Where are the militia volunteers marching through downtown, lugging AK-47s while constantly on the lookout for the Chinese army?

Have you seen any kids carrying grenades or bazookas into seventh-grade classrooms?

No?

Thought not.

And yet, people who have never set foot in North Idaho seem to think we’ve all retreated to bunkers with our racist pals, waiting for war — or the Apocalypse, or collapse of the government, or “progressive traitors” trying to repeal the Second Amendment.

Consider an email I just received...

It came from a friend, not any idiot from the hills of Arkansas who has never been 30 miles from home — but a highly educated professional who has lived and worked in various parts of the United States.

“Why in the world would you move up there?” he wrote. “What are you doing surrounded by all those nut jobs?”

If you doubt that we have a very real image problem in North Idaho, file that email as evidence.

Now, if I asked this person to describe the “nut jobs” he believes are lurking on every street corner in the Coeur d’Alene area and the rest of the Idaho Panhandle, I suppose he would describe an insanely armed survivalist, some war junkie with a scrambled brain — probably a screaming racist who celebrates Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

THE BAD news is that my misinformed friend is a member of the huge majority — Americans who think Idaho (and our chunk of it, more specifically) is basically a haven for gun-crazy warriors looking to shoot someone for no particular reason, and/or a place of physical beauty but ugly mentality, where white Christians plot the demise of the country’s “mongrel masses.”

Good grief, how did we get this reputation — and why can’t anyone make it go away?

You can likely think of several quick responses, spawned by different eras and haunting Idaho for entirely different reasons.

Yet if you’ve never been here long enough to understand any context, and you boil some of these things in the same pot, they form a fairly unpleasant image.

Start with this: Two huge and respected publications (at least in the eyes of the so-called intellectual elite) have just published back-to-back examinations of what is called the American Redoubt.

What The Economist magazine and then The Washington Post concluded — with what most journalists would call little more than anecdotal evidence — was that there is an increasing migration of survivalists, preppers, collapsing-society worriers and others of a similar persuasion.

Mystery numbers that no one can prove, rising to the hundreds of thousands, were thrown around to describe people fleeing urban society to defend themselves in what the Post described as “a lightly populated territory that includes Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon.”

Somehow, that vast swath of land pretty much disappeared in the story, replaced by North Idaho in general and Coeur d’Alene in particular.

We became, for the sake of simplicity, ground zero for this giant influx of folks with plenty of ammo and a desire for privacy — not to mention a zeal to defend themselves.

Think how much open land a Redoubt seeker could find in the Inland Northwest. You could move an entire Central American nation into Wyoming and barely disturb the wildlife.

SO WHY North Idaho?

Why did the reporters set up camp in Coeur d’Alene, aside from plenty of creature comforts and a nice view of the lake?

The Post story conceded “thousands” of these Redoubters hoping to wait out a nuclear war (good luck with that, by the way) might actually be more like “hundreds.”

And reporter Kevin Sullivan was at least honest enough to point out that most residents of Kootenai County and surrounding areas have never even seen any survivalist neighbors.

A quote from the Post article:

"The locals regard the newest transplants as benign if odd," several said in interviews.

“The mainstream folks kind of roll their eyes,” said state Sen. Shawn Keough, a 20-year veteran Republican legislator who represents North Idaho.”

SO WE’VE established that this local Redoubt movement — what there is of it — seems fairly peaceful.

By definition, preppers want to be left alone to wait until, as one put it, they are confronted by: “The End of the World as We Know It.”

Fair enough.

They are buying pretty darn expensive property, paying taxes on it, keeping their artillery out of sight — so what’s the problem?

Ah, now we’re back to the image of North Idaho as the place where people with goofy beliefs go to mingle.

And THAT, whether we like it or not, is down to Richard Butler, neo-Nazis, Ruby Ridge and events that began four decades ago.

Butler and his hideous Aryan Nation caused all kinds of misery and mischief, openly preached hatred (Butler was author of that “mongrel masses” quote), and thumbed its nose at the federal government from its headquarters near Hayden Lake.

The ghastly thing is that all across America, to a lot of people, North Idaho STILL means racists and skinheads with hideous ideals and murderous plans.

So now that Redoubt folks have drifted into the Northwest, it’s just so doggone easy to connect dots that either don’t exist, or have nothing to do with one another.

BILL MORLIN, a journalist from Spokane who covered Butler and the Aryan Nation for more than 30 years (and now works with the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization dedicated to tracking hate groups), insists Butler’s shadow continues to darken the landscape of North Idaho — and especially the U.S. 95 corridor from Coeur d’Alene to Sandpoint.

Morlin has written in an SPLC publication that, despite some heroic efforts by human rights advocates in Coeur d’Alene to combat Butler’s vitriol, the state itself missed a chance to defend itself.

“Idaho chambers of commerce and the state’s business and civic leaders, for the most part, ducked the opportunity to publicly rebut these worries (that Idaho was unsafe), and they festered.

“Now, four decades after Butler moved to Idaho, it seems fair to say his noxious, racist religious beliefs and the people they attracted — beyond his mere residence in the state — left a mark on Idaho and the region that’s only now starting to fade.”

Morlin points out various human rights campaigns have changed the state dramatically for the better.

“But few outside the state,” he writes, “have heard about this progress in Idaho, and there’s evidence that the image problem persists.”

And now come the Redoubters, only adding to the image that Idaho is, well...

Weird.

I’ve got an email here from a very, very bright guy that seems to prove the point.

For everyone who loves this amazing place, it feels kind of sad.

•••

Steve Cameron is a special assignment reporter for The Press. Reach him at [email protected].