Idaho activists burn masks
COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — More than a year into a pandemic that has claimed 524,000 lives in the United States, right-wing protesters in Idaho, including a handful of elected officials, set protective masks aflame Saturday, claiming face coverings stifle their personal liberties.
Although local, state and federal health officials are clear that masks are crucial in the fight against COVID-19, helping to prevent the disease from spreading, some 70 adults and children — none wearing face coverings — stepped forward on a downtown street corner in Coeur d’Alene and dropped masks into a symbolic burn pot containing dry ice. “U.S.A., U.S.A.,” they chanted.
The protesters held mask-burnings Saturday in locations across the state, where masks are strongly recommended but not required by Idaho Gov. Brad Little. At a gathering of more than 100 in the state capital, protesters tossed coverings into a flaming barrel and cheered at supportive remarks by Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, a far-right militia supporter whose relations with Little, a fellow Republican, are strained.
“If a woman can kill an unborn child and it’s her body and her choice, I can decide whether to wear a mask,” a man shouted at the rally in Coeur d’Alene, a hub of the conservative northern Idaho panhandle.
The protesters appear to inhabit an alternate reality, one in which they claim that the coronavirus is no more dangerous than the flu and that health directives based on science are dictatorial.
On Saturday, they planned burnings in two dozen Idaho cities, equating them to the Boston Tea Party despite the fact that tea dumped into the harbor by Colonists to protest British taxes in 1773 did not, like masks, help protect others from a deadly disease. Experts on extremism say that dismissing the rallies simply as antics of a fringe movement would be a mistake, much like overlooking signs of an imminent attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“The denial of the reality of the pandemic and the denial of the legitimate results of the election are not too far apart from each other,” said Lindsay Schubiner, a program director at Western States Center, which tracks extremist groups. “It’s hard to have a functioning democracy if we don’t live in the same shared reality, and that’s one reason why spreading conspiracy theories has been so damaging and such a useful tool for the far right.”
The Portland, Ore., organization had been monitoring activists planning Saturday’s rallies in private
Facebook groups and other online forums that fall below the radar of everyday social media. Such groups include People’s Rights, founded by Ammon Bundy, who led the 2016 armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and Idaho G-416 Patriots, described as an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The main organizer appeared to be Darr Moon, a mining engineer whose wife, Dorothy, serves in the Idaho House of Representatives.
In many states, Little might be regarded as a laissez-faire leader regarding the pandemic, but in deepred Idaho, he gained approval for declining to impose a statewide mask mandate even when COVID-19 cases peaked in mid-December. The disease has claimed nearly 1,900 lives and infected more than 170,000 people in Idaho, where daily new cases have declined to average fewer than 300.
Responding Friday to plans for the mask burnings, Emily Callihan, the governor’s communications director, said in an email that the emergency declaration had enabled Idaho to get federal money for expanding vaccinations and testing. “He took a measured, balanced approach that has worked to prevent a crisis in our hospitals while keeping our state open longer than almost every other state,” she wrote.