From projects to paradise

POST FALLS — Alex Barron doesn’t like talking to the media and he’ll tell you why.

He names off columnists and reporters along with quotations from their writings in newspapers to show how he — and the movement he shoulders — has been misrepresented in the press.

“We’re not sovereign citizens, we’re not three percenters, we’re not oath keepers, we’re not Pachyderms,” Barron, a self proclaimed dean of the American Redoubt movement, said at a meeting of the North Idaho Pachyderms Friday in Post Falls.

American Redoubt, a movement associated with the political migration of conservatively minded Christians to the Inland Northwest, has been attacked in the media as a bogeyman movement with a sketchy following, he said.

“They call us anti-government, (but) we’re very traditional Christians... Christians are not anti-government,” Barron said.

Speaking to a group of about 30 at Templin’s Resort, Barron said his following also has been accused of having racist ties, something he denied.

“Although I was a fan of Malcolm X,” he said.

Barron, who grew up in one of the country’s biggest housing projects, the 70-acre Cabrini Green in Chicago, said the projects are still an indelible part of his makeup.

“It was bad,” he said. “It was worse than you think.”

He escaped a dozen attempts of murder and violence.

“It was a segregated black community,” he said. “There were snipers ... criminals.”

He remembers a 7-year-old boy being murdered, and a 9-year-old girl who “was beaten and raped and poisoned by having insecticide sprayed down her throat.”

The giant, 30-story complexes surrounded by chain-link fences were part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s approach to urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s.

They were a good place to be from, he said.

“I did have a childhood racked by tragedy, but we survived,” he said.

To get out, he joined the Navy as a teenager. It was where he learned about responsibility and service.

“I learned a great deal about being an American that I didn’t learn in Chicago,” he said.

And he learned to set aside the past he knew as a child.

“Everyone has a sad story. Everyone.”

Those stories, though, the ones where we as Americans overcome odds and conflict, are part of the country’s fabric, he said.

“We love that kind of stuff as Americans,” he said. “That’s who we are.”

Americans identify with the underdog, and in many ways the redoubt movement embraces the underdog’s determination to prosper in the face of oppression.

By the standards of American Redoubt, progressivism is synonymous with oppression of thought, discourse and truth.

“We believe in unlimited ethnicity, one overlying culture. We believe in the melting pot,” Barron said.

When progressives talk of diversity, he said, “It is not about the diversity of ideas. If you don’t have their ideas, you are a racist.”

Progressivism has become synonymous with authoritarianism, he said, and it is increasingly opposed to philosophical and scientific debate.

“We’ve compromised as much as we are going to compromise,” he said. “They don’t understand that we are as committed to our lifestyles as they are to theirs.”

The movement is gaining ground despite a stilted representation in the mainstream media, he said. Unique pageviews on Barron’s Charles Carroll Society website and Redoubt News surpass most Idaho media, he said.

Redoubters embrace American culture and history despite its blemishes, he said.

“We have a culture,” Barron said. “We have a right to be proud of our culture.”