Jackboots in Coeur d'Alene

A Preview of Privatized Totalitarianism

(Part 2 of the What The Hell Is Going On series is coming in the next couple days, I promise)

“People have known for ages that going from the protection of society into the wild can have a profound effect on the balance of reason and emotion. It can cause altered states of consciousness, hallucinations, even death. The word “bewildered”...comes from the archaic verb, “wilder.” To “Wilder” someone means to lead him into the woods and get him lost.”

-Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival

Because woods figure less prominently in modern life than they once did, we rarely wilder people. Instead, we disappear them. The wildered had it easy, comparatively speaking: the woods are harsh but there is food and water there, and wild predators attack only to find food or protect themselves. The disappeared, on the other hand, are at the mercy of nature’s ugliest and cruelest predator: faceless, nameless, and unaccountable. You are beyond the reach of your community, but your community is not beyond the reach of you. The hole you left serves as a constant, terrifying reminder that the Powers That Be can take everything from you, at any time, for any reason.

I’d always thought of disappearances as a symptom of centralized totalitarianism: the thing Big Brother does after he’s done watching. Here in the 21st century, though, Silicon Valley owns the panopticon. It’s not surprising that disappearances are becoming privatized as well.

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Last Saturday, the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee (KCRCC) held something they billed as a “legislative town hall,” which they billed as “a great opportunity to meet your Idaho State Legislators and get updates on the 2025 Legislative Session.” A town hall is a meeting where public officials answer questions from the audience. It doesn’t matter where you hold the town hall, despite the name. It can involve any kind of politician and an audience of any size. If the audience asks and the politicians answer, it’s a town hall.

The KCRCC meeting turned out to be a lot of things, but it wasn’t a town hall. As members of the crowd directed questions and comments at the legislators onstage, moderator Ed Bejarana grew increasingly irate.

“You folks who are just popping off with stupid remarks, you are not taking into account the people sitting next to you,” Bej arana, professional voice actor and freelance asshole, told the crowd. “There’s a bunch of people who came to hear [the legislators].”

“Is this a town hall or a lecture?” Teresa Borrenpohl yelled loudly from her seat.

This wasn’t the first time Borrenpohl spoke at the meeting — she says she loudly (and accurately) accused state senator Phil Hart of stealing timber for public land shortly before her question about the meeting itself. Nor is it the first time she’s spoken out against the KCRCC — or the second, or the third.

If you read my recent article for Lux and Teen Vogue about far-right efforts to shut down North Idaho College (NIC), you are already familiar with the KCRCC. You know that the extremists who took over Kootenai have spent the last decade and a half hijacking Idaho’s Republican party. You know that the instant they gained control they moved to establish tribunals capable of excommunicating any Republican who fails to vote in lock-step with a platform that includes banning gay marriage, defunding education, and repealing the 17th amendment that establishes direct elections for the Senate. And you know that many Idahoans are fighting back against this would-be return to the Dark Ages.

Almost everyone involved in this fight is right of center, ranging from self-proclaimed moderates to Reagan Republicans. Teresa Borrenpohl is an exception. Just 10 percent of Idahoans are registered Democrats, and Borrenpohl is one of them. Despite these odds, she ran for the county’s representative seat in 2020, 2022, and 2024 because she wanted people in her county to see that they’re not alone. She received 21.1 percent of the vote in both 2024 and 2022, and 24.3 percent in 2020. It’s not enough to win, but it’s enough to know that, statistically speaking, some of your neighbors agree with you.

The KCRCC has a long history of labeling everything Borrenpohl does as harassment, be it asking questions of NIC board member Todd Banducci as he walked to his car or bringing political signs to a board meeting open to the public. They have obsessively attempted to charge her for pulling a fire alarm during a 2022 board meeting; when police reports found no evidence that she did so, they accused the cops of a coverup.

Perhaps this longstanding animosity can help us understand why, out of all the audience members making noise at this point in the meeting, Kootenai County sheriff Robert Norris chose to focus on Borrenpohl specifically. Norris makes no secret of his political leanings; in 2023, he extralegally removed two books that he considered “obscene” from a public library and only returned them when forced to by — I’m kidding, he refused to return them and still hasn’t. That’s the kind of power he wields. That’s the kind of place Kootenai County can be.

“Get up or be arrested. Those are your choices,” Norris tells Borenpohl. When she continues to sit quietly, he grabs her arm, then threatens to pepper spray her. “This little girl is afraid to leave!” Bejarana announces scornfully, hatefully, as Norris tries and fails to remove her.

It is at this point that Norris steps back and motions to two large men in black paramilitary sweaters and olive drab pants.

“Who are you? Where’s your badge? Who the fuck are you?” Borrenpohl demands as the men move towards her and order her to stand. They do not answer these questions, and they are not wearing badges. When they grab Borrenpohl’s wrists and begin to wrestle her into the aisle, Bejarana’s voice becomes a high, mocking falsetto. “No no no, I can’t move! I generally should be allowed to cry and yell and scream! I should be able to interrupt!”

“Is this your deputy?” Borrenpohl screams at Norris. “These aren’t deputies. Who the fuck are these men?!”

They drag her from her seat and into the aisle. One of them straddles her to hold her down, the other kneels by her side and forces her shoulders to the ground. A third looms dispassionately, zip ties at the ready. Despite their bulk she manages to get away and lunges for the relative safety of her seat before three of them drag her back, pick her up, and carry her bodily out the auditorium. The audience is on their feet; some are furious, but more seem jubilant. This meeting, town hall or otherwise, is over. “You’re hurting me!” she yells, and they are — she will spend the rest of her Saturday in the ER.

The men carry her into the hallway as her shirt begins to ride up. They set her down and attempt to wrestle her hands behind her back, fail, then order her to go. Borrenpohl stays seated and demands their names. Other men in black sweaters and olive-drab pants have pinned at least two attendees against the wall; bystanders who presumably attempted to help. “She’s been tresspassed,” one of the less sympathetic audience members tells the uniformed, on-duty cops as they finally arrive. He’s right, but only in the Jesus “Forgive me for my trespasses” sense: this was a public meeting to which the public was explicitly invited.

Unlike Sheriff Norris, who serves Kootenai County, these officers serve the city of Coeur d’Alene and apparently did not get the memo that the rule of law no longer applies to enemies of the Party. They deescalate the situation. Borrenpohl speaks to the cops, gets to her feet, and leaves. KCRCC will later state that she has been arrested. They are, as usual, lying.

My words cannot do this incident justice. I cannot capture it no matter how many days I spend trying — small cruelties, like the moment Bejarana tells Borrenpohl “I am simply overtalking you, because your voice is meaningless.” Or the moment when, in the hallway, Borrenpohl says she’s going to file a lawsuit and an old white man barks laughter into the camera. You should watch the videos if you haven’t already, and if you have the stomach for it. You should see what’s happening in America right now.

The first video provides a close-up look at what happened to Borrenpohl (originally posted to Facebook):

The second allows you to hear what Bejarana said throughout this assault and see what happened in the hallway.

You can find other videos here:

• From the audience

• From next to Borrenpohl

• The video that first made it onto social media

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“The problem is this: they didn’t come here to listen, they came here to interrupt,” Bejarana told the crowd as the goons wrestled Borrenpohl to the ground. “Isn’t that what’s Elon is exposing in Washington DC? Don’t we have that same kind of disruption everywhere in our government?”

It sounded like an absurd non sequitur to me the first time I heard it. But I have watched these videos several times since then, and it makes perfect sense to me now.

This is a peek at the privatized hellscape Elon Musk and the rest of the tech bros want: a world where law enforcement is replaced by nameless thugs who do what they are told by whoever cuts their checks. We still do not know the names of these men, and we only know the name of their company thanks to Internet sleuthing: Lear Asset Management, which got its start shutting down illegal grow operations in California while kitted out in full military gear, complete with sidearms and company logo combat patches. Lear’s founder, former investment banker Paul Trouette, told Talking Points Memo in 2014 that he does not believe private citizens are restricted by the fourth amendment. “Law enforcement just doesn’t have the means to take care of it any longer,” Trouette said, which matches DOGE’s agenda perfectly. Their destruction is not a bug, it’s a feature. Silicon Valley wants to destroy the government’s ability to provide basic services, then replace the agencies they’ve gutted with privatized agencies they pay for and control.

America has a police brutality problem. I saw that problem up close in 2020, I filmed a hard drive’s worth of it, I have a scar on my leg to prove it. Police forces continue to murder Black people at disproportionate rates, and the cops who take those lives continue to walk free thanks to qualified immunity. But police officers have names and badge numbers. They are at least hypothetically required to follow protocol and could hypothetically be punished for breaking the law if we could ever break the stranglehold of police unions and create accountability. Despite the deep, systemic, and (I believe) unsolvable issues within the force writ large, some cops do protect and serve to the best of their ability, and that does matter. The police in that video above did more to help Borrenpohl than almost anyone else in that auditorium.

A privatized police force that breaks skulls at the behest of billionaire CEOs or right-wing extremists (or both) would be far worse than the police we have right now. Who will be held accountable for what happened on Saturday, even if the courts function the way they should? KCRCC chair Brent Regan told the Bonner County Daily Bee he wasn’t sure what security company they’d hired. He referred them to Norris, who also denied knowing anything about the agency. Then again, Norris also denied ordering or instructing the mercenaries to do what they did, even though the videos you just watched show him doing exactly that. Nevertheless, KCRCC and Norris’ role in this brutality is nebulous; hitting them with serious charges may prove difficult. The private security company is clearly liable and the men who assaulted Borrenpohl might even go to prison. But goons are a dime a dozen, especially when the economy goes bad. A system of privatized police allows for maximum violence with minimal accountability.

Yesterday morning, Politico revealed that Trump allies have drafted a proposal for mass deportations carried out by a private citizen army led by Erik Prince, the former CEO of the Blackwater mercenary group best known for massacring civilians in Iraq. Prince’s personal army would round up undocumented people (or, you know, people who look undocumented), take them to “processing camps,” and fly them out of the country on a private fleet of airplanes. Trump has not acknowledged the proposal and the people who proposed it insist Trump has not responded directly either. We heard this song and dance with Project 2025: Trump had never heard of it and totally denounced it right up until he began hiring its architects and enacting its policy. Where did Politico get this memo, exactly? It feels like a trial balloon. Just how angry would the public be at us if we created a mercenary gestapo?

Borrenpohl’s nameless assailants did not disappear her on Saturday, February 22nd, but they took her a long way down that path. They transformed her words of dissent into screams of fear, then removed her from her community by force. It took the actual police a few moments to arrive. What if the men had not set her down in that hallway? Who would have stopped them from throwing her in a van and driving off, as happened in Portland in 2020 and happens in authoritarian regimes every day?

The dissenters of Kootenai County must surely be asking themselves these questions as I type this.

The nation at large has questions too. “Your voice is meaningless,” Bejarana told Borrenpohl — but he was wrong. Her voice focused national attention on KCRCC’s anti-American brutality, and in just a few days her GoFundMe for legal fees is at $290K and climbing. This incident lays bare one of authoritarianism’s greatest weakness: they believe that brute force solves all problems and all other methods are weak, effete, and pathetic. It is actually quite difficult to force people to sit down, shut up, and obey — especially when they've been raised in a culture that values freedom of expression. Force must be applied constantly for it to work, and the culture of fear it depends on can quickly turn to rage if their power falters even slightly. Persuasion, on the other hand, takes nothing but a video.

In 2001, America beat Afghanistan into the ground. Our force was overwhelming, our victory complete. And then, over the next two decades, that victory turned into one of my country’s most humiliating defeats. Brute force is devastatingly effective…but only short term. Long-term, it’s a very different story.

Here is a link for Teresa Borrenpohl’s GoFundMe, and I would encourage you to donate if you can. This is about sending a message. This is about telling these people that this country will not stand for this, that they cannot do this in the dark, that their power is not as complete as they think it is. I hope you will consider donating if you have the means to do so.