3. The Enemy Within

September 25, 2024·38 min·3 clips

After the FBI said there were no snipers on the hillside, operations logs resurfaced proving Parker was right all along.

Idaho is the scene. Gabriel Gatehouse starts with Ben Furman, who has spent years in local Republican Party politics and says the 2022 state convention opened people's eyes. Twin Falls is where the story gets going. Delegates came there to choose a new party chair, a job with real power in one of America's most conservative states. The pizza flyer matters, oddly enough. Tom Luna's campaign event, billed as pizza and patriots, gets pulled into the convention story after another flyer promised free pizza at the same address. From there, Gatehouse follows local reporting to the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which worried Idahoans no longer see as just another think tank. Its tool is blunt. The Freedom Index scores proposed state laws in real time, judging bills by whether they shrink government or grow it. Opinion turns into pressure. Legislators who ignore the foundation's suggestions can end up facing election trials, which gives the scorecard teeth. Then the mission statement raises the temperature. The foundation says it exists to defeat Marxism, a claim Gatehouse meets with disbelief because this is Idaho. Interviews go nowhere. The IFF says it does not give interviews to legacy news media, so he reads and watches its own articles, reports, podcasts, and videos. The material gets bleak. One podcast treats voting as a reassurance ritual and democracy as a facade, turning civic life into theater. A senior policy analyst is described as a youngish web developer with a huge beard who calls the U.S. government a curse and says he eagerly awaits its eradication. Gatehouse does not shrug this off as random weirdness. The rhetoric sits next to a working system of ratings, pressure, and election trials. Furman's slogan draws the line: Conservative, not crazy. That becomes shorthand for the split between old-school Republicans who want to conserve the existing system and a movement ready to treat the U.S. government as the enemy.

As heard by us

A prank flyer opens onto Idaho's larger fight over conservatism and power.

Gabriel Gatehouse starts with a prank at Idaho's 2022 GOP convention, then uses it to open up a bigger fight inside Idaho Republican politics.

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Why you'd press play

If Idaho Republican politics starts local and turns into a bigger power struggle, this is your lane.

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