On the evening of September 15, 1986, Bill Wassmuth had just come home from a run. He was standing in his living room in Coeur d’Alene when a pipe bomb packed with shrapnel detonated against the back of his house. The blast shredded the siding, blew out the windows, and launched metal fragments through a neighbor’s garage door. 

Wassmuth was the pastor of St. Pius X Catholic Church, a priest in a small Idaho city. His offense was speaking out. He had used his voice — from the pulpit, in the newspaper, at community meetings — to challenge the Aryan Nations, which had established a compound near Hayden Lake and was working to make North Idaho inhospitable to anyone who didn’t look like them. The bombing was a violent version of an argument that recurs throughout history: this person should stop talking.  

 Wassmuth didn’t stop. He was already helping lead the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. This coalition of Republicans, Democrats, business owners, clergy, and law enforcement helped turn the community decisively against the Aryan Nations. Their efforts didn’t succeed because everyone shared the same politics. They succeeded because they shared a commitment to the principle that public life belongs to everyone.  

 The pipe bomb is an extreme case. More often, the desire to silence an inconvenient voice arrives gradually and dressed in official language.  

 In Idaho, that official language has an address. The attorney general is the most powerful lawyer in the state. The office carries the authority to investigate, to issue legal opinions that shape how laws are understood, and to decide which fights the state’s full legal weight will be thrown behind. When that office is used not to protect the public but to discourage participation, the office has been turned against the people it exists to serve. Consider a letter from the Attorney General’s office to the Twin Falls school board chairman, concluding that he violated state law after encouraging district staff to vote in an upcoming election. Not for any candidate. Just to show up. Or a published column by the attorney general arguing that a former Idaho Supreme Court chief justice should no longer be listened to. These are not bombings. But they rest on the same premise: some people’s participation in public life is a problem to be managed rather than a right to be protected.   

 When the state discourages participation, it doesn’t just silence individuals. It narrows the conversation for everyone.  

 At the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, many of the words carved in stone come from people who understood how quickly the space for dissent can narrow. The Memorial exists not as a monument to a distant past but as a reminder that the civic habits of democracy require active protection in every generation. Ronald Reagan understood this when he warned that freedom “is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” That warning belongs to no political party. It belongs to all of us. 

Idaho was built by people who showed up — to school board meetings, to community forums, to polling places — and expected their government to answer them, not the reverse. The strength of that tradition rests on a principle so simple it shouldn’t need defending: the answer to speech we disagree with is always more speech. Never silence. Never the state’s most powerful lawyer suggesting that participation itself is the problem.  

 No one in power gets to decide whose voice counts. The right to speak belongs to us all.  

Jess Westhoff serves as the Education Director for the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights.
Christina Bruce-Bennion is the Executive Director for the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights.