OPINION: Desperate rhetoric from Idaho's faux Republicans
A prominent feature in Idaho’s Republican headquarters is the party’s “Hall of Fame.” It is a wall covered with dark walnut-looking commemorative plaques featuring hundreds of small brass nameplates.
On each plate is engraved a name recognized by the Party as having advanced Republican governing philosophy: lower taxes, more personal responsibility, and freedom from overreaching government regulation.
If you listen to this year’s Primary Election debate, that Hall of Fame is a fraud. Those names are mostly “RINOs” (Republicans-in-name-only), turncoats to “true” Republican principles — especially the names on the wall the longest.
According to heated rhetoric, the more often a name appears in the Hall of Fame, the more likely that person is a traitor to the one and only “true Republican platform.”
And no, that isn’t the National Platform approved by Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020. It’s the one drafted by a few dozen activists in Twin Falls in 2022. That platform demands legislative districts be drawn by politicians, declares women who were never pregnant may still commit “murder by abortion,” and abandons any enforcement of drug laws.
Most state party platforms are two to three pages long, designed to be read as “good reasons to vote the Party’s ticket.” Idaho’s most recent platform is 16 pages using a small font, single-spaced. And it was not written by the veterans of the Party’s Hall of Fame.
Rather, it was produced by followers of the website “PrecinctStrategy.com,” a useful tool that explains how political party leadership is chosen. The website is “old hat” to most Hall-of-Famers, teaching grassroots organizing principles true for decades. But this website opens with the worrisome greeting: “We’re taking over the Republican Party.”
Supporting such a “takeover” are the likes of North Idaho’s Vincent James Foxx, a white supremacist who expounds on how vulnerable local party control can be to populist sloganism. “There is nothing they can do about it,” he says referring to the GOP Hall-of-Famers.
Foxx suggests usurping party control in “remote pockets of the country” solely for the purpose of “amassing power until it’s time to unify.” “Unify to do what?” is the question.
A popular answer comes from American First Media editor Alex Witoslawski, an individual flagged by the Anti-Defamation League for involvement in the now-defunct white supremacist group Identity Evropa. Witoslawski writes about the virtues of “entryism:”
“Entryism — why we should focus on infiltrating mainstream conservative politics and how you can take steps to do so with minimal time commitment and without outing yourself …As true dissidents, entryism is our best option for enacting change in the real world. The ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville showed the dangers of openly organizing in ‘meatspace’ (a.k.a. the real world).”
It should surprise no one when Hall-of-Famers stepped up this year to say, “Hey … that’s not the party to which we donated our lives!” Many have chosen this year to run to do the same local party volunteering that they did decades ago.
To the followers of Dorothy Moon, champion of the “we must amass power until we unite” crowd, these Hall-of-Famers are a serious threat.
This is why her principle handler, Kootenai County’s GOP Central Committee Czar, Brent Regan, and his minions, have started referring to these challengers (who, in Coeur d’Alene, include a former Republican Lieutenant Governor and a past GOP State Vice-Chair) as Democrats, lobbyists, pawns of the establishment, “backed by George Soros.”
The Anti-Defamation League notes that “using the name of Hungarian Jewish Billionaire George Soros” purely to conjure fear when there is zero evidence of involvement, is, itself, antisemitic.
When the goal is avoiding “outing yourself,” using antisemitism to keep your hold on power is clearly an act of desperation. You can take that desperation as a good sign that the Idaho GOP may be on its way back.
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Trent Clark of Soda Springs is president and CEO of Customalting Inc. and has served in the leadership of Idaho business, politics, workforce and humanities education.