What are we to make of disruptions in Democracy?
Case in point in a feature from The New Yorker
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BLOGGER INSERT > Here's one example of mis-appropriating statements to falsely justify adherence to what they are doing: "To Bundy, the escalating protests are the predictable result of escalating government interference. He cited President John F. Kennedy, who, in a 1962 speech to Latin-American diplomats, said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” While Bundy said that he does not necessarily condone trespassing on private property, he endorsed the spirit of the recent events in Boise. “I encourage them to protest at their homes. They are public officials, and by that nature they become accountable to the people,” he said. “It’s their right, protected by the First Amendment’s right to assemble. They have the energy and the right to stand on streets or sidewalks and protest government agents’ actions. Like it or not, that’s the way it is.”
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It's a long story detailed at the start to provide background... if that "Anti-Masker Rebellion" sounds familiar, the same uprisings are going on here in Arizona, although the political party flip-flop has a different standing,
Read along to catch up to the issues there in Idaho and here in Arizona:
". . .Since 1995, when the Democratic governor Cecil Andrus completed the last of his four nonconsecutive terms, Idaho has been ruled almost exclusively by Republicans. In the statehouse, where the G.O.P. outnumbers Democrats four to one, the real political action isn’t between the two parties but within the conservative ranks. The pandemic has pitted establishment Republicans, who defer to public-health officials’ expertise, against hard-right libertarians who prize austere constitutionalism.
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BLOGGER INSERT from this article: "As the virus spread unimpeded this fall, rumors emerged that students at Brigham Young University-Idaho, in Rexburg, had been intentionally infecting themselves with the coronavirus in order to sell their antibody-rich plasma for nearly double the going rate of blood unaffected by the virus. According to the Deseret News, the students could have been earning as much as two hundred dollars per week for their antibodies. The school, which is wholly owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, cracked down, warning that any further attempts at virus profiteering would bring suspension or permanent expulsion. Two weeks after the scandal broke, the Times COVID-19 database identified Rexburg as having the highest daily per-capita infection rate in the country. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last spring, Idaho’s Brad Little was among the country’s first conservative governors to impose public-health orders. On March 20th, the state quarantined Blaine County, where the virus had spiked to what was briefly the highest infection rate in the country; the following week, Little ordered a statewide stay-at-home order, mobilized the Idaho National Guard, and reallocated nearly forty million dollars from the state budget for medical and testing equipment. By the time Little extended the stay-at-home order, on April 15th, Representative Heather Scott, of northern Idaho, had already referred to him as “Little Hitler.”
> Forcing people to stay home was “no different than Nazi Germany,” Scott said, where “nonessential workers got put on a train.”
Judy Boyle, a representative from Midvale, about sixty-five miles northwest of Boise, upped the Nazi ante, calling mask requirements “too similar to not allowing Jews to shop when they were ‘required’ to wear the yellow star!!!”
Even as Little earned high approval ratings on the crisis from average Idahoans, ranking members of his own party turned on him, with Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin and the former U.S. congressman Raúl Labrador (who is expected to challenge Little in 2022) kicking off the mutiny.
. . . Little, who makes a point of wearing a mask in public, tried to balance calls for statewide mandates against the insurrection in his own party. Under pressure from Republicans in the statehouse to roll back any statewide orders, he ultimately deferred to the state’s seven public-health districts to decide what was right for their own communities. That decision kicked off months of messy public debates on district health boards, which are composed largely of elected county commissioners, many of whom doubt the efficacy of masks and the threat of the virus. Some jurisdictions, unwilling to wait for the health boards to act, passed their own mandates, replicating within the state the same policy patchwork at play nationwide. (Little’s office did not respond to questions for this story.)
In the first week of Little’s initial stay-at-home order, Ammon Bundy began coördinating his first protests, as did Health Freedom Idaho and the Idaho Freedom Foundation (I.F.F.), a dark-money-funded libertarian policy shop and the state’s center of gravity for right-wing advocacy. . .If Idahoans complied with mask mandates and business shutdowns, Bundy warned protesters in the spring, “then they will go further until we are lined up naked facing a mass grave being shot in the back of the head.” . . Together with Health Freedom Idaho and the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance, the I.F.F. staged a joint rally in mid-April, which brought about a thousand protesters to the capitol with rifles and homemade signs: “Faith Over Fear,” “Liberty or Death,” “Brad Little Is Non-Essential.” That month, Bundy brought protesters to a police officer’s home in Meridian, after the officer arrested a young mother who refused to leave a closed playground; in July, protesters shut down a public-health district meeting in Caldwell.
By the time of the August spectacle at the state capitol, Bundy and the health-freedom activists had spent four months staging increasingly bold protests. Inside the chamber that week, several legislators embraced the activists’ world view. . Two months before President Trump took the myth mainstream, Barbieri accused hospitals of “making up statistics” about COVID-19 for profit. “N95 masks are of no value,” he added. The former representative Tim Remington, a pastor who represented the same district, suggested that the virus was not as contagious as reported. “I’ve actually laid hands on people that have COVID and prayed for them. I never got COVID,” he said. . .
“The government has no right to tell a person what they can put over their mouth,” Bundy told me. “The government has no right to tell a person they have to stay in their home. That’s called freedom. That belongs to the individual.” The real story from August, Bundy said, is the amount of force that the state is prepared to bring down on citizens exercising their right to free speech. “When you see a hundred or more police officers surrounding the capitol, when never once did we do anything threatening, that was very revealing to people.” . .
Bundy, who was arrested twice in twenty-four hours during the August protests, doesn’t doubt that the coronavirus is contagious or that people are dying from COVID-19. Instead, he points to the pandemic’s pervasive rules and the state’s COVID-19 fatality rates, which remain similar to its annual combined deaths from flu, pneumonia, and chronic lung diseases, as evidence of overreach. The locked doors and social-distancing rules of the special legislative session, he said, were violations of the state’s 1974 Open Meeting Law
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> A devout Mormon, Bundy rose to prominence in 2014, following a standoff with federal law enforcement over unpaid grazing fees near the cattle ranch owned by his father, Cliven, on the Nevada-Arizona border. The younger Bundy became a leader of what had been known in the Reagan era as the Sagebrush Rebellion, an alliance of ranchers and industrialists lobbying for state and private control over the more than fifty per cent of federally administered lands that lie in the mountain West. . . > The anti-government activist Ammon Bundy has coördinated protests against mask mandates and social-distancing rules during the pandemic
> Bundy defies easy categorization.
He has publicly rebuked President Trump’s anti-immigration policies, defended refugee caravans, distanced himself from right-wing militias, and, following George Floyd’s killing by police in Minneapolis, voiced support for Black Lives Matter. “I believe police do need to be defunded,” he told me. “If you think that somehow Black Lives Matter is more dangerous than the police, you must have a problem in your mind.” To him, white ranchers hit with exorbitant federal fines for land mismanagement are not so different from Black Americans hounded by police over unpaid fines for minor infractions. “We are standing up for people’s rights, no matter their color,” he said. “I think it’s rooted in a similar problem: injustice.” > For three consecutive years, Idaho has been the fastest-growing state in the country. The majority of that growth is in and around Boise, which has nearly doubled in size since 1990. . .The city is such a real-estate boomtown that it has spawned its own HGTV franchise, “Boise Boys,” which follows two friends on a mission to flip houses and get rich in the new American West. > West Coasters have been fleeing to Idaho en masse since at least the late nineteen-seventies, when about ten thousand were moving in each year and “Don’t Californicate Idaho” was a common bumper sticker. One of those emigrants was Richard Girnt Butler, the Army Air Corps veteran and founder of the Aryan Nations, which he ran from a compound in the north, near Hayden, a suburb of Coeur d’lawsuit by a Native American family who had been attacked by Butler’s goons. . . > According to an ongoing Carnegie Mellon
survey, Idaho remains
one of the least mask-compliant places in America.
Most of the state’s health boards have forfeited the authority that Little bestowed on them last spring, instead treating masks as an issue of individual responsibility. “It’s a personal choice, a matter of liberty,” . . And in any case, he said,
the county sheriff would not enforce it. “We live in a free society,” Reinke said. Criminalizing minor infractions, he argued, would only cause more harm.
> In late October, overtaxed hospitals in Twin Falls and Coeur d’Alene started diverting patients to Boise and Spokane. Coeur d’Alene’s largest hospital reported ninety-nine-per-cent capacity during a district-health-board meeting on October 22nd; at the same meeting, the board
voted to repeal its own mask ordinance . .
> Twin Falls, although Reinke’s health board rejected a mandate, the members did agree to send the governor a letter requesting that he impose one himself: “Governor Little, we are pleading for your help. Issue the much-needed public health orders to help our communities and hospitals to curb the spread of COVID-19.” Muffy Davis, who represents communities within the South Central Public Health District, was incredulous. “Is it more important to play politics than to do what’s right?” she asked me. “The health board needs to step up and have the balls to just do it.”
> In a public letter, dated November 3rd, the state’s Disaster Medical Advisory Committee, which is tasked with writing and implementing crisis standards of care or rationing, wrote to “request,” “implore,strongly implore,” and finally “beg” Little to order an immediate statewide mask mandate. “We realize instituting a masking mandate will incur the wrath of some portions of the population,” the committee wrote, “but evidence suggests over 75% of the population would be supportive and the small radical fringe who would oppose such a mandate have no right to endanger the rest of the population.”> On November 18th, hundreds of protesters surrounded a city-council meeting in Rexburg, shouting, “We will not comply!,” until officials shelved the mask question and broke up the meeting.
> In Boise, on November 23rd, a few dozen members of Bundy’s People’s Rights organization, the digitally organized social-activism network that he launched in April, protested in front of Mayor Lauren McLean’s home with tiki torches, shouting their discontent . . .Bundy drove to his parents’ ranch in southern Nevada for Thanksgiving, which the family celebrated indoors with, he estimated, about seventy relatives and friends. He came down with a mild cold and slight cough afterward, but it cleared up in a few days, and the virus remains low on his list of worries. . .
> I asked Bundy about the increasing aggression of health-freedom activists in Idaho. On the afternoon of December 8th, the same day that Boise’s Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial was vandalized with stickers bearing swastikas and the words “WE ARE EVERYWHERE,” about four hundred protesters surrounded Boise’s Central District Health office during a virtual board meeting intended to discuss tightening current restrictions. At the same time, two more groups arrived outside the homes of two board members, Dr. Ted Epperly and the Ada County commissioner Diana Lachiondo, where armed protesters shouted, fired air horns, and played loud sound clips from the film “Scarface.” Lachiondo’s two sons, who are eight and twelve years old, were home alone, calling their mother. Lachiondo left the call in tears to go to her children, and the city’s mayor and police chief ended the meeting moments later. .
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