White supremacist propaganda tied to longstanding hate groups

The white supremacist propaganda that was mailed to a Sandpoint couple Wednesday has ties to groups in the Northwest dating back to at least the 1970s, human rights experts say.

The mailing, which is attributed to a group called the Northwest Front, is an iteration of the Northwest Imperative — a white supremacist group that’s been present to varying degrees in the region for decades, and was founded be neo-Nazi Harold Covington, said Brenda Hammond, president of the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force.

“The agenda is to create an all-white state,” Hammond said. “It would require driving out non-whites and recruiting like-minded white people.”

Hammond said the group seems to be mostly connected by a shared ideology and lacks clear organization or leadership.

"I think even while Harold Covington was alive, trying to figure out how many members his group had was always a little bit difficult,” said Travis McAdam, program director at the Montana Human Rights Network.

Even during the neo-Nazi’s heyday, some claimed he exaggerated his support to sell books, while others claimed he had “activists” on the ground. While Covington died in 2018, the idea of a white ethnostate in the Northwest has been long-standing among white nationalist groups across the country for decades.

The idea first took hold in the 1970s, McAdams said, when Richard Butler started the Aryan Nations headquarters near Hayden. Since then, despite the widespread strategic failure and the condemnation of many locals, the area has continued to attract white supremacists.

“I always say that the idea of this area of the country, being where an area and homeland should be — I often call it like, part of one nationalist myth and lore. What I mean is, it's been talked about for so long that you can go onto white nationalist forums and on message boards, and see people from all across the country that talk about how they want to move up to this area, whether it's to Montana or Idaho or Washington or Oregon,” McAdam said. “It's not because they have any connection to the area, they don't have family, they're not coming up here for specific jobs. But there's that idea of this area of the country being a place for white nationalists to come and settle.”

Determining the exact source of these types of mailings can be difficult, McAdam said, considering the attribution to Northwest Front, it is likely either a member or someone who’s lived in the area long enough to know about the group. People who truly believe in white supremacy have been known to spend their own money out-of-pocket to distribute white supremacist literature, he said.

References in the letter to the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection also shows that the letter was more than just a redistribution of old materials.

“Oftentimes with groups like this, who have founders that have written a lot, it's not surprising to have letter drops that [are] literally somebody just copy-and-pasting out of one of their books or copying an old flyer,” he said. “But this one at least feels like with a couple of the references to current events, that somebody at least took the time to do that and try to make it a little bit more relevant.”

Typically the mailings’ purpose is not primarily to recruit, McAdams said, but to create fear in the communities they would drive out — people of color, Jewish people and the LGBT community among others.

“The real reason that this kind of literature is distributed is they want to scare people in the community that they have deemed, when it comes down to it, the people they want to erase from our communities,” he said. “They want those people to be scared, and they want those people to feel isolated, and they want those people to be nervous and wondering, who it is that sent this? And is it somebody in my town? Is it somebody in my neighborhood?”

Although no motive has been confirmed, the mailer, which was the only one reported as of Wednesday, was addressed to a man whose wife is a mixed-race Black woman.

Although stories often center on hate groups or militias, McAdams said, there have also been consistent community efforts against them.

“Instead of just trying to write something like this off, we'd much rather see people engage with their local human rights task forces and have a meaningful discussion about what our real values are and to have those discussions,” he said. “Make this an opportunity for the community to really explore and think about what their values are and what they want the narrative about their town to be.”

The Bonner County Democratic Central Committee issued a statement Thursday condemning the propaganda.

“We are sickened to hear that racist propaganda is again being circulated in our community," said Rachel Castor, vice-chair of the Bonner County Democratic Central Committee. “In response to this hate speech incident, we have already secured $1,050 in pledges to the ACLU of Idaho from a number of concerned residents.”