It’s time for Boise State to kick professor Yenor off Idaho taxpayer rolls | Opinion

It was bad enough when Boise State University political science professor Scott Yenor now famously said “some women” are “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.”

It was bad enough that he said universities shouldn’t make efforts to recruit more women to science fields — or medical fields or legal fields, or any fields really — but rather society should “inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children.”

That was two years ago, and Yenor has remained on the taxpayer dole at Boise State University. It’s bad enough that he’s tarnished the reputation of Boise State and the state of Idaho with his misogynistic views.

But it got more serious last month when Talking Points Memo and The Guardian revealed a trove of emails showing that Yenor had set up a secret boys club, called the Center for American Civic Renewal, for Christian men “who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm.”

How did they find out? Yenor was using his Boise State University email account, which is funded by your tax dollars and is public record.

Now we come to find out that Yenor — once again using our taxpayer dollars — set up Action Idaho, which bills itself as a news and media company but is neither. It’s really just a toxic Christian nationalist propaganda machine.

According to a story by The Guardian published Friday, Yenor is the one who established and ran Action Idaho, which spreads conspiracies, inflammatory right-wing extremist commentary on politics and attacks on the LGBTQ community.

The Action Idaho X account weighed in on the racial attack against the University of Utah women’s basketball team in Coeur d’Alene with: “No victims. No witnesses. No crime. What do you think really happened?”

The Guardian obtained these documents exposing Yenor and his plans for Action Idaho through public records requests because Yenor was using his publicly funded email account not only to set up his site, but to solicit donations and attempt to hire an executive director.

Perhaps the most egregious offense Yenor committed was funneling $2,500 in grant funds held by Boise State for a speaker’s fee to pay Pedro Gonzalez, the very man Yenor was attempting to woo to the executive director’s job, offering to pay him $45,000 a year.

Among the documents The Guardian obtained was a list of what Gonzalez’s duties would be: “Establish the reputation of Action Idaho as a Christian nationalist, populist authority both locally and nationally,” and “Provide ongoing guidance, resources, and support to other leaders in the state regarding the best practices, methods, and principles of a Christian national populism.”

Just so we’re all clear about whether we use “Christian nationalist” as a mislabel.

Yenor also used his Boise State email to solicit donations for Action Idaho from a right-wing donor.

The “goal” for his donation would be to “translate anti-critical-race-theory (anti-CRT) movement and anti-lockdown movements into a durable political movement to radicalize political opinion in Idaho and shape the primaries to the advantage of conservatives.”

Theo Wold, former solicitor general under Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador, was named as one of the board members of this self-described Christian nationalist organization.

Another email showed Yenor writing to the donor that Action Idaho had “put forward about two months of content, with the hopes of expanding the operation now that the primary is over and we have gotten our Trumpian position out there,” according to The Guardian.

We’ve seen enough, and we’ve been patient long enough.

It’s well past time to call on Boise State to fire Yenor.

This goes beyond mere ideology (although we could argue that Christian nationalism and anti-LGBTQ ideology are fireable offenses). Yenor’s actions cross the line into apparent misuse of taxpayer dollars.

If Scott Yenor wants to set up a repugnant, vile “Trumpian” propaganda machine to influence elections, he can go find some far-right private university to employ him, not a public, taxpayer-supported institution.

Or better yet, he can do it on his own time and dime, not with Idaho taxpayers footing the bill.

Fire Yenor now.

Statesman editorials are the unsigned opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members Mary Rohlfing and Patricia Nilsson.