Even in red Idaho, woke media propaganda is alive and well

Ask any major political figure from twenty or thirty years ago about the need for legislation to keep men out of women’s bathrooms, and they would have thought you were crazy. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, or even Idaho’s own Sen. Frank Church (D) would surely have consigned such talk to the same realm as UFOs.

Yet the 21st century has been a strange time. In recent years, Idaho Republicans have had to pass legislation prohibiting doctors from using drugs and surgeries to “transition” children. They led the nation in passing a law protecting women’s sports from biologically male athletes. Now they have passed a bill that keeps men out of women’s restrooms.

This latest so-called “bathroom bill” — actually the second of its kind in Idaho law — came on the heels of a high-profile incident currently the subject of a lawsuit. A local high school allowed a gender-confused boy to use the girls’ restroom, only for a girl to walk in and hear him allegedly masturbating in one of the stalls. The girl and her parents had their objections brushed off — essentially treated by the school district as if they were the problem.

This is Idaho — certainly a more conservative place than the median American state. Yet if you read our local print news media, you’d think it was the Republican lawmakers who are the crazy ones.

Following a sit-in protest in Republican Gov. Brad Little’s office that resulted in nine arrests, the Idaho Capital Sun — the local affiliate of the overtly leftist States Newsroom organization — published a lengthy and very biased article full of quotes and interviews with the protesters, including some of those who were arrested.

The headline characterized House Bill 822, which prohibits teachers and counselors from socially transitioning children without parental consent, as “outing trans kids to parents,” entirely accepting the protesters’ premise that there are transgender schoolchildren who need protection from their bigoted and intolerant parents — and, further, that school bureaucrats both want and know what’s best for a child experiencing an uncomfortable period of life, whereas his or her parents presumptively do not.

That article went on to quote numerous protesters with no real attempt at balance. Although requests for comment to Little’s office did not receive a response, there are certainly dozens of statements from supporters of the new law that could have provided an alternative viewpoint. They could have found lawmakers to point out that parents are the primary stakeholders in raising their children, and to argue that it is an obvious red flag whenever adults tell children to keep secrets from their parents.

The Idaho Statesman, long seen as a left-wing institution in red Idaho, was not nearly as unbalanced in its coverage, but it did still describe the legislature as passing bills “targeting” or “aimed at LGBTQ+ people.” Again, the paper simply accepted at face value a premise that most people reject, especially in Idaho — that children can have a “gender identity” that is different from their biological sex.

The bigger question is why local print and television news media in Idaho would adopt the same tone you might expect in a progressive place like Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York City. Shouldn’t local news reflect the perspectives of local residents?

President Trump took nearly 67 percent of Idaho’s vote in 2024, compared to just over 31 percent for Kamala Harris. Yet if you read the local newspaper, turn on the local news, or go online to an Idaho Press Club-endorsed platform, you find the same cookie-cutter narratives as you would in the bluest of blue states.

You can blame media consolidation, the apparent attraction that journalism has to professional activists, some other cause or a combination of things. But the result matters more than you may realize. As author Theodore Dalrymple once observed, the more absurd the lies people are made to accept, the more their will to resist propaganda is eroded.

In other words, when normal Idahoans open their morning newspapers or turns on the evening news and see a narrative about brave activists standing up to supposed extremists like Little, they may begin to think their own views — that boys are boys and girls are girls — are in the minority, low-status or even disreputable, and that they should keep their views to themselves.

And that’s the whole point of the propaganda — to make them do so.

It is not crazy to believe that men should use the men’s restroom, and that teachers should not be transitioning children without their parents’ knowledge or consent. Idahoans — and Americans more broadly — deserve better than a media filled with progressive missionaries, preaching a woke gospel from the pages of our newspapers of record and the desks of our television news stations.

Brian Almon is chairman of Idaho’s District 14 Republican Party, a trustee of the Eagle Public Library Board, and editor of the Gem State Chronicle.

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