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