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.