It’s not clear when or exactly to what extent the Republican Central Committee got involved in the trustee election. Brent Regan, the committee’s chair, did not respond to requests for comment. But some locals, like B. Evan Koch, who chairs the county Democrats’ central committee, noted that area Republicans’ interest in the trustees’ races seemed to reach a new intensity in 2020, compared with previous years. By September, two Republican Central Committee members — Greg McKenzie and Michael H. Barnes — had declared their intent to run. (Banducci, also a member of the central committee, ran unopposed.)
McKenzie, a research engineer who moved to the area in 2013, described himself as someone who could bring fiscal discipline to the college. The board has been “rubber-stamping budgets for too long,” he wrote on his campaign’s Facebook page. McKenzie was also concerned by the “lack of tolerance” displayed on college campuses nationwide, he wrote on Facebook. Barnes, a U.S. Navy veteran and an IT-security auditor, told voters he was running because higher education has “failed our country.” It has slipped into “ever more radical-left progressive ideology” and is dangerously promoting “socialist objectives,” he posted on Facebook. During a speech about his candidacy, Barnes noted that he was troubled by the college’s “Cardinal Pledge” — the promise North Idaho encouraged students and employees to sign, saying they would wear a cloth face covering, maintain physical distance, and follow other health-and-safety protocols. “I visited the campus and I saw kids, adults too, of all ages, walking in the clear open with a mask on with nobody around them, just blind submission to what they say.” (Barnes did not respond to an interview request.)
Barnes was also fired up by an incident at the college over the summer. After the death of George Floyd, the college’s Diversity Council, a group of mostly faculty and staff members, said in a statement that it supports “gatherings that give voice to the systemic and structural issues embedded in societal inequities, from #BlackLivesMatter to #WaterForLife.”
The council later clarified that the college itself has not taken a stance on Black Lives Matter, the movement that protests violence against Black people, and that the council has never supported it with actual resources. But the misconception that taxpayer dollars were going to Black Lives Matter caught fire, tapping into existing distaste for the movement. In June, when residents peacefully rallied at a Coeur d’Alene park to support Black Lives Matter, they were met by counterprotesters, some of whom were armed, the Press reported.
To improve North Idaho College, Barnes said on his candidacy-Facebook page, the board should remove “politically charged advocacy” for Black Lives Matter and other “‘social justice’ indoctrination efforts.”
State lawmakers also flexed their anti-social justice bona fides by criticizing North Idaho. At a town hall hosted by the GOP’s central committee, legislators were asked what they were going to do about “our NIC tax monies” going to support Black Lives Matter. One Republican representative, Tony Wisniewski, claimed that Black Lives Matter “does not support, necessarily, two loving parents in a home” and that “they give the option” that “single-parent families are OK.”
“Now what is that going to do to our Black communities?” Wisniewski asked the crowd. “It’s going to destroy them.”
He also energized the audience by saying that their taxpayer dollars go to a highly paid Boise State University employee who sits “in their stinking office all day long to come up with diversity programs.” That’s “disgusting, in my opinion,” he said, to applause.