Relatively peaceful demonstrations have been occurring in Coeur d'Alene on a near-daily basis since as early as June 13. The organizers have been conducting marches across the city and “sit-ins for peace” in a town which, just two decades ago, had to deal with parades from the Aryan Nations, a White supremacist organization. On Juneteenth, locals even held a panel discussion with BLM members to talk about racism.
“I was just tired of staying silent when the Black community continues to struggle,” said Laurali Strong, an 18-year-old White woman who helped organize one of the demonstrations.
The demonstrations in Coeur d'Alene weren't without tensions, however. BLM-affiliated events have brought out as many as 300 counter-protesters carrying rifles, AR-15 style weapons and other firearms. Many of these counter-protesters have described themselves as members of local militia groups.
Jeff Stankiewicz, founder of the Idaho Light Foot Militia, said that he dispatched his members to the small city to protect it against the looting that has characterized BLM demonstrations in more urban areas.
“We're Americans and we believe in law and order,” said Kandy Breckenridge, owner of a boutique store in Coeur d'Alene. She guarded her store with an AR-15 during one of the demonstrations. She further stated that some of the marchers thanked her, saying that the presence of armed locals made them feel safer.
City officials have done nothing to stop the BLM demonstrations. Mayor Steve Widmyer, an independent, said that the most important thing was that the demonstrations were able to communicate their message in peace. (Related: BLM rioters in Olympia, Washington vandalized their mayor's home in an act of “domestic terrorism” ... but she still DEFENDS them.)
Demonstrations happening in dozens of small towns across the United States
This phenomenon is happening in other rural, majority White parts of the country as well.
In Cadillac, Michigan, a town of just 10,000 people and home to a branch of the neo-Nazi organization the National Socialist Movement, hundreds danced, prayed and protested for “racial justice.” Similar demonstrations have sprung up in Manheim, Pennsylvania, which has a small and active Ku Klux Klan presence, and in Mount Vernon, Ohio, which was a history of racial intolerance.
What's surprising about these demonstrations is how they are happening in the rural parts of the country that overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump in 2016.
In Yuma, Yuma County, Colorado, Tony Rayl, editor of the Yuma Pioneer said that the day he saw 60 of his neighbors holding signs and demonstrating silently was “the most bizarre day of his life.”
Listen to this episode of the Health Ranger Report, a podcast by Mike Adams, as he talks about all of the scary similarities between the supporters of Black Lives Matter and the supporters of Nazi Germany in 1937.
Growth of BLM in rural America dangerous for President Trump
Trump won all the counties the cities above are present in. In Wexford County, Michigan, he won with 65 percent of the vote; in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 56 percent; in Knox County, 66 percent; and in Yuma County, Colorado, he won with an overwhelming 80 percent of the vote.
These protests are growing in the four key battleground states that catapulted Trump to the White House – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. Among them, Portage and Mahoning counties in Ohio, Macomb County in Michigan and, perhaps most dramatically, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which voted for Obama in 2012.
According to Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, if President Trump is unable to hold onto the rural White working class voters that were able to give him a victory in the election, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania, it's possible that he might lose the election.
In 2016, Trump won in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by insanely narrow margins thanks in part to overwhelming Republican support from rural, working class and sometimes majority White counties.
Other experts have noted that this kind of activism in rural parts of the country is very unusual. Judy Muller, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, said that the death of George Floyd may have triggered a “major cultural change” in the nation.
Hundreds of demonstrations have occurred in over 200 small cities and towns across these four states, with a majority of them having populations under 20,000 and being located in the heart of Trump Country, or counties that either flipped to the GOP or voted Republican by a high margin.
This phenomenon shows just how far BLM's reach has taken them, and how beguiling their supposed message of “racial justice” is. If it isn't countered quickly, it can spell trouble for Trump's reelection campaign.
Betsy Coffia, Democratic commissioner for Grand Traverse County in northern Michigan, where protests have been occurring in the county seat of Traverse City, said that all it takes for the Democratic Party to take back Michigan is “a few extra votes here and there, we're talking, like, a handful of votes per county.”
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