Commissioner Anderson Defines Party’s Furthest Right Boundary
Elected two years ago as a Republican, Stevens County Commissioner J.D. Anderson defines his party’s furthest right boundary.
The ardent constitutionalist isn’t active in Republican politics, but is still a major factor.
When the party had to nominate a successor to Republican Commissioner Allan Mack last spring, Anderson was the standard by which candidates were measured. Would one of them allow Anderson to do more than talk about defying federal or state laws?
The same question came up at a candidates forum last month.
Although Anderson has said he doesn’t belong to any militia groups, he appeared with Militia of Montana founder John Trochmann in an Aug. 10 militia meeting in Wenatchee. Other speakers included Jack McLamb, founder of Police Against the New World Order and a longtime associate of survivalist Bo Gritz, and Lake Chelan Citizens Militia commander Dan Black.
“You’re being used, and you’ll be the first to go (under the New World Order),” Anderson told a Wenatchee World reporter at the conference. “They’ll kill you first because you know where all the bodies are. The militia won’t kill you. We love you.”
In July, Anderson was listed as a speaker at an Idaho Citizens Awareness Network picnic in Coeur d’Alene. The organization is an umbrella for tax protesters and other anti-government groups.
And in January, Anderson acknowledged sending a letter to 86 Colville businesses and more than 100 individuals accusing the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of stealing police files and kidnapping a woman. The unsupported charges were intended to bolster his point that the Colville Statesman-Examiner newspaper is biased against people of his persuasion.
Anderson noted that the Statesman-Examiner is owned indirectly by an international chain that has hundreds of newspapers. Among them, Anderson said, are “the London-based Daily Telegraph and the Israel-based Jerusalem Post.”
Afterward, he said his letter was not anti-Semitic.
When a woman publicly criticized his Wenatchee remarks, Anderson said in a letter to the Chewelah Independent newspaper that “basing information and understanding on subjects, events and people as written by the news media is not a responsible thing to do.”
, DataTimes