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Boise State University in Idaho in 2015. Photograph: David R Frazier
Photolibrary/Alamy
View image in fullscreen
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 enough


Jason Wilson
Fri 29 Mar 2024 06.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 Mar 2024 08.45 EDT
Share



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.


‘Idaho’s seen as a war zone’: the lone abortion activist defying militias and
the far right
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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”.

US businessman is wannabe ‘warlord’ of secretive far-right men’s network
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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”.


COURTING PEDRO GONZALEZ

Long before the website went live, however, Yenor apparently spent months
attempting to recruit a conservative writer, Pedro Gonzalez, to head up Action
Idaho.

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Last June, Breitbart reported that in 2019 and 2020 Gonzalez had sent a slew of
messages in Telegram chats, including one called Right Wing Death Squad, which
expressed crude anti-Black racism and antisemitism, and admiration for white
nationalists like Nick Fuentes. Between those messages, the Action Idaho job
offer, and the Breitbart story, Gonzalez had become a pro-DeSantis influencer
and a senior writer at Paleoconservative magazine Chronicles.

Expense claims made by Yenor show that in September 2021, he paid Gonzalez
$2,500 from grant money held by BSU to give a guest lecture in commemoration of
Constitution Day.

A recording of the speech was available on Yenor’s YouTube channel at the time
of reporting, and in it Gonzalez castigates the “globalist American empire” and
bemoans “a shifting in the locus of sovereignty away from the real nation, the
flesh and blood people of America, and the soil on which they live and die and
to award international bureaucracies in an abstract global village”.

Less than two months after his 2021 Constitution Day speech, on 7 November,
Yenor and Patrick Alles were copied in on an email from Jackson Yenor, Yenor’s
son, to Gonzalez offering him “$45,000/yr. to be the Executive Director of
Action Idaho”.

Idaho judge issues new arrest warrant for far-right activist Ammon Bundy
Read more

Jackson Yenor continued: “We think that we will be able to raise enough seed
money to finance this position for the next two years.” An attached document
offering specifics of the position said that among other dutiez, Gonzalez would
be required to “Establish the reputation of Action Idaho as a Christian
nationalist, populist authority both locally and nationally”, and “Provide
ongoing guidance, resources, and support to other leaders in the state regarding
the best practices, methods, and principles of a Christian national populism.”

It’s unclear who, if anyone, Action Idaho appointed to the Executive Director
role when Gonzalez declined the offer.

The Guardian contacted Gonzalez for comment on his engagement with Action Idaho
but received no response.


PITCHING KLINGENSTEIN

Regardless of Gonzalez’s eventual decision, Yenor immediately began using his
name in funding discussions with wealthy donors, including Claremont Institute
board chairman Thomas D Klingenstein, who lives in New York City.

The Guardian previously reported that Klingenstein, who has long been the
Claremont Institute’s largest donor, had greatly enlarged his political
donations to Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm cycle and beyond.

On 17 November 2021, Yenor emailed Klingenstein with a version of the initial
written pitch which he had fleshed out with funding asks, writing: “See the
attached, my attempt at an accurate budget. I will ring you up at a little after
11 MT (1 ET) tomorrow.”



The document specifies that a “$155K investment gets us a website, email lists,
media director, and head writer for that year”.

The “goal” for using the investment would be to “translate
anti-critical-race-theory (anti-CRT) movement and anti-lockdown movements into a
durable political movement to radicalize political opinion in Idaho and shape
the primaries to the advantage of conservatives”.

The document spells out that much of the cost is “personnel, including an
Editor-in-Chief (we have offered the job to Pedro Gonzalez)”.

The document also said, however, that “weekly Articles by Scott Yenor on Idaho
Politics and Education” would be provided “gratis”.

The document set out a funding mechanism which would funnel money through an
innocuously-named non-profit: “Donations for this start up company will pass
through a 501c3, Voices Empowering Communities, toward the LLC media company:
Action Idaho.”

> The deck expresses an ambition to ... create a ‘playbook for rallying people
> to build a greater Idaho on the ruins of what is a faltering establishment’

The document continues: “Action Idaho will be governed by a Board of Directors,
including Scott Yenor (Meridian, ID) and Theo Wold (former Trump White House
advisor) and Josh Turnbow (media producer), who will set the overall strategic
objectives for each quarter.”

Josh Turnbow is a film director whose credits include American Standoff, a 2017
documentary about the Ammon Bundy-led occupation of the Malheur National
Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Theo Wold served as deputy assistant to Donald Trump,
and in 2023 was appointed as solicitor-general of Idaho by newly-elected
attorney general, Raul Labrador. On 30 January 2024 the Claremont Institute
announced Wold had been appointed as a director there.

There is no evidence a separate Action Idaho LLC was ever created. Nevertheless,
the documents indicate that Yenor’s proposal met with some success.

The same day, Klingenstein forwarded Yenor’s proposal to a number of addressees,
including Maine Republican political consultants Keith Herrick and Garrett
Mason; Ben Judge, a conservative writer with bylines in Claremont publications;
and Matthew Peterson, former vice-president of Education at The Claremont
Institute and co-founder of rightwing venture fund New Founding, who is now
editor-in-chief at conservative media outlet Blaze Media.

To those addressees Klingenstein wrote: “Take a look at this. It’s Scott Yenor’s
proposal for conservative multimedia? product for Idaho. I agreed to fund part
of this.”

In May 2022, Yenor reported back to Klingenstein, copying in Arthur Milikh,
executive director of The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of
Life.

“A quick note on what we are doing with your donation,” Yenor began, and
reported that the 501c3 had “put forward about two months of content, with the
hopes of expanding the operation now that the primary is over and we have gotten
our Trumpian position out there”.

The Guardian contacted Klingenstein for comment on his involvement with Action
Idaho but received no response.

Abbott, the Idaho 97 organizer, said that: “For the amount of money Action Idaho
apparently received, they really haven’t produced a lot.”

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