Idaho is a lovely state, with mountains and lakes and beautiful rolling hills and prairie. My parents eloped to Coeur d’Alene, because the age of consent was low there and 16-17 year old could get married without parental consent. I had friends who went to college at Washington State University specifically because it was right next to the Idaho border, where the drinking age was 18. WSU was a bit of a party school, although it also has a commendable recommendations as a good college. I’ve driven through the state many times — it’s on the route from Minnesota to Seattle, and also from Salt Lake City to Seattle.

It’s just too bad the state is full of losers, racists, and fascists.

They’ve also got a lot of good people, don’t get me wrong. There was a big Pride event planned for this weekend, so there are liberal, open-minded, interesting people living there. But it’s also home to swarms of redneck religious fanatics and white nationalists.

That Pride event could have been a disaster, when those two worlds collided. They would have, too, if the police hadn’t been tipped off that a mob of suspicious characters had plans to intentionally disrupt the event.

Police in Idaho arrested 31 people who had face coverings, white-supremacist insignia, shields and an “operations plan” to riot near an LGBTQ Pride event on Saturday afternoon. Police said they were affiliated with Patriot Front, a white-supremacist group whose founder was among those arrested.

Authorities received a tip about a “little army” loading into a U-Haul truck at a hotel Saturday afternoon, said Lee White, the police chief in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a city of about 50,000 near the border with Washington. Local and state law enforcement pulled over the truck about 10 minutes later, White said at a news conference.

Many of those arrested were wearing logos representing Patriot Front, which rebranded after one of its members plowed his car into a crowd of people protesting a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.

They had to change their name after one of their own committed murder. At least the new name doesn’t associate them with the whole of Idaho, just that lamentable part of the state packed with yahoos, the northern panhandle.

In a news release posted on the group’s website, the Panhandle Patriots encouraged the community to “take a stand” against the LGBTQ “agenda.” It also suggested without evidence that “extremist groups” were trying to hijack the event to provoke violence and said the group would change its event name to “North Idaho Day of Prayer” in response.

It must have been a rough day for the police, given that many of them would have sympathized with the wanna-be rioters. I’ll give them full credit for doing their duty, though, even though the Patriot Front idiots made it easy for them. Don’t you know you don’t assemble in public first, you send everyone in via separate routes with instructions to condense at a specific time and place later? See, if you neglect to pay attention to the Commies, who know a thing or two about infiltration and guerilla warfare, you’ll keep making these boneheaded mistakes.

I wonder what “agenda” they were opposing? Near as I can tell, the LGBTQ agenda is simply to be allowed to exist with all of the rights accorded to citizens. Also, they are the extremist group, and I have to wonder what group they were trying to scapegoat with that claim.

Oh well, all’s well that ends well. Here’s what the Panhandle Patriots got:

If the roles were reversed and it had been the gay folk who ended up zip-tied and kneeling, the fascist wanna-bes would have strolled down the line with a pistol and murdered a few innocent people. Since the people doing the arresting are still constrained by the rule of law, fortunately, they were instead charged with a misdemeanor and released on $300 bail.

They’ll be back.