“Who the Fuck Are These Men?”
How extremists reconquered Idaho—and how some locals are fighting back.
Michael Edison Hayden
By nightfall, people all over America had seen the footage. It was barely a month into President Donald Trump’s second term, and a team of black-clad private security officers was violently dragging a woman out of a Republican town hall meeting in Idaho. One agent mumbled that things would get “a hundred times better” if she would cooperate.
“That’s what they say to rape victims, you fucking piece of shit!” she shouted back.
The woman, a ginger-haired 41-year-old named Teresa Borrenpohl, had worn beige pumps to the event. Her left shoe popped off as the agents hauled her away.
Megan Kunz, a friend of Borrenpohl’s wearing a “Destroy American Fascism” hoodie, tried to help. But an older man in a blue flannel blocked Kunz’s path, towering over her like a self-deputized sheriff.
“You’re not my dad!” Kunz snapped.
“And you aren’t my wife!” he replied.
The town hall, hosted at a high school by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee (KCRCC), had been contentious from the start. Borrenpohl and others interrupted speakers; conservative attendees shouted back. Emcee Ed Bejarana, an audiobook voice actor with a folksy baritone, called Borrenpohl a “little girl” and went on an extended diatribe about the “crazy” audience members who were “just popping off with stupid remarks.”
“Is this a town hall or a lecture?” Borrenpohl repeatedly shouted at Bejarana.
That’s when Bob Norris, the county sheriff, ordered Borrenpohl to leave, before directing a security team to remove her. “Who the fuck are these men?” Borrenpohl said as the guards grabbed her. In the struggle, she kicked and bit one of them, according to court documents. People lurched from their seats and shouted. Gregg Johnson, who’d never met Borrenpohl before, yelled, “Hey, leave her alone!” at the men in black. Within minutes, Norris and a security guard had detained Johnson, zip-tying his hands behind his back.
It took Kunz about 10 minutes to locate Borrenpohl in the lobby and return the missing shoe. When she finally found her, Kunz started to cry.
Footage of the chaotic town hall zipped across phone screens, a flashing red warning of the Trumpian illiberalism that unfolded in the year that followed. In places like Kootenai County, where white Christian Republicans hold a supermajority, local politics is mutating into something undeniably extreme. North Idaho offers a particularly stark example. A decade after Trump took over the GOP, the Coeur d’Alene region finds itself beset by a vexing mix of far-right activists and white nationalists who are trying to drive moderate voices out of political life.
North Idaho came up a lot during my time at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the storied civil rights watchdog where I worked from 2018 through 2023. The region seemed to have an uncanny ability to attract bigots from elsewhere in the country. But Leigh McOmber, a 57-year-old resident I met last summer at Coeur d’Alene’s annual Pride celebration, recalled a time when the area felt far more tolerant.
“When I hear people who have just moved here in the last few years talk about Idaho values being these horrific, anti-LGBTQ, racist, awful opinions, this is not what Idaho…was,” she said, reflecting on the decades she’s lived in the region. “It was never like that.”
By the 1970s, though, neo-Nazis were arriving.
Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations, moved from California to Hayden Lake—a few miles outside Coeur d’Alene—around 1973 and built a compound there. In the 1980s, a related terrorist group called The Order committed bombings, robberies, and other violent attacks throughout the American West, including the murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg in Denver.
Then in 1991, an Aryan Nations associate named Randy Weaver failed to appear in court on a firearms charge. US marshals began surveilling his property the following year, and when they approached his residence in the Ruby Ridge area of North Idaho, they came into conflict with the Weaver family, ultimately killing Weaver’s teenage son and Weaver’s wife, who was carrying the couple’s baby in her arms when she was shot. A friend of Weaver’s shot and killed a marshal in the chaos; a jury acquitted him of murder.
The Ruby Ridge disaster galvanized the radical right in America, especially in North Idaho. Longtime residents of Coeur d’Alene remember seeing Aryan Nations supporters standing on street corners, waving swastika flags. Members marched down Sherman Avenue, the city’s main drag.
In 1998, Aryan Nations security personnel fired on a family driving near their compound, mistakenly believing themselves to be under attack. The SPLC sued on behalf of the family, resulting in a judgment of more than $6 million. The suit decimated the Aryan Nations, and for a time, residents felt like things had calmed down—until Trump’s first term.
“Things got weird in Coeur d’Alene after the 2016 election,” Kunz told me. “But then after the Covid-19 pandemic, shit went completely off the rails.”
In 2019, the KCRCC—the same entity that would go on to sponsor the shambolic February 2025 town hall—passed a resolution urging the federal government to reinstate the travel privileges of Martin Sellner, an Austrian “Identitarian” whose movement aims to “preserve and secure a future for ethno-cultural identity in Europe.” Sellner had sought to enter the country to marry Brittany Pettibone, a local social media influencer who in 2016 helped mainstream the far-right Pizzagate conspiracy theory about a nonexistent pedophile dungeon below a Washington, DC, pizzeria. It’s unclear why the US government had revoked Sellner’s travel authorization, though the move came following revelations that he’d exchanged emails with Brenton Tarrant the year before Tarrant murdered 51 people in two New Zealand mosques. (There is no evidence Sellner was involved in Tarrant’s crimes.)
Around that time, a new slew of right-wing radicals moved to the area. There’s Lana Lokteff and Henrik Palmgren of Red Ice, a “Pro-European/Pro-White” outlet that publishes video episodes with titles like “The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon” and “AI Zionism: No One Understands How Bad This Is.” Owen Benjamin—a fringe comedian who has made comments defending Adolf Hitler, like saying the führer merely wanted to “clean [Germany] of the parasites”—tried to build a compound in the region, which locals feared might lead to another Ruby Ridge. Matt Colligan, a participant in the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, moved to the area from Massachusetts.
And unlike the neo-Nazi terrorists of decades past, some of the new extremists quickly began making inroads in the local GOP power structure. A Republican group called the North Idaho Pachyderm Club, which is promoted on the official Kootenai County GOP website, has invited far-right activists Vincent James Foxx and Dave Reilly to speak in recent years. Reilly, who has a history of antisemitic commentary, even secured a KCRCC endorsement for his failed 2021 school board campaign.
More moderate Republicans became targets. Jennifer Drake, who owns an English-style pub called the Crown and Thistle, says others in her party first lashed out at her in 2020 for participating in a charity drive to provide sanitary pads to needy women. The event was sponsored by a chapter of the Satanic Temple, which promotes secularism and satirizes conservative Christians while also playing with the idea of devil worship in a tongue-in-cheek way. Drake allowed the group to put a “Menstruatin’ with Satan” donation bin outside her restroom. Once word reached Facebook, some religious conservatives took the idea of devil worship at face value, and conspiracy theories spread. Extremists have harassed Drake ever since.
In June 2020, armed individuals patrolled the city’s streets in an event called “Gun d’Alene”—part of the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement. Two years after that, dozens of masked members of Patriot Front, a neofascist collective, were caught packed in a U-Haul, preparing to storm a Pride parade. Police arrested 31 men associated with Patriot Front from at least 10 states, and the images of handcuffed figures in matching blue shirts and khakis tore across the internet. (Several members were convicted, while some of the cases were dismissed.) Coeur d’Alene’s police chief told reporters that the department subsequently received more than 100 threatening phone calls from as far away as Norway.
Then in March 2024, the University of Utah women’s basketball team, which was staying in Coeur d’Alene during the NCAA tournament, said they’d been subjected to racial harassment so frightening that they fled town. Law enforcement concluded that “five credible eyewitness statements confirmed that someone shouted the N-word” at a member of the group as they walked to dinner and that two hours later, a white 18-year-old was recorded yelling, “I hate [N-word]s, but I’ll fuck your butt!”
It was “incredibly upsetting for all of us,” Utah coach Lynne Roberts told the Associated Press.
Local prosecutor Ryan Hunter expressed outrage at the “abhorrently racist and misogynistic” behavior but said there was insufficient evidence that any crime had been committed. In the court of public opinion, though, the verdict was damning. The story made headlines everywhere from the Salt Lake Tribune to ESPN. Even the governor felt compelled to weigh in. “There is no place for racism, hate, or bigotry in the great State of Idaho,” tweeted Republican Brad Little. “We condemn bullies who seek to harass and silence others.”
Then came the town hall.
For politically engaged residents, the detainment of Teresa Borrenpohl was both a local story about familiar gadflies and an example of how menacing Idaho politics had become.
Everyone knew the fiery Borrenpohl. She’d run three long-shot campaigns for the Idaho legislature as a Democrat and spent much of the previous few years opposing efforts by the KCRCC to dominate the board of North Idaho College, where she once worked.
The NIC fights ranged from disputes over governance to culture war issues like pandemic masking and abortion. At one point, the board’s KCRCC-backed chair wrote that he was “battling the NIC ‘deep state’” and lamented that the “liberal progressives are quite deeply entrenched” at the college, according to reports and email records released by NIC. The situation got so bad in 2023 that the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities threatened to revoke NIC’s accreditation, alleging that “ongoing actions” by the community college’s board “continue to place the institution at risk for viability.”
“What happened at North Idaho College prefigured what is happening to higher education throughout the country,” said Kate Bitz, an organizer with the Western States Center, a civil rights group. “The far right figured out here that it’s a game changer in terms of who is in charge of a community or a community’s future.”
Things came to a head in the fall of 2024, when moderate board candidates backed by the “Save NIC” campaign faced off against a KCRCC slate running under a “Make NIC Great Again” banner. “Liberal factions, real estate interests, and unelected officials are conspiring to seize our college and convert it into a hub for their woke agenda,” the KCRCC warned voters. “But we can thwart their plans!”
On Election Day, even as Trump captured 75 percent of the vote in Kootenai County, Save NIC candidates swept to victory, taking control of the board. But the bad blood persisted. The KCRCC arranged for a private security company, Lear Asset Management, to patrol the February 2025 town hall, citing both a bomb threat that had been made against one of the participants and the fact that Borrenpohl and her Save NIC compatriots were encouraging allies to attend the event. KCRCC Chair Brent Regan later told investigators that Lear’s leadership was “known to the committee” and offered to do the work for free.
At the start of the town hall, Regan issued a stern warning to the audience: “If there’s any disturbances or people can’t maintain decorum, we have security here, and you’ll be escorted out of the building.” If that message was intended for Borrenpohl, police records later indicated that she arrived too late to hear it. (Borrenpohl’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.)
In the investigation that followed, the city’s cops also pointed out that Borrenpohl and her allies were far from alone in disrupting the event. Detective Dan Haley counted 13 “comments/cheers/jeers” from audience members opposing the KCRCC speakers and 11 from KCRCC supporters. But the Coeur d’Alene police weren’t the ones calling the shots during the meeting. That was Bob Norris, the Kootenai County sheriff. An elected Republican who’s waged a high-profile campaign against “harmful” materials in public libraries, Norris has a contentious relationship with some locals.
Borrenpohl can be heard warning Norris not to forcibly remove her—“Bob, you know this is a bad idea”—at which point he backed away and, in the words of state investigators, “pointed her out to two” security guards. The Lear guards then “physically removed Borrenpohl from the event” as Norris “attempted to oversee the matter.” Civil claims filed by Gregg Johnson and Borrenpohl assert that the Lear security guards failed to adequately identify themselves, an allegation that Lear and the KCRCC dispute. Local law enforcement initially cited Borrenpohl for battery, but city prosecutors dropped the charge soon after. Instead, they charged Lear owner Paul Trouette and three of his employees with battery and false imprisonment, both misdemeanors.
The Lear agents pleaded not guilty, arguing that they were acting under lawful orders from Norris. The sheriff “can command any citizen to assist him in the accomplishment of his duties,” the KCRCC’s Regan argued on Newsmax last April. “And that should be a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Idaho’s attorney general declined to charge Norris, concluding that he’d acted properly in response to the disruptions, and prosecutors eventually dropped the charges against all of Trouette’s employees. But in December, Trouette himself was found guilty of battery against Johnson and another town hall attendee and of two additional misdemeanors. He was acquitted on four other counts, including false imprisonment and the allegations related to Borrenpohl.
“Justice was done,” Ryan Hunter, the local prosecutor, told reporters.
Over a pint at the Crown and Thistle, Christa Hazel recounted how Idaho Republican politics has changed in recent years. “I remember a time when the local Republican Party celebrated when a Democrat would leave their affiliation and join the Republican Party,” she said. “But now…Chairman Brent Regan…will accuse other Republicans of being fake or Democrats in disguise.” (“I am not accusing anyone of anything,” Regan countered. “I am simply pointing out when some people who claim to be Republicans act like Democrats.”)
Hazel moved to Coeur d’Alene from Alabama in 1984, when she was still a girl. She watched as her FBI agent father spent the 1990s investigating the Aryan Nations and The Order. She was hardly a liberal. As student body president at North Idaho College in 1994, she backed an effort to block the formation of a Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alliance. (NIC’s board overruled the student senate and recognized the club.) Hazel told me recently that she didn’t support the club on grounds that they were “asking for special treatment” under the college’s rules, but she added that she was, and remains, supportive of the LGBTQ community.
Hazel first encountered Regan at a tea party gathering in 2010, and their political paths have crossed many times since. In 2012, Regan was appointed to the local school board, becoming part of an aggressive right-wing majority. He sparked an outcry when, during a discussion about gun control, he recounted a conversation he claimed to have had with his wife: “I said, ‘They can’t figure out what an assault weapon is—it’s just black and it looks scary.’ And she looks at me and says, ‘Well, so is Obama.’” He apologized, but four months later, Hazel—running as a “common sense conservative”—defeated him in his bid for a full term.
In 2016, Regan bested a more moderate candidate to become chair of the KCRCC, the powerful committee that runs the county Republican Party. Hazel resigned as a member of the committee the following year, telling the Coeur d’Alene Press that it had been “taken over by far-right conservatives.”
Since then, the mustachioed Regan has cast an intimidating shadow over local GOP politics. Dan Gookin, a Republican city council member who was running an upstart campaign for mayor when I spoke with him last year, called Regan a “tyrant” and a “dictator.”
Regan chairs the influential Idaho Freedom Foundation, an activist organization that indexes the votes of local legislators. Republican lawmakers have complained that the group is pushing them further to the right by rating them negatively if they fail to pursue a hardline agenda—like an effort to block a state sex-ed program on grounds that it promotes “porn literacy.”
His rhetoric can still be extreme. “Kamala Harris is not a Natural Born Citizen. Kamala Harris does not meet the requirements to be President,” Regan tweeted in 2024. “It’s just common sense.”
Hazel, meanwhile, has devoted herself to putting the party on a more mainstream path. She co-founded the Save NIC campaign and joined the moderate North Idaho Republicans group that challenges Regan’s faction. She and Gookin are particularly bothered by the local GOP’s embrace of figures like Dave Reilly.
Reilly is a relative newcomer to North Idaho. He was living in northeastern Pennsylvania in 2017 when he traveled to Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally. When local news outlets reported on his presence at the deadly event, he moved away from the Keystone State—and sued for defamation. He claimed he was not a “participant” in the rally and was simply there to film it as a member of the media, but judges threw out nearly all his claims.
In a 2019 essay, Reilly criticized the Charlottesville violence, which he said had fulfilled “the wishes” of political elites who sought to turn the white nationalist rioters into villains. An ardent Catholic, Reilly argued that “white identity” was a false concept promoted by “Jewish sociologists” and that youth should embrace conservative religious identity instead. “Although it’s true that the Catholic Church has been infiltrated by homosexuals, Jews, and bad leadership,” he wrote, “the Catholic faith is too old and too deeply internalized and too minutely codified to be co-opted by the evil intentions of social engineers.”
He arrived in Kootenai County around 2020, and his online commentary continued. “There’s a ‘Center for Jewish Ethics’?” he tweeted in March 2021. “Is that where you go to learn how to shoot Palestinian kids, run child sex-trafficking operations, blackmail governments to get your way, oppress the poor and defraud laborers of a just wage?”
He often took aim at other figures on the right. In November 2020, he complained on Twitter that a prominent GOP influencer “wants Republicans to cater to ‘dreamers’, homosexuals and J*ws, while COMPLETELY NEGLECTING Christian, white, working-class Americans.” And he blasted conservative activist Chris Rufo for being “an employee of Paul Singer; a radical Jewish Zionist, a Vulture Capitalist, and manager of Elliot Management.” When he gave a talk on critical race theory to the North Idaho Pachyderm Club in the summer of 2021, Reilly pulled out a copy of The Culture of Critique—which promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories—and praised it.
None of that stopped the KCRCC from endorsing Reilly for a seat on the school board of Post Falls, a 45,000-person city in Kootenai County, in 2021. “We have all seen the headlines about transgender child grooming, the implementation of Critical Race Theory, and the adoption of a race-based ‘equity framework’ in Coeur d’Alene,” he wrote on a candidate questionnaire published on the KCRCC’s website. Reilly pledged to keep “divisive, destructive and, frankly, delusional” curricula out of Post Falls’ schools.
Regan has repeatedly said the KCRCC wasn’t aware of Reilly’s online rhetoric when it endorsed him. “Years ago there was an individual that the committee recommended for office who we later [found] out had made some controversial posts on social media,” Regan told me in an email. “After that we initiated our Vetting Committee to better investigate potential candidates. He is not a member or affiliated with the KCRCC.”
But when media outlets exposed Reilly’s antisemitism a month before the election, the KCRCC didn’t pull its endorsement, instead calling him “highly rated.” And Regan personally defended his character. “Have you bothered to meet Dave Reilly and spend a few moments talking to him before you formed your opinion?” Regan wrote on Facebook in response to a complaint about the endorsement. “If you bothered to get all the source information, as I have, you would find Dave Reilly’s true story inspirational.”
Reilly lost, but he hasn’t disappeared from local politics—including his apparent connections to a far-right website called the Idaho Tribune. As my SPLC colleagues and I pointed out in 2022, the outlet often promotes Reilly’s favored causes and denigrates people like Borrenpohl, Jennifer Drake, and Dan Gookin. When I asked Reilly whether he ran the Idaho Tribune, he texted back: “I’m behind *everything* in North Idaho, depending on who you talk to.”
In June 2022, Reilly sent a tweet alerting Libs of TikTok—the online handle of anti-LGBTQ influencer Chaya Raichik—to Coeur d’Alene’s upcoming Pride in the Park event. Four days later, the Idaho Tribune breathlessly warned that the event would feature a “drag queen show for Idaho children” and that members of the Satanic Temple were planning to attend. “They are grooming your children,” the website announced.
Raichik heard the call. “We are living in hell,” she wrote, before tweeting an image of a Pride in the Park flyer with the date, time, and location. Four days after that, the Patriot Front members rolled up in a U-Haul.
In 2023, InvestigateWest reported that the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the activist group Regan chairs, contracted with Reilly to help shape its messaging. (According to the IFF, the part-time gig lasted less than three months.) In October 2024, Reilly again appeared at the Pachyderm Club, giving what he described as a talk on “the hidden connections between the liberal” NIC candidates and the Biden Justice Department. The Pachyderm Club did not respond to a request for comment.
The Pachyderms have also hosted Vincent James Foxx, whose website has called for the “regulation of morality” in response to queer people and has raised alarms about Jewish influence in Hollywood. A California transplant, Foxx has been described by ProPublica as the onetime “unofficial propagandist” of the Rise Above Movement, which, according to federal prosecutors, held itself out to be a white supremacist, “combat-ready, militant” group. On a 2022 livestream, Foxx boasted about attending one of the contentious NIC board meetings and hurling slurs.
“I was able to call a couple of guys ‘faggot,’” he bragged. “This one kid, I guess he was like a college student…He walks up to me, he hands me this flyer…[It says] ‘Look at how racist these guys are, look how dangerous these [KCRCC-backed] board members are.’ And I don’t say anything, I just take the flyer from him…[Later], he’s like, ‘Oh wow, you’re, like, a literal Nazi, aren’t you?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you’re, like, a literal faggot, aren’t you?’”
Hazel said it’s all part of a disturbing pattern: “When you bring antisemites into the tent, what happens?” she asked. “If you point this out, Regan…will attack the messenger for being woke.”
Regan told me that his critics are wrong. “You won’t find any direct evidence supporting those claims,” he wrote. “What you will find is a resolution passed by the full KCRCC committee by unanimous vote rejecting supremacy in all forms. You will find I offered a reward for the arrest and conviction of the person(s) responsible for the reported racist hate incident involving the Utah Women’s Basketball Team.”
Bitz, of the Western States Center, found that response notable.
“It’s interesting to see Regan on his back foot like this,” she said. “Because looking at the KCRCC, this is one of the local Republican Party organs in our country that is most comfortable rubbing shoulders” with extremists.
Once sustained by lumber and mining, Coeur d’Alene now runs on tourism. It’s a captivating place: Imagine the woodsy landscape of Twin Peaks with a shimmering, picturesque lake at its center.
Blair Williams, who owns the Art Spirit Gallery, told me that a quiet but growing group of people in Coeur d’Alene have become fed up with being seen as a hub of hate. They see it as an existential threat not only to their values, but also their livelihoods.
That’s why, after Patriot Front stormed Pride in the Park, concerned residents convened quietly to vent about what was happening to their city. “We didn’t want others to be aware so that we wouldn’t be targeted because we know darn well this is the community we live in,” she said.
In March 2025, Williams sent an email to then-Mayor Woody McEvers warning that all of this was bad for business. She alerted him that Get Lit!—a literature festival sponsored by Eastern Washington University—had opted against housing authors in Coeur d’Alene because of its reputation for political extremism. A spokesperson from Get Lit! confirmed this, noting that an Indigenous writer had grown concerned after seeing video of men dragging Borrenpohl out of the town hall.
McEvers never replied to her. Williams handed me a different statement she’d written that read like a cry for help: “Without addressing the roots of racial hostility and fostering genuine inclusivity, Coeur d’Alene risks further economic decline, continued cultural isolation, and a tarnished reputation that no amount of natural beauty or community pride can easily erase.”
In the meantime, locals are doing what they can to persevere. At the 2025 Pride in the Park, Sarah Lynch told me that the LGBTQ community refuses to let Reilly, Libs of TikTok, or Patriot Front win. Lynch, a former Air Force pilot who now serves as executive director of the North Idaho Pride Alliance, pointed out that the event broke attendance records.
The next day, a Sunday, I visited Candlelight Christian Fellowship, a church housed in an old cineplex that locals told me was another source of political extremism. Inside, the stage was flanked by two enormous flags, one American and one Israeli. After some robust singing, a speaker announced a group of four people for whom we should pray. The last one was Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. They projected his face onto a big screen.
Then Pastor Paul Van Noy, balding and with a salt-and-pepper beard, emerged wearing a loose-fitting tropical shirt. He criticized Pride in the Park, which he claimed he’d just happened to stumble upon while taking a Saturday stroll with his wife. “By the way, I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t want anyone else to go,” he said. “Don’t let them count the numbers. Coeur d’Alene Press said there were 3,000 people. That is a total fabrication.”
“We love the gay community just like we love drunkards, just like we love drug addicts,” Van Noy explained. “But we do not love what harms people.” He added that “the only reason I’m bringing this up” was that “the people that are there, who are being advocated for, are also mutilating children.” (Gender surgeries on transgender youth are extremely rare, and in 2023, Idaho entirely outlawed gender-affirming medical care for minors.)
At the end of the service, a man handed out sacks of locally grown potatoes.
That night, I met Dave Reilly at Whispers, an outdoor lounge at the Coeur d’Alene Resort. I walked through a winding lobby with a giant fish tank as speakers played Heart’s 1985 power ballad “These Dreams.” The room gave way to a sprawling patio overlooking Coeur d’Alene Lake. There was a giant stone fireplace.
Reilly was wearing a crucifix the size of a softball around his neck and a keffiyeh, the scarf associated with the Palestinian freedom movement. An outspoken defender of white nationalist Nick Fuentes, Reilly is also vehemently anti-Israel. The genocide in Gaza has opened new opportunities for him to try to win converts to his cause.
Reilly was accompanied by Rebecca Hargraves, a striking woman with blond hair and excellent posture who co-hosted a podcast with him. Hargraves moved to Idaho from Seattle “because I was sick of having to deal with minorities,” she wrote on X in 2024. She has urged “white people that don’t feel safe” to join her in the state and “fortify the hell out of it” and has called for a return to “voluntary” segregation.
Also with them was Casey Whalen, a citizen journalist who occasionally writes for the Idaho Tribune. And there was a nervous, skinny man who wore a red Bass Pro Shops ballcap and didn’t want to be identified. He seemed to subscribe to Reilly’s worldview, though Reilly told me that he was Jewish.
“There was an exodus in California in the early ’70s, another one in the early ’80s, another one because of Rodney King in the early ’90s, and then because of Covid,” Reilly said, sipping his beer. “So, I mean, this is the fifth or sixth wave of mass migration to Idaho.”
I asked whether he meant a migration of white nationalists. The man in the red hat corrected me to say they preferred to use the word “separatists.”
Reilly denied that he wanted to build a white ethnostate and insisted his focus was on his Catholicism. Richard Spencer—who gained infamy for his own participation in Unite the Right—later told me that he thought Reilly, while sincere in his faith, had shifted to emphasizing Catholic themes because the ethnostate conversation “hit a brick wall” with the average American.
Reilly said Idaho is already “great the way that it is” and noted that celebrities like the Kardashians, Mark Wahlberg, and Justin Bieber have vacationed here.
“But why do they come up here?” Hargraves interjected.
“Because it’s nice,” Reilly answered.
“Why is it nice?” Hargraves continued. “It’s, what, 90 percent white? Okay, let’s go to anywhere in the world that’s 89 percent Black. And you can tell me it’s going to be some sort of vacation destination?”
The conversation at one point turned to the Candlelight church. Van Noy is a self-professed Christian Zionist, which puts him directly at odds with Reilly. “Why do they have such a boner for you?” Hargraves asked Reilly. “I don’t get it.”
“They tanked my school board campaign in 2021,” Reilly said. Van Noy later told me over email that while he personally didn’t support Reilly, it was a “local Jewish man (who is a believer in Jesus as Messiah—and often attends Candlelight)” who “led the charge” to defeat him; the church itself didn’t get involved.
More recently, Reilly has been pointing to allegations made by Van Noy’s adult daughter, who stated publicly in November that Van Noy had failed to protect her from past sexual abuse by others. Van Noy maintains he did nothing wrong and told me that there are “many false accusations circulating.” Candlelight, he said, “has a zero-tolerance, one strike policy, for all sexual crimes.”
As we sat on the Whispers patio, Reilly talked about how he’d started out as an artist and became addicted to opioids, then got clean through the church. After Unite the Right, he lived in Kansas, where he immersed himself in religion before moving to North Idaho.
“A lot of my life, I just view as—‘this is my art,’” Reilly said. “And if my art is Nazism, well, then fine, whatever. You can call it whatever you want.”
Reilly laughed for a moment and then asked me not to print that part.
“Strike that,” he said.
The next day, I met Russell Mann, a Republican in his mid-40s who runs the local Bombastic Brewing, over coffee. He said Reilly and his crew bring back bad memories of Idaho’s extremist past, and he blames the KCRCC and the Republican Party for helping undo the progress that had been made since Aryan Nations was driven out. “The difference between then and now is that political power is behind this,” Mann told me.
“I would say that anywhere I go, or anyone I talk to, and I mention Idaho, they instantly think, ‘That’s a racist place’ or ‘That’s a terrible place,’” he said. “I thought 20 years ago that by now, I wouldn’t have to explain anytime I say I’m from Idaho that I’m not racist. But it came back.”
Mann noted that Reilly had warmly greeted Frank DeSilva during an online chat that took place on the night of the 2025 Pride in the Park. DeSilva served more than a decade in prison for his affiliation with The Order and once admitted in court that he had organized a 1983 cross burning. When I asked Reilly about this, he told me that DeSilva had “requested to speak” and that if he had known DeSilva “was so long-winded,” he would have passed.
In late June, news broke of a man near Coeur d’Alene murdering two firefighters with a shotgun and severely wounding another before taking his own life. The killer, 20-year-old Wess Roley, who’d aspired to be a firefighter himself, had baited the victims into a death trap by starting a blaze. The crime didn’t seem politically motivated, but it sparked another flurry of social media posts about Kootenai County and messages from pretty much everyone I’d been interviewing—even Reilly.
“I get people that hate cops, but firefighters?” he texted me.
In November, Gookin, the moderate Republican, overcame intense KCRCC opposition to win Coeur d’Alene’s mayoral election by a few hundred votes. His victory came on a night in which ideologically diverse candidates, ranging from center-right to socialist, defeated MAGA-backed politicians across the country. And just last week, North Idaho College received official confirmation that it had been removed from probation and would keep its accreditation.
One theme I heard repeatedly about Coeur d’Alene was that it is a bellwether for radicalization. Meaning that if you see something like authoritarians shutting down speech at a town hall there—or maybe even a maniac ambushing firefighters—you should take it seriously, because it could be coming to your city next.
Perhaps that’s even true for the modest successes of folks like Borrenpohl, Hazel, and Gookin as they look to reclaim power from the extremist right. As Kate Bitz of the Western States Center said, “If it happens in North Idaho now, no one should be surprised when it happens nationally a few years later.”
