This editorial was published by the Lewiston Tribune and written by Tribune Opinion page editor Marty Trillhaase.
If you are among those who oppose the Idaho Freedom Foundation and everything it stands for, you’ve had a good week.
And that may be just the beginning.
Monday, Idaho’s premier right-wing influence machine announced the departure of its founder and president, Wayne Hoffman. Replacing him will be former state Rep. Ron Nate, R-Rexburg.
The transition tops a series of reversals for the IFF.
As InvestigateWest’s Daniel Walters reported last month, the organization contracted with Dave Reilly, a Unite the Right promoter who has made antisemetic tweets, to handle its communications. The revelation put IFF on the defensive.
Throw in for good measure reporting that revealed Hoffman was no longer living in Idaho or the former IFF president’s own Oct. 11 column in which he extolled the virtues of taking entheogens — otherwise known as hallucinogens or psychedelics — in the Mexican jungle.
Last week, Walters looked over the IFF’s webpage and noted only four employees were listed — down from 10 a year ago.
Last year, it suffered a series of electoral losses, including a recall election that sent one of its acolytes, former Sen. Branden Durst, packing from his post as superintendent of the West Bonner County School District. Political opponents in eastern Idaho believe IFF’s brand in their region has become toxic.
Opposition is mounting. Most notable — as columnist Chuck Malloy notes elsewhere on these pages — among them is a group of prominent Republicans who have organized behind the banner Take Back Idaho.
If passed by the voters later this year, an Open Primary Initiative would undermine IFF’s core asset — its ability to intimidate Republican lawmakers who have to clear the closed GOP primary through a voting index that operates in real time. When it comes to general elections — most notably its opposition to the 2018 Medicaid expansion initiative — IFF has come up short.
And as it has pivoted from the small government, low taxes, libertarian-oriented legacy of the late Ralph Smeed that Hoffman launched 15 years ago to the culture warriors of today, the work of IFF is no longer hypothetical. In the real world, its rhetoric and policies have put the IFF at odds with ordinary Idahoans who want good schools, don’t want to be hounded by medical debt collectors, want the diversity of their own families respected and put more trust in local librarians than Statehouse politicians.
But at least Hoffman brought a series of strengths to his job. He was a talented organizer. He had a knack for messaging. Even if Hoffman was not exactly a happy warrior, he often had a twinkle in his eye. You certainly never got the sense that his heart was in the culture wars.
Not so with Nate.
He’s a true believer whose humorless ideology has frequently landed him in trouble. The baggage Nate carries with him includes:
In 2016, he was caught trying to surreptitiously tape record a fence-mending meeting with then-Senate President Pro Tem Brent Hill, R-Rexburg.
In 2021, Nate was among 19 House members who refused to censure the morally bankrupt former Rep. Priscilla Giddings, R-White Bird, who exposed by name and picture the young woman raped by former Rep. Aaron von Ehlinger, R-Lewiston, to public ridicule — then lied about it to the House Ethics Committee.
Nate once called Giddings a “model of integrity and a top-flight legislator,” who “doesn’t deserve this, she doesn’t deserve any of this.”
The next year, Nate was so obnoxious in his efforts to bring the House calender to a screeching halt through his attempts to remove sales taxes from groceries that by the time he finished, he carried only 10 other votes — despite the popularity of the tax break.
And in the 2022 election in which Hoffman’s allies swept a series of legislative races, particularly in northern Idaho but in much of the state as well, Nate lost his own bid for reelection to a more reasonable Republican, Rep. Britt Raybould, R-Rexburg.
Presumably, the real power rests with IFF’s board members, including Brent Regan, of Coeur d’Alene, and Doyle Beck, of Idaho Falls. Nate’s influence may be limited to the margins. But if he can’t find some way to effectively halt the organization’s decline, lawmakers who have followed the IFF line almost exclusively — such as Rep. Mike Kingsley, R-Lewiston — may have to learn how to think for themselves. — M.T.
