Idaho’s Incoming Solicitor General Theo Wold shows affinity for authoritarian views
If I were running a business right now, I would be very worried about the impending legal climate in Idaho.
Attorney General-elect Raúl Labrador recently announced his pick for solicitor general — a former Trump administration official named Theo Wold.
Wold appears to have taken on a few personae in his recent career.
In a 2020 interview on right-wing talk radio, Wold adopted the style of speech and talking points typical of the administration he worked for. He castigated the media, inveighed against “swamp creatures” ruling Washington, promised “haymakers” for Mexican cartels if his boss was re-elected, and generally acted as a carbon copy of any number of Trump surrogates.
But watch his speech two months ago, and he’s changed considerably. Gone is the Trumpy style of banter. Now with an odd, vaguely European diction, Wold expounds a vision for conservatives to use government power to take control of cultural institutions.
This includes an authoritarian agenda for businesses: using the power of government to force businesses to adopt, or at least conform with, conservative values.
“There are American principles, and we should not be sheepish in demanding that companies adhere to them, including by constructing a legal regime — whether on immigration or fetal research or any number of other issues — that forces them to,” he said.
Wold made these comments at the National Conservatism Conference in Miami, a gathering of reactionaries that has recently hosted such luminaries as Professor Scott Yenor of Boise State University, who thinks modern women are “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome,” and Viktor Orban, who has destroyed constitutional democracy in Hungary and replaced it with an authoritarian regime that justifies the oppression of minority groups by invoking Christian values.
Throughout his speech, Wold drops winks and nods to conspiracy theories like Agenda 21, a favorite obsession of the John Birch Society.
(Winking and nodding to conspiracy theories without explicitly endorsing them seems to be a pattern with Wold, as when he recently shared a post from Matt Walsh invoking the Great Replacement, a far-right conspiracy theory that there is a plan to replace white populations in Europe and America with immigrants. This theory has motivated numerous terrorist attacks in recent years.)
In his speech, Wold spun theories of his own, especially the claim that a leftist cabal — stationed mostly in investment banks, it seems — is planning to use ESG investment standards to force governments to impose Marxism.
To combat this supposed leftist plot, Wold articulated a vision of the prescribed role of business in American society. And it isn’t the traditional Republican or even tea party-era vision of radical free enterprise — the old critique of “crony capitalism” Wold emphatically rejects. Conservatives, he argues, have ceded the cultural battlefield by fighting for neutrality — that is, freedom to choose your own values. Instead, he argues, conservatives should use government power to take cultural power.
“This is fighting principle with principle,” he said. “This is understanding the war for what it is and meeting the left with a counterinsurgency of our own.”
Business is just one of many territories where the culture war will be fought, in Wold’s vision. And Wold argues that this is a fight that will have to be led by states.
“It is states that incorporate businesses,” he said. “States have the ability to set policy, and through the natural demographic sorting process that is already underway in this country, states have the greatest ability to espouse conservative principles.”
And in a couple of months, this man will be Idaho’s chief litigator.
This year, voters in the Republican primary rejected Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, who long operated the AG’s office as an eminently professional legal service. And general election voters rejected Tom Arkoosh, who promised to run the office much as Wasden had.
Instead, voters chose Labrador.
Elections have consequences. And the consequences are coming.