The second thing that didn’t make sense to Inglis was the rage. The crowd, all of them, were boiling with anger. At most political events, it was rare for anyone in attendance to stand up and speak into a microphone; the few people who did were the same handful of gadflies who spoke at every meeting. This crowd was different. They weren’t just ready to stand up and speak. They looked ready to charge the stage. They were shouting. Booing. Cupping their hands around their mouths and catcalling.
The crowd was shouting, and Inglis was trying to make his voice heard and to calm things down a little bit. But the acoustics in the auditorium were awful, and the sound system was crummy. His voice was drowned out.
One of Inglis’s political aides, a young man named Price Atkinson, was out in the crowd, carrying a microphone to hand to the attendees to let them ask questions. Atkinson was wearing a suit and tie, and his short, dark hair was neatly combed. At one point, Atkinson leaned over and held the microphone for a particularly agitated middle-aged woman with long, dark hair who wore a peach-colored shirt. The woman was waving a ream of papers in her hand. She said they were copies of the Affordable Care Act, the proposed law better known as Obamacare. She had spent hours reading through the entire bill, she said, and was horrified by what she saw there.
“There are things in this health care bill that people don’t realize are in there!” she cried out. “They want to put a chip in every one of us! It talks about it right here!” she said, flipping through the pages. She claimed that if Obamacare passed, every American would be mandated to have a microchip implanted in their body, allowing the government to monitor the populace.I
This proclamation evoked cross-shouting from the rest of the crowd. People raised their hands for the microphone. More shouting ensued. The woman seemed determined to read pertinent portions of the bill, and crowd members began to shout, “Let her read it!” as other crowd members booed and catcalled.
Inglis tried, again, to speak. This was how it went all summer. The crowds who attended his public meetings were enraged with Washington, DC, enraged with Barack Obama, and enraged with Inglis himself. They were enraged about government bailouts, the stimulus, Obamacare, and, very often, about the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that Inglis had voted against. Inglis discovered that voting against Waxman-Markey wasn’t enough. The crowd was aware of Inglis’s views on climate change and his proposed bill to pass a carbon tax. He tried patiently to explain the fifteen-page bill he had proposed and explain how the carbon tax would be balanced by a cut in payroll taxes. But the crowds were not convinced. They called the Waxman-Markey bill, which was just then being debated in the Senate, the “cap-and-tax” bill and the “crap-and-tax” bill.
Amid all the shouting, Inglis saw small things that were deeply puzzling.
During the town hall meeting where the woman waved her pages and warned about being microchipped, Inglis saw something behind her. There, in the back of the room, a person was filming the event. And they were using a nice video camera, set on a tripod. This stuck in Inglis’s mind. It seemed to signify something.
“It wouldn’t be your average person who comes with a tripod and sets up,” he said. Somebody was helping.
* * *
When heated protests broke out across the country over the Fourth of July weekend of 2009, one of the larger events was sponsored by a little-known political group called Americans for Prosperity. Strangely enough, this event was held in the deep-blue, liberal state of New Jersey, which had voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. The event was hosted by Steve Lonegan, Americans for Prosperity’s state director in New Jersey. The protest was held in a large city park, and Lonegan was slated as one of the main speakers.
It was sunny that day, and Lonegan wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt and a red necktie when he walked out on the large stage to address the crowd. He stood near a podium draped with a bright-yellow banner, called the Gadsden flag, that showed a coiled rattlesnake above the motto “Don’t Tread on Me.” The flag dated from the Revolutionary War, and it became a common sight that summer.
When Lonegan grasped the microphone, he didn’t look like a revolutionary. He looked exactly like what he had been for twelve years, which was a small-town mayor. His shirt was tucked into his slacks, and his necktie seemed to be knotted just a little too tight. He was slightly portly and wore glasses. But he was a good speaker and he knew how to rile up a crowd. Lonegan, a Republican, had honed his speaking skills during the decade that he was mayor of the small, liberal town called Bogota (pronounced Buh-GO-dah). He sharpened those skills even further after he left public office, when he became a traveling evangelist for the political vision of Charles Koch.
Lonegan was hired as one of the first state directors for Americans for Prosperity. When he joined AFP, as insiders called it, Lonegan was just one of a handful of state directors. The group was founded in 2003, and within a year, it included state-level chapters in Kansas, Texas, and North Carolina. AFP was small and quirky and a marginal force in American politics back then. Its budget was about $3 million in 2003 and just $1 million in 2004. Still, Lonegan felt a close sense of camaraderie with the early directors and board members of AFP. Lonegan reported directly to the AFP president, an activist named Tim Phillips, whom Koch had hired in from the conservative Christian movement. When he joined AFP, Phillips stopped campaigning against abortion and gay marriage and started campaigning for tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. This was a message that Lonegan believed in passionately, and he took up the cause with gusto. He started raising money for AFP’s New Jersey chapter—in over six years, he claimed to have boosted the annual fund-raising take in his state from $150,000 to $1.6 million.
Lonegan invested countless hours of his own time. He drove from town to town throughout New Jersey and gave speeches at libraries and Rotary club meetings, and even at Democratic Party gatherings. He hosted a local radio show where he preached against the creeping reach of state authority in New Jersey. He often drove for hours to show up at some public library where only four or five people arrived to hear him speak.
Now people were listening. That Saturday on the Fourth of July, Lonegan was looking out over a crowd of hundreds. They were mostly older and almost entirely white. They looked affluent. Someone had brought a large American flag that swayed in the breeze. Dozens of people brought camping chairs that they’d set up in a rough semicircle on the grass in front of the stage.
The crowd was united in their outrage but disparate in their complaints. A man with white hair, sunglasses, and cargo shorts held a placard that simply read: “I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK.” A middle-aged woman in a straw sun hat held a yellow, stenciled placard that read: “JUST SAY NO. NO MORE SPENDING. NO MORE TAX INCREASES. NO GOVT RUN BUSINESS.” Other signs read: “SAY NO TO SOCIALISM!” And “SILENT NO MORE!”
If the crowd’s grievances were diffuse, then it was Lonegan’s job to focus them. He united the crowd by giving a stump speech that AFP helped him fashion over many years.
“You know, we’ve been hearing a lot about global warming, right?” Lonegan said. “The reason that we’re redistributing our nation’s economy and industry around the world—it’s under this pretense of global warming. We’ve heard now how we’re destroying the environment, and we’re destroying the polar bear population.”