He Brought Pictures of Dead Babies and a Bullhorn to a Farmers Market.

Long before Scott Herndon went to Boise, Sandpoint knew him as the man with the bullhorn and the dead-baby signs. As a leader of the Abolitionist Society of North Idaho, a chapter of the fringe group Abolish Human Abortion, Herndon spent the better part of a decade planting himself wherever families gathered: the Saturday Farmers' Market, the Walmart parking lot, and the public sidewalks outside Sandpoint schools. In March 2014, Sandpoint High School's principal had to send a letter home warning parents that Herndon's group was coming with graphic fliers and signs, and asking students not to engage. A former middle-school administrator later recalled spending an afternoon fielding calls from parents whose 12- and 13-year-olds had walked out of school past poster-sized images of dismembered fetuses. By the summer of 2016, the Farmers' Market president told the Sandpoint Reader that Herndon's graphic signs and amplified preaching were driving away customers and cutting into vendors' sales. The confrontations he provoked sometimes ended in shoving. In September 2016, the Sandpoint City Council passed a new noise ordinance restricting loudspeakers in public spaces, a law written in direct response to complaints about the market protests. Herndon's own wife showed up to argue against it.

None of this was an accident, and Herndon never pretended otherwise. "If people don't recognize this as a gross injustice, I have to force it on people," he told the Reader in 2016. "When you're trying to turn a culture around 180 degrees, it's going to necessarily be disruptive." He brought his own children along to hold the signs. His YouTube channel is a years-long archive of street sermons, one-on-one confrontations caught on GoPro, and a video of his kids singing a song calling abortion "child sacrifice" and "a Holocaust disguised." In 2018, he filed a ballot initiative to make performing or obtaining an abortion first-degree murder in Idaho. As a senator, he tried to strip the rape and incest exceptions from the state's ban and, when asked about a 13-year-old raped by a family member, called her pregnancy an "opportunity." This is who Scott Herndon has always been. Not a conservative who happens to oppose abortion, but a man who decided your Saturday morning at the market, and your kid's walk home from school, were his to disrupt. He said so himself.