Republican legislators send message to extremists

A pair of Republican bills making their way through the Idaho Legislature would send a message to extremist groups like the Patriot Front and the Ku Klux Klan: Welcome to Idaho!

One bill, pitched by Sen. Kelly Anthon, R-Burley, aims to make it more difficult to label someone a domestic terrorist. Another bill, from Sen. Dan Foreman, R-Moscow, famous for going on a video-recorded rant against a group of high school students, seeks to get rid of a state law that regulates militias.

In defending his bill, Anthon cited a controversy from 2021 when the National School Boards Association asked the federal government to look into death threats against school board members over curricula, diversity efforts and COVID-19 health and safety policies as domestic terrorism.

Anthon and others on the far right have minimized those threats and used the controversy as a rallying cry against what they call the weaponization of the government.

But making death threats against a public official in order to influence a decision or policy is the exact definition of domestic terrorism. That’s not just “exercising their rights.”

We suppose Anthon might feel differently if someone showed up to a Senate Judiciary and Rules Committee hearing with an AR-15 threatening to kill a senator if a bill were to pass out of committee. Just exercising their rights, you know.

But more than that, Anthon’s bill includes the bizarre caveat that only people working “in cooperation with any foreign terrorist organization” could be considered terrorists.

So if you’re terrorizing fellow citizens or even plotting to kidnap the governor, like a group did in Michigan, come on in! The water’s just fine for you here in Idaho.

Anthon’s bill also would rescind a provision in Idaho law that has been around since the 1980s.

Anyone remember the Aryan Nations? It was a neo-Nazi, white supremacist hate group based in North Idaho in the 1980s whose long shadow casts a dark cloud over Idaho’s reputation to this day.

Lawmakers passed a law that aimed to combat the practice of “civil disorder” through organized violence in reaction to the Aryan Nations.