©Scott Sines
If you don’t think these alt-right groups are dangerous think again. If you don’t think hate speech leads to hateful actions you’re wrong.
People in the Inland Northwest were no strangers to hate speech and White Supremacy groups in the late 1980’s and early 90’s. The Aryan Nations headquarters was only about 40 miles from the newspaper office of The Spokesman-Review.
Bill Morlin was our expert on hate groups and had been following Randy Weaver for a while. Weaver was an avowed racist and federal fugitive on the run from a gun charge. There is evidence that pressure from the newspaper’s reporting compelled federal marshals to conduct a surveillance operation on the Weaver cabin in August 1992.
The marshals ran into Weaver, his young son Sam, Striker the dog and family friend Kevin Harris on trails near the cabin. Gunfire erupted and when the 10-day standoff at Ruby Ridge finally ended Weaver’s wife Vicki, his young son Sam, Sam’s dog Striker and federal marshal Bill Degan were dead. Weaver and Harris were badly wounded.
It’s all well documented. No need for me to try and rewrite it. The wikipedia description is pretty good. The definitive book is Every Knee Shall Bow written by Jess Walter who was a reporter on the scene. Now he is an award-winning author. The book was made into a five-part network mini-series.
Search youtube for Siege at Ruby Ridge part 1,2,3, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrNGkDlbdF4
http://www.goodreads.com/bo…/show/61207.Every_Knee_Shall_Bow
Weaver surrendered but the newspaper didn’t. We had pictures of some of the angriest protesters at the roadblock. We found most of them and paired angry pictures of them at the roadblock with peaceful family portraits and told their stories and described their beliefs to our readership.
It opened eyes and our Editor Chris Peck launched us on a project called the Ragged Edge. He described it as the line people crossed when they stopped believing Thomas Jefferson and started believing Richard Butler the head of the Aryan Nations.
We invited some of our biggest critics and white separatists to write for the section. Their words revealed something about the place where we lived that we didn’t want to believe was true. One of our photojournalists was granted access to militia training in a remote location in North Idaho on the promise that we let them review the film. They were worried about identifying landmarks. We were worried because the pictures were so shocking.
We launched a newspaper effort called “In it together, to great to hate” and sponsored a symposium that drew nearly 1,000 people to North Idaho College. We printed posters for home and car windows with the logo and delivered them with the morning newspaper.
The hate groups responded by bombing a Planned Parenthood clinic and robbing a nearby bank. The newspaper responded with a full report including scary surveillance photos of the armed masked men.
The report included information on a cash reward for information offered by the bank.
The bombers responded by throwing a bomb on the loading dock of one of our offices including a note threatening the newspaper and demanding that we rescind the reward. A father and his young sons narrowly escaped injury. The newspaper responded by publishing the threatening note on page one, with a declaration that the reward not only stood it had been increased, including a donation from the newspaper.
The bombers were eventually caught. We didn’t need police mugshots to publish in the newspaper. We already had pictures of them from The Ragged Edge project. They were the ones who were in our building looking at film of the militia maneuvers.
So please don’t dismiss the talk coming from the alt-righters as ‘locker room talk and overheated campaign rhetoric’ because for some it’s a call to action.
Here is a selection of pictures and newspages from The Spokesman-Review’s coverage of the standoff, and the subsequent rise of hate groups in the region.
