https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/29/boise-state-university-professor-scott-yenor-action-idahoBoise State University (BSU) professor and Claremont Institute scholar Scott Yenor was the hidden hand behind Action Idaho, a far-right online media platform that featured inflammatory rightwing commentary on politics in that state, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.
[...]
He also attempted to hire a rising conservative writer, Pedro Gonzalez, to lead the initiative. Gonzalez was later embroiled in a controversy about antisemitic remarks he made in online chats in 2019 and 2020. They also show him tapping a network of expertise that overlaps both with the Claremont Institute and the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), a secretive fraternal Christian Nationalist organization the Guardian has reported on extensively.
[...]
Action Idaho reserved a particular antipathy for Idaho’s LGBTQ+ community. On 8 June 2022, Action Idaho helped focus rightwing attention on pride events that month. These efforts culminated on 15 June with the mass arrest of Patriot Front members who were attempting to disrupt a pride event in Coeur d’Alene. Action Idaho published an article with no author byline, headlined LGBTQ+ Pride Fest is a Groomer Fest just a week after those arrests.
A lot of you will be asking who Scott Yenor is, but this reporting is as interesting for the pattern it reveals as for the particularities involved: Politically sympathetic intellectuals and donors mix freely with online radicals and more action-oriented extremists, all in an atmosphere in which the preferred means of establishing trust is by staking out the most extreme positions possible and making pariahs of those who argue for moderaiton.
