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 on 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.