According to the guide, questions were scripted, with each supporter choosing from the same list of questions provided by organizers. Attendees were encouraged to “Look friendly or neutral so that staffers will call on you.” Then, “Don’t give up the mic until you’re satisfied with the answer,” because staffers might try to “limit your ability to follow up” by taking the mic back. The guide tells them to hold firm “because no staffer in their right mind wants to look like they’re physically intimidating a constituent, so they will back off.”
The guide further instructs, “If they object, then say politely but loudly: ‘I’m not finished. The Congressman/woman is dodging my question. Why are you trying to stop me from following up?’” We had done enough research to know what this advice looked like in practice. They wouldn’t just use the microphone for follow-up questions. They would use it to wrest control of the meeting and essentially hijack the event, hoping it would descend into chaos. Any answer to a question that was not the progressive answer would be rejected and would trigger a follow-up with an allegation of dodging the question. Fortunately, we were prepared for that. All this instruction on how to dominate the microphone and use it to disrupt and intimidate would turn out to be wasted effort.
Had the crowd been actual constituents who had attended our past town halls, they would have known this tactic was a dead end. I’ve never set up more than one microphone at a town hall meeting, and that one was for me. I always take a lot of questions but insist that the audience allow questions to be heard without a mic. I’m very aware that people come to hear me explain why I voted the way I did. They don’t come to listen to someone “ask questions” that sound a lot more like a Senate filibuster or a courtroom interrogation.
My constituents have never appreciated the person who tried to take over the meeting. So, I have always called on people myself, had them ask their questions without a mic, then repeated their questions for the broader audience if the volume was a problem.
The protestors, having never been to our town halls, did not expect to be unamplified. It messed up their chi, so to speak. They complained bitterly during and after the town hall, angry that their plans had been thwarted. They could cry foul all they wanted; it was the right decision. Maintaining control of the microphone allowed me to turn down the temperature when the crowd got aggressive, ensuring the safety and security of everyone there. I hate to think what might have happened had things gotten any more heated than they already were.
Who Will Resist the Resistance?
Why are they destroying the town hall as an American institution? To save democracy, of course! It is the story of the post-2016 political left. As the succeeding chapters will demonstrate, political theater has become a substitute for public policy.
This is a book about what happens when one political party decides that to save democracy they must subvert it. To protect free speech, they must silence it. To fend off fascism, they must practice it. To promote good public policy, they must resist it. In the end, it appears that to uphold the rule of law, some felt they must violate it.
Throughout this book, we’ll explore two emerging patterns in American politics. The first is the left’s deliberate substitution of political theater in place of any real policy agenda. The second and more disturbing pattern is the use of authoritarian tactics to defeat perceived authoritarianism. We will look at which side poses the real authoritarian threat. We consistently get this conflict wrong. We misunderstand what politicians are doing, and the media misinterprets the reasons they’re doing it. The hysteria sweeping the left is shaping our country in ways we’ve failed to appreciate, and with results that may matter more to our future than anything President Trump has accomplished.
The resistance talks so much about saving democracy that they’ve obscured the extent to which they threaten it. Sure, they sought to overturn a free and fair election, but it wasn’t clear at first that they didn’t intend to stop there. They want to manipulate our election process to permanently tilt the playing field in their favor. All in the name of protecting freedom and fairness, naturally.
In the chapters that follow, I’ll show why we’re still not taking this threat seriously enough. The Democrats are playing a high-stakes game, gambling with the most prosperous economy and the most stable government in the history of the world. For what? Power.
I would argue we don’t see the approaching crisis clearly enough. Should we lose our prized institutions, we may never see them restored. Seemingly small procedural changes could have far-reaching repercussions in the life of every American. Show trials, ballot fraud, quiet rule changes, political donation laundering—the list of outrages is long and growing longer. But the main puzzle remains: why do the Democrats think they are the good guys here?
The Escape
Back at the town hall, the tension was peaking. “It was definitely a powder keg just waiting for one little spark,” Jex said, adding, “Honestly, the spark was almost there. Had it gone on another ten–fifteen minutes, it would have erupted.”
We had known ahead of time that my exit from the event might prove challenging. We were prepared. Even during the program, my security detail was on high alert at all times. I stood alone on the front of a stage, backed by curtains. On either side, hidden from view, two beefy, athletic off-duty cops (who are my friends) stood like guard dogs at the ready on both sides. A third officer mostly waited directly behind me, hidden by the curtains. Had someone rushed the stage, the reaction would have been swift and physical. Though unarmed, the assailant would have been quickly subdued, and I’d have been whisked out the back. I hoped nothing like that would happen, but we were ready if something did.
That still left the matter of leaving the venue. A group at another event had mobbed a congressman’s car as he exited the hall. In that case, the car had been some distance away, forcing the congressman to run the gauntlet on foot through a crowd of rowdy protestors. “There’s no winning on that,” Russo said, so an evasion plan took shape.
Chief Russo happened to drive the same model vehicle as I did. So, the chief parked his unit at the top of the school’s driveway with officers standing around it as if securing the area. During the event, they kept checking the car, walking around it, making their presence obvious. They even stuck an American flag in the windshield.
Sure enough, the protestors surrounded the chief’s car as the event concluded, hoping to corner me on my way out. Jex was there. “A group started to mobilize at the west end of the building,” he remembers. “This was the same group that one of the CHPD uniformed officers reported brandishing guns earlier in the night. They were organizing a search for Jason’s car. They were masked—bandannaed up.”
“Operation Decoy” worked to plan. Drawing the menacing group’s attention to Chief Russo’s car created a window of opportunity for my exit from the venue. I won’t reveal the exact plan that got me safely out, but I do recall a few harrowing Crazy Ivans (high-speed U-turns) at the hands of Mike Fullwood, an off-duty officer who also worked private security for me at the event.
Jex, who has done security for at least a dozen other town halls, remembers this one feeling different. “There wasn’t that constituent feel,” he said. “All the other events that Jason did, there was definitely a different feel based on how the constituents talked and interacted. In the past, even the people who were not fans of Jason, who asked critical questions, were not like this. It was a different mentality.”
I share all that to fully illustrate the sea change in the public conduct we all witnessed that night. There was a malevolence, a barely subdued violence that dominated the night’s events. It was like nothing we had seen before in Utah, certainly where a congressional town hall—one of the oldest customs of our representative republic—was concerned.
I don’t think they got what they were after at my town hall, at least not if one cable news reporter I spoke with can be believed. But they had MSNBC, CNN, and other national outlets o
n hand just in case.
This opposition was far from organic. This was a reality show organized by groups outside my district, scripted and promoted like the professional public relations campaign it was, specifically designed to disappear the conservative supermajority in Utah’s 3rd Congressional District for the benefit of cable TV news audiences.
What did the national media think was going to happen? I can’t say for sure, but given my conversation with the cable news reporter, it’s fair to say the event was less explosive than promised. As loud and unruly as it may have been, that town hall did not deliver all that the outside instigators had implied.
They were looking for violence and chaos. Great staff preparation; an excellent display of community policing, crowd control, and crisis deescalation; and some terrific on-the-fly tactical execution kept it from going where anarchist forces wanted to go.
My office had been contacted ahead of the town hall by a national cable news reporter who wanted to ensure she could get an on-camera interview with me at the event. To be as open and transparent as possible, I insisted on speaking with her myself earlier in the day to prepare for the interview.
I asked her, “Why are you here?” I was fascinated that she and others would come. I reminded her that I’m a Republican in Utah who won with 73 percent of the vote. It was January—we were less than thirty days into my new term. Why were they here? She admitted that they were told there was going to be a riot, perhaps a fire, and that this was something that they would want to be covering as a network.
Incredulous, I asked her, “Did you feel any duty or obligation to communicate that with law enforcement?” People were potentially going to be in harm’s way. “Did you tell our campaign? Law enforcement?” I asked. Sheepishly she admitted they had not. We later confirmed with Chief Russo that none of the media outlets covering the event that night had contacted him to warn of the potential for violence. They all just kept quiet and showed up hoping for a figurative train wreck. It was justified as long as they got some good footage.
I told her, “You really need to think about who told you this.” She told me the network had had conversations with some people in San Francisco about what would happen at a town hall in Utah. News outlets expected something violent to happen—and they were there to capitalize on the mayhem. That’s what brought them there.
“You were getting used,” I told her. “This was a setup.” I appreciated her candor. She ended up not asking me to go on camera that night.
Now, there was no fire, no riot. There were no guns discharged, despite reports of people brandishing weapons. But given the tenor of the crowd, I credit the Cottonwood Heights Police Department and my team for maintaining the degree of order that prevailed. Their preemptive planning prevented the type of violence television crews had been warned to expect. But for the outstanding efforts of seasoned law enforcement professionals, the event might have ended very differently.
As far as Indivisible Utah was concerned, the event was a huge success. They got their national footage of a large crowd shouting down a congressman. But what price did they pay for that footage?
All across the country, elected officials began thinking twice about hosting town hall meetings. What representatives want to put their staff or their constituents at risk of physical harm? What community wants to pay overtime for three dozen or five dozen police officers to keep the peace at such an event? Certainly, there are still members of Congress doing town hall meetings—especially freshmen and those who serve on committees that pose no threat to the Democratic agenda.
The radicals target selectively. Here in Utah, my successor has hosted a number of town hall meetings without incident. But he is a freshman in a safe seat. Next door, in the 4th Congressional District, Representative Mia Love was perpetually targeted for harassment by Indivisible groups who saw her as vulnerable and who resented the threat she posed to the Democratic iconography of identity politics. Leftist nonprofits would spend heavily to unseat her in the next election. They would succeed by the narrowest of margins.
I didn’t see then what I see so clearly now—not right away. That first town hall in the wake of a presidential election no one saw coming was just an opening salvo.
What happened that night was my first glimpse of the Democrats’ bold new battle plan to deceive, intimidate, and overpower their opposition. I didn’t grasp then the significance of what we were seeing—or what it portended. But I do now.
This made the Tea Party wave of 2010 look like, well, a tea party.
It was the opening skirmish of a battle in which Democrats would reveal their new willingness to gladly sacrifice the core institutions that made America great in exchange for absolute power. From the moment Donald Trump was elected, nothing would be so sacred to Democrats that it could not be repurposed or renounced in the single-minded pursuit of leftist dominance in every quarter. One of the first casualties, after the truth, would be the traditional town hall. But the quest for power in 2020 will see a long list of institutions politicized, weaponized, or otherwise sacrificed in a progressive power grab.
Chapter 1
Monetizing Anger
Nonprofits called it the Trump Bump. As a wave of televised despair and indignation overwhelmed Blue America on election night 2016, the unexpected electoral upset unleashed a powerful green wave of rage donations. In their anguish and despondency, progressive voters opened their checkbooks. But it wasn’t just political campaigns on the receiving end of the cash flow. It was progressive nonprofit groups as well. The biggest bumps went to the 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofits. Named for the section in the IRS code that defines them, 501(c)(4)s have some latitude to engage in political activities (provided that engagement is limited and nonpartisan). By contrast, 501(c)(3) charities, which we’ll scrutinize in the next chapter, ostensibly have minimal ability to engage in politics.
Planned Parenthood received 80,000 donations in the first three days after the election. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported receiving $7 million from 120 donors in the five days following Donald Trump’s victory. By contrast, the New York Times reported, the five days following President Obama’s reelection brought in just $28,000 from 354 donors to the ACLU. Around the same time that I was holding my last town hall in late January 2017, the ACLU reported receiving $24 million in donations over a single weekend due to the release of the Trump administration’s travel ban policy.
Nonprofit news outlets on the left also saw the bump. Pro Publica, best remembered by conservatives for publishing confidential tax information about conservative nonprofits requesting tax-exempt status in 2013, was among these. Pro Publica raised more money in the days following the Trump election—$750,000—than it raised in all of 2015. Inside Philanthropy reported similar large fund-raising bumps for the Center for Public Integrity, the Marshall Project, and NPR affiliates like WNYC.
This phenomenon dubbed “rage donating” lit up the nonprofit sector in the days and weeks following Hillary Clinton’s epic election loss. It would continue to varying degrees throughout the Trump presidency, ultimately enabling Democrats to take back the House in the 2018 midterm elections.
Nonprofits Take Center Stage
The growing significance of the nonprofit sector in our political and electoral landscape will potentially have far-reaching implications for future elections. Well-meaning campaign finance reforms that require donor disclosure, cap campaign donations, prohibit foreign financing, and preclude the use of government resources for partisan activity may appear successful on the surface. But much of the activity that is now illegal in the campaign world has shifted to the nonprofit world. While this is true for both parties, the effect is far more pronounced on the left.
In the progressive-dominated nonprofit sector, partisan political activity is helping swing the results of elections using the very methods Congress has criminalized on the campaign side. With no limits on donations, no disclosure of who is donating, no means of discerning
whether foreign governments are participating, and with minimal oversight, a growing list of political nonprofit advocacy groups operate freely and openly in the partisan political space.
The last two election cycles have shown that the impact of nonprofit engagement in our political process has been profound. And it is growing, fueled by the tsunami of rage donations that have energized Democratic campaigns in the wake of the Trump presidency.
The same kind of energy might have propelled more significant fund-raising gains on the right in the heady days of the 2009 Tea Party movement had conservatives been able to access the kind of nonprofit infrastructure available to progressives. But many of the groups purporting to lead the Tea Party movement were formed after the fact and missed the big opportunities of the nascent movement’s early days. They were not established nonprofits with large endowment funds, high name recognition, or extensive databases of supporters and volunteers. Furthermore, as Tea Party groups began cropping up around the country from 2009 to 2012, many had difficulty getting up and running in the face of unexplained IRS delays approving their applications for nonprofit status.
By contrast, the Trump Bump came at a time when the nonprofit world was already dominated by established left-leaning organizations, many of which control multimillion-dollar endowments, enjoy steady revenue from government contracts, and have a long history of political activism.
Rage donating has been good for nonprofit advocacy groups under both the Obama and the Trump administrations, benefiting groups across the political spectrum, though disproportionately favoring progressives. In my experience, the phenomenon also has a downside that sometimes had a counterproductive influence on our work in Congress.
Power Grab Page 2