North Idaho Has A New Wingnut News Source, And It's A Doozy

They should let Sam Elliott out of that poster, for one.

Residents around northern Idaho last week found their mailboxes packed with the expected flyers for candidates in the area's city council, school board, and mayoral elections being held today, as well a another very special publication: a 16-page tabloid called The People's Pen, a rag whose bare-bones website describes it as "a printed publication empowering patriots." The cover illustration, by local arteest and sometimes political cartoonist Daniel Brannan, depicts a super-muscly patriot guy in camo body armor, carrying an AR-15 and a holstered handgun, as other patriots "cowboy-looking dude" and "lady with elaborate blond braids" also stand armed and ready, as a really buff German shepherd sits alertly, too. Also, for some reason, the painting features lens flares.

Civil War Or At Least Rezoning

The grouping is labeled "The Battle for Coeur D'Alene 2030 AD," and it's not entirely clear until you read the tabloid why that's the apparent date of the coming civil war, or at least a squirmish in it. Turns out there's a wingnut running for CDA City Council, Roger Garlock, who explains in an interview that he wants to put a stop to the nefarious actions of a group of city planning commissions, one of which is named "CDA 2030." Garland says CDA 2030 will implement the UN's Agenda 21 plan and force all the people of north Idaho to live under tyranny and stuff, by forcing changes to zoning laws and destroying all the city's single-family zoned neighborhoods via "infill zoning, high density zoning, and mixed use zoning."

If that sounds familiar, it's because it's pretty much what Donald Trump tried to scare suburban white ladies about, because it can only end in forcing good decent folk to live next door to Cory Booker, if you know what he means, and you do, because all the dogs in the neighborhood are howling. The one in that cover painting is just really well trained, probably, as it prepares to fight along with its owners to kill those who would undo the zoning laws that Make America Great.

Agenda 21 Coming To Make You Ride Bikes

Also, just in case anyone had forgotten what Agenda 21 is, there's a lengthy discussion of how it's all a fiendish plan to do away with individual freedom and to make all levels of government yield to the tyrannical dictates of the United Nations and force you to ride bicycles. It's among the most enduring conspiracy theories on the far Right, even though we're well into the 21st century and no blue-helmeted stormtroopers have shown up to crush liberty under their jackboots. In mere reality, Agenda 21 and a follow-up UN document, Agenda 2030, are simply a set of recommendations or aspirations aimed at promoting sustainable development, not a blueprint for the New World Order. Or so the globalists would have us believe. It's kind of difficult to steal America's sovereignty and impose one-world socialism when the UN has no actual power to do so.

Not that wingnuts like the good folks at People's Pen don't try to say it's on the way any day now. The unidentified author (it may all be copy-pasted from some rightwing site) explains that virtually every aspect of Agenda 21 has already been woven into US law, like for instance how the EPA and the Endangered Species Act can overrule people's freedom to develop their land as they wish, and the schools are full of communists pushing "equity" on our children, and the free market is also being destroyed by multinational corporations that will soon dictate that only "sustainable" products are allowed: "In time, there will be no choice in what products are available to buy."

Again, it's all bullshit, but in the wingnut mind, it's an easy shorthand for why your car has a computer, all the lumber mills shut down, and TV commercials feature mixed-race families and even show gays kissing on the mouth. We'll add that People's Pen doesn't air that grievance, remaining more euphemistic and complaining that the media is required to promote "sustainability, gender equality, diversity, social justice, collectivism, multiculturalism, and promoting government authority." For complaints about gay people kissing in commercials, you have to go to the Washington Post' s comment section.

Critical Race Theory Gonna Give Black Kids All The Good Stuff

The current issue also includes a nice dose of moral panic over the supposed scourge of "critical race theory" in local schools, and explains how the average school day works in the fallen American Schools of Today's America:

It's Monday morning; a child sits down at his classroom desk, six feet apart from his classmates who, like him, are all wearing masks. His teacher begins the day by going over the weekend news segments currently dominating the headlines, where she claims, as she always does, that "former president Donald J. Trump attempted to destroy our Democracy," and that his supporters, who are all "white supremacists," failed in their attempted coup at the United States capitol. This recap of the news is then followed by the daily discussion on race, sexuality, gender and "social equity." The bell rings and the students quietly shuffle on to their 'next class.

This is a brief glimpse into our children's classrooms. This dystopian description of the average child's day at school may sound like hyperbole, but it is in fact a reality for millions of children all across this nation.

Darn, they're on to what actually happens in all schools. You teachers who read Wonkette can surely back this up. We're told that CRT is nothing less than a "malicious attempt to re-write history, and often times completely fabricate current events in a way that inspires mistrust, confusion and contempt for groups and individuals based on their race." (This definitely means white people, especially conservatives, who are the greatest victims of everything.) The goal, you see, is radically transforming society with policies that "exclusively aid 'people of color.'"

That sounds about what you'd expect in Coeur d'Alene, where the population is a bit more than 93 percent white and .3 percent Black. The teachers are probably all communists, like they are throughout the US.

There's very little in this rant about CRT that we haven't seen on Fox News a few thousand times since Joe Biden was elected, apart from a very local-news gripe about the supposedly racist war on white people in Coeur d'Alene because the school district uses a program called "Portrait of a Graduate" from education nonprofit Batelle, which vows to do lots of education for life through education excellence buzzwords.

Ah, but People's Pen knows Batelle's real agenda, because of a photo on the website comparing the student of the past, who only learned subject skills, to the student who's prepared for the global economy, who has "21st-century skills" like "content mastery, communication, and collaboration."

Would you believe that People's Pen doesn't mention the buzzwords at all? Instead, it freaks out over the photo, because the white kid is the avatar of outdated education, and the 21st century globalist kid is, well, JUST LOOK AT WHAT THEY'RE DOING TO OUR SCHOOLS!

Take a second look at the image above. This is an image of your children's future "equity" based curriculum.

Gosh, maybe they simply mean the buzzwords. They don't say, so maybe that's all the warning could possibly mean.

There's a lot more griping about all the socialist indoctrination, plus a brief rant about allegedly "pornographic" books in school libraries, plus the mandatory fearmongering that your children are learning that there are "between 25 and 73" different genders, so please vote for all the school board members backed by the Kootenai County Republicans, including the sweaty anti-Semitic guy too. 

Be Like Us, Think For Yourself

There's also an editorial encouraging patriots to move beyond simply reacting to the evil plans of "the Adversary" to take away all our freedom, and to start planning the kind of America that patriots will build once The Adversary is finally defeated. Who exactly the Adversary is goes unnamed. Probably it's international communism, or Satan, or the local zoning commission, or The Jew. We bet it's The Jew:

Let's take a break from reacting to the Adversary's plans and prods to action, sit down and write down our own plans. We always react to the Adversary's plans, and it gets to catalog our behavior to perfect its plans upon plans upon plans. Nothing would mess up its plans more; than if we independently take the time to make and follow our own plans, and our neighbors' plans, and our friends plans. It's time to stop reacting and start acting on our own plans. The Adversary can have its think-tanks, conferences, and seminars, but even its super-computers would strain at calculating all our independent plans.

At least there's no call to resist the Mark of the Beast. Probably had to leave room for one of the two Ben Garrison cartoons.

Art Criticism For Wingnuts

The current edition closes with a screed by house arteest Daniel Brannan complaining that a new statue scheduled to go up in CDA looks exactly like the Biblical Tower of Babel. The statue, a "Monument of Peace and Unity," is a horrible thing because the artist isn't from Idaho (and has an Asian name, not that Brennan underlines that too emphatically), and because in the name of preaching "diversity" and "community," the piece actually celebrates the exact opposite of Biblical values,godless secular humanism, and is an "ode to one of the greatest evils in recorded history," because the Tower of Babel was definitely a real thing. See, we might have gone with the Holocaust as "one of the greatest evils in recorded history," but maybe the only reason it's relevant is because it's just like mask orders. Brannan even did his very own Garrison-esque cartoon to mock the blasphemy of the CDA Arts commission. Here's a photo of the design, and the cartoon:

Are you terrified yet? Ready to take up arms to fight the socialist overlords of Kootenai County? Well don't worry, we're sure another issue is on the way eventually.

[The People's Pen (PDF scan emailed to me) / Daily Beast / USA Today / KREM-TV ]

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