In revenge for the arrest of their comrades, members of a far-right faction released the home addresses of police officers in Idaho.
The arrests provoked anger… even in Norway. The Coeur d’Alene police received nearly 150 calls to the station on Monday, half of them citizens congratulating them on the arrest on Saturday of 31 members of a far-right group suspected of having wanted to start a violent riot during a pride march organized in this city of Idaho. But the other half of the conversations were more heated, according to police chief Lee White, quoted by the “Idaho Statesman”: “The other 50 percent, completely anonymous, wanted nothing more than yelling, shouting at us and saying a few nice things to us, death threats against me or any member of the police when we were only doing our job,” he said. These threatening phone calls came from all over the country, and one even came from … Norway, he said.
But the police officer assumed his intervention, made possible thanks to the alert given by a citizen worried to see these thirty men getting into a truck “like a small army”, in riot gear: “They are not members law enforcement officers that we have arrested. They were members of the Patriot Front hate group. They weren’t antifa or FBI in disguise. I don’t doubt for a moment that if that truck had stopped near the park [où avait lieu la marche des fiertés], it would have ended in a riot.” Due to the threats against him and his colleagues, Lee White added that it was “more appropriate” not to reveal the identity of the person who tipped off the authorities, while the threat presented by far-right groups , often over-armed and who recruit thanks to conspiracy theories, worries all the way to the top of the American state.
“We are not going to return to the period of the Aryan Nations”
More serious than these calls: certain supporters of the far-right Patriot Front movement, to which the 31 arrested claim to belong, published on the Internet the names and personal addresses of police officers from Coeur d’Alene and Kootenai County, whose agents took part in Saturday’s operation alongside officers from the SWAT Intervention Brigade. “We are monitoring these posts,” Kootenai Sheriff Bob Norris told the Coeur d’Alene Press. Coeur d’Alene Mayor Jim Hammond gave a press conference on Monday, recalling the area’s troubled past with extremist groups: In the 1980s and 1990s, the racist organization Aryan Nations met there every year, at their Hayden Lake HQ – until the group was forced into bankruptcy by a lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-right watchdog and tolerance advocacy group. “We are not going to go back to the Aryan Nations period. We are a culture of love and kindness”, assured the city councilor, in office since January.
The far-right Patriot Front group was created in 2017 by Tom Rousseau, a 23-year-old young man from the Vanguard America movement, involved in the Charlottesville riots in August 2017. A young anti-racist activist was killed in this city of Virginia after a member of one of these racist organizations ran into the counter-demonstrators who came to protest against this gathering of many fascist groups.
The 31 men arrested on Saturday, some of whom were from other states, were all released after posting $300 bail. They will have to be brought to justice in the coming weeks and risk being prosecuted for “conspiracy to riot”.