Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,4

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