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Behind Fascist 'Warrior' Facade, Patriot Front Is Just Another Grift

Behind Fascist 'Warrior' Facade, Patriot Front Is Just Another Grift

One of the constants of the world of right-wing extremists is that their leaders all find ways to turn their authoritarian activism into a moneymaking operation that wrings funds out of their gullible followers. Even if these leaders buy their own bullshit—and most of them do—they also are assiduous in creating revenue streams generated from the eager suckers who lap it up.

Take Patriot Front, the neofascist marching gang that recently drew national headlines for being busted outside a Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, for example. A recent examination of the organization’s operations by Mackenzie Ryan of The Guardian found that Patriot Front’s ability to spread its brand of hate politics by operating as a “white nationalist pyramid scheme” that recruits angry young men with a vision of creating a “warrior elite,” the reality of which is remarkably buffoonish.

“No other white supremacist group operating in the US today is able to match Patriot Front’s ability to produce media, ability to mobilize across the country, and ability to finance,” Anti-Defamation League researcher Morgan Moon told Ryan. “That’s what makes them a particular concern.”

The man atop Patriot Front’s pyramid is Thomas Rousseau, the 24-year-old Texas man who founded Patriot Front in 2017 out of the ashes of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America, under whose banner he had marched in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017, alongside James Alex Fields, the man who later that day drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Fitting his politics, Rousseau runs Patriot Front in remarkably authoritarian fashion: ordering his followers to follow exercise regimens and to participate both in online ideological discussion and real-world “actions” that both spread the group’s propaganda and line Rousseau’s pockets.

Most of its recruitment begins online, in gaming chat rooms, message boards, or social media channels where they seek out young white males seething with various resentments. Part of its marketing, as Stephen Piggot of the Western States Center told Ryan, involves creating video packages aimed at younger audiences. Simultaneously, he says, much of their appeal involves the group’s emphasis on translating the ideology into real-world action.

Recruits are particularly drawn in by Patriot Front’s emphasis on creating “young warriors” and a “warrior elite,” Moon said. This includes an emphasis on fitness and diet, and is manifested in the real-world paramilitary training sessions it organizes.

Once recruits sign on, they’re quickly drawn up in Patriot Front’s authoritarian operations. They’re required to attend monthly online meetups and street demonstrations, and to meet a weekly activism quota that the group’s top lieutenants, called network directors, monitor with spreadsheets. Should a recruit fail to meet those requirements, Rousseau expels them, Moon said.

A data leak of Patriot Front chat rooms published earlier this year by the journalism collective Unicorn Riot revealed these operations in detail. Rousseau and his network directors oversaw the chats, organized by region. They organized real-world “actions” in the chatrooms, such as pasting propaganda stickers and fliers around the downtown areas of cities where they lived, as well as hoisting banners with their slogans and logo over freeways on overpasses.

The “actions” included a number of criminal acts of vandalism, such as defacing memorials, statues, and murals in highly public places. These included a memorial to George Floyd in New York City, as well as other works of public art that provoked their ire, such as a mural supporting Black Lives Matter in Olympia, Washington, and depictions of Black heroes such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman.

They also clearly believed they could do so with impunity. “As our recent actions have shown we can walk down busy avenues at prime time in Seattle and deface the largest most well protected mural in shitlib Olympia without so much as being accosted once,” one member who apparently participated in the Olympia vandalization wrote.

A more recent Unicorn Riot report exposed how members of Patriot Front participated in a likely hate crime by vandalizing an LGBTQ youth center in Springfield, Illinois, in November 2021. Video recordings made by the group’s members showed them stenciling their logo over a rainbow mural on one side of the Phoenix center, a nonprofit that provides housing and support to at-risk LGBTQ youth.

The video shows them applying the stencil, fleeing the scene, and then discussing how they targeted the building because “it’s a gay and trans youth center.” They also reveled in the distress they expected to create: “Those f*gs are gonna lose their mind,” boasted one of the vandals.

In all, Patriot Front records showed the group responsible for at least 29 acts of destruction of public art honoring Black, Mexican, Asian, and LGBTQ people. According to the ADL, Patriot Front has been responsible for up to 14 hate incidents a day.

Rousseau and his lieutenants set quotas for members to engage in various “actions,” including regional group quotas of at least “10 big actions a month.” Acts of vandalism are recorded in a spreadsheet.

The group also monitors its roughly 220 members’ personal lives and is fanatically controlling. Members are required to regularly log their weight and fitness regimen, follow an apparently disordered diet obsessively, and update their superiors on their “bad habits,” such as pornography and junk food. Leaders pointedly chastise members for failing to participate in enough chats or meetings or to file their mandatory fitness updates.

On top of all these demands, Rousseau charges his followers a premium for the same Patriot Front propaganda material that he then requires them to spread, according to Southern Poverty Law Center researcher Jeff Tischauser. Network directors are required to push members to buy new flyers and then spread them monthly.

“In this sense, Patriot Front is close to a white nationalist pyramid scheme,” Tischauser observed.

The scheme has created some internal turmoil. Researchers say Patriot Front chats they have obtained include complaints from members about the constant expense of buying new stickers, stencils, and other propaganda materials that Rousseau both requires they buy while charging them a premium.

There have been other cracks in Rousseau’s façade, notably the June arrests of 31 Patriot Front marchers in Coeur d’Alene—all of whose identities were publicly exposed—while attempting to create a riot at the city’s annual Pride in the Park event. The court cases arising from those arrests got under way this month, with Rousseau among the defendants.

“They got kind of the opposite of what they wanted: they weren’t able to disrupt the LGBTQ Pride events, and they got a whole lot of mainstream media attention,” Piggot said.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Idaho Republicans Embrace White Nationalism, Vow To 'Take Over' Dem State Party

Idaho Republicans Embrace White Nationalism, Vow To 'Take Over' Dem State Party

Idaho has long been on the white side of history. The population is 93% white. It is quite literally the whitest state in the nation, home of the Aryan Nations and a bastion for neo-Nazis and Klansman. And though the Aryan Nations has splintered into smaller, less powerful groups in recent years, Idaho remains one of the leading states for hate crimes, according to The Southern Poverty Law Center.

So, I guess it’s no surprise that the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee (KCRCC) has been attempting to infiltrate the Kootenai Democrats, funnel money from the Dems to GOP organizations, and plant an “antisemitic troll” as the party’s chair.

The plan was revealed after a call was discovered between Kootenai County resident John Grimm, who unsuccessfully ran for Kootenai County Sheriff in 2020, and a person he identified as KCRCC Youth Chair Dan Bell, according to reporting by the Coeur d’Alene Press.

“Long story short, we want to take over the Democrat Party,” Bell reportedly said during the call.

Grimm says he recorded the call to prove what he believed—that KCRCC members were “masters of deception” who could “twist the meaning” of their own statements. He also says he’s a devout conservative Republican and thinks that KCRCC went “too far.”

The Kootenai GOP planned to install notorious antisemite Dave Reilly. Bell described Reilly on the call as “an F-list antisemitic troll,” adding: “He recently ran for school board in the area, despite saying he would never enroll children in public schools.” Reilly did unsuccessfully run for a local school board seat last year, The Daily Beast confirms, as part of a larger trend of fringe, far-right conservatives making moves to control Coeur d’Alene.

Reilly went to Twitter to confirm the plan, tweeting, “Today, I registered as a Democrat and filed to become a Precinct Captain.” He added a photo of his voter registration card and accused the Dems of “Left Wing Extremism.”

Even Idaho’s lieutenant governor has her two feet firmly planted in the white side of the race line. Lt. Gov. McGeachin is being pressured to resign after she recently spoke at the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), a conference organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

McGreachin claimed not to know what or where she was speaking, but the man who spoke just before her, Vincent James or Vincent James Foxx, is a well-known white nationalist and antisemite. He's the founder of the website Daily Veracity and was once a proud member of a white supremacist group from southern California. Fuentes is known for his role in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

On his America First podcast, Fuentes called writer Matt Walsh a “Shabbos goy race traitor,” and went on to explain how accurate his own assessment was:

“That's what it is folks. I know some people don't like to use that expression but it's totally true, throwing his own people under the bus he hates white people. Nobody else talks like that about their own people except white people and it’s gross.”
“Race traitor, you worked for Jews, you know. That's going to get me in trouble.”

In her speech, McGreachin said:

"I need freedom fighters all over this country that are willing to stand up and fight for the protection of our freedoms and our liberties. Even when that means fighting amongst our own ranks because there are too many Republicans who do not exhibit the courage that is needed today for us to fight and protect our freedoms and our liberties. We are literally in the fight for our lives.”

When asked by reporter Sergio Olmos if she knew who Nick Fuentes was, and if she’d researched who he was before she spoke at the event, McGreachin claimed she didn’t. Of course, her go-to was to flip the confrontation to the fault of the media. When Olmos told her that Fuentes has an antisemitic history, she proceeded to cut him off.

Even today, Nick Fuentes went on a rant praising Russian soldiers fighting to "liberate Ukraine from the Great Satan and from the evil empire in the world, which is the United States."

When Olmos asked her about Vincent James, a 31-year-old video blogger and livestreamer with a fondness for white supremacists and radical right-wing politics, McGreachin said she doesn’t know who he is, and accuses “the media” of making “conservatives [...] guilty by association.”

Olmos then gave her one final out, asking her, had she already known who Nick Fuentes was and what he stood for, if would she still have spoken at the event.

“Who cares what Nick Fuentes says,” she says flatly. “I’m not going to run away or hide from being willing and wanting to talk to young conservatives about these issues.”

Then she runs away like an Olympic sprinter.

Olmos gets one last statement in, hammering the nail in the coffin with, “That’s not the first time you’ve associated with groups like this.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Doug Traubel

Anti-Semitic And Racist Lawman Was Finalist For Sheriff Of Idaho’s Largest County

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

One of the clearest priorities for public officials that has emerged from the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection is the dire need to root far-right extremists out of the ranks of the nation's law enforcement agencies—underscored by an FBI intelligence report warning that white supremacists are targeting such agencies for infiltration. More than anything, effectively confronting far-right terrorism and violence will require ensuring that law enforcement is not subverted by officers who sympathize with their frequently unhinged ideologies.

But in Boise, Idaho, local county commissioners considered appointing as sheriff a man named Steve Traubel, who is an ardent supporter of the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an organization that preaches that sheriffs are the supreme law of the land, accountable to no one. During his job interview this week as one of three finalists for the sheriff's position, Traubel repeated the antisemitic theory that Jews "led the Bolshevik Revolution" and are to blame for creating the Soviet Union, as well as for the subsequent violence.

However, although Traubel had significant backing from GOP officials, the county commission on Friday chose someone else.

Traubel, a onetime Sheriff's Office investigator who worked in the Ada County Prosecutor's Office until 2019, and the other two candidates—Matt Clifford, a lieutenant in the Sheriff's Office, and Mike Chilton, a Marine Corps veteran and onetime Sheriff's Office employee—were interviewed Wednesday by the Ada County Commission. The three finalists were chosen by the Ada County Republican Central Committee to replace former Sheriff Steve Bartlett, who resigned suddenly in May, less than a year after winning reelection.

On Friday, the commission announced that it had chosen Clifford for the job.

While Chilton has been evasive about his background—having refused to supply the commission with requested information on his employment and personal history—Traubel's background as a far-right extremist is well-established, and he was largely unapologetic about it in his interview. According to Boise State Public Radio, Traubel received more votes from GOP central-committee members than any other potential nominee, and county commissioners received several letters supporting Traubel from those party leaders.

Traubel openly embraces the CSPOA, which embraces him in return. On his website, Traubel features an endorsement from CSPOA founder Richard Mack:

However, Doug Traubel has more than just law enforcement experience; he has freedom experience. He knows and understands the principles of liberty upon which America was founded. He knows that Liberty is the ultimate responsibility of every sheriff in this country. The people of Ada County will be able to trust him to run the sheriff's office in a manner that will guarantee safety and protect freedom. They must go together and with Doug, they will.

Traubel is also the author of a self-published book titled Red Badge: A veteran peace officer's commentary on the Marxist subversion of American Law Enforcement & Culture, available on Amazon. According to its description, Traubel "pulls no punches as he delivers hard-hitting evidence that reveals how Marxists have repackaged themselves and are subverting the rule of law with social justice and an administrative state, superimposed over the constitution."

It adds: "Controlling local police is essential to the success of the revolution. To do this the Marxist hammer of political correctness is reshaping a peace officer's oath over the anvil of ignorance and fear. Five decades of federal indoctrination, intimidation and seduction have turned local police leadership into tools for Marxist social engineering."

Traubel also wrote a screed for the far-right Gem State Patriot website claiming that former President Obama is "a laughable stooge of the tried-and-failed Marxist ideology" and claiming:

It is 2016! There is no longer black oppression in the United States. Police are good. Criminals are bad. It is not white versus black. It is police versus criminal. It is good versus evil. It is principles versus relativism. It is truth versus deception.

When Ada commissioners began grilling Traubel over these and other remarks on Wednesday, he unleashed a deluge of far-right conspiracist nonsense, much of it anti-semitic and racist in nature, including his insistence that Jews were responsible for the Communist regime in Russia—noting that while Jews were victims in Nazi Germany, "they were the villain class in the Soviet Union" because they "led the Bolshevik revolution."

Traubel's claim not only is false, it was a common propaganda trope known as "Judeo-Bolshevism" promoted by the German Nazi regime in the years leading up to and including the Holocaust, claiming that Communism was a Jewish plot to undermine Germany. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: "The existence of a communist state so close to Germany was not merely a political threat, but also an existential racial and ideological threat. For Nazis, both Jews and communists were made worse by their supposed identification with one another."

Traubel, however, insisted Wednesday that the claim was real: "What we don't often hear … is how many hundreds of thousands of people were killed (in the Soviet Union) and what group actually started that," he said.

If the commission were to select Traubel, he would not be the first CSPOA-affiliated sheriff to lay claim to jurisdiction in a large urban area. That distinction belongs to former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke of Wisconsin, the pro-Trump advocate who at one time was a Fox News regular.

As was the case with Clarke—who, after his tenure has ended, advocated for right-wing "patriots" to take to the streets in defiance of COVID-19 restrictions—having such a sheriff would play law enforcement in the hands of the same movement (that is, the "Patriot" movement, in which the CSPOA is an active and powerful presence) primarily responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection.

When CSPOA sheriffs have taken office, the results are often disastrous. Just ask the residents of Grant County, Oregon, where one such sheriff has taken to ruling the county like his personal fiefdom.

Traubel openly embraced the CSPOA belief in the supremacy of the sheriff during the interview. He told commissioners that if, in his view, a "social justice mentality is pulling the reins on the police" in Boise during a protest, "if I get wind of that, I'm going in." He indicated he believed the Boise Police officers would then be "under my command."

"It kind of sounds like you'd be willing to take up arms against the Boise police," commissioner Rod Beck commented.

Other commissioners questioned comments and claims that Traubel has made on social media, including his racist (and false) assertions that Black men are responsible for "at least 50%" of all rapes—which he asserted he read in a book that was "factual and well-sourced," but could not name—and other bigoted remarks, including the assertion that "Islam is the culture of death."

But Traubel's bigotry is part of the CSPOA package, which itself is founded on far-right conspiracy theories whose origins were profoundly racist and anti-Semitic. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained in a 2016 report on the organization's spread, particularly in rural counties where such "constitutionalist" beliefs are often popular:

[T]he real root of the "county supremacy" movement that has been explicitly embraced by the CSPOA is the Posse Comitatus, a racist and anti-Semitic group of the 1970s and 1980s that also defined the county sheriff as the highest "legitimate" law enforcement authority in the country. The Posse, whose Latin name translates as "power of the county," said government officials who "disobey" the Constitution should be taken to a downtown intersection and "hung there by the neck."

Richard Mack (while insisting that the United States is "not a democracy" but "a constitutional republic") claims that sheriffs and police officers—by virtue of having taken an oath to uphold the Constitution—were the true arbiters of what the law permits, and may choose not to uphold laws they deem outside it, regardless of any court rulings, even at the highest federal levels:

Why do you think that I have an obligation to go along with any unconstitutional act or anything that violates liberty? It's not my definition. It's right there, it's plain and easy. I know what "shall not be infringed" means. I know what that means. Because my legislature bestows no obligation on me to go along. Just the opposite. I swore to uphold and defend the Constitution, and you, like everybody else, think I don't have to. That's the problem. We don't follow the Constitution anymore. Let's try that for a year. But it's your definition. It's not my definition.
… Why is the sheriff so powerful? Look at your history of the sheriff. Also, look, he is the only elected law enforcement officer anywhere in the country. He's the only one. He gets his power directly from the people. He reports only to them. They're his only boss. He has no other boss except the people. And he promised them that he would uphold and defend their constitutional rights. And so you're saying, no, he doesn't have to. If the legislature tells him not to, if they pass a law. You think all laws are good if they pass?
In his county … the governor's not his boss. He doesn't report to the governor. He doesn't report to the president. When they are wrong, what do we do?

Not one of these arguments has ever been upheld in any court of law in the United States. Moreover, as the Center for Public Integrity explored in depth in a 2014 study of the CSPOA, the organization's worldview is dangerously aligned with views held by domestic terrorists and violent white supremacists:

What's unique about his group is not that it opposes gun controls but that its ambition is to encourage law enforcement officers to defy laws they decide themselves are illegal. On occasion, some of his group's sheriffs have found themselves in curious agreement with members of the sovereign citizens' movement, which was also founded on claimed rights of legal defiance and is said by the FBI to pose one of the most serious domestic terrorism threats.

Indeed, the sovereign citizens movement that preaches the same beliefs vis-a-vis the role of government has, over the past 20 years, also posed the most lethal threat to law enforcement officers in the country. The FBI in 2010 designated the movement a significant source of domestic terrorism.

"It's terrifying to me," Justin Nix, a University of Louisville criminology professor who specializes in police fairness and legitimacy, told The Washington Post. "It's not up to the police to decide what the law is going to be. They're sworn to uphold the law. It's not up to them to pick and choose."

GOP Extremists In West Challenging Party ‘Establishment’ For Power

GOP Extremists In West Challenging Party ‘Establishment’ For Power

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

One of the consequences of the GOP's sidelong embrace of its extremist elements—from the insurrection denialists and Big Lie gaslighters to the QAnon cultists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert—is that far-right extremists are now perfectly comfortable identifying as Republicans. In some cases, they're demanding the overthrow of the party's establishment—which can't seem to decide whether to fight back or just succumb willingly to the incoming far-right tide.

Establishment Republicans in Western states are particularly under siege from extremist elements among their voting base. In Idaho, for instance, armed-standoff-guru-turned-pandemic-denialist Ammon Bundy filed paperwork to run for governor, in a race already featuring another leading state "Patriot" movement figure. In Nevada, an insurgent far-right group organized on social media and led by Proud Boys members are attempting an open hostile takeover of the Clark County GOP, the state's largest county-level Republican organization.

Bundy's filing is rich in irony. For starters, he is currently banned from the Idaho Statehouse in Boise after his two ejections and arrests for defying masking requirements, for which he is currently standing trial. For another, as KTVB notes, Bundy himself is not even registered to vote in Idaho, and has apparently never done so in the five years or so that he has lived in Emmett.

He also named himself the treasurer of his campaign, which means that he will have to refile the paperwork, according to the Idaho Secretary of State's office, which tweeted out an explanation: "Because a treasurer must be a registered Idaho voter, Ammon Bundy will either need to register and refile or name a new treasurer by refiling. IDSOS staff have notified him as such."

The Republican field to replace incumbent Governor Brad Little (who has not announced whether he will seek re-election) is already large, and Bundy's competition in the primary already features another leading "Patriot" movement figure, Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin, who announced her candidacy last week. While Bundy was probably the earliest far-right figure in Idaho to take up the cause of opposing COVID-19-related public-health restrictions, McGeachin—who has supported Bundy and his fellow standoff-loving "Patriots" steadfastly from her office in Boise—has also been on the pandemic-denialist bandwagon.

McGeachin appeared alongside Bundy at one anti-restriction rally in Boise. More notoriously, she appeared in a video in which she brandished a handgun and a Bible while sitting in the driver's seat of a pickup, railing against coronavirus restrictions.

The political insurgency inside Clark County's GOP was reported Friday by Rory Appleton at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who explained that a group of far-right activists with deep ties to the Proud Boys are positioning themselves to take over the county Republican leadership. Some of its members, meanwhile, are alleged to have threatened a number of prominent Republicans.

The group, Appleton reported, organized online—primarily using the encrypted chat app Telegram—while reveling in anti-Semitic and white-nationalist memes and rhetoric. "Two Republican women in public office told the Review-Journal they've been threatened by leaders of the fringe movement, as did the current board of the Clark County party, which is hiring security for a crucial meeting Tuesday," the story reads.

Calling itself the "Republican Chamber of Commerce" (despite lacking ties to any known GOP organization), the far-right group first made its presence felt last month when it organized a late surge in votes favoring the censure of Barbara Cegavske, the state's Republican Secretary of State, for refusing to play along with attempts to overturn the 2020 election results based on Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud.

Since then, it has been preparing to provide a similar wave of votes to sweep three of their three leading figures—Rudy Clai, Matt Anthony and Paul Laramie—into the leadership of the Clark County GOP. The group has no record of doing business anywhere in the state of Nevada, and has no connection to any of the known chamber or Republican groups already established in Nevada.

Yet its website appears to be a nominally mainstream GOP group. Its primary emblem resembles the Republican National Committee's logo but inverted, with a red elephant on a white background encircled in red with the letters "RCC" and "Republican Chamber of Commerce" within.

Anthony has achieved a level of media notoriety as one of Las Vegas' most prominent Proud Boys, though he insists the local chapter is nonviolent and nonracist. After the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, he defended the people arrested and warned against a law-enforcement crackdown on "Patriots": "They're basically going all in on tyranny, guys. … They're watching. It's to be expected. They're the enemy. They're going to shut down our ability to communicate."

As it happens, Anthony is also a fugitive: He is the subject of an arrest warrant from the state of Michigan after he broke probation by moving to Nevada and then refusing to return after Nevada declined to oversee his probation, all stemming from his 2012 arrest on a drug charge.

The group's Telegram channel—owned by Anthony, and administered by Clai—is titled "Keep Nevada Open," apparently an offshoot of a Facebook group with the same name that boasted 17,000 members and organized anti-masking and other pandemic-related protests. Appleton describes a review of the channel's contents by the Clark County GOP executive board, led by chief of staff Richard MacLean:

MacLean showed his fellow board members several pictures and videos posted within the group, though not specifically by Anthony and Clai.
One photo blamed the 9/11 terrorist bombings on Jews. Another video featured a long clip of an Adolf Hitler speech and Nazi soldier marches. Some featured cartoon characters with negative Jewish stereotypes, and one photo featured messages written on dollar bills.
A post even poked fun at Republicans, claiming they seemed to be shocked at certain current events while white nationalists were thrilled by them.

The board promptly ejected the three men from the party. However, on Thursday, 10 people including Anthony and Clai filed a lawsuit against both the county and state party central committees, accusing them of illegally boxing them out of Clark County GOP meetings. They claim Clai and Anthony are heading up an alternative leadership slate, and are running against a mainstream ticket headed up by state Sen. Carrie Buck.

Despite the pushback by local Republican officials, the extremist elements remain emboldened in no small part because national-level Republicans have shown their eagerness to ignore the radicalism and even embrace it. Certainly, the local far-right leaders are confident that the party's base supports them, and not the establishment players.

"We have the numbers, and they don't, so they have to play dirty," Anthony said in an interview Thursday. "It's that simple."

McGeachin's campaign signs feature the hashtag #IAmIdaho. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are at a pivotal moment in history, not just for Idaho but for our nation," McGeachin said.

Bundy told NBC News on Monday that, despite the filings, he hasn't formally announced his candidacy, but is preparing to build a campaign organization.

"The people of Idaho are very freedom-minded," Bundy said. "I had never desired [to run for office], but I knew as early as 2017 that I would run for governor of Idaho."