31 members of white supremacist group arrested in Idaho, preventing planned riot

On Saturday, law enforcement arrested 31 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front in Idaho. The men were packed into a U-Haul and were traveling to a Pride event held in Coeur d’Alene where they had plans to riot, according to local law enforcement. Daniel Walters, an investigative reporter at the Inlander, has been covering the story and he joins us with the latest on this story.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho arrested dozens of members of a white supremacist group on Saturday. They were in the back of a U-Haul on their way to an LGBTQ Pride event. The police chief said that they had shin guards, shields, helmets, a smoke grenade, and long metal poles like those used by some January 6th rioters. 31 men were charged with conspiracy to riot.

Daniel Walters wrote about this for the New York Times over the weekend. He is the senior investigative reporter at the Inlander, that’s Spokane’s alt weekly, and he joins us now. Daniel, welcome.

Daniel Walters: Hey, how are you?

Miller: Doing great, thanks for giving us some of your time. Why did police stop this U-Haul?

Walters: First of all, at least according to the police, they ended up getting a tip from a concerned citizen who saw what the tipster described as a small army of men packing into a U-Haul, probably about 20 men, dressed like a small army near Northwest Blvd and I-90 in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

And this was the day of the Pride parade. There’d been a lot of build up to this, a lot of concern about there potentially being violence or conflict at this event. And so when police pulled these people over, on one of the individuals who seemed to be a leader, the police found a seven page document laying out in detail their plans for confrontation, their plans to use smoke, they found a smoke grenade on one of them. There was enough for the police to believe that they had what’s called a conspiracy to riot, which is a misdemeanor in Idaho.

Miller: You included in your coverage some description from the police chief about that plan. What have police said about what the group was planning to do? It’s pretty striking.

Walters: There was details about a column forming on the outside of the park preceding inward until barriers to approach were met. There’s a line about smoke being used. And there was also a line about once an appropriate amount of confrontational dynamic has been established, the common will disengage and head to Sherman Avenue, a pretty iconic street that runs the center of downtown Coeur d’Alene.

And so it kind of sounded like they were planning on having some sort of confrontation. Not sure if it was intended to be with police or members of the pride event or activists or what, but it definitely did sound like they were planning specifically for a confrontation.

Miller: What is this? What is the Patriot Front?

Walters: I’m not as much of an expert on the Patriot Front as maybe some other groups because they’re not necessarily as local to north Idaho as some other groups. They’re based out of Texas. The Huffington Post has done some really, really good reporting on them. They seem to have split off from a group called Vanguard America, which probably is most infamous for their association with James Alex Fields, who was the person who killed the woman with his car in Charlottesville.

They end up splitting off from them, but since then they’ve been doing a lot of these confrontations, these sudden events that they intend to go viral. They tend to get video footage and imagery from them, including an incident I think in Philadelphia where they were specifically packing into vans, and then having confrontations and were later arrested by police. So this seemed to be very, very much in their wheelhouse in terms of their strategy, the kinds of things they would want to do, as much to create more propaganda to recruit more members as anything.

Miller: Where did these men come from?

Walters: There’s a whole wide, wide selection. Most of them are not from the area. The founder of the group, Thomas Rousseau, is from Texas. There’s a number of different states. We did find two that were from Spokane, Washington though. One looks like he had more recently moved to Texas, but they’re definitely both from Spokane, Washington. Most of the rest of them were just from scattered throughout the United States, in particular areas like Texas that were known to have been associated with the Patriot Front.

Miller: A local motorcycle club had planned to do something they called “Gun d’Alene” to coincide with this Pride event. What ended up happening with their plans?

Walters: I wasn’t at the event itself, but I had talked to them a lot. I had actually sat in on one of these meetings with them when they were talking about this plan to confront what they believed to be “groomers,” or what they saw as this perverse, awful strain they thought was impacting children within the Pride parade. This has been planned for months.

But then, basically as there’d been more and more reporting on this, there’s been more and more chatter from both the far left and the far right about this, how people are gonna respond to this, they kind of rebranded it a little bit, and they changed it to the North Idaho Day of Prayer. They were specifically trying to distance themselves from some of these white supremacist groups that had been rumored to be coming to Idaho. They didn’t want necessarily be explicitly associated with it. From what I understand they were there, and they were passing out anti-gay literature, but I hadn’t had any reports of them actually engaging in in violence or anything like that.

Miller: One of the lines that I saw from the police chief was striking though. He said “there were people walking around the event with long guns and handguns and bear spray, and all kinds of things like that.” He did note that this was legal in Idaho. Have you gotten the sense that that display of firepower, that that was from far right groups who wanted to intimidate attendees, or people who were there to defend against far right groups?

Walters: I can’t say for sure in this instance. I always want to be really careful, because I don’t know for sure and it’s hard to be definitive.

What I do know is that “Gun d’Alene” was a reference to the time two years earlier, after the George Floyd Floyd protests, there was a lot of concern there was going to be left wing rioting in in Coeur d’Alene, that there was going to be vans of of radical Antifa members who are going to be showing up and committing violence. They never ended up showing up, but you did have a lot of members of Coeur d’Alene far right standing outside of businesses, displaying long guns prominently. And that has become known as Gun d’Alene, sort of this mythology that’s looked back on really fondly by Coeur d’Alene, this idea of “we stood up and defended our community against the forces of the radical left” is how they see it.

Which is sort of ironic now that the people who actually did show up packed together in the truck and with plans for violence two years later turned out to be from the radical right instead.

Miller: What’s the timeline now in terms of criminal prosecutions?

Walters: I don’t know that specifically. I do know this is a misdemeanor. I do know everyone has been out on bail now, and so I had heard, from what I’ve seen reported, that they’re allowed to go back to their own states wait for whatever is going to be the next next stage, and I just don’t know enough to want to speak definitively on that on air as you understa

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