John Heida

John Heida built Stop Idaho RINOs PAC. In the 2024 Republican primary, his PAC distributed an AI-generated and Photoshop-fabricated Playboy magazine cover with the face of sitting Rep. Julie Yamamoto, a retired educator and the House Education Committee Chair, and paired it with the false accusation that she was “promoting pornography in schools.” Yamamoto lost the primary to Kent Marmon, also endorsed by Heida’s PAC. Heida is a Canyon County committeeman and California transplant. On June 15, 2026 he handed the PAC’s chair and treasurer roles to Cierra Clarke of Twin Falls. The company that collected roughly 65 percent of the PAC’s 2024 spending is his, and it did not change hands.

Inside this dossier:

• The Playboy fabrication of a sitting Republican legislator. AI and Photoshop manipulation, paired with a false “promoting pornography” caption, distributed at primary scale. Yamamoto, a retired educator and House Education Committee Chair, lost. Marmon, endorsed by Stop Idaho RINOs, won.
• Family-targeting attacks. The 2024 Canyon County prosecutor race saw Stop Idaho RINOs distribute content targeting Greg Chaney’s family, with distorted personal-incident retellings.
• The money went to his own company. Silo Hill Media billed Stop Idaho RINOs $11,561.02 in 2024, roughly 54 percent of everything the PAC spent that year, and its address of record is the address Heida used for his own 2026 candidate contribution.
• The Mickelsen ICE-targeting amplification. Heida’s Stop Idaho RINOs amplified Ryan Spoon’s January 21, 2025 ICE-tip post against Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen and solicited additional tips through the PAC’s distribution channels. ICE arrived at Mickelsen Farms three days later.
• IFF-scorecard alignment for target selection. The PAC imports the IFF Freedom Index score and runs fabrication content against the bottom of the list. Targeting output is identical, with no disclosed coordination required.
• The scorecard left the PAC. The PAC built and ran voteswithdems.com, and the dashboard now carries a for-profit LLC’s copyright line, no “paid for by” disclaimer at all, and a sponsorship pitch. The PAC still links to it as a “third-party tool.”
• Two committees closed, the third changed hands. Think Liberty Idaho PAC and Canyon County Conservatives, both listing Heida as chair and treasurer, terminated on December 31, 2025 and swept their residual balances into Stop Idaho RINOs. Five and a half months later Heida handed Stop Idaho RINOs to Clarke.

The Playboy fabrication that defines the operation

In the 2024 Idaho Republican primary cycle, Stop Idaho RINOs PAC, run by Canyon County committeeman and California transplant John Heida, distributed a fabricated image. Heida’s PAC put the face of sitting Idaho Rep. Julie Yamamoto (R-Caldwell, House Education Committee Chair, retired educator) onto a fake Playboy magazine cover. The image was paired with the false claim that Yamamoto was “promoting pornography in schools.”

Every word of that is documentable. Per the coverage, the PAC used image-manipulation software, AI tools and Photoshop, to fabricate a magazine cover that does not exist, put a sitting Republican state legislator’s face on it, and distributed the fabrication with a false accusation attached.

The target was a former teacher who had served as House Education Committee Chair. She had helped open a charter school and sat on its board. Her “offense” was opposing the IFF-backed voucher program and voting her conscience on library legislation.

Yamamoto lost the 2024 Republican primary to Kent Marmon, who was IFF-endorsed, Idaho Freedom PAC-backed, and also endorsed by Heida’s Stop Idaho RINOs.

That incident defines Stop Idaho RINOs and what John Heida built. Everything else in this dossier sits around it.

In the 2024 Republican primary cycle, Stop Idaho RINOs PAC, operated by John Heida, distributed an AI-generated and Photoshop-fabricated Playboy magazine cover image with sitting Rep. Julie Yamamoto’s face superimposed, paired with the false accusation that she was ‘promoting pornography in schools.’ Yamamoto, a retired educator and House Education Committee Chair, lost the primary to Kent Marmon, who was endorsed by Stop Idaho RINOs.

Source: Stop Idaho RINOs historical PAC content · multi-outlet 2024 cycle coverage, 2024 primary cycle

The operating model

The Stop Idaho RINOs template repeats across cycles:

1. AI and Photoshop image fabrication. In 2022 and 2024, the PAC produced AI-generated and Photoshop-manipulated images of opposing legislators. The Yamamoto Playboy cover is the best-known among several. These images show the target doing or being something the target is not and has not, fabricated photographic evidence of invented conduct, distributed through social media to audiences primed not to verify.

2. Family-targeting attacks. The 2024 Canyon County Prosecutor race (Chris Boyd vs. former Rep. Greg Chaney) saw Stop Idaho RINOs distribute content targeting Chaney’s family. Distorted retellings of personal incidents from Chaney’s past, deployed to boost the Boyd campaign. The PAC’s targeting goes past the candidate and reaches family members who never entered politics.

3. False accusation paired with plausible-deniability text. The Yamamoto Playboy cover did not say “Yamamoto is in Playboy.” It paired a fabricated Playboy image with the accusation “Yamamoto promotes pornography in schools.” The image carried the emotional payload while the caption provided plausible-deniability cover, and the structure is repeatable. At primary-election scale, it floods social-media feeds in Republican audiences with fabricated imagery before the target can respond.

4. IFF-scorecard alignment for target selection. Stop Idaho RINOs targets the legislators who score low on the Idaho Freedom Foundation Freedom Index. The PAC imports the IFF score instead of producing its own ideological assessment, then runs fabrication content against the bottom of that list. IFF’s scorecard drives PAC attack-ad targeting with no disclosed coordination between the two, and the targeting output is identical.

5. Endorsement machinery. The PAC issues formal endorsements in Republican primaries. The endorsement list overlaps heavily with IFF endorsements and Idaho Freedom Caucus alignment. When a candidate lands on the Stop Idaho RINOs endorsement list, as Sen. Scott Herndon did and Rep. Kent Marmon did, they are publicly accepting cover from an operation that fabricated a Playboy cover of a sitting Republican legislator. Accepting that endorsement is a choice legislators make knowingly.

The Mickelsen ICE-targeting amplification

In January 2025, Ada County GOP Vice Chair Ryan Spoon tagged Tom Homan on X to call for ICE raids on Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen’s farms. Heida’s Stop Idaho RINOs amplified Spoon’s call and solicited additional ICE tips against Mickelsen through the PAC’s distribution channels. ICE arrived at Mickelsen Farms three days after Spoon’s post. One employee was detained.

The sequence from Spoon’s post to the PAC’s own tip solicitation is the clearest documented instance of network distribution channels being turned toward federal immigration enforcement against a sitting Republican legislator.

Heida’s role in the IFF-network propaganda chain

Stop Idaho RINOs publishes the evidence its own attack content then cites. The PAC built and ran voteswithdems.com, a single-page dashboard ranking sitting Idaho Republican legislators by a fabricated “VOTES WITH DEMOCRATS [X]% OF THE TIME” percentage. The dashboard carried the legally-required disclosure in its own footer, “Paid for by Stop Idaho RINOs · John Heida Treasurer,” when it was captured on April 26, 2026, and the PAC’s own homepage carried the same line through the February 12, 2026 archive.

Sen. Jim Guthrie tops the dashboard’s published list at 80.8%. Behind him sit the same Idaho Republican incumbents the IFF Index targets, that @stopidahorinos targets, and that network-funded primary challengers run against. The percentages get produced by treating routine bipartisan votes (tax-code reference updates, anti-fraud lottery prohibition, education funding, parental-rights provisions) as “voting with Democrats” whenever the Democratic caucus voted the same way as the targeted Republican. The full methodology breakdown lives in the 80% Lie investigation.

Here is how Heida’s PAC infrastructure fits inside the broader IFF playbook chain:

By the time a District 28 voter sees the “Sen. Guthrie votes with Democrats 80% of the time” line, they have seen it cited from four sources. All four trace to the same office. Heida ran step 1, step 2, and step 5: the construction, the amplification, and the endorsement of the candidate the manufactured number was built to elect.

The full methodology breakdown, including the bills voteswithdems.com cites as “crossover” evidence (most of them at 100% Democratic-caucus unity), lives in The 80% Lie. How the same number got used against the District 28 incumbent is documented in Manufacturing a Martyr.

The June 2026 handoff

On June 16, 2026, Stop Idaho RINOs published a press release under the dateline “Boise/Twin Falls, Idaho, June 15, 2026,” announcing that Cierra Clarke of Twin Falls would take over as chairperson effective that day. The release identifies Heida as “founder of Stop Idaho RINOs” and describes Clarke as the chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in the Magic Valley, “a dedicated mother, former aspiring teacher,” pursuing a political science degree. Heida used the release to restate the PAC’s founding purpose in two parts: make sure Greg Chaney loses his election, and “hold Idaho Republicans accountable when they govern and vote like Democrats” (Stop Idaho RINOs).

His own audience did not buy it. In the comment thread under the release, a subscriber posting as “Retired” wrote, “I do not accept the reason given for your stepping aside.” Another, Steve Allmer, asked simply when it was happening (Stop Idaho RINOs).

The state paperwork followed, and the Idaho Secretary of State’s Sunshine portal now lists Clarke as both chairperson and treasurer of filer entity 34, Stop Idaho RINOs, an active state political committee, with one amendment on file (Idaho SOS Sunshine). Heida’s name appears nowhere on the current registration. The PAC’s website tracked the same change. Its footer named Heida as treasurer through the February 12, 2026 capture. By May 20, 2026 the rebuilt site carried no disclaimer at all, and by July 19, 2026 it read “Cierra Clarke Treasurer.”

Clarke’s own dossier, including the firing and trespass order that preceded her taking over a statewide PAC by eight months, is at Cierra Clarke.

Silo Hill Media, the company that did not change hands

The June handoff moved the registration and nothing else. Silo Hill Media, the vendor that collected most of the money Stop Idaho RINOs ever spent, carries an address of record on the filings that matches Heida’s own in every year it billed the PAC, and committees are still paying it.

Silo Hill billed Stop Idaho RINOs $11,561.02 in 2024, against total PAC spending that year of $21,378.24. Roughly 54 percent of everything the PAC spent in its biggest year went to a company at the chairman’s own address. It billed another $2,132.44 in 2025 (Idaho SOS Sunshine expenditure records).

The addresses line up on the filings. Silo Hill’s 2023 through 2025 address of record is PO Box 131, Huston, Idaho 83630, the same box Stop Idaho RINOs used on every expenditure row in those years and the address the PAC publishes on its own about page. Heida used the same Huston box for a $10 personal contribution to Idaho Young Republicans on January 22, 2025. Silo Hill’s 2026 address of record is a Caldwell, Idaho 83607 home address (street withheld), the identical address John Heida used for his own $100 contribution to Heidi Smith-Takatori’s “Heidi for Idaho” committee on May 7, 2026 (Idaho SOS Sunshine).

In 2026 the payers changed. Stop Idaho RINOs stopped paying Silo Hill, and a Canyon County candidate slate and two party and PAC organs started. The Canyon County Republican Central Committee paid $633.13 on May 26, 2026. Lamborn for Idaho paid $315.18. Defend Liberty Idaho paid $65.00 on April 22, 2026, coded “Management Services.” Committees for Bennett, Cayler, Smith-Takatori, Christensen, Golden, Raslan, Tanner, Worley, and Johnston also appear on Silo Hill’s 2026 receiving side (Idaho SOS Sunshine expenditure records). The firm that produced the PAC’s content now bills the candidates the PAC exists to elect, along with the county party that certifies them.

The platform and the scorecard

Stop Idaho RINOs rebuilt its website between February and May 2026. The new site is served from app.myverastly.com and carries the line “Powered by Verastly” (May 20, 2026 capture). Verastly’s published contact information is john@verastly.com, 208-996-2132, 1901 Cleveland Blvd #1051, Nampa, Idaho 83651 (verastly.com). The same Cloudflare R2 storage bucket serves both the Verastly logo and the Stop Idaho RINOs logo.

The scorecard moved further. voteswithdems.com, the dashboard the PAC built and still promotes, carries the footer ”© Copyright 2026 Floor Vote Holdings, LLC. Powered by Verastly.” On April 26, 2026 that same footer still read “Paid for by Stop Idaho RINOs · John Heida Treasurer,” documented in The 80% Lie. Seventeen days later, in the May 13, 2026 archived capture, the disclaimer was gone, with no “paid for by” line on the page and no individual named anywhere on it. Floor Vote Holdings publishes its own contact block as info@floorvoteholdings.com at 1901 Caldwell Blvd #1051, Nampa, Idaho 83651, the same suite number, city and ZIP that Verastly publishes, and describes itself as publishing “independent legislative scorecards.”

Floor Vote Holdings is not a registered Idaho political committee, so nothing it raises or spends appears in Sunshine. It sells sponsorships. The dashboard now invites readers to “Click any state to help sponsor its scorecard,” routing to a sponsorship inquiry form. idahoscorecards.com carries the same Floor Vote Holdings footer.

Stop Idaho RINOs still sends traffic there. “Votes With Dems” sits in the PAC’s navigation, and voteswithdems.com appears in a footer block the PAC labels “Great Third-Party Tools,” alongside idahoscorecards.com, emailidaho.com and idaholeg.com (stopidahorinos.com). A PAC-built asset now reaches readers as an undisclosed for-profit product with a sponsorship page, and the PAC that built it describes it to its own readers as a third-party tool.

Three committees filed from one PO box

Heida was chair and treasurer of record for three Idaho committees, all filing from PO Box 131 in Huston.

Think Liberty Idaho PAC (filer entity 127, Idaho State jurisdiction) and Canyon County Conservatives (filer entity 255, Canyon County jurisdiction) each listed Heida, John as both chairperson and treasurer. Both are terminated, and both swept their residual balances into Stop Idaho RINOs on December 31, 2025, $62.25 and $0.30, coded “D - Donations & Gifts,” payee PO Box 131, Huston, reported on the PAC’s 2025 Annual Report filed February 23, 2026. Neither committee recorded a single transaction in 2026 (Idaho SOS Sunshine).

Canyon County Conservatives had been more than a shell. Stop Idaho RINOs paid it $2,157.42 during 2024, a transfer between two committees Heida chaired at the same mailing address.

Two of the three committees closed on the last day of 2025, and Heida handed the third to Clarke five and a half months later. His own stated timeline in the transition release, “beginning in late 2025,” starts inside that same window.

What the PAC spent, by year

2024 was the whole operation. The PAC’s largest single reported position that year was against Idaho Proposition 1, the top-four ranked-choice voting initiative, with a filed “oppose” stance: $2,000.00 to Republican Ads of Washington, D.C. on October 28, 2024, and $1,320.00 to Silo Hill Media on December 4, 2024, with roughly $4,470 committed against the measure in total. The 2024 vendor list runs Silo Hill Media $11,561.02, Meta $3,327.25, Canyon County Conservatives $2,157.42, Republican Ads $2,000.00, X $463.42, and small amounts to Sendinblue, Stripe and the Huston post office (Idaho SOS Sunshine).

The PAC’s 2025 donors include two Idaho Freedom Foundation board members writing on consecutive weeks: Bryan Smith, $1,000 on February 21, 2025, and Doyle Beck, $1,000 on February 28, 2025. Maria Nate, then the State Freedom Caucus Network’s Idaho director, gave on a recurring $103 monthly basis through 2025. Rep. Jacyn Gallagher gave $150, $100 and $50 (Idaho SOS Sunshine contribution records).

Which side of the split Heida is on

Idaho’s hard right fractured in 2024, and the fault line was Speaker Mike Moyle. Per InvestigateWest’s Daniel Walters on September 14, 2024, IFC co-chair Rep. Heather Scott and an IFC majority backed Moyle, while State Freedom Caucus Network Idaho director Maria Nate treated him as a sellout. The national SFCN cut ties with the Idaho Freedom Caucus and began building a rival caucus, telling Idaho Dispatch that co-chairs Heather Scott and Tammy Nichols “did not meet our standards to associate with the national brand.” Sens. Glenneda Zuiderveld and Cindy Carlson both resigned from the IFC. Zuiderveld said she had reached a point where she could no longer compromise her principles, and Carlson cited an overemphasis on fundraising and a lack of financial transparency. In July 2024 the IFC hired defeated Sen. Scott Herndon as its own director, and the two sides fought over the logo.

Heida’s PAC sits with IFF, Idaho Freedom Action, the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance and Idaho Dispatch on the Nate side of that split, and the operators on that side say so themselves. In a July 5, 2025 post titled “When Access Politics Turns to Vile Personal Attacks,” Greg Pruett denounced North Idaho activists Lauren Walker and Brandy Pardee and listed the organizations he says they attacked: “the Idaho Freedom Foundation, Idaho Freedom Action, Stop Idaho RINOs, the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance, and the Idaho Dispatch” (Freedom Bros Podcast). The same post states the factional map outright: “Moyle has become the center of a major rift in Idaho’s conservative movement. One faction, led by Rep. Heather Scott, supports him. The other faction is led by the Idaho Director of the State Freedom Caucus Network, Maria Nate, who does not support him.”

Pruett put Heida inside that bloc by name in a March 24, 2026 thread on X: “For the last 2 years, Dustin, John, and I… have warned everyone… Lauren was not a friend of the conservative movement” (@idahogrit).

Walker returns fire at Heida directly and by nickname. She has called the PAC “Slop Idaho RINOs” repeatedly, including “Plus John Heida’s Slop Idaho RINOs, can’t forget him” on March 30, 2026, and tagged the account “@stopidahorinos Heida Dairy Association” on May 6, 2026. On January 28, 2026 she wrote, “Hey everyone, I heard Slop Idaho RINOs has a new tip line on their website. Do you think they take ICE tips also?”, a reference to the Mickelsen episode documented above.

Dorothy Moon’s selective omission

A December 2025 Idaho State Journal opinion piece by Randy Stapilus cited Stop Idaho RINOs as a standing far-right PAC active in Idaho elections for years. Stapilus specifically noted the PAC’s absence from Idaho Republican Chair Dorothy Moon’s public criticism of outside political spending groups.

Moon, the state party chair, has criticized generic “outside money” while declining to name the in-state PAC fabricating Playboy covers of sitting Republican legislators, and that omission is its own data point.

Idaho State Journal opinion column by Randy Stapilus noted Idaho Republican Chair Dorothy Moon’s public criticism of outside political spending groups conspicuously omitted Stop Idaho RINOs, the in-state PAC fabricating images of opposing Republican legislators.

Source: Idaho State Journal · Randy Stapilus opinion column, December 2025

The North Idaho amplifier overlap

Stop Idaho RINOs’s image-fabrication and faction-mapping work runs in the same North Idaho political-media circuit as Dave Reilly and Casey Whalen, each of whom has a dossier on this site. Reilly’s anti-Semitic posting record is archived publicly at davereillysdeletedtweets.com by Take Back Idaho. Whalen published a November 24, 2025 interview with Germar Rudolf, the Holocaust denier convicted in Germany in 1995 and again in 2007, and has published his own footage of a Nick Fuentes speech. His record is set out in the Casey Whalen dossier.

IFF, Citizens Alliance of Idaho, the new chamber Idaho Freedom Caucus, and Dorothy Moon’s Idaho GOP “welcomed them in”. That builds on former Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin’s 2022 appearance at Nick Fuentes’s AFPAC. Heida’s PAC infrastructure is one node inside that welcome. He endorsed the candidates the IFF Index targets, his PAC fabricated images of opposing Republicans, and it ran down-ballot alongside the same North Idaho content circuit.

The California-to-Idaho move

Heida moved from California to Idaho about five years before the 2024 cycle and operates from Canyon County. He chaired PACs that smeared Republican legislators who do not vote the IFF position. The “Stop Idaho RINOs” branding tells new arrivals which Idaho Republicans the network considers insufficiently loyal, and Heida wrote the list. His successor is also a recent California arrival, in Twin Falls since late 2021.

What this means for any candidate Heida endorses

Idaho is a one-party state in most districts. The GOP primary is the election. Once a PAC proves that fabricated magazine covers of sitting Republican legislators can be deployed at primary-election scale without consequence, with no Idaho GOP chair denunciation, no IFF disavowal, no legal action, and no loss of endorsement value, the technique scales. 2024 produced the Yamamoto Playboy cover. Every successful deployment raises the ceiling on what image fabrication at scale can do inside Idaho Republican primaries.

The 2026 restructuring is worth reading alongside that. The registered committee has a new name on it and zero reported spending. The vendor company, the platform, and the scorecard sit outside the disclosure regime entirely, and the candidates on the Canyon County slate now pay the vendor directly. Anyone trying to follow the money through Sunshine after June 2026 will find a committee that spends nothing.

Voters weighing any Stop Idaho RINOs endorsed candidate are weighing whether they want this PAC’s methods to keep deciding Idaho’s Republican primaries. Accepting the endorsement is a choice candidates make. Sen. Scott Herndon and Rep. Kent Marmon both made it.

Connected pages

• Cierra Clarke dossier, the Twin Falls Moms for Liberty chapter chair who took Stop Idaho RINOs’s chair and treasurer roles on June 15, 2026
• The 80% Lie investigation, full breakdown of the voteswithdems.com scorecard methodology
• Manufacturing a Martyr investigation, where @redrangetv’s attack on Sen. Guthrie runs on the Heida-built voteswithdems.com number
• Kent Marmon dossier, 2024 D11A primary winner over Yamamoto, endorsed by Stop Idaho RINOs
• Scott Herndon dossier, returning IFC chair candidate, endorsed by Stop Idaho RINOs
• Greg Pruett dossier, Honor Idaho / Idaho Dispatch propaganda counterpart
• Dustin Hurst dossier, IFF-side operative, civil stalking injunction respondent
• The Propaganda Network organization page
• Idaho Freedom Foundation organization page

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