Last week, right wing activists in Idaho ramped up their campaign of intimidation (boldface mine):

One of the memes being passed around on right-wing social media this week shows a man loading a revolver with the text, “Can’t expect God to do all the work”—accompanied by a Facebook post reading: “Sunday, 9/11/2022, time to start at the Fred Meyer pride parade.” Another threatens that “Proud Boys Will be in attendance, 300+ and growing by the minute from multiple states, you Fucked Around FO!!!”

The annual Boise Pride Festival scheduled for this weekend has been a peaceful and joyous celebration of Idaho’s LGBTQ community for 33 years. But this year, it’s being targeted with hateful and threatening rhetoric—as well as an organized counterprotest—by the state’s growing crowd of right-wing extremists, many of whom only moved recently to the state.

Indeed, the same array of far-right activists—including the state’s Republican Party leadership, local “Patriot” groups and their Proud Boy cohorts, transplanted white nationalists, and extremist social media mavens with histories of targeting marginalized groups—who generated the threatening scenario in Coeur d’Alene in June that culminated in the mass arrest of 31 neofascist Patriot Front marchers are now following the same blueprint in targeting Boise Pride. This time around, that scenario is on steroids—to the point that organizers were forced to postpone one of the event activities, a kids’ drag show.

Even the political wing of the Proud Boys felt the need to get involved:

The far-right chair of the Idaho Republican Party, Dorothy Moon, issued a statement Wednesday demanding Pride sponsors drop out, saying companies who fund the festival are “financing the sexualization of our children and the perverse idea that children should engage in sexual performances with adult entertainers.”

All of this is just to remind us the fundamental political divide of our era, which Comrade Thers noted long ago:

Anyway, what we have here is a situation where a relatively small minority of Americans are claiming the right, ultimately backed up by their possession of weapons, to define the True Nature of American Freedom…

How this differs in any important philosophical regard from the position, of, say, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, I cannot say.

How it differs in any practical sense, well (McVeigh cough) who knows.

Despite the hyperventilations of tenured professors who have been embarrassed on Twitter, both sides don’t do this.