2023-09-17 18:08:03
Idaho, idyllically located in the northwest of the USA and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, known for its mountainous landscapes, extensive protected wilderness and recreational areas, is booming. The state has experienced the fastest population growth in the United States in recent years. Before Covid-19, most immigrants fled big cities like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle in search of cheaper housing and lower taxes. Idaho’s Covid restrictions have been fiercely controversial, often unenforced and brief. Idaho Gov. Brad Little ended the official public health emergency in April 2022, earlier than most other states.
But in recent years, the urban refugees have been joined by people who are not quite like themselves: survivalists who expect a catastrophic collapse of civilization; religious “preppers” who believe that the end times will bring the apocalyptic judgment day of biblical prophecy after the peoples of the earth retreat into the caves foretold in the book of Revelation; white Christian nationalists, devout if fanatical believers whose dream is a restored, pure America, free of secular liberals and most foreigners.
Buy a house, get the gun for free
The mortgage market in these states has taken note. A rectangular area on the map that includes parts of eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho – particularly in the mountainous northern panhandle – has seen home sales rise. This rectangular area has become known among insiders as “The American Redoubt,” a reference to military installations used to protect soldiers stationed on the outer edges of a fortress. The analogy couldn’t be clearer: America is becoming a foreign country.
A home selling website called Flee The City is offering contracting homebuyers a BCM Standard Recce Rifle, an AR-type weapon with optics used by U.S. Special Forces. An Idaho broker named Chris Walsh, who runs Revolutionary Realty, proudly displays the charming motto “We Don’t Service Liberals” on his website and offers advice on how to clear properties in the event of an invasion can find “firing lines”. Walsh quotes Thomas Jefferson’s assertion: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. This is his natural fertilizer.”
Preparing for the end of the world
The history of the American Redoubt movement can be traced back to a now-famous 2011 blog post by California-born writer, former US Army intelligence officer and survival consultant John Wesley Rawles. The blog was titled “The American Redoubt – Move to the Mountain States.”
Rawles’ early blogs were not particularly original. Like other survivalists, he emphasized the need to prepare for the collapse of civilization by stockpiling food and water, homeschooling children, learning how to farm and make tools, amassing a large stockpile of weapons, and training to use them use; in short, learned all the necessary skills to live completely outside the net of civilization. The new twist was Rawles’s exhortation to his followers to move to remote areas and establish communities there.
Example Rome
As a devout Christian, Rawles points to the example of early Christian believers in the Roman Empire who built organic support networks. As a result, many unsuspecting city dwellers who ventured into the Redoubt Land during the pandemic in hopes of starting a new life increasingly found themselves among people who do not simply live and let live, as the old libertarian motto of the American West, but rather highly motivated and organized groups of self-proclaimed patriotic Christians and communal libertarians who had concrete plans of action. A gospel updated for the new millennium was born, preached by rural anti-government activists with such sentiments.
Rawles was well aware that his vision of a radical and armed new social movement could be interpreted as collectivist, like communism or fascism. However, he quickly assured his readers that his political model reflected the independent self-government of the Swiss cantons.
“We don’t need officials telling us how to govern Idaho.”
Trump became aware of the Redoubt movement when he was running for president. Just before the 2020 election, three people were arrested at a church in Moscow, Idaho, on the border with Washington state, for refusing to wear masks. Trump tweeted: “Democrats want to close your churches, permanently. I hope you see what’s happening here. Vote now.” In January 2022, opposition grew in Idaho to President Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which included funding for health care for low-income people but also for Covid health measures such as vaccinations and treatments.
The Redoubt movement viewed these programs as unwarranted government interference. When the funds were discussed at a town hall meeting in Coeur d’Alene, northern Idaho’s largest city, protesters loudly complained that the federal government was forcing communism on Idaho. “We don’t need federal officials telling us how to run Idaho,” one man said.
Why Trump is concerned about little Idaho
Other protests in Idaho, including one against a gay pride parade, caught the attention of Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG), a Georgia congresswoman who subscribes to QAnon and other far-right conspiracy theories. This happened last February when she was confronted by 100 protesters while speaking at the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee’s Lincoln Day Dinner in Coeur d’Alene. In a typically rousing response, Greene tweeted: “I’m so honored that so many protesters – made up of evil women watching the view and their ‘Low-T’ (testosterone) husbands – are here in Idaho!
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It’s not entirely clear why Trump and his MAGA supporters are interested in small, deeply conservative red states like Idaho, where no Democrat has a chance of winning a statewide election today (Idaho hasn’t elected a Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson narrowly defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the last Democratic senator left office in 1949). But the larger issues at stake also have national implications.
The twice-divorced Trump is hardly the ideal candidate for Christian conservatives, but his support for abortion restrictions, immigration bans, home schooling and “family values” in general continues to attract a wide range of Christian voters, particularly those who view America as disgraced, despite his personal failings since it has embraced secular ideas about sex, gender and race.
Purity mania in Idaho
As Bradley Onishi, an expert on Christian nationalism, explains, the organized Christian turn to politics began in the 1970s and revolved around relatively narrow issues like abortion, gay marriage and school choice, but in the Trump era the movement’s aspirations are much deeper and broader. The goal is to restore the purity of America by returning to traditional social and cultural norms, what Onishi calls “purity culture.”
In an interview, Onishi explained: “There is another component that is often overlooked when we talk about purity culture. It was a project of national renewal. The idea was that if churches could get their young people to build the right kind of families with the right kind of heterosexual, patriarchal relationships, and if they could get them to stay away from anything that crossed those boundaries, then these families could be the building blocks for the real America. This meant that any sense of impurity should be eliminated, not just in teenage relationships but in American politics as a whole.” Impurity, in this vision, was an “infection that comes from immigrants” as well as the “infection of American bodies through queer families and queer relationships that are not part of God’s plan,” said Onishi.
“Make America Great again” as ideological glue
The growth of the Redoubt movement can be traced to local circumstances in the northwestern rectangle on the US map. But in these far-flung climes, the notoriously vague slogan “Make America Great Again” acts as a kind of ideological glue to ignite passions that resonate with Americans who feel left behind by the rapid changes in postmodern culture.
Trump knows he needs these voters to have a chance of winning in 2024. Many members of the American Redoubt movement undoubtedly want to find caves in the mountains to protect themselves, but others, certainly a much larger number, want to cave the entire country. In fact, the entire planet. As Douglas Wilson, an Idaho pastor considered one of the most important Christian nationalists, wrote in his blog a year ago, Jesus’ command that all people be baptized means that “all nations should be Christian nations.”
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