Dear Friends: We at the Gem State Patriot are a not-for-profit service for the people of Idaho. We have been serving Idahoans for nine years and we seldom, if ever, ask for donations. Unfortunately, like so many other conservative organizations, we suffer from time to time from a lack of recognition of the services we […]
This episode opens with a bone to pick: a federal plan the discussion says would reprocess fuel rods at the INL and accept a third of the nation’s radioactive waste, atop the Snake River Aquifer. The episode recounts the 1950–1983 era of liquefied waste injected into the ground that reached the aquifer, invokes Three Mile […]
Proponents of abortion, and of Proposition 1 here in Idaho, want to steer the conversation toward vague concepts of healthcare, freedom, choice, and rare edge cases while avoiding the obvious: abortion is the deliberate destruction of a human life. Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg of a deep sickness in modern culture. […]
I have lived in Idaho my entire life. I’d tell you about its unmatched beauty, its tight-knit communities and the peace and safety we’re blessed to have, but that would encourage more people to move here and we have more than enough people moving in as it is. In Fact, the only thing that prevents […]
Like flock cameras, data centers are the latest issue for opposition. Among many issues, their massive use of water resources, excessive need for electricity, and of course, their purpose of storing and analyzing data that citizens are being robbed of are all at the top of the list for opposition. But these centers are behind […]
For years Meta assured parents that Instagram was safe for their children while its own internal records documented what the platform was doing to them. This week the company agreed to pay $17.1 billion and to rebuild how Facebook and Instagram work for children. Idaho will receive between $89.2 million and $127.7 million of that, […]
Let me start with the fact that the federal government controls 61.9% of Idaho’s land or about 32.8 of its 52.9 million acres. Unfortunately, as the players in Washington change so do the objectives for our land. We can all remember Lava Ridge where the BLM gave final approval in Dec. 2024 to a 104,000 […]
Healthcare has been a constant government obsession for decades, and over the years has continued to take gradual control over it. What is befuddling is the motive behind doing so. It is unclear just exactly what the fascination is that motivates the government to stick its nose into a person’s private health matters. Not being […]
Recently, the Department of the Interior announced Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) funding for 2025, with Idaho receiving $43 million. Although modest in its funding level, PILT is a critically important program that rural communities across the Gem State depend on. It was designed to be an ‘offset’ revenue mechanism to replace the absence […]
BOISE, ID — Four years ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that the U.S. Constitution says nothing about abortion and returned the thorny issue of how to regulate abortion back to the states, where it had rested until the Roe decision transferred that authority to the Courts. Following Dobbs, Idaho chose to protect the […]
Dear Friends, The grizzly bear is one of the most emblematic animals of the Mountain West, and it is a perfect example of the federal government continuously overreaching into state affairs and management. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been a frequent vehicle bringing federal bureaucracy into states, particularly in the West. Spotted owls, wolves, […]
In just a few short months, Idaho voters will be asked if they want to legalize abortion in the Gem State. In spite of all the rhetoric you’ve heard about Proposition 1—how it’s about reproductive freedom, about choice, about saving women’s lives—in the end, it comes down to abortion: the willing destruction of an unborn […]
I have often written about how our education system in Idaho is doing and how it is affecting our children. Recently there has been a lot of conversations about the new interest in DSA and socialism on the news and in what direction our country may be moving. While civics is a course taught in […]