The “whiteopia” of North Idaho has become one of the most desirable places in the West for conservatives to relocate. So why is the local GOP tearing itself apart — and who’s responsible?
Brent Regan doesn’t work the room during the monthly meetings of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, because he doesn’t need to: People come to him, as if before a ruler, or a king. He has the confidence of a man who's rarely challenged but always has the upper hand when he is; he’s used to others agreeing that he’s the smartest person in the room. Over email — the only way he'll speak to reporters, after a history, he says, of being misquoted and misunderstood — the community college graduate and Mensa member wields his intellect combatively, like a tenured professor dressing down an unprepared freshman.
He frequently "rejects the premise" of a question and invokes everything from "Cartesian relativism" and "Greco-Roman philosophy" to the Magna Carta when asked to describe his political beliefs. "Your conclusions about conservatism remind me of the Indian fable about the blind men trying to describe an elephant," he told me.
It's this didactic tendency that has helped keep Regan, a man described as both the sugar daddy of the hard right and the godfather of North Idaho politics, from winning elected office. His only attempt — a run for school board trustee, back in 2014 — fell flat. But Regan doesn't want for power. According to those who’ve observed him closely, the loss, one of the few in a gilded life, taught him a lesson: He wasn’t a politician. He was a puppet master.
Under Regan, the KCRCC has tacked further and further to the right, creating a political platform unrecognizable to Republicans of the past. Over the last three months, they’ve issued resolutions condemning Idaho’s two conservative senators for voting to sanction Russia (the bill passed the Senate 98–2); suggested that GOP gubernatorial candidate Tommy Ahlquist is not, in fact, a Republican (like President Trump, Ahlquist, a Boise businessman, has donated to both Democrats and Republicans); and called for the repeal of the local urban renewal law, dubbing it the “economic equivalent of fascism” (it’s not). In short, they’ve redefined what it means to be an Idaho Republican, working to clean house, on both a local and state level, of those who oppose them.
The effects of the population boom are most visible on US Highway 95, which runs through Coeur d’Alene and straight north through the county. Constipated by endless traffic lights and big box stores, the gridlock is unending. In many ways, Californians moved to North Idaho and made it over in California’s image — except when it came to politics.
Pedersen knew the power of the Nickel's Worth and the classifieds section in general: He’d been placing ads in both on a near-daily basis for years, advertising that he bought all manner of old antiques, gold, and jewelry. So after Obama got elected and Pedersen found the GOP’s response wanting, he bought a few ads with pictures of Lincoln, Washington, and Reagan, paired with the text “Are you tired of the Republican Party? Conservatives Unite!” Because he already had a standing ad order, he didn’t have to pay the politics rate, which was considerably higher. On April 1st, 2010, 130 people showed up for the first meeting — and the Rally Right was born.
One of Pedersen's ads in the Nickel's Worth.
“Bob Pedersen did more to advance the far-right cause than anything else with those ads,” Sandy Patano told me. He’d seemingly created a political force out of thin air — and then helped usher them into office. As Bjorn Handeen later put it, "We thought by commandeering the nerve center of the local Republican Party, and then even the state party, we would force a fair hearing of our ideas," he said. "In May 2010, it happened."
In 1999, Regan and his wife, Moura, moved from their home in Davis, California, to North Idaho — for the people, he told me, but also for the beauty, and the weather, and to get away from Gray Davis, the progressive Democrat who had recently been elected governor. Like thousands of others who have moved to North Idaho, Regan is a traditionalist Catholic — meaning he is among those Catholics who have broken from the official church, attend mass in Latin, and consider Pope Francis to be a heretic.
Everyone in Kootenai County politics knows Regan’s acolytes and enemies, those in his favor and those out of it. But if Regan is the current sun of the far-right conservative system, the planets in his orbit are a varied bunch. Some, like committee secretary and “Bard of the Redoubt” Alex Barron, are traditional Catholics who moved here to be part of the Redoubt community. Bjorn Handeen — who sponsored the committee’s resolution against Russia sanctions — is more of an ideological wild card, an anti-globalist who attempted to create a KCRCC committee that would vet candidates "to determine if they are true Republicans."
Christa Hazel’s conservative credentials have been challenged, for example, because she posted pictures to Facebook that included “known” liberals. A far-right blog accused Duane Rasmussen, one of the founders of the North Idaho Pachyderm Club, of “bringing Socialism to Kootenai County” for making friends with Spokesman-Review columnist Dave Oliveria, who often published photos Rasmussen had taken of GOP events. When lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Steve Yates spoke at a recent Central Committee meeting, he was challenged for attending Johns Hopkins, a liberal school.
Regan may function as the de facto political godfather in Kootenai County, but his exercises of power are rarely flashy. He’s only been a committee member since May 2016, when he was also elected chairman. But he’s been operating in the background for years. In 2013, he funded the Jeremy Morris-led Truth North Idaho which sent emails under pseudonyms asking candidates for city council about their positions on reproductive rights and public prayer, then posting their responses, out of context, on the group’s website. (Morris claims that the group was simply illuminating the liberal beliefs of candidates claiming to be nonpartisan.) In 2015, Regan was the sole funder of Responsible CDA, which sent out flyers that many called “misleading” in support of hard-line Coeur d’Alene city council candidates.
Last year, he helped tap someone to run against Gary Ingram, the man who’d helped build the Republican Party in North Idaho, for his position on the Central Committee. “It was just some guy they hauled in,” Ingram told me. “But I beat ’em.” (Regan says that he heard a rumor of someone else doing so, but had no firsthand knowledge of it himself.) He was also the primary funder of a group calling itself the KCRCC — Kootenai County Republican Concerned Citizens — which distributed literature with endorsements of far-right candidates; its $6,100 disclosed funding was obtained, in its entirety, from Regan’s company, Regan Industries.
An example of a KCRCC rack card.
In the early ’80s, Nonini was arrested for cocaine possession with the intention to distribute — but never convicted. These days, he’s a devout Catholic, wiry and no-nonsense, with the sort of early-morning energy of a man who does a day’s worth of yard work before 8 a.m. Last year, he was running unopposed for his third term in the state Senate. But then Regan ally Angela Cross launched a campaign against him on Facebook, urging voters to write in anyone else — and he was dropped from the Concerned Citizens rack card.