Greater Idaho responds to Oregon Governor’s outdoor mask mandate
In response to Governor Brown’s outdoor mask mandate, Citizens for Greater Idaho issued a press release saying “Idaho’s state lockdown lasted a few weeks while the population was panicked and little was known about COVID; Oregon’s state lockdown is 17 months old. We call on patriots to help us move the Oregon/Idaho border to save eastern and southern Oregon from tyranny. We commend sheriffs in these areas who refuse to cooperate with such mandates, such as Union County Sheriff Cody Bowen.”
Klamath County Greater Idaho petition campaign successful
Move Oregon’s Border announced that it has collected more than enough signatures to force a “Greater Idaho” ballot initiative onto a Klamath County ballot next year. Although only 1696 signatures are required to qualify for the ballot in Klamath County, Move Oregon’s Border volunteers, including Allen Headley, collected 2796 signatures thanks to a groundswell of support at their county fair booth, ropings, and restaurants.
Move Oregon’s Border said that it would not submit the signatures until completing a successful fundraising campaign. “We’d like to be on the ballot in May instead of November 2022, but we need the partnership of industry and major donors so that we can let voters know the benefits of moving the Oregon/Idaho border. We are asking our fans to connect us with potential major donors so that we can deliver a convincing win in Douglas and Klamath counties. We want to spend $25k in Klamath County and at least $40k in Douglas County,” said Mike McCarter, the president of Move Oregon’s Border. The group had already announced that it has enough signatures for the Douglas County ballot.
Move Oregon’s Border is also making progress in Josephine County, where 916 of 2429 signatures required have been collected. According to greateridaho.org, the group is farther behind in Curry, Morrow, and Umatilla counties, but the deadlines for each county are in Spring 2022.
“We have a real shot at convincing the Oregon Legislature to let our counties go because getting rid of a group of counties that have the same average income as Idaho would be a great boost to the Oregon state budget, and getting rid of our legislative seats would reduce gridlock in the Oregon Legislature,” Mike McCarter said, “Recent OVBC polling showed that in Oregon there is no majority opposed or in favor of it, because Oregonians are still undecided.”
Citizens for Greater Idaho calls out incompetence of compilers of Big Tech anti-extremism database
Citizens for Greater Idaho ridiculed the authors of a paper by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). GIFCT is compiling a database of political content to be banned or throttled by internet companies, in partnership with national governments and every major social media corporation. The report, published by the GIFCT, proposes that the database classify various “separatist” political movements on a spectrum from level 0 to level 3. Citizens for Greater Idaho hasn’t been told whether the Greater Idaho movement is actually in the GIFCT extremism database, or simply categorized as “extremist” in a chart for the paper for illustrative purposes.
Citizens for Greater Idaho said, in a press release at greateridaho.org:
The incompetence or bias of the authors of that paper is evident in that the paper only gave two examples of level 1 “fringe separatist groups” (the Greater Idaho movement and the Texas Nationalist Movement), and one example of a level 0 “partisan separatist” group (the Scottish National Party or SNP), but the Greater Idaho movement and the Texas Nationalist Movement are mainstream, majoritarian groups that are less fringe than the SNP. Why did Greater Idaho get labelled “extremist,” when it is even more mainstream than the SNP?
GIFCT labels level 1 groups “non-violent extremism,” but the fact that majorities of voters vote in favor of the Greater Idaho movement proves that the movement fails to meet GIFCT’s own definition of extremism, which is: “a deviation from something that is commonly considered (more) ‘ordinary,’ ‘mainstream,’ or ‘normal.’” The movement to move the Oregon / Idaho border averaged 62% support in elections in May 2021, with five out of five counties voting in favor of the idea. Contrast this with the Scottish Nationalist Party, which has never won the the support of a majority of Scotland’s voters. The Texas Nationalist Movement is working to get Texas independence on the ballot in May for the first time in history, but polling sometimes shows Texans in favor of Texas independence. Therefore the only reason to call these groups “fringe” in comparison to the Scottish Nationalist Party is political bias or ignorance, as the SNP is a left-leaning party, whereas the other two groups are non-partisan groups whose volunteers are, so far, mostly conservatives and libertarians.
Every new idea begins as extremist, but the Greater Idaho idea already has majority support. The tendency of the ruling class to mark popular ideas as “extremist” reveals that the ruling class does not really value “democracy,” but rather the rule of an elite technocracy credentialed based on conformity to ruling class preferences.
We question the idea of shadow banning merely because of “extremism.” Extremism is not illegal. Our pilgrim fathers and our founding fathers were extremists compared to the British consensus. The use of a deliberately vague term such as this allows a group to import its biases into the term for the purposes of punishing the group. Using this term can tar a group by association with much worse groups. This becomes a way of “othering” a group that is disfavored by one political party. Big Tech needs to determine whether it wants the market share of conservatives or whether it will force conservatives to use upstart social media competitors.
GIFCT’s website offers no phone number, and emails and tweets to the group and related groups over the course of 19 days have yielded no replies. How can social media users be accountable to a group that has no appeal process and no options for dialogue? The Greater Idaho movement only knew it might be included in the database because it was chosen to be included in a chart in a paper, but almost every other movement won’t know whether it is included or not. Why is a whole movement included, rather than specific offending memes? GIFCT seems to be a way for governments to impose censorship through corporations, which they couldn’t legally impose directly.
Citizens for Greater Idaho is not a separatist group. Oregon and Idaho are already separated by a state line. The Greater Idaho movement merely seeks to move a line, not create a new one. This would unite eastern and southern Oregon with Idaho counties under the same state government. Eastern and southern Oregon don’t want to join northwestern Oregon’s plans for cultural revolutions and a transformation in the economy from working the land to office work. It is not eastern and southern Oregon that are voting to depart the old Oregon, but rather northwestern Oregon voters, who repeatedly vote for a radical new vision for civilization and impose it on counties that want no part of it.
Citizens for Greater Idaho is alarmed that this “extremism” label will increase the throttling of its ability to reach voters and engage in electoral campaigns. We call for a recategorization of the the movement in GIFCT’s database.
Citizens for Greater Idaho recommends that the authors of this paper be replaced with competent researchers who are willing to put more than a couple minutes of research into groups before putting groups on a list to be shadow banned. The paper was written by an Australian team. We believe that only US citizens should be categorizing US groups for the GIFCT, because of their local knowledge and their understanding of the uniqueness of the American creed. We believe the United States doesn’t want its political discourse to be colonized by foreign committees under the pressure of foreign governments. The name of the paper is “Dynamic Matrix of Extremisms and Terrorism (DMET): A Continuum Approach Towards Identifying Different Degrees of Extremisms,” by Marten Risius, Kevin M. Blasiak, Susilo Wibisono, Rita Jabri-Markwell, and Winnifred Louis, published July 2021.
Big Tech has a role in politics that has never received the consent of the people. An earlier version of the Greater Idaho movement disbanded in 2016 when Facebook deleted its Facebook group. A new Facebook group, Move Oregon’s Border, was created in 2019, which grew to 12,500 members by 2021, but was again permanently unpublished by Facebook. Fortunately, the new movement had collected five thousand email addresses in anticipation of Facebook’s action, and was able to keep winning elections through other social media. In April, Citizens for Greater Idaho created a new Facebook page and group. Conservative movements are seriously hindered by this interference. We recommend that you sign up for email updates from Citizens for Greater Idaho at greateridaho.org and follow us on Gab or MeWe.
Crook County commissioners promise to let voters vote on Greater Idaho
On August 4, the governing body of Crook County Oregon, the Crook County Court, considered letting Crook County voters vote on the issue of Greater Idaho at the November 2021 special election. There was standing room only in the County Annex, which holds 50 people, and some were forced to wait outside. Judge Crawford, with Commissioner Jerry Brummer nodding in emphatic approval, vowed to place a question regarding Greater Idaho on the ballot if the Attorney General of Oregon re-issues an opinion stating that, pursuant to state law ORS 203.035, Oregon counties have the authority to place non-binding advisory questions on a ballot. Commissioner Brian Barney appeared unsympathetic.
At least six Oregon counties and cities have placed advisory questions on ballots since 2018, according to a press release at greateridaho.org, but only one was regarding the Greater Idaho concept. The group’s press release says “waiting for the re-issue of a standing opinion is totally unnecessary but we thank the Court for their promise.”
Currently, Citizens for Greater Idaho is requesting county and city governments place advisory questions on the ballot in: Coos County, Crook County, Wheeler County, Gilliam County, Wallowa County, and the cities of La Pine, Redmond, Maupin, Rogue River, Gold Hill, Central Point, Eagle Point, and Shady Cove.