For 50 years, ‘Exponent II‘ has made the LDS Church squirm. It has no plans to stop.
Leah Sottile
Leah Sottile is a correspondent for High Country News. She is also a freelance journalist, the author of When the Moon Turns to Blood and the host of the podcasts Bundyville, Two Minutes Past Nine, Burn Wild and Hush. Subscribe to her newsletter The Truth Does Not Change According to Our Ability to Stomach It.
Posted inOctober 2024: Latino Vote
What the Bundy Bunkerville standoff foreshadowed
Ten years after the impasse between the Bundy family and the BLM, the doctrine of white oppression is widely embraced.
Posted inJune 2024: The Idea of Wilderness
Hate groups in western Washington echo the past
The bigotry displayed when white supremacists disrupted a Pride celebration in Centralia repeats a pattern that dates back to 1919.
Posted inAugust 1, 2023: In the Line of Fire
Oregon’s Greater Idaho movement echoes a long history of racism in the region
Instead of fixing Oregon, the Greater Idaho movement seeks to leave it. White supremacists are on board.
Posted inArticles
James Watt, Ted Kaczynski and power over lands
The legacies of the two recently departed men are intertwined.
Posted inMarch 1, 2023: Moving Parts
The 90-foot sentinel of Butte, Montana
What does a statue dedicated to mothers reveal about women’s rights?
Posted inJuly 1, 2021: An Urban Greenspace Revolution
How a trail in rural Oregon became a target of far-right extremism
To understand the state’s urban-rural divide, start by looking at Yamhill County’s proposed walking trail.
Posted inMarch 1, 2021: The Rough Road Ahead
Did James Plymell need to die?
How homelessness is criminalized in small cities and towns across the West.
Posted inAugust 1, 2020: Infectious Ideologies
As a plague sweeps the land, zealots see a gift from heaven
Extremist pastors are using the COVID-19 pandemic to push their conservative religious ideologies.
Posted inArticles
What really is antifa?
Effie Baum, an ‘everyday anti-fascist,’ talks about President Trump’s threat to designate the movement as a terrorist organization, and corrects the record.
Posted inJune 1, 2020: Dissent at a Distance
The Gadsden flag is a symbol. But whose?
How a Revolutionary War-era flag evolved into an anti-government symbol.
Posted inMarch 1, 2020: Predator (Mis)perceptions
The residual power of Ammon Bundy
What’s it like when the West’s most notorious anti-government figure comes to your town?
Posted inFebruary 18, 2019: Barriers to Entry
Racist policing plagues Portland’s nightclubs
A reckoning is coming for Oregon’s white supremacist past.
Posted inArticles
The deadly consequences of Christian ‘faith-healers’
A new film explores a fringe sect’s concept of freedom and the child deaths caused by it.
Posted inFebruary 19, 2018: Unfrozen North
Idaho protects the rights of faith healers. Should it?
A debate rages over the extent of religious freedom in the face of preventable deaths.
Posted inArticles
The Malheur Refuge trials are over, but the movement that led to them isn’t.
Four defendants receive guilty verdicts, ending a yearlong drama.