Boise State University (BSU) professor and Claremont Institute scholar Scott Yenor was the hidden hand behind Action Idaho, a far-right online media platform that featured inflammatory rightwing commentary on politics in that state, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.
The documents, obtained through public records requests, also show that Yenor sought and received funding for the initiative from wealthy and influential donors like Claremont Institute board chair, Thomas D Klingenstein.
He also attempted to hire a rising conservative writer, Pedro Gonzalez, to lead the initiative. Gonzalez was later embroiled in a controversy about antisemitic remarks he made in online chats in 2019 and 2020. They also show him tapping a network of expertise that overlaps both with the Claremont Institute and the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), a secretive fraternal Christian Nationalist organization the Guardian has reported on extensively.
Yenor has not publicly disclosed his involvement in Action Idaho, and it has only been fleetingly mentioned in previous reporting on Talking Points Memo. The revelations could raise further questions about the potential conflicts between Yenor’s professorial position at a public university and his political activism.
The Guardian contacted Scott Yenor with a detailed request for comment on this story. He only responded directly to one question, writing that “Pedro Gonzalez did not accept the offer” of employment. The remainder of the reply was personal abuse.
Lindsay Schubiner is director of programs at the Western States Center, a civil rights non-profit whose activities include monitoring extremists. She said: “Action Idaho is making yet another dangerous attempt to mainstream extremism in Idaho politics. It is particularly troubling that the driving force behind it is an educator.”
“Boise State University leaders should not be silent; bigotry on campus impacts the quality of education of every single student,” Schubiner added.
Action Idaho’s genesis
The earliest mention of Action Idaho in Yenor’s Boise State email account comes on 25 May 2021, when he sends an email with two attached documents to his wife, Amy Yenor.
One of the documents is a written donor pitch for “a media outlet to organize conservative political opinion and activism” in Idaho, to take on “issues and fights that will make the state more congenial to conservatives”.
“This new media outlet is Action Idaho,” the document explains.
Also attached to the 25 May email is a PowerPoint-style presentation deck which offers a more pointed variation on the written pitch. The deck specifies that “the new media outlet must be un-cancellable, reliable, and strategic in taking on Idaho’s Establishment and protecting a culture conducive to liberty and faith”.
The deck expresses an ambition to channel conservative opinion towards the capture of institutions from school board to the legislature, creating a “playbook for citizens and their legislators, for elections, for school board actions, for creating a new culture, and for rallying people to build a greater Idaho on the ruins of what is a faltering establishment”.
More combatively, it says Action Idaho “needs to identify friends of that culture and support them (i.e., in business, schools, politicians, churches), while identifying enemies of that culture and expose them and seek to undermine their public support”.
Action Idaho’s publishing history
During its relatively short publishing history, the Action Idaho website delivered on these promises.
There is still an Action Idaho Twitter/X account which provides inflammatory far-right commentary on Idaho state politics: one recent focus has been attacks on Idaho Republicans who are deemed insufficiently rightwing.
But Action Idaho’s main publication venue for almost two years was a website at actionidaho.org. That URL now redirects to an online gambling operation.
The domain was first registered on 15 December 2021, according to WhoIs records. On 7 February 2022, hosting was shifted to Wix, and available Internet archive records indicate that this was when the site began publishing in earnest.
The enemies Action Idaho took on included Yenor’s own employer.
In March 2022 the site published an article by Anna K Miller, a director at the rightwing Idaho Freedom Foundation and a longtime Yenor collaborator, praising a Title IX complaint filed against BSU by mens’ rights activist and former University of Michigan professor Mark Perry. Perry’s complaint claimed that a BSU scholarship encouraging women to enroll in so-called Stem courses was discriminatory against men. Perry has filed hundreds of similar complaints at colleges around the country.
The Stem scholarship was reportedly set up by a then student at BSU in response to a 31 October 2021 speech by Yenor in which he said career-oriented women were “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be”, and called universities “the citadels of our gynecocracy”.
An 11 June 2022 article with no author byline also attacked BSU, calling the ejection of self-described “Campus Preacher”, Keith Darrell, from the university’s grounds the “latest episode where Boise State University offended Christians and free speech”.
The article and separate reporting in BSU’s student newspaper did not report on the content of the preaching, but in a separate incident at New York’s Binghamton University last October, Darrell reportedly said that death sentences for gay people were justified and that “step-by-step consent is a boner killer”.
In September 2021, Darrell was arrested for resisting or obstructing officers at Boise State.
Action Idaho’s support for an extremist preacher is in line with the ethos spelled out in a July 2022 article, where an uncredited author wrote: “Forming alliances with anyone interested in stopping the real threat to the American way of life and to Idaho is prudent and right. This might include making alliances with those cancelled for political crimes or those who hold views that our establishment finds totally distasteful.”
Action Idaho reserved a particular antipathy for Idaho’s LGBTQ+ community. On 8 June 2022, Action Idaho helped focus rightwing attention on pride events that month. These efforts culminated on 15 June with the mass arrest of Patriot Front members who were attempting to disrupt a pride event in Coeur d’Alene. Action Idaho published an article with no author byline, headlined LGBTQ+ Pride Fest is a Groomer Fest just a week after those arrests.
Alicia Abbott is a community activist and north Idaho organizer for the Idaho 97 project, which monitors and organizes against far-right extremism in the state.
In a telephone conversation, she said that Action Idaho had been “a harmful page on the Internet, moronically reposting other Idaho extremists and hateful disinformation”.
Courting Pedro Gonzalez
Long before the website went live, however, Yenor apparently spent months attempting to recruit a conservative writer, Pedro Gonzalez, to head up Action Idaho.
after newsletter promotion
Last June, Breitbart reported that in 2019 and 2020 Gonzalez had sent a slew of messages in Telegram chats, including one called Right Wing Death Squad, which expressed crude anti-Black racism and antisemitism, and admiration for white nationalists like Nick Fuentes. Between those messages, the Action Idaho job offer, and the Breitbart story, Gonzalez had become a pro-DeSantis influencer and a senior writer at Paleoconservative magazine Chronicles.
Expense claims made by Yenor show that in September 2021, he paid Gonzalez $2,500 from grant money held by BSU to give a guest lecture in commemoration of Constitution Day.
A recording of the speech was available on Yenor’s YouTube channel at the time of reporting, and in it Gonzalez castigates the “globalist American empire” and bemoans “a shifting in the locus of sovereignty away from the real nation, the flesh and blood people of America, and the soil on which they live and die and to award international bureaucracies in an abstract global village”.
Less than two months after his 2021 Constitution Day speech, on 7 November, Yenor and Patrick Alles were copied in on an email from Jackson Yenor, Yenor’s son, to Gonzalez offering him “$45,000/yr. to be the Executive Director of Action Idaho”.
Jackson Yenor continued: “We think that we will be able to raise enough seed money to finance this position for the next two years.” An attached document offering specifics of the position said that among other dutiez, Gonzalez would be required to “Establish the reputation of Action Idaho as a Christian nationalist, populist authority both locally and nationally”, and “Provide ongoing guidance, resources, and support to other leaders in the state regarding the best practices, methods, and principles of a Christian national populism.”
It’s unclear who, if anyone, Action Idaho appointed to the Executive Director role when Gonzalez declined the offer.
The Guardian contacted Gonzalez for comment on his engagement with Action Idaho but received no response.
Pitching Klingenstein
Regardless of Gonzalez’s eventual decision, Yenor immediately began using his name in funding discussions with wealthy donors, including Claremont Institute board chairman Thomas D Klingenstein, who lives in New York City.
The Guardian previously reported that Klingenstein, who has long been the Claremont Institute’s largest donor, had greatly enlarged his political donations to Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm cycle and beyond.
On 17 November 2021, Yenor emailed Klingenstein with a version of the initial written pitch which he had fleshed out with funding asks, writing: “See the attached, my attempt at an accurate budget. I will ring you up at a little after 11 MT (1 ET) tomorrow.”
The document specifies that a “$155K investment gets us a website, email lists, media director, and head writer for that year”.
The “goal” for using the investment would be to “translate anti-critical-race-theory (anti-CRT) movement and anti-lockdown movements into a durable political movement to radicalize political opinion in Idaho and shape the primaries to the advantage of conservatives”.
The document spells out that much of the cost is “personnel, including an Editor-in-Chief (we have offered the job to Pedro Gonzalez)”.
The document also said, however, that “weekly Articles by Scott Yenor on Idaho Politics and Education” would be provided “gratis”.
The document set out a funding mechanism which would funnel money through an innocuously-named non-profit: “Donations for this start up company will pass through a 501c3, Voices Empowering Communities, toward the LLC media company: Action Idaho.”
The document continues: “Action Idaho will be governed by a Board of Directors, including Scott Yenor (Meridian, ID) and Theo Wold (former Trump White House advisor) and Josh Turnbow (media producer), who will set the overall strategic objectives for each quarter.”
Josh Turnbow is a film director whose credits include American Standoff, a 2017 documentary about the Ammon Bundy-led occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Theo Wold served as deputy assistant to Donald Trump, and in 2023 was appointed as solicitor-general of Idaho by newly-elected attorney general, Raul Labrador. On 30 January 2024 the Claremont Institute announced Wold had been appointed as a director there.
There is no evidence a separate Action Idaho LLC was ever created. Nevertheless, the documents indicate that Yenor’s proposal met with some success.
The same day, Klingenstein forwarded Yenor’s proposal to a number of addressees, including Maine Republican political consultants Keith Herrick and Garrett Mason; Ben Judge, a conservative writer with bylines in Claremont publications; and Matthew Peterson, former vice-president of Education at The Claremont Institute and co-founder of rightwing venture fund New Founding, who is now editor-in-chief at conservative media outlet Blaze Media.
To those addressees Klingenstein wrote: “Take a look at this. It’s Scott Yenor’s proposal for conservative multimedia? product for Idaho. I agreed to fund part of this.”
In May 2022, Yenor reported back to Klingenstein, copying in Arthur Milikh, executive director of The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.
“A quick note on what we are doing with your donation,” Yenor began, and reported that the 501c3 had “put forward about two months of content, with the hopes of expanding the operation now that the primary is over and we have gotten our Trumpian position out there”.
The Guardian contacted Klingenstein for comment on his involvement with Action Idaho but received no response.
Abbott, the Idaho 97 organizer, said that: “For the amount of money Action Idaho apparently received, they really haven’t produced a lot.”