BOISE, Idaho — North Idaho was pushed to the forefront of the nation’s attention Saturday when 31 members of a white nationalist group were arrested in Coeur d’Alene.
Members of the Patriot Front, a group the Southern Poverty Law Center described as a “white nationalist hate group,” were arrested downtown near a Pride in the Park event when police pulled over a U-Haul truck and found the members inside, with riot gear and at least one smoke grenade.
In the aftermath of the arrests, Coeur d’Alene Mayor Jim Hammond referenced the city’s history with hate groups and extremism, particularly a neo-Nazi compound that existed in Hayden Lake, a suburb just north of Coeur d’Alene. Hammond also said that Coeur d’Alene had become a place that “respects and welcomes everyone,” according to previous Idaho Statesman reporting.
“We’re not going back to the days of the Aryan Nations. We are past that,” Hammond said. “And we will do everything we can to make sure that we continue to stay past those kinds of problems.”
Aryan nations
In 1974, Richard Butler moved from his home in California to Hayden Lake in North Idaho with dreams of a “white-only homeland” in the Pacific Northwest, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
By 1977, he’d created the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, otherwise known as the Aryan Nations. The neo-Nazi group was a prominent figure in white nationalist circles throughout the 1980s and 90s, drawing over 100 white supremacists every year to the group’s compound in Hayden Lake for what Butler called the “Aryan World Congress.”
Butler’s gatherings drew some of the most notorious white supremacists in the U.S. to Idaho, such as Ku Klux Klansmen Tom Metzger, Louis Beam and Don Black.
The group eventually splintered in late 2004 following the death of Butler at the age of 86.
“If you were around in those days, or if you recall, with the help of a lot of citizens in this community and the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups, we were able to completely rid ourselves of that group and the kind of awful culture that they were trained to present to our community,” Hammond said Monday. “We are a culture of love and kindness.”
The Order
In 1984, an Aryan Nations offshoot group called The Order placed a homemade bomb under the kitchen of the Congregation Ahavath Israel Synagogue in Boise. The bomb caused no casualties but about $4,000 in damage.
Bruce Carroll Pierce, one of the two men involved in the bombing, called it an “act of war” to serve “the greater good.”
A year later, Aryan Nations security chief Elden Cutler was arrested for paying $1,800 to hire a hitman to kill an informant who was looking into The Order. Although the hit job was unsuccessful, Cutler was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
The Order was linked to numerous other crimes throughout the 1980s, such as the hijacking of an armored truck for $3.6 million, the murder of Denver radio show host Alan Berg in 1984, and the arrest of Idaho native David Tate, who murdered a Missouri state trooper in 1985.
Lordship Church
The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Lordship Church in Bonners Ferry as a hate group on its statewide tracker map.
The church’s pastor, Warren Campbell, has been tracked by SPLC for a while after a 2012 report claimed that Campbell’s church in California was becoming “increasingly radical, ramping up its paramilitary activities and forging alliances with an array of figures revered on the radical right.”
Campbell told the Statesman in 2017 that he “abhorred” being labeled as a hate group but described Muslims as “violent people.”
“Islam has been at war with America since Thomas Jefferson,” Campbell told the Statesman in 2017. “The Mohammedans are violent people. And I believe that they are dangerous to America. We could spend all day citing incident after incident.”
Other hate groups in Idaho
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists six hate groups in Idaho as of 2021. Two of those, Proud Boys and the Patriot Front, are considered statewide; G416 Patriots is in Meridian; and three other groups are in North Idaho — Lordship Church, Independent History and Research in Coeur d’Alene and The Brother Nathanael Foundation in Priest River.
Although hate groups are decreasing in the state, hate crimes are increasing, according to previous Statesman reporting using data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Fifty-four hate crimes in Idaho were reported to police in 2020 — 19 targeted racial groups, most of which targeted African-Americans and the Hispanic and Latino communities.
