This deep red state has become a 'bellwether for radicalization'

White nationalists clashing with police at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017 (Evan Nesterak/Flickr)

When the late white supremacist Richard Butler founded the Aryan Nations back in the early 1970s, he chose Idaho for the group's headquarters. The Aryan Nations opened a compound in Hayden Lake, a suburb of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho — and starting in 1981, Butler held the annual Aryan Nations World Congress gathering on the compound. Members of other white supremacist, white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups were invited, including the Ku Klux Klan, The Order, and former KKK Grand Dragon Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance (WAR).

In a lengthy article for Mother Jones' March/April 2026 issue, reporter Michael Edison Hayden (known for his work with the Southern Poverty Law Center in the past) examines Idaho's long history of far-right extremism — from the Aryan Nations to MAGA Christian nationalists — and describes the deep red state as a "bellwether for radicalization."

"North Idaho came up a lot during my time at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the storied civil rights watchdog where I worked from 2018 through 2023," Hayden explains. "The region seemed to have an uncanny ability to attract bigots from elsewhere in the country…. By the 1970s…. neo-Nazis were arriving…. Then in 1991, an Aryan Nations associate named Randy Weaver failed to appear in court on a firearms charge. U.S. marshals began surveilling his property the following year, and when they approached his residence in the Ruby Ridge area of North Idaho, they came into conflict with the Weaver family, ultimately killing Weaver's teenage son and Weaver's wife, who was carrying the couple's baby in her arms when she was shot."

More recently, Hayden notes, "new extremists" in Idaho have been "making inroads in the local GOP power structure."

"A Republican group called the North Idaho Pachyderm Club, which is promoted on the official Kootenai County GOP website, has invited far-right activists Vincent James Foxx and Dave Reilly to speak in recent years," Hayden reports. "Reilly, who has a history of antisemitic commentary, even secured a KCRCC endorsement for his failed 2021 school board campaign. More moderate Republicans became targets….. In June 2020, armed individuals patrolled (Coeur d'Alene's) streets in an event called 'Gun d’Alene' —part of the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement. Two years after that, dozens of masked members of Patriot Front, a neofascist collective, were caught packed in a U-Haul, preparing to storm a Pride parade."

Hayden emphasizes that extremism in Idaho can encourage extremism in other parts of the U.S.

"One theme I heard repeatedly about Coeur d’Alene was that it is a bellwether for radicalization," Hayden warns. "Meaning that if you see something like authoritarians shutting down speech at a town hall there — or maybe even a maniac ambushing firefighters — you should take it seriously, because it could be coming to your city next…. As Kate Bitz of the Western States Center said, 'If it happens in North Idaho now, no one should be surprised when it happens nationally a few years later.'"

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