Idaho students chant 'assassinate Obama' on school bus: Report David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: Wednesday November 12, 2008





Print This Email This Madison County, Idaho was once dubbed "the reddest place in America" by Salon, but that didn't make it any less shocking when elementary school children allegedly started chanting "assassinate Obama" on the school bus.



Matthew Whoolery told KIKD News he found out about the chanting from his second and third graders, who had no idea what the word "assassinate" meant.



"They just hadn't heard anything like this before," Whoolery stated. "I think the thing that struck us was just like, 'Where did they get the word and why would they put that word and that person together?'"



Whoolery, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University in Rexburg, is not an Obama supporter, but he was shocked that any public official would be threatened in that way. "I don't think that the majority of people in Rexburg have extreme ideas like that, but we were just surprised that it would go that far," Whoolery told KIKD.



The Madison County School District has sent out an email saying that students are to be told this sort of behavior is unacceptable.



According to an article which appeared in Salon in 2006, "You've heard of Jesusland, but Rexburg, Idaho, is something more. It's not just a small town in rural Eastern Idaho. It's a small town in rural Eastern Idaho completely dominated by a fast-growing Mormon college, Brigham Young University-Idaho."



"Through this conservative convergence," the article continues, "Rexburg and surrounding Madison County may well be the rosiest place in all of red America. Need numbers to prove it? In the 2004 presidential election, 93 percent of Madison County's votes went to George W. Bush or minor-party conservative candidates -- arguably the reddest result of any county in the entire country."



The population of Madison County is not only heavily Republican but also 97.7% white. One of Rexburg's lone Democrats, a professor at the university, told Salon that "she remembers the time when a group of classmates followed her third-grader home, shouting out 'baby-killer' all along the way. She took it up with the teacher, who didn't seem to mind."





The full KIDK story can be read here.



This video is from KIDK 2 News, broadcast Nov. 11, 2008.









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