How extremists reconquered Idaho in the age of Trump—and how some locals are fighting back

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.