Watch Out, Oregon, Ammon Bundy's Pals Are Now Stinking Up Your GOP
See what happens when you don't tidy?
In yet another indication that the Republican Party is being eaten by far-Right crazies — by which we mean further-Right crazies than the usual old crazies you used to find — The Guardian reports that in rural central Oregon, at least 66 members of the rightwing group founded by perennial antigovernment militant Ammon Bundy have filed to run for county-level roles in the Republican Party, hoping to take over the party organizations in three counties during party primaries held last Thursday.
In several cases, there were no opponents for the "precinct committee person” election, guaranteeing a win for members of the Bundy-founded People’s Rights Network, which sprung up in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington to oppose pandemic health tyranny measures like “please wear masks to protect others” and “vaccination will help you not die.” Among the duties of precinct committee members is electing county party leadership, which in turn influences the state party too.
The move is part of what appears to be a coordinated attempt to capture the local Republican party infrastructure, following a far-right strategy of “entryism” into more mainstream political bodies.
The Bundy pals are playing out a “precinct strategy” for taking over local-level GOP organizations, conceived by Arizona lawyer Dan Schultz and promoted by gross Trumpworld podcaster Steve Bannon, that seeks to organize far-Right crazies to run for low-level party jobs nobody pays a lot of attention to.
While Bundy’s People’s Rights group has chapters all over the country, the bunch in Oregon, “People’s Rights Oregon 5” (PRO5), is especially well-organized, according to Devin Burghart who studies and tracks far-right extremists for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR). Each regional Bundy subgroup has a number, you see, and “PRO5” was the fifth such group in Oregon. It apparently has some of the activest activists, too; Burghart notes that it switched sooner than most of the other Bundyites to getting involved in party politics. With about 1,400 members, PRO5 is “one of the most successful areas in terms of organization.”
In fact, in 2022, the Bundy Buddies managed to take the majority of precinct committee seats in Deschutes County, and then elected two of their members to run the committee, Scott Stuart as chair, and Connie Whelchel as vice-chair. Stuart sounds like an especially fine specimen of the Very Fine People rising in local GOP groups in the Trump era. In addition to pushing COVID and 2020 election conspiracies, he “showed up to a Fourth of July parade in Redmond, Oregon, in a Confederate uniform and waving a Confederate battle flag.”
The Guardian article includes a lot of fun details about how an Oregon amateur radio enthusiast infiltrated the People’s Rights Network’s private radio network, which they thought was super secret but wasn’t, and how that allowed the volunteer sleuth to identify them using open FCC records of radio licensees, making it possible to identify which Bundy Bund members were running for precinct committee person slots. It’s all very clever and you can read it here because the technical details don’t interest so much as the rightwing organizing. The radio guy is staying anonymous because a lot of those folks are connected with violent asshole militias.
But wow, a whole bunch of PRO5 Bundyites were on the ballot as precinct committee people (PCPs, which fits the rural Oregon vibe) in three counties:
[At] least 34 PRO5 members ran for PCP positions in Deschutes county; 12 ran in Crook county; and at least 20 in Jefferson county.
In precinct 2 of Jefferson county, for example, where 17 PCP slots are available, at least 12 of 18 candidates are identified as PRO5 members; in precinct 11, the only candidate is Paul W May, a People’s Rights member; and in precinct 21, all four candidates for four available slots are members.
Jefferson County has 49 precinct committee slots, so the 20 or 21 Bunditos guaranteed to take seats will likely become a “powerful voting bloc for central committee positions,” even if they fall short of an outright majority of seats.
Among the notable Bundy-affiliated weirdos is one BJ Soper, a militia guy from way back who’s drawn to armed standoffs like an insurrectionist is attracted to camouflage and tacticool gear. His own militia group, Pacific Patriots Network, even joined with Oath Keeper Oafs and “Three Percenters” to try to intimidate Bureau of Land Management folks in the 2015 “Sugar Pine Mine” fuss that managed to be resolved without any actual armed standing off or shooting. Now Soper’s a big wheel in Oregon’s Bundy organization, and one of the organizers of the effort to get fellow PRO5 members into county GOP seats.
None of this is actually illegal, of course — people can organize to run for office — but it seems just a tad concerning that a bloc of people who are very closely affiliated with antigovernment extremists are quietly organizing to take over the GOP from the ground up. They really don’t seem all that intent on fixing potholes and making sure the ambulance services have working equipment.
Guardian reporter Jason Wilson noted on Twitter that it may be hard to determine how the effort turned out, because “County-level reporting on results is patchy, and local GOP orgs didn't respond to my attempts to check on results.”
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[Guardian]
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