After firefighter ambush, Idaho commissioner rejects focus on white nationalism

A Sunday “ambush-style” attack that killed two firefighters has thrust North Idaho into the national spotlight.

The motive for the attack, which occurred at the Canfield Mountain recreation area near Coeur d’Alene, remains unknown.

But some national media outlets speculated that it could be connected with white nationalist, anti-government sentiment in a part of the state that’s been a “hotbed” of such ideology, Jim Cavanaugh, a retired special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told MSNBC.

“It’s just a historical fact that there’s been some anti-government sentiment heavy in that area, leading toward white supremacy,” Cavanaugh said. He added: “That doesn’t mean that this case is tied to that. This could be anything at all.”

At a Sunday-night press conference, Kootenai County Commissioner Bruce Mattare pushed back.

“When you hear how others portray the people who live here on the news, it’s not true,” he said. “What happened here decades ago is not reflective of the fine people who live here today.”

He was referring, he told the Idaho Statesman, to the area’s history as the home of the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group. In the 1970s, the group’s founder, Richard Butler, created a compound near Hayden Lake, outside of Coeur d’Alene, that drew neo-Nazis and white supremacists for conferences and training.

The group created antisemitic graffiti and escalated to violent attacks, Tony Stewart, one of the founders of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, previously told the Statesman. One of its offshoots, called The Order, placed a homemade bomb under the kitchen of Boise’s Congregation Ahavath Israel Synagogue, hijacked an armored truck and murdered a radio show host.

But those days are long past, Mattare said Monday.

“To me, it’s such an unfair characterization of this community, given the fact that these things occurred decades ago, and it just — it doesn’t exist here,” he told the Statesman by phone. “And so to continue to bring that up, I’m not quite sure I understand what people are trying to achieve.”

White supremacists don’t ‘parade down Main Street’ but ideology persists, advocate says

Coeur d’Alene human rights activists, with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center, bankrupted and ousted the Aryan Nations from its Hayden Lake compound in 2001. But echoes of similar ideology have remained: In 2022, white supremacists rallied at Hayden Lake. Later that year, 31 members of the white supremacist Patriot Front group were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to riot at an LGBTQ+ Pride event.

After the arrests, then-Coeur d’Alene Mayor Jim Hammond said, “We’re not going back to the days of the Aryan Nations. We are past that,” the Statesman previously reported. “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.”

Longstanding Kootenai County residents recall a time when white supremacists marched openly down the street, said Mattare, who moved to the area in 2013. “They were very visible,” he said.

These days, he said, “if it exists, it exists in their basement or in their minds.”

But Christina Bruce-Bennion, the executive director of Boise’s Wassmuth Center for Human Rights, said such groups’ relative lack of visibility doesn’t mean they’ve been wiped off the map.

“The ways that some of these movements show up now are not necessarily a parade down Main Street of people who have swastikas and shaved heads,” she told the Statesman. They may recruit and share ideas largely online, she said, or try to find ways to entrench in community institutions and normalize their ideas.

Mattare acknowledged that for some, North Idaho’s 50-year-old history with white supremacy “still seems like yesterday.” But his community should not be defined only by its darkest periods, he said.

“We have an amazing resort here. We have world-class golf courses here. We have an airport that is cutting-edge on some of the things they’re doing,” he said. “We have amazing people.”

Many of his constituents, he said, “want to look forward to the future and not dwell on the past.”

Bruce-Bennion sees things differently.

“We can look to the lessons of the past and connect them to today and try to figure out, OK, what can we learn from that to apply to how things might look today?” Bruce-Bennion said. “Yes, it was a hard time in a dark moment,” but there was a lot of creativity in how the community responded.

She noted that the days of the Aryan Nations prompted the formation of local human-rights advocacy groups, including Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations and the Human Rights Education Institute. (Neither group responded to calls or emails for this story.)

Bruce-Bennion recalled one “Lemons to Lemonade” campaign where local businesses raised money for human rights for every minute of the white supremacist group’s marches down the city’s Main Street. During one such march, they raised over $35,000.

“There were a lot of ways that, over time, the community really built momentum, not just what you’re against’ but what are you for?” she said. “What kind of a community do we want to be?”

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