Building a Bigger Tent

Ronald Reagan Built a Bigger Tent. Thad Butterworth and Ryan Spoon are Burning It Down.

On the evening of March 19, the Ada County Republican Central Committee convened what its chairman, Thad Butterworth, had apparently determined was worth approximately $5,000 of party money: a secret proceeding to remove a duly elected Precinct Committee Officer named Alicia Purdy from her position. Purdy had not been appointed to her role or installed by any faction. She had been elected by the Republican voters in her precinct, the people she was meant to represent. That, it turned out, was not sufficient protection against what Butterworth and his allies had constructed for her.

I attended that meeting with my wife, Andrea, and her friend, both members of the CanAda Republican Women, a group Andrea founded. She is studying parliamentary procedure with the goal of becoming a parliamentarian herself and wanted to observe the process firsthand. They were seated in the main meeting room before the proceedings began. The correct approach was simple: announce that the committee was moving into executive session and ask anyone who was not a PCO to excuse themselves. Standard practice. Basic courtesy. Instead, Butterworth dispatched his son and deputies to remove them in the most confrontational manner possible, turning a routine procedural moment into a performance of authority he has never actually earned. Genuine leadership does not need to announce itself through a show of force. Butterworth’s instinct for confrontation is not toughness. It is the reliable signature of a coward.

After the meeting, ACRCC secretary Ben Chafetz and a colleague, Mike Hon, approached Purdy and falsely accused her of bringing her guests to cause trouble. When Purdy noted that they had not come with her, Hon said loudly: “Sure you don’t know them.” Purdy’s reply was precise: “I never said I didn’t know them. I said they didn’t come with me.”

The proceeding itself had all the integrity of a kangaroo court. The motion to investigate Purdy had been introduced at the June 2025 ACRCC meeting while she was absent. The man who made the motion later acknowledged, when Purdy confronted him, that he was “not privy to any of the information/evidence in this matter” and had simply been asked to make it. He encouraged her to “resign before anything damning/embarrassing is publicly presented” and claimed she had “Harris/Walz signs” in her yard. Purdy’s response: “Complete fabrication. My Republican family would have disowned me had that been the case.” When she asked who actually held the evidence and why they were apparently incapable of making the motion themselves, she received, in her words, “radio silence.”

Ben Chafetz, who headed the sham investigative committee, notified Purdy in August 2025 that she was under formal investigation but refused, despite her repeated written requests, to tell her what she was actually accused of. Her legal counsel, a former Idaho Republican attorney general and lieutenant governor, was barred from representing her. Chafetz’s guidance on how she should prepare her defense was extraordinary in its audacity: “I would recommend reflecting on past actions, statements, or engagement that could have prompted scrutiny.” In other words: figure out what you did wrong, because we won’t tell you.

The approximately $5,000 price tag for this exercise covered the cost of reserving space at the Ada County courthouse for the special proceeding and hiring a parliamentarian from North Idaho, whose travel and expenses were covered by the committee, presumably to lend an air of procedural legitimacy to what was, by any honest measure, a predetermined outcome in search of a process.

What the ACRCC appears to have found disqualifying in Alicia Purdy’s Republican record: a personal donation in 2022 to a friend and colleague, made before she was ever a PCO; a recurring education PAC donation since redirected to the Idaho Young Republicans; running for a nonpartisan NEA director seat as part of a Republican-organized effort; opposing vouchers on fiscal grounds; holding a nuanced pro-life position; again before she held any party position.

Her actual Republican record is not ambiguous. Charter member of the Idaho Republican Educators caucus, chair of the NEA Republican Educators caucus for the western states, member of the Idaho Federation of Republican Women, active door-knocker and donor for Republican candidates across Ada County and beyond. Fellow PCO Mike Luna captured the logic problem plainly: “If it is good for the party in principle, it cannot suddenly be improper in practice. Otherwise, the standard is not about the behavior. It is about the person.”

As for the $5,000 the ACRCC spent attempting to remove her, Purdy offered the most efficient summary available: “I am a fiscal conservative, after all.”

The meeting failed to reach a quorum. The ACRCC’s own secretary claimed not to have the agenda for the event her organization had just spent five thousand dollars preparing. The entire enterprise collapsed under the weight of its own bad faith. Most Ada County Republicans simply declined to show up, and the people who engineered this proceeding were left to absorb their humiliation in a room that wasn’t full enough to conduct business.

This, in the current idiom of Idaho Republican Party leadership, is called building the party.

Understanding the Purdy proceeding requires understanding who Thad Butterworth is and how he came to lead one of Idaho’s most important county party committees. Butterworth lost his race for College of Western Idaho trustee, lost his Idaho Senate race against Sen. Treg Berndt, and ran on the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s machine candidate slate alongside Janice McGeachin, who appeared via video at a Nick Fuentes neo-Nazi rally, and Priscilla Giddings, who doxxed a rape victim to shield a colleague now serving twenty years in prison for that crime. Idaho voters rejected them all.

When the previous ACRCC leadership resigned in protest over Dorothy Moon’s conduct, Moon and her then-IFF allies installed Butterworth and Vice Chair Ryan Spoon to take control. They did not earn those positions through any normal democratic process. Spoon’s chief operational lieutenant is Chafetz, a failed legislative candidate who holds no actual influence or respect, drafted the letters Purdy received, and managed the investigative committee that told a duly elected PCO to guess at her own charges. Spoon’s own local Republican precinct declined to elect him to anything.

Butterworth’s ideological proximity to the movement’s darker edges is not incidental. He has been photographed alongside Stew Peters, a white supremacist and antisemite who has praised Adolf Hitler, promoted Holocaust denial, and called for the installation of a Christian monarchy, with the comfortable body language of someone posing with a friend. He has never publicly denounced Peters or anything Peters represents.

Spoon has been unusually candid about the strategic vision. His stated goal is to make Idaho so intolerable for those who disagree with his faction that they will choose to leave the state. He presents this as conservative governance. What it actually describes is an authoritarian theory of politics that has abandoned persuasion entirely and replaced it with attrition. What this network is executing on Purdy and people like her follows the methodology H.L. Bill Richardson outlined in Confrontational Politics: manufacture conflict, make civic participation miserable enough that reasonable people disengage, then fill the vacuum with loyalists. The goal is not winning general elections. The goal is organizational control.

The evidence that this strategy is failing is no longer subtle. The previous ACRCC leadership founded the Idaho Majority Club after departing in protest, and the contrast in outcomes has been unambiguous. The Idaho Majority Club raises more money than the Idaho Republican Party, draws larger crowds, and consistently attracts more elected officials and prominent speakers. In February of this year, it hosted Donald Trump Jr.’s visit to Idaho. Not one member of the IFF’s Gang of Eight legislative caucus attended. They were, apparently, too busy boycotting the President’s son to show up for one of the most significant political events of the Idaho legislative season. If only their voters knew they were never real Trump supporters like they pretended to when running for office.

The Idaho Majority Club hosted Donald Trump Jr. at their February event

Dorothy Moon is now fighting for her position amid a pronounced fundraising drought. The businesses and mainstream Republican donors who once sustained the state party have quietly concluded that its current leadership is neither competent nor serious, so they closed their checkbooks. IFF’s Gang of 8 leader, Maria Nate, has publicly called for defunding the Idaho Republican Party, the very institution Moon nominally controls. And they have the audacity to call everyone else “RINOs.”

And yet this same network is rallying behind Mark Fitzpatrick for governor, just as they previously rallied behind Ammon Bundy against Gov. Brad Little.

Fitzpatrick is a former California law enforcement officer turned real estate agent and bar owner, proprietor of the Old State Saloon in Eagle. His public profile was built not through any policy achievement or civic contribution but through deliberate provocation: “Beers for Breeders,” anti-vaccine Christian singles nights, and a flat earth presentation called “NASA Lies — Flat Earth 101.” He was excommunicated from the Eagle Christian church, which he helped found. He has hosted antisemitic conspiracy theorists, a Christian nationalist event linked to Doug Wilson’s network in Moscow, and an appearance by Jake Shields, named in a Network Contagion Research Institute report as a top amplifier of foreign Iranian-linked influence operations.

In June 2025, Fitzpatrick hosted the “Heterosexual Awesomeness Festival” in Cecil Andrus Park, across the street from the Idaho State Capitol. Promoted for months across far-right social media, it drew only a few dozen attendees and cost Fitzpatrick roughly $85,000. During the livestream, white nationalist Dave Reilly sat beside Fitzpatrick and remarked that Boise was clean because it had no Black residents. Fitzpatrick smiled. He did not interrupt, cut the feed, or object. His eventual disavowal came only after a vendor publicly withdrew support.

Reilly’s co-host Rebecca Hargraves offered her own assessment afterward. Idaho’s Jewish population of 0.3 percent was, in her view, “far too high.” She added, “I’m racist. You people aren’t breaking any stories here.” Fitzpatrick has not commented.

Fitzpatrick has long used the trappings of mainstream conservative support as a marketing prop, invoking broad Republican solidarity when it suited his brand and the optics of the moment. The reality underneath that branding is now surfacing. Key figures in his orbit are publicly breaking with mainstream Republican politics, and Fitzpatrick’s own son was recently caught suggesting that Trump is controlled by satanic Jews and that he can no longer support him. This is the logical destination of a worldview built on layered conspiracy, in which each theory eventually swallows the last and no figure, however prominent, survives scrutiny. Optics kept the uglier conclusions out of public view long enough to sell tickets, collect endorsements, and pose for photographs with elected officials.

The IFF operated a booth at the “Straight White Pride” festival, collecting names and contact information of like-minded people willing to broadcast their supremacy publicly. IFF president Ron Nate had awarded Fitzpatrick a “Citizen Hero Award” before the event. The legislators who publicly aligned with the Old State Saloon’s messaging and attended the opening event include Senators Josh Keyser, Tammy Nichols, and Brian Lenney, as well as Representatives David Leavitt and Josh Tanner. Lenney, notably, took to the Idaho Senate floor to call Donald Trump Jr. a “Mar A Lago Fintech Bro” the same season he was publicly aligning himself with a bar owner who smiled through a white nationalist’s commentary about his own city. The ideological consistency here is difficult to locate.

This is who the far-right establishment has chosen as their standard-bearer for the Idaho governorship, set against a sitting incumbent who has earned the President’s endorsement.

Ronald Reagan understood something the current ACRCC leadership and their network have forgotten. If someone agrees with you eighty percent of the time, they are your ally, not your enemy. A coalition that demands perfect compliance is not a coalition. It is a closed system that shrinks by design. The Idaho Republican Party was built on a genuinely big tent: fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, libertarians, farmers, small business owners, and working families who agreed on enough to win together. That tent is being deliberately collapsed by the people who insist they are strengthening conservatism.

Alicia Purdy made the case herself before March 19. She is an elected PCO in a purple precinct, and ejecting Republicans who agree eighty percent of the time, she says, “only serves to weaken the party.” She quoted Reagan because he was right, and because the people running the Ada County Republican Central Committee appear to have never engaged seriously with him.

The Idaho Majority Club exists because people figured this out and built something better. They raise more money, draw bigger rooms, and host events that actually matter. That is what a bigger tent looks like in practice, and it is already working.

The Idaho Republican Party is worth fighting for. Building it back requires an honest account of what has been done to it, the willingness to name what needs to be named, and the conviction that most Idaho Republicans, people who care about their communities and want a party that can win and govern, deserve better than what Dorothy Moon, Thad Butterworth, and his installed minions have given them.

Idaho’s republican party needs more people like Purdy and fewer useless Spoons and Butterworths if it wants to remain relevant.

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About the Author

Gregory Graf is the CEO of Snake River Strategies and creator of Political Potatoes. He’s a lifelong conservative Republican living in Star, Idaho.

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