, a far-right online media platform that featured inflammatory rightwing commentary on politics in that state, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.
Lindsay Schubiner is director of programs at the Western States Center, a civil rights non-profit whose activities include monitoring extremists. She said: “Action Idaho is making yet another dangerous attempt to mainstream extremism in Idaho politics. It is particularly troubling that the driving force behind it is an educator.”
The deck expresses an ambition to channel conservative opinion towards the capture of institutions from school board to the legislature, creating a “playbook for citizens and their legislators, for elections, for school board actions, for creating a new culture, and for rallying people to build a greater Idaho on the ruins of what is a faltering establishment”.
An 11 June 2022 article with no author byline also attacked BSU, calling the ejection of self-described “Campus Preacher”, Keith Darrell, from the university’s grounds the “latest episode where Boise State University offended Christians and free speech”.at New York’s Binghamton University last October, Darrell reportedly said that death sentences for gay people were justified and that “step-by-step consent is a boner killer”.
In a telephone conversation, she said that Action Idaho had been “a harmful page on the Internet, moronically reposting other Idaho extremists and hateful disinformation”.Long before the website went live, however, Yenor apparently spent months attempting to recruit a conservative writer, Pedro Gonzalez, to head up Action Idaho.
It’s unclear who, if anyone, Action Idaho appointed to the Executive Director role when Gonzalez declined the offer.Regardless of Gonzalez’s eventual decision, Yenor immediately began using his name in funding discussions with wealthy donors, including Claremont Institute board chairman Thomas D Klingenstein, who lives in New York City.
The document set out a funding mechanism which would funnel money through an innocuously-named non-profit: “Donations for this start up company will pass through a 501c3, Voices Empowering Communities, toward the LLC media company: Action Idaho.”