People’s Rights Network Has 66 Candidates Vying For Public Office

(PatriotWise.com) — Roughly 66 members of a far-right group founded by Ammon Bundy have sought to secure positions in the local Republican Party in Oregon in recent years.

Last week’s party elections in three counties in central Oregon included candidates running for Republican precinct committees who belong to Bundy’s People’s Rights Network.

Precinct committee members are responsible for electing the county-level executives for the state Republican Party.

The move appears to be an attempt to capture the local party infrastructure in Oregon on the county level, and in recent years, Ammon’s People’s Rights Network has been making some inroads.

Details of the precinct committee candidates come from hours of recorded conversations from an amateur radio network set up by members of Ammon’s group that were intercepted by an anonymous radio operator.

The recordings include conversations on planned protests against the COVID vaccines and the state’s pandemic mandates, as well as discussions about guns, armed interactions, and having a group member in the military “scrounge up” supplies for the People’s Rights Network.

The effort to elect network members to local party positions is similar to an effort promoted by podcaster Steve Bannon called the “precinct strategy.”

First pushed by Arizona Republican activist Dan Schultz following the 2020 presidential election, the precinct strategy seeks to install pro-Trump Republicans in local GOP precincts to ensure that the local Republican infrastructure is more MAGA-aligned.

According to the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), a watchdog that tracks far-right extremist groups in the US, the “precinct strategy” is a post-2020 far-right effort to “take over the local party apparatus” to change it “from the ground up.”

The IREHR has done extensive research into Ammon Bundy and his group, which it said has expanded into multiple US states with more than twenty thousand followers since it was founded in Oregon in 2020.

According to IREHR, some members have run for office in Oregon both as Republicans and Libertarians.