YAL’s War on Idaho Conservatives

Every time I cover the antics of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), I think, “This is it, there’s nothing more to say, and I’m done.” Yet every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in with yet another escalation of their war against Idaho conservatives.

If you’re just tuning in, feel free to catch up on my previous coverage of this distasteful saga:

• December 2024: Sound and Fury
• January 2025. Regulating Political Speech:
• February 2025: Shooting Yourself in the Foot
• February 2025: Discourse versus Demagoguery
• March 2025: Stirring the Pot
• June 2025: Missing the Point Again

If you’re signed up for emails from YAL or its American Action Fund (AAF) project, you know what I’m talking about. This morning, they escalated again—launching a broadside not only at the same conservative legislators they’ve repeatedly branded “traitors,” but now at the Idaho GOP itself and its chairwoman, Dorothy Moon. Their email linked to a secretly recorded audio file from a recent event where Moon candidly shared her frustration with YAL’s continued attacks.

In yet another rambling screed full of lies and half-truths, AAF’s Idaho manager Sulamita Rotante denounces Chairwoman Moon, Speaker Mike Moyle, Rep. Josh Tanner, and more than 90% of Idaho Republicans for failing to eliminate the grocery tax or oppose the legislative pay raise.

By all means, read the whole thing here:

I spoke with Moon this morning. (Full disclosure: I consult for the Idaho GOP, but—as always—I speak only for myself here.) She told me she was unaware she was being recorded, but stands by her comments. According to her, she learned that one of the attendees was personally asked by Rotante to pose a grocery tax question, record the answer, and deliver the audio to YAL.

Let that sink in. A self-described liberty organization is now trafficking in ambush recordings to smear Idaho’s elected GOP chairwoman—someone who, ironically, has faced relentless attacks from the party’s left flank for three years.

Say what you will about the Gem State Conservatives, but at least they’re from Idaho, which is more than can be said for YAL.

What is YAL, anyway? What are its principles? Young Americans for Liberty is based in Austin, Texas, a state where Republican legislative leadership routinely hands committee chairs to Democrats. Yet they operate nationwide, picking ideological fights with Republicans they deem insufficiently pure.

Take a look at AAF’s Facebook ad library and you’ll see it’s all over the map. In Florida, Texas, South Dakota, and Ohio, they’re focused on property taxes. In Idaho? It’s grocery taxes. Why the selective focus? Does YAL decide what issues to push, or do they take their lead from local allies? Is their goal to enact conservative policy, or just act as mercenary thugs in Republican civil wars?

Their fixation on the lawmaker pay raise is another case in point. They repeatedly denounce the “22% raise” without ever stating the actual numbers, which went from $19,933 to $25,000 per year. This is presumably because if donors saw how modest the base pay actually is, they might sympathize rather than feeling outraged.

The other states in which YAL operates have wildly divergent legislative salaries. The base pay for Texas lawmakers is only $7,200, with a generous per diem, while Ohio lawmakers earn over $63,000 per year. States like Florida, South Dakota, and South Carolina fall in between.

So when YAL hammers Idaho lawmakers over salary adjustments, it’s not about sound policy, but cheap outrage. That’s their playbook: use issues like the grocery tax or pay raises to generate anger, harvest emails, raise money, and wage scorched-earth primaries.

Everything they do is about the next legislative campaign. Calling conservative Idaho lawmakers “traitors” or targeting the state chairwoman is not about laying the groundwork for conservative legislation in 2026, but about getting voters riled up to oust these people from office in next year’s primary election. I don’t even think YAL cares who replaces them so long as they take scalps.

Because that’s what it’s about: taking scalps. Remember that in 2024, YAL’s PAC, Make Liberty Win (MLW), sent a blatantly dishonest mailer to voters in District 30 claiming that then-Rep. Julianne Young voted against a bill to protect children from harmful materials in libraries:

This was completely false, but the damage was done as Young lost by two votes to now-Rep. Ben Fuhriman, who by all measures is much less conservative. Did YAL/MLW care? I don’t think so. They took the scalp of someone they considered not good enough. No apology. No accountability. Just on to the next target.

The mailer lied about Rep. David Cannon too, but he survived his primary election.

YAL’s strategy seems to be little more than chaos for clicks—generating anger and outrage for the sole purpose of list building and fundraising. Like the Mad King from Game of Thrones, YAL seems content to burn everything down hoping to rule over the ashes.

If you’re not a longtime reader, you might be confused by all the names and acronyms. YAL, AAF, MLW, what is all this? These groups operate under different names and tax codes, but they’re all part of the same national operation.

• Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) is a 501c4 political advocacy organization
• American Action Fund (AAF) is a special project of YAL
• Make Liberty Win (MLW) is a political action committee

On paper, they’re separate. In reality, they share staff, strategy, and funding.

How much funding?

According to FEC filings, Young Americans for Liberty funneled nearly $8 million into the Make Liberty Win PAC from 2023 to 2024. Much of it is labeled “Carey contributions”, a term that allows hybrid PACs to raise unlimited funds from nonprofits and spend them on “independent expenditures” like attack ads and mailers supporting or opposing candidates or measures.

That’s how they operate: use the nonprofit to recruit and radicalize, then deploy the PAC to destroy. In the 2024 primary alone, MLW spent more than $700,000 in Idaho via independent expenditures. Topping the list was Rep. Mike Moyle, against whom MLW spent over $112,000 in an unsuccessful attempt to unseat the Speaker of the House. They spent another $107,000 against Chuck Winder, then the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and were successful in that endeavor.

Look: I’m not complaining about campaign financing—it’s an essential part of modern politics, and all sides engage in it. I’m also not complaining that Winder was defeated—that was a win for Idaho conservatives, and YAL/MLW deserves some credit for making it happen. The problem is that these organizations parachute into Idaho with big guns and fat wallets and end up causing a lot of collateral damage.

Here’s a question: Who told YAL/MLW to target Julianne Young?

Most of MLW’s stances on their independent expenditures—supporting or opposing specific candidates—made sense based on which figures were considered more conservative. Yet some should raise your eyebrows. MLW spent $8,600 against Young, despite her 79.9% Freedom Index score in 2024 and the obvious moderate leanings of her challenger. (Rep. Ben Fuhriman scored 51% this year.) MLW even tossed a hundred bucks against Rep. Kevin Andrus and his 77.1% Index score, despite him running unopposed. (Andrus scored 77% this year as well.)

In total, MLW spent $630,000 opposing candidates but just under $73,000 in favor of others. That means nearly 90% of their expenditures in Idaho were hits against their enemies. It’s clear YAL/MLW’s modus operandi is more about generating anger and outrage rather than promoting what they believe is good.

YAL uses issues like the grocery tax and the lawmaker pay raise to stir up outrage, which leads to clicks, which leads to money, which leads to more power. They want you to believe the political situation in Idaho is absolutely dire—not because it’s true, but because it’s easier to fundraise off a manufactured crisis than tell the truth. In email after email, Sulamita Rotante denounces the 2025 session as a disaster, handwaving away medical freedom, anti-SLAPP protections, election security, Medicaid reform, protecting children, reclaiming power from unelected bureaucrats, and more than $400 million in tax cuts are nothing but crumbs.

They’re not concerned with fixing problems; they’re only interested in fundraising off of them. It’s a lucrative field, not only for YAL and MLW, but for their vendors. Here in Idaho, MLW spent nearly $400,000 on a Virginia firm called PAC Management Services, $130,000 on WAB Holdings out of Texas, and $112,000 on Propellant Media from Atlanta, Georgia.

The latter is an interesting case. Nationwide, MLW spent nearly $1 million on Propellant, which also counts as clients far-left campaigns such as Black Voters Matter and Stacey Abrams for Governor.

Imagine that. While MLW and its sister organization YAL are accusing Idaho Republicans of selling out conservative values, they’re funneling donor dollars to the same firm that helps elect Democrats.

Now, Propellant appears to be a large firm that takes clients from all sides. But when YAL/MLW talks about purity and principle, and accuses Idaho conservatives of compromise, they should probably check their own balance sheet.

The same people who claim to be fighting the political establishment are lining the pockets of the progressive digital establishment—all while lying to Idaho voters and taking down good legislators like Julianne Young.

This isn’t about grocery taxes or spending cuts. It’s about control.

YAL and its affiliates don’t want a coalition; they want a purge. If you’re not with them 100%—on every vote, every phrase, every social media slogan—you’re the enemy. And if you stand in their way, they’ll smear you, lie about you, and use out-of-state money to run you out of office.

Chairwoman Moon is just the latest target. There will be more.

Idaho Republicans need to wake up to what’s happening. This isn’t a local grassroots uprising. It’s a national political machine, funded by millions, operating with no guardrails, and intent on hijacking our state and the Idaho GOP.

It’s time to draw the line.

It’s clear to me that YAL has strayed from its original mission, which came out of the wake of Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign to motivate and organize young people to push political change in America. Cliff Maloney, former president of YAL, once said that the purpose of politics is the adjudication of power—using the political process to implement policies that maximize freedom and liberty. But Maloney was ousted in 2021, and since then the organization has devolved into sowing chaos for clicks.

Maloney went on to found Citizens Alliance, which has a chapter here in Idaho. Citizens Alliance of Idaho (CAI) doesn’t shy away from confrontation—just look at CAI director Matt Edwards going hard against Rep. Steve Berch last month—but the organization’s primary focus is promoting good policy, not taking scalps.

CAI promotes its “Pledge,” a short list of principles that participating lawmakers are expected to uphold when casting their votes. This year, 41 out of 105 legislators are considered pledge signers in good standing—a reality that paints a very different picture than YAL’s narrative, which attacks 90% of Idaho Republicans.

For full disclosure, I served as contributing editor to CAI’s Idaho Signal program during the session and have attended several CAI candidate training events. Once again, that has no impact on what I write here, beyond the fact that I support CAI’s mission.

Last week, Edwards posted a thread on Twitter listing many of the great conservative bills passed by pledge signers during the 2025 session:

Yet YAL continues to scream that the 2025 session was an utter failure; a triumph of establishment politics as usual. Their goal appears to be nothing more than taking scalps, destroying anyone—even (especially?) conservatives who oppose them. What is their goal regarding the Idaho GOP? Are they working to oust Chairwoman Moon? Who is making these tactical decisions—AAF Vice President Ted Patterson? Idaho Director Sulamita Rotante? Or are they mercenaries taking orders from someone else?

I ask all Idaho conservatives—even those currently receiving praise from YAL—to reject scorched-earth politics and chaos for clicks. Secret recordings and personal attacks are not how we should be doing things in the Gem State.

Tell YAL to take those tactics back to Texas and let us take care of ourselves.

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