North Idaho has beaten the far-right before. Now renegade Republicans are seeking to root it out of their own party, with a crucial test in Tuesday’s primary.
By Hannah Allam, The Washington PostPrecinct candidates and volunteers prepare to campaign in Post Falls, Idaho. They are part of a group of self-described"traditional" Republicans that is seeking to oust incumbent officials who they feel have become too extreme.
Now, however, North Idaho residents are confronting that history head-on as a new movement builds against far-right extremism. “I want a full sweep,” said Christa Hazel, 50, a Republican organizer who has been doxed and harassed since resigning from the party’s central committee in 2017 The hard-liners dismiss their critics as closet liberals or “RINOs,” Republicans in name only. They argue that the labeling of committee members as racists or extremists is the last resort of elites whose politics no longer match the sensibilities of North Idaho.
The Aryan Nations showed up in the area in 1974 and stayed until the group crumbled in 2000 amid legal challenges and infighting. The leader, Richard Butler, built a heavily guarded 20-acre compound that served as a national hub for white supremacists. Butler acolytes formed splinter groups that waged a deadly terror campaign with the goal of triggering a race war.
The problem, as she and her allies see it, is that traditional conservatism has become entangled with darker ideologies often held by right-wing “political refugees” who have fled California and other western states and moved here in search of racial and religious homogeneity.The election was days away, and Hazel said she was excited thinking about all the voters she had met who confided that they were also uncomfortable with the stances of the Republican committee.
At the breakaway faction’s women’s luncheon this month, an emcee asked how many attendees were running for office. After receiving blowback for attending the violent Unite the Right march in Charlottesville in 2017, Reilly moved to North Idaho. In 2021, he ran for a school board seat, and was endorsed by the GOP committee. Regan was among the local Republican leaders who donated to his campaign, according to Idaho records. More recently, the Idaho Freedom Foundation hired Reilly for communications work.Reilly did not respond to messages seeking comment.
an association of veteran public officials and business leaders that has been the main engine of mobilization for Republicans who don’t fall in line with the hard right. It featured a an illustration of a gun-toting man: Randy Weaver, patriarch of a family at the center of a 1992 standoff with federal agents at nearby Ruby Ridge, a deadly episode that galvanized the anti-government movement.for more traditional conservatives.
On a Tuesday evening this month, dozens of voters filed into the high school in Sandpoint, a lakeside town 60 miles from the Canadian border with breathtaking mountain vistas. Herndon, among the highest-rated politicians in the Freedom Foundation rankings, said warnings about a resurgence of hate in North Idaho sound alarmist. He rejects the “extremist” label.
Franck said she has a precancerous condition and was being treated by a specialist who was among the best she had seen in her life. That doctor left this year.
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