Revealed: US professor was behind extremist site that spread conspiracies
Documents show Scott Yenor ran Action Idaho, which attacked LGBTQ+ people and Republicans deemed not rightwing enough
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Boise State University in Idaho in 2015. Photograph: David R Frazier Photolibrary/Alamy
Idaho
Revealed: US professor was behind extremist site that spread conspiracies
Documents show Scott Yenor ran Action Idaho, which attacked LGBTQ+ people and Republicans deemed not rightwing enoughJason Wilson
Fri 29 Mar 2024 06.00 EDT
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Boise 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.
The documents, obtained through public records requests, also show that Yenor sought and received funding for the initiative from wealthy and influential donors like Claremont Institute board chair, Thomas D Klingenstein.
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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.
Yenor has not publicly disclosed his involvement in Action Idaho, and it has only been fleetingly mentioned in previous reporting on Talking Points Memo. The revelations could raise further questions about the potential conflicts between Yenor’s professorial position at a public university and his political activism.
The Guardian contacted Scott Yenor with a detailed request for comment on this story. He only responded directly to one question, writing that “Pedro Gonzalez did not accept the offer” of employment. The remainder of the reply was personal abuse.
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.”
“Boise State University leaders should not be silent; bigotry on campus impacts the quality of education of every single student,” Schubiner added.
Action Idaho’s genesis
The earliest mention of Action Idaho in Yenor’s Boise State email account comes on 25 May 2021, when he sends an email with two attached documents to his wife, Amy Yenor.One of the documents is a written donor pitch for “a media outlet to organize conservative political opinion and activism” in Idaho, to take on “issues and fights that will make the state more congenial to conservatives”.
“This new media outlet is Action Idaho,” the document explains.
Boise State University leaders should not be silent; bigotry on campus impacts the quality of education of every single student
Lindsay Schubiner
Also attached to the 25 May email is a PowerPoint-style presentation deck which offers a more pointed variation on the written pitch. The deck specifies that “the new media outlet must be un-cancellable, reliable, and strategic in taking on Idaho’s Establishment and protecting a culture conducive to liberty and faith”.
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”.
More combatively, it says Action Idaho “needs to identify friends of that culture and support them (i.e., in business, schools, politicians, churches), while identifying enemies of that culture and expose them and seek to undermine their public support”.
Action Idaho’s publishing history
During its relatively short publishing history, the Action Idaho website delivered on these promises.There is still an Action Idaho Twitter/X account which provides inflammatory far-right commentary on Idaho state politics: one recent focus has been attacks on Idaho Republicans who are deemed insufficiently rightwing.
But Action Idaho’s main publication venue for almost two years was a website at actionidaho.org. That URL now redirects to an online gambling operation.
The domain was first registered on 15 December 2021, according to WhoIs records. On 7 February 2022, hosting was shifted to Wix, and available Internet archive records indicate that this was when the site began publishing in earnest.
The enemies Action Idaho took on included Yenor’s own employer.
In March 2022 the site published an article by Anna K Miller, a director at the rightwing Idaho Freedom Foundation and a longtime Yenor collaborator, praising a Title IX complaint filed against BSU by mens’ rights activist and former University of Michigan professor Mark Perry. Perry’s complaint claimed that a BSU scholarship encouraging women to enroll in so-called Stem courses was discriminatory against men. Perry has filed hundreds of similar complaints at colleges around the country.
The Stem scholarship was reportedly set up by a then student at BSU in response to a 31 October 2021 speech by Yenor in which he said career-oriented women were “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be”, and called universities “the citadels of our gynecocracy”.
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”.
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The article and separate reporting in BSU’s student newspaper did not report on the content of the preaching, but in a separate incident 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 September 2021, Darrell was arrested for resisting or obstructing officers at Boise State.
Action Idaho’s support for an extremist preacher is in line with the ethos spelled out in a July 2022 article, where an uncredited author wrote: “Forming alliances with anyone interested in stopping the real threat to the American way of life and to Idaho is prudent and right. This might include making alliances with those cancelled for political crimes or those who hold views that our establishment finds totally distasteful.”
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.
Alicia Abbott is a community activist and north Idaho organizer for the Idaho 97 project, which monitors and organizes against far-right extremism in the state.
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”.