luke’s Chris Roth in the Bundy case – has more backbone than any Republican officeholder. “Standing up to the threats, bullying, intimidation, disruption, and self-serving actions of the defendants was necessary,” Roth said of the lawsuit against Bundy. “Inaction would have signaled that their menacing behavior was acceptable. Clearly, it is not, and the jury’s decision validates that fact.”

Yet as heartening as Roth’s courage is a sad fact remains. The abject failure by elected Republicans in Idaho and across the West to challenge and unambiguously condemn these homegrown terrorists puts them – and all of us – on a rendezvous with catastrophe.

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You can get a specific read on just how crazed the power struggle within the Idaho Republican Party has gotten by mentioning just one name: Damond Watkins.

The idea that he would be on the losing end of a bitter power struggle in the party’s upper reaches - for that matter, that he would have been involved in a party squabble at all - shows how much things have changed in the last few years.

He comes from one of the best-known and most solidly-established of eastern Idaho Republican families. His father, Dane, was a state senator and a Republican nominee for Congress who I covered for years, and one of the most even-tempered politicians I ever saw. (His father was a key Idaho Falls establishment figure for years before.) Damond’s brother, Dane Jr., was an elected (Republican) Bonneville County prosecutor for years, and now a judge

Damond worked for years (he has since moved on) at Melaleuca, a top executive close to its leader, Frank Vander Sloot; both Melaleuca and Vander Sloot have been well known regionally for many years as a top institutional private-sector centerpoint for the region’s Republican Party. Damond Watkins also put in many years of work for the regional and state Republican Party, chaired the county organization, and for the last decade he has been the Idaho state committee man - one of two state representatives - to the national committee, and has often paid for the travel out of his own pocket.

When last month Watkins abruptly announced his resignation from the position, the party released a statement that he “played a pivotal role in shaping our party’s vision and driving positive change … [and deserved] gratitude for his service and contributions over the years.”

What the party didn’t say then was that the same leadership making that statement had pressured Watkins to quit.

A remarkable story in the Idaho Falls Post Register put together the pieces.

The party’s state leadership - its top officials and its governing bodies - have been changing over the last decade or so, moving away from more establishment leaders like Trent Clark and Rom Luna (both former chairs) to people more aligned with the extremist groups centered in party organizations like Kootenai County. It’s become a much more hard-core group.

The immediate excuse was that he wasn’t spending enough time in Idaho (he also has a house in North Carolina), but that was a pretext only: He’d been attending meetings and doing the work. Behind the scenes several months ago someone tried a challenge to his voting qualifications in Idaho, but the county clerk said he was a properly registered voter. After that, the party brought in an “investigative committee,” which the newspaper indicated collected whatever it could find as evidence against him, including a recording of him speaking in church.

At the June party meeting in Challis, Party Chair Dorothy Moon confronted him with the report, saying (he recalled), that “Everybody, when they see the truth, what’s in this report, they’re going to drop you like flies.” That included, she said, his friend Vander Sloot.

Not so. Vander Sloot rebutted: “I have the highest regard for him. I think what Dorothy Moon and her team did to Damond was abhorrently wrong, immoral, and dishonest. It’s extremely sad to me to see any leader stoop to these levels. It’s especially sad to me to see this happening in the Idaho Republican Party. We are better than this.”

He wasn’t alone in support for Watkins. Clark and Luna (who had been ousted as chair by Moon) also released a statement (including one sent to the national party) saying much the same.

Moon was quoted by the Post Register about all this: “Some of this isn’t anybody’s business. It’s a private club.” This tells you what the leaders of the party running Idaho thinks of its relationship to the people of the state.

All of this was about one person and one party structural position. Here’s your sign of how far the current leadership of the party is willing to go to eliminate opposition.

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For almost forever, one of Idaho’s biggest selling points has been its great outdoors, and the reality has matched the hype. It’s a beautiful state, with lots of open territory to explore, even in a time of growing population.

But how well will it hold up in a time of roaring high temperatures?

And it’s getting hot. The heat has made international news in the Middle East, in southern Europe and the southern United States, among other places. Idaho has not been immune.

On Tuesday, the Weather Service projected that “a high of 101 degrees on Wednesday and then experience at least 13 straight days of 100-degree weather - which is as far as the current forecast goes.” The actual temps fell short of that, but not by much. It’s still hot in Boise, and around much of the rest of southern Idaho - a mere outskirts of the massive heat dome that has hit so much of the rest of the country in the last few weeks.

There’s still plenty of time this summer for Boise to break its record of nine straight days of triple digits, a level hit previously just four times - all of those since 2004.

An Idaho Statesman article from a few days ago asked, “Is choking on smoke the new norm? Could the golden days of pool parties and outdoor barbecues become few and far between because being outside is just not worth it?”

Or to put a harsher point on it, will people want to be outdoors in Idaho when temperatures run so hot, and over time ever hotter? What happens then to the centerpiece of Idaho’s appeal?

What if we never get so cool again, in our summer times, as we used to be?

That question makes sense of the University of Idaho-led research proposal called FIERCE, for Fueling an Innovative, Equitable and Resilient Climate-smart Economy. This large-scale regional effort is a semi-finalist for a National Science Foundation award (from a fund totaling $160 million) and it could have an effect on how the Northwest responds to climate change, making the best of a challenging situation.

The group said on its website that “Our vision is to capitalize on the Columbia River Basin’s rich natural resources to develop innovative products, solutions, and a skilled workforce to fuel a resilient economy that will solve climate change.”

It is intended to build a coordinated effort by organizations across the Columbia River basin, to do three things:

“Development of climate-smart natural and technological solutions through the integration of chemistry, biology, natural resources, and engineering research. Development of partnerships with climate-smart venture capitalists and corporations to scale-up solutions and products through investment in existing and new regional businesses. Creation of a STEM workforce development program that transcends traditional disciplinary, vocational, and educational boundaries for creation, implementation, monitoring, and assessment of solutions that have an actual impact on the atmosphere.”

As it does these things, researchers may want to consider some region-specific questions.

The outdoors appeal that Idaho long has had, but could be endangered. Yes, the mountains still are relatively temperate, but even that is changing.

Commercial and income impacts, including, but also beyond agriculture, will have to be considered. Anyone who works consistently outdoors may be affected by the changes ahead.

Wildfires have been moderate so far this year - take some gratitude for that - but the season for them still is young, and the trend line in the last couple of decades has been concerning.

Change is coming, and we all need to start planning for it. The University of Idaho effort is a good start, but a lot more is called for. Might the Idaho Legislature be inclined to at least consider that question?

Okay, let’s not get carried away. But more people should step up and take the changes that are so clearly coming with greater seriousness.