John Heida
His PAC fabricated a Playboy cover with the face of a sitting Republican legislator who chaired the House Education Committee. Distributed it at primary scale. She lost.
The Playboy fabrication that defines the operation
In the 2024 Idaho Republican primary cycle, Stop Idaho RINOs PAC — operated by Canyon County committeeman and California transplant John Heida — distributed a fabricated image superimposing the face of sitting Idaho Rep. Julie Yamamoto (R-Caldwell, House Education Committee Chair, retired educator) onto the cover of Playboy magazine. The image was paired with the false accusation that Yamamoto was “promoting pornography in schools.”
No element of that is hyperbole. Every word is documentable. The PAC used image-manipulation software — AI-generated and Photoshop, per the coverage — 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, who had helped open a charter school and sat on its board, and whose “offense” was opposing the IFF-backed voucher program and voting her conscience on library legislation.
Yamamoto lost the 2024 Republican primary to Kent Marmon — IFF-endorsed, Idaho Freedom PAC-backed, and also endorsed by Heida’s Stop Idaho RINOs.
That is the anchor fact about Stop Idaho RINOs and what John Heida runs. Everything else in this dossier is context surrounding that one incident.
DOCUMENTED — STOP IDAHO RINOS YAMAMOTO PLAYBOY FABRICATION
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.
The operating model
The Stop Idaho RINOs operating template repeats across cycles:
1. AI and Photoshop image fabrication. The 2022 and 2024 election cycles feature documented instances of the PAC producing AI-generated and Photoshop-manipulated images of opposing legislators. The Yamamoto Playboy cover is the best-known. It is not the only one. The distinguishing property of these images is that they 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) featured Stop Idaho RINOs distributing content targeting Chaney’s family — distorted retellings of personal incidents from Chaney’s past, deployed to boost the Boyd campaign. The PAC’s targeting rubric extends past the candidate to family members who never entered politics.
3. False-accusation deployment with plausible-deniability structure. The Yamamoto Playboy cover did not state “Yamamoto is in Playboy.” It paired a fabricated Playboy image with the rhetorical accusation “Yamamoto promotes pornography in schools.” The image provides emotional payload; the caption provides plausible-deniability text. The structure is repeatable. Deployed at primary-election scale, it saturates social-media feeds in conservative Republican audiences with fabricated imagery before the target can respond.
4. IFF-scorecard alignment for target selection. Stop Idaho RINOs targets are consistently those legislators who score low on the Idaho Freedom Foundation Freedom Index. The PAC does not produce an independent ideological assessment. It imports the IFF score and deploys fabrication content against the bottom of that list. The practical effect: IFF’s institutional scorecard drives PAC attack-ad targeting, with no disclosed coordination between the two — but the targeting output is functionally identical.
5. Endorsement machinery. The PAC issues formal endorsements in Republican primaries. The endorsement list overlaps significantly with IFF endorsements and Idaho Freedom Caucus alignment. When a candidate appears on the Stop Idaho RINOs endorsement list — as Sen. Scott Herndon did, and Rep. Kent Marmon did — they are publicly receiving cover from an operation that has the Playboy-cover fabrication on its public record. 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 Spoon-Stop-Idaho-RINOs-Fitzpatrick sequence is the cleanest documented case of network coordination on weaponizing federal immigration enforcement against a sitting Republican legislator.
Two PACs, one operator
Heida operates two Idaho-registered PACs out of Canyon County:
- Stop Idaho RINOs
- Liberty Idaho PAC
Both are based in Canyon County. Both are run substantially as one-man operations. The financial structure of either, the donor base, and the operational overlap with IFF endorsement and IFC-aligned candidate funding would be visible to formal examination.
Dorothy Moon’s selective omission
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 — and specifically noted the PAC’s omission 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 specific in-state PAC fabricating Playboy covers of sitting Republican legislators. The omission is its own data point.
DOCUMENTED — IDAHO STATE JOURNAL, DECEMBER 2025
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.
The California-to-Idaho move
Heida moved from California to Idaho approximately five years before the 2024 cycle. He operates from Canyon County. He chairs PACs that smear Republican legislators who do not vote the IFF position. The “Stop Idaho RINOs” branding works as a frame for new arrivals to the state to identify which Idaho Republicans the network considers insufficiently loyal — a list Heida himself constructs.
What this means for any candidate Heida endorses
Idaho’s structural one-party dominance in most districts means the GOP primary is the election. Once a PAC demonstrates that fabricated magazine covers of sitting Republican legislators can be deployed at primary-election scale without institutional consequence — no Idaho GOP chair public denunciation, no IFF-network disavowal, no legal action, no loss of endorsement value — the technique scales. 2024 produced the Yamamoto Playboy cover. Each successful deployment raises the ceiling on what image-fabrication-at-scale can do inside Idaho Republican primaries.
Voters evaluating any Stop Idaho RINOs-endorsed candidate are evaluating whether they want this PAC’s methods to continue to decide Idaho’s Republican primaries. Accepting the endorsement is a choice candidates make. Sen. Scott Herndon and Rep. Kent Marmon both made it.
Connected pages
- Kent Marmon dossier, 2024 D11A primary winner over Yamamoto, endorsed by Stop Idaho RINOs
- Scott Herndon dossier, Senate IFC chair, 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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The Connections