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  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.”

  At the mention of polar bears, the crowd groaned and booed. Lonegan had them. He stoked their discontent by claiming the EPA was suppressing a report showing that the polar bear population was actually increasing, in spite of Al Gore’s hysterical warnings. To underscore his point, Lonegan introduced his guest speaker, a man dressed in a polar bear suit, who had been wandering through the crowd carrying a sign that said, “I am AFP!”

  The guy in the polar bear suit, introduced as “Prospero the Polar Bear,” stepped up to the microphone as the crowd started to chuckle.

  “I don’t know—how many of you can hear me?” Prospero asked into the microphone, as it reverberated with feedback. “There’s too many polar bears!”

  This drew sweeping laughter. “When I grew up, there was plenty of space,” Prospero continued. “Now there’s fifty thousand of us. And we just keep making more and more. They say it’s getting warm and icebergs are melting. Well, I needed more space, so I came down here.” The Prospero routine killed. As Prospero stepped back, Lonegan took the microphone and quoted the founding fathers and the US Constitution, driving home the importance of liberty and the c
onstraints that must be placed on government. The rhetoric was elegant and forceful. It equated the cap-and-trade bill with government tyranny, and the fight against the bill with America’s primal struggle against oppression.

  Lonegan’s rhetoric was strategic. By emphasizing the centrality of climate change legislation to popular discontent with American politics in 2009, he was carrying forward the corporate lobbying campaign that Charles Koch had initiated from the boardroom in Wichita. This strategy was central to AFP’s role in Koch’s political network. From the earliest days of AFP’s inception, the group operated as something like a fast-food franchise. AFP was composed of semiautonomous state chapters, but all of them served products from the same menu. The menu was designed with great care and specificity by Charles and David Koch and their lieutenants in Koch’s lobbying operations. This meant that state-level directors had a lot of autonomy. Lonegan developed his own pool of local donors and had the freedom to hire his own field directors and to determine where he spoke. But ultimately Lonegan and other state directors were told by AFP headquarters what they should say and how they should say it.

  “I had to report to the national office,” Lonegan recalled. “They gave guidance on where our issues would lie. . . . So, I would report regularly to my boss on what issues were emerging, and then we’d determine how they’d want to address it. Not every issue that I saw as an issue did they think was an issue.”

  This blend of local autonomy with centralized control created a political organization that was uniquely powerful and effective. AFP could mobilize the type of popular citizen involvement that most people referred to as grassroots support. But it coupled this popular support with intelligence and guidance developed inside one of the most well-funded corporate lobbying operations in America. This meant that AFP could get people marching in the streets, and it could get them marching in the exact streets and zip codes of congressional districts where their marching would most effectively benefit Koch Industries’ strategic interests. The lobbying shop, under Philip Ellender, attained the kind of real-time, granular political intelligence that only the largest corporations had the resources to develop. That information was then shared with a multistate network of ground-level activists of the kind that Lonegan had built over many years in New Jersey.

  Koch’s lobbyists were unique in their ability to closely coordinate with the network of “third-party” groups that Koch Industries supported and nurtured. Koch’s lobbying office held conference calls “daily—multiple times every day” with Koch operatives who coordinated the activities of the third-party groups, according to one person familiar with Koch’s political operations.

  The coordination could also occur at the highest levels. Richard Fink, Charles Koch’s top political lieutenant, sat on AFP’s board of directors from the beginning. He also sat in on the lobbying strategy meetings in Washington of the kind that were attended by Ellender and the compliance lawyer David Hoffmann.

  The potency of this tight coordination would not be felt during AFP’s early years. During the George W. Bush era, AFP wasn’t much more than a political sideshow. Even by 2008, the organization was doing the political equivalent of cheap stunt work. The group hired out a hot-air balloon to fly around with a placard claiming that concern over climate change was nothing more than “hot air.” It hired cameramen to accost people who showed up for an Al Gore speech on global warming the summer of 2008, asking them why they drove to the event if driving meant that they burned fossil-fuels.

  AFP’s full power was not mobilized until the Waxman-Markey bill threatened Koch Industries. As the threat of regulations on carbon emissions increased, Charles and David Koch dramatically increased the funding and reach of Americans for Prosperity. In 2007, the group had a budget of $5.7 million. By 2009, that budget was $10.4 million. In 2010, it was $17.5 million.

  In 2009, AFP became a central part of the Koch network’s political influence operation. The group filed paperwork for chapters in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. The state chapters opened pages on Facebook and built e-mail lists for volunteers. Lonegan had a hard time keeping up with the increases in funding, staff, and new state chapters.

  While the funding increases were important for AFP, something else was happening that was even more significant for the group. Lonegan and AFP finally had an audience. After Barack Obama’s election, Lonegan was no longer speaking to crowds of four or five people at public libraries—he was speaking to hundreds. The crowd that showed up for the Independence Day rally was just the beginning. There were people everywhere, even in New Jersey, who were fed up with the direction of American politics and were becoming activists for the first time in their lives. This movement would come to call itself the Tea Party.

  As it turned out, Charles Koch had laid out a white tablecloth and fine china for this tea party many years in advance. The causes Charles Koch had been advocating—cutting the national debt and halting the reach of federal government into private markets—were causes that Tea Party activists cared about passionately.

  Koch Industries and the leaders of Americans for Prosperity did not create the Tea Party or even orchestrate it. But they were ready for it, and prepared to steer it and shape its concerns. Lonegan and others at AFP helped make climate change regulation a central focus of the Tea Party movement. When Lonegan hosted rallies, he and his team were ready to record the e-mail address of anyone who shared it. They made phone trees and hosted volunteer training sessions. They passed out the phone numbers of local congressmen to activists and coached them on the best time to call. (Late night was sometimes best so that volunteers could leave voicemails, which would be waiting in big batches when the politician showed up for work the next day.) They taught volunteers the fine art of calling talk-radio programs and getting on the air, coaching them to mention the right website address or phone number when they were on the air.

  Lonegan and his colleagues did more than just get Tea Party activists to focus on the Waxman-Markey bill. Americans for Prosperity also helped direct the activists’ passion toward a very specific group of targets: Republican politicians. Attacking the Republican party was one of AFP’s central strategies from the earliest days. In 2006, Lonegan attended a private AFP event hosted by Charles and David Koch, in Aspen, Colorado. The event was an annual symposium attended by wealthy conservative political donors, academics, and activists that Charles Koch began to convene in 2003, just as he helped launch Americans for Prosperity. The seminars were another innovation in Charles Koch’s broader political strategy: rather than fund his political causes alone, Charles Koch sought to enlist fellow donors. Twice a year, the donors attended seminars in Aspen, Palm Springs, or other scenic getaways, pledging their money to Koch’s causes and hearing speeches from politicians who auditioned for Koch’s political support. When Lonegan heard Charles Koch speak at the seminar in 2006, he was inspired by Koch’s ambitious vision and strategic intelligence. Lonegan was also impressed by Charles Koch’s strategy of using his donor group’s resources to attack conservatives rather than liberals. The strategy seemed counterintuitive, but effective.

  “I’m a big fan of Charles Koch. I think he’s a brilliant guy and very well read, and he gets it,” Lonegan recalled. “He said, ‘The problem we have is not the Democrat Party. They’re doing what Democrats do. Our problem is the Republican Party. We’ve got to make Republicans act like Republicans.’ ”

  Koch and Americans for Prosperity pressured the Republican party from the right, steering it away from the compromises of neoliberalism and pushing it toward a vision that was espoused by Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek. It gained more volunteers every day, and it steered them toward one target: Republican politicians like Bob Inglis.

  * * *

  Bob Inglis’s congressional district in South Carolina contained the tiny town of Boiling Springs, located just a little bit north of Spartanburg. The town was easy to miss. Its most prominent feature was a strip of stores near H
ighway 9 and a Walmart Supercenter on the north end of town. But Boiling Springs became an important landmark on the political map in 2009, when a woman named Maria Brady had a vision from God. The vision arrived when she was at work, and it would set her life on a direct collision course with Bob Inglis.

  Brady and her husband, Michael, owned a printing company in Boiling Springs that published the local newspaper, Boiling Springs Today. Maria was working from home when she had the epiphany, sitting in front of the computer. She heard a voice in her head that said very clearly: “Quit complaining. Quit complaining and do something.”

  Brady had been complaining a lot during that winter of 2009. Business at the printing shop collapsed after the financial crash. The company printed advertising circulars, and local businesses cut their advertising budgets sharply during the deep recession. Maria and Michael laid off workers, scaled back production, and worried about paying the bills. Yet whenever Maria turned on the television news, she saw that the same Wall Street CEOs who’d caused the crash were getting multibillion-dollar rescue packages from the government. They weren’t even losing their bonuses.

  After she heard God’s voice, Brady fell down on her knees and prayed, asking what He meant and what He wanted from her. When Michael returned from the printing shop later that day, he looked like he’d seen a ghost. He told Maria that God had just spoken to him and told him that he needed to do something to help his country. Maria shared her own vision. It was clear: they were being called to do something.

  Maria began to scour the Internet. It was April of 2009. She came across mentions of a new form of revolt by people fed up with the condition of America. She heard about events that people were calling Tea Parties. The notion of throwing a Tea Party was romantic. Patriotic. It conjured images of the earliest American revolutionaries throwing off the yoke of imperial Britain.