On June 11, 2022 31 alleged members of Patriot Front were arrested near the Pride celebration in Coeur d'Alene Idaho. Brad speaks with two people who were at the event--Alicia Abbott of The Idaho 97 and Chad Schobert, who was born and raised in the region. They talk about how even before Patriot Front arrived there were armed militia members circling the Pride event, how all of this fits into the radicalization of the region during the Trump years, and the experience of living in a Christian nationalist, anti-government, wannabe theocratic state.
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Hello everyone and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Today we have a special episode, one that we scheduled on the fly after what happened last weekend in Coeur d'Alene.
That's when Patriot Front showed up to try to disrupt and riot and ostensibly attack the Pride event that was happening on that day.
31 people were arrested and as details have emerged it's become clear that there are connections to churches and Christian leaders In the area and the region, and that the Christian nationalism behind the attacks on Pride in Coeur d'Alene and other places is just barely below the surface.
So I called up two people I know who were at the event, and that's Alicia Abbott and Chad Schobert, and we discussed what they experienced, what they saw, how all of this fits into the politics and culture of the region.
And how the LGBTQ community is responding.
We did have to schedule the interview on a very short term or on a short notice basis.
And so I was able to speak to Alicia and then Chad joined later.
And so what you'll hear first is my discussion with Alicia.
And then after that, Chad joins us for about 10 or 15 minutes.
Thanks for listening.
Here's the interview.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
We have a special episode today.
We wanted to jump on the mic and see if we couldn't talk to some folks who were there about a very troubling instance from this last weekend, and that is the fact that 31 People who are allegedly part of Patriot Front, which is a white supremacist organization, were arrested in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, at a Pride event.
And so I'm speaking today with two folks who are from that Part of the country from that part of Idaho who have lived there for a long, long time.
And that is Alicia Abbott and Chad Schobert.
Alicia is Project Outreach Coordinator at Idaho 97.
Somebody who just does a lot of work publicly to bring awareness to the political and social goings on of Coeur d'Alene, of Sandpoint, of North Idaho, sometimes called the Panhandle, if I'm not wrong, Alicia.
And so first, let me just say thanks for joining me on short notice.
Hey, thank you, Brad, for having me.
I appreciate it.
If you listen to this show regularly, friends, you know that I have kind of been preoccupied, might be a word, with Idaho and the surrounding states because it's part of a movement called the American Redoubt.
And Alicia and I will get into that in a second.
I, as somebody who's grown up in Southern California, know, I mean, dozens of people who have moved to Idaho over the last 10 or 15 years.
And I'm talking between 50 and 100 folks I could probably find in the state of Idaho who I went to church or high school with.
This brings me to what happened on Saturday in Coeur d'Alene.
Coeur d'Alene is, for those of you who can't picture Idaho geography, is in the very northern part of Idaho, but it's often thought of as a kind of center of a kind of certain Christian separatist and militia anti-government movement called the American Redoubt.
Alicia, you're a kind of We're gonna get into the fact that you were there.
You were part of the organizing crew, the people who put on the Pride event in Coeur d'Alene, where these Patriot Front folks showed up.
Would you just start by helping us understand, if I've never been to Idaho, if I am from Baton Rouge or Atlanta or New Jersey, and I've never been to Idaho.
I don't know anything about Idaho.
Tell us about Coeur d'Alene.
Tell us about North Idaho.
What is it like there, just in terms of the social and political climate?
You know, we're a very rural area.
Coeur d'Alene is our most metropolitan area in the Panhandle, but it doesn't even top out 100,000 people, I don't believe.
So that's the kind of area we're living in.
It's beautiful.
It's mountainous.
Got a lot of great lakes.
Um, to enjoy, but in addition to that, we are definitely experiencing, um, a migration of very, very Christian folks looking to be in an area that is safe.
And, um, I would say in alignment with their ideology.
So, um, we're, we're definitely seeing an influx of different types of thinkers move to our area, uh, Idaho.
In general is for the most part been kind of a purple state up until the nineties when we kind of shifted into Tea Party territory.
And since then, for the last 20 years, we've been predominantly Republican.
So, um, you know, our state is suffering from an infiltration of Christian nationalism into all of our small boards, our library boards, our school boards.
And our legislature.
So that's kind of what Idaho looks like if you are from a different state and you kind of want to know what it is like at the moment.
It's going through a lot of change.
It's going through a lot of growth.
And unfortunately, I don't think we're quite prepared for the growth and change we're experiencing.
A lot of people moving from Washington state, coastal Washington, I should say, California.
Like I said, I know many people from Southern California, but there's Northern Californians.
Are they making the state, the state and specifically, are they making Northern Idaho more or less conservative?
Oh, they are definitely making Idaho more conservative.
And I would say, how about there?
Let's just say they're shifting the Overton window quite a bit is what they're really doing.
They're making things that we would typically view as hateful, as discriminatory, and they, you know, put dog whistles to it.
And then it becomes a little bit more acceptable to our communities.
And we definitely saw that during the legislature.
When they tried to demonize librarians for having LGBTQIA affirming material.
The type of conservatism we're seeing come into our communities now is about censorship.
It is about extreme property rights.
You're having issues with that.
It is about ignoring public health institutions.
And these are very, very dangerous ideologies that are doing a lot of power grabs, to be quite honest right now.
Our primary was not successful in the panhandle.
We continued to elect very extreme candidates.
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