The worst choice in this election

Here’s one of the most pressing questions in the Nov. 2 local elections:

What’s worse, voting for David Reilly or backing the political group that actually endorses him?

Let’s call it a tie.

Reilly is running for Post Falls School Board, which even if you ignore his background of documented anti-semitism and far-right extremism, is alarming in itself. The transplant has lived in Post Falls since last October. He has no children of school age, and of his young daughter he wrote “that the one thing that is absolutely out of the question was the idea of sending her to a public school.”

But let’s back up. Though Reilly has been making national headlines for all the wrong reasons this election season, one of the best analyses was done by the Spokesman-Review’s Shawn Vestal.

“What do you do when you hear that a dude who’s running for school board once claimed that it was a ‘mistake’ to give women the right to vote or that women should not be allowed on social media?,” Vestal wrote in "Kootenai County GOP gives thumbs-up to anti-Semitic carpetbagger."

“Or that this would-be school board member tweeted ‘Judaism is the religion of the anti-Christ’ and ‘all Jews are bad’ and any number of other anti-Semitic things?

“Or that this guy was a guest on Red Ice TV, a white nationalist web show that was booted off YouTube for violating its hate-speech policies?”

Getting back to our pressing question, Vestal tackled that, as well.

“If you’re Brent Regan and the burn-down-the-house Kootenai County GOP, you give the carpetbagger David Reilly your full, unqualified endorsement as a candidate for the Post Falls School Board,” Vestal wrote. “The endorsement still stands after a wave of national and local attention on Reilly in the past two weeks.

“Regan is head of the KCGOP and board chairman of the radical, anti-education Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is currently working to sicken Idahoans with conspiracy lies and to blame the COVID-19 crisis on hospitals.

“Few figures have been as instrumental in the souring of traditional North Idaho conservatism into anti-social extremism as Regan, whose fingerprints are all over the hostile takeover of the North Idaho College board of trustees, which just fired the president for no good reason.

“Regan and the IFF have aggressively pushed an ever-more fractious, ever-less solidly hinged attack on anyone other than the farthest of far-right politicians, creating a conservative civil war in Kootenai County.”

So here’s the bottom line.

Post Falls voters, please support these three responsible, qualified candidates for school board: Zone 1: Neil Uhrig, Zone 4: Bridget Malek, and Zone 5: Jacob Dawson.

When you see an organization steadfastly supporting a candidate like David Reilly, look beneath its waving flags and alleged love of liberty. You're certain to find something rotten at the core.