ABSTRACT
The author born and raised in southern Idaho, he is still an accomplished marksman and woodsman. The Right in Idaho had a long history of political extremism. From the mid-1950s onward, anticommunist paranoia, embodied in the John Birch Society, was a dominant political force in southern Idaho. The Birch Society's influence even followed the author to northern Idaho, where the Latter-day Saints (LDS) influence was significantly smaller. When he was editor of the local paper in Sandpoint, Idaho, he remember spending one evening at the home of a local businessman. Idaho's image nationally has taken a real beating as a haven for racists, and for the most part this is a gross distortion of the reality. A large portion of the Patriots he met and interviewed, interestingly, started out as members of the John Birch Society, which acted as a launching pad to radicalism for many future extremists. There is no evidence that Idaho Christian patriots have less formal education.
