Glen Tate - 299 Days - The Preparation

“That won’t be happening, Daddy,” Manda said. She looked at Grant with the most serious look he had ever seen from her. “I know what’s coming.”

Grant was sick of the government assholes at work. It was getting ridiculous. Jeanie was trying to fend them off and get Menlow pointed in the direction of reform, but she wasn’t willing to do anything that jeopardized her job.

Menlow had secretly started running for governor long ago. Although election day was still years away, his actions were already becoming calculated, as he prepared for the race. There is nothing more spineless than a politician running for a higher office. Menlow was so busy trying to make all the government people, and all the other left- wing Washington State voters, happy that he had long since abandoned his pledge to reform the State Auditor’s Office into a force for exposing corruption. It was pathetic. Grant felt stupid for believing in him.

Grant was looking for a way out of government employment. He had toughed it out for longer than he expected to be there. He had helped many citizens when he was there. He got so much more done on the inside of government, even for that short period, than he could have from the outside. But, he’d been thwarted. It was time to go back to WAB.

The Matsons were hosting the annual Fourth of July party with Tom, Brian, and Ben from WAB. When Menlow found out that Grant was having the WAB people over socially, he was a little concerned.

“Do you think that’s a good idea, Grant?”Menlow said with grave concern. “I mean, WAB is pretty partisan.”

“Yeah, partisan for your party,” Grant said. “You are a Republican.”

It was becoming increasingly socially awkward to be a “conservative” in this liberal town. The liberals weren’t screaming or throwing things, but there was definitely a separation between them and those who were conservative. Only fellow liberals were allowed into this mainstream world. The WAB guys talked about this over too many beers at the Fourth of July party.

This was the perfect time for Grant to ask for his job back. After they started talking about what a piece of shit Menlow had become, Grant simply said to Tom, “Can I come back to WAB?”

“About time,” Tom said. “Same salary and everything?” “OK,” Grant said. “You drive a hard bargain.” That was it.

Grant was no longer a state employee. It felt liberating. They celebrated some more.

Now that they were good and drunk, Ben had an idea. A conservative think tank in town (the only one) had a full studio for making political podcasts and doing radio shows. WAB knew them well. Ben suggested that WAB get together and start a podcast called “Rebel Radio” to begin describing all the corruption they were seeing.

It would be more than just a show about state politics; it would have an edge. A “Don’t Tread on Me” edge.

“How about a show on the coming collapse of California?” Tom offered.

“Yeah, and how public employee unions are looting the treasury of this state,” Brian suggested.

“We need to have a show on Baby Boomers and how they voted themselves tons of shit and now the rest of us need to pay for it,” Ben said.

The show topics started flowing like all the beer. Brian was writing them down.

The conservative think tank was happy to produce the podcast, but secretly. Their sound engineer could easily electronically alter each speaker’s voice to make them unrecognizable. It didn’t sound like an artificial robot, just like another person. It was amazing. The sound engineer made Grant’s average radio voice sound rich and deep. Hiding their voices was important because the identities of the podcasters and the think tank had to remain a secret.

They knew that Rebel Radio was going to say some unpopular things that would make some very powerful people mad. The WAB guys still had to lobby legislators for their small-business members. This “Don’t Tread on Me” edge to Rebel Radio would terrify the spineless Republicans they had to lobby. The think tank was especially interested in not having anyone know they were involved with Rebel Radio because they had a tax-exempt charitable status. They knew the IRS would yank it if they put out opinions like this. Of course, it was perfectly legal for them to do this but the IRS had been “interpreting” the tax-exempt laws pretty harshly against conservative groups.

A few days later, Grant resigned from the State Auditor’s Office. The resignation was anti-climactic. He didn’t even go into Menlow’s office and talk to him like he used to. He just wrote a letter and put it on Menlow’s desk. The letter was polite and didn’t go into all the details. It just said that Grant was going back to the private sector after he had assisted the Auditor with his reform goals. It was bland but Grant didn’t care. He just wanted out.

The two-week period at the State Auditor’s Office between resignation and his last day was weird. The bureaucrats there started unloading on him since they knew he was leaving. All kinds of little things that had been festering for a while came out. A few of his soon- to-be former co-workers actually raised their voices with him. He couldn’t wait to get back to helping people for real again. He also couldn’t wait to start broadcasting Rebel Radio.

A few weeks later, Rebel Radio was taped. The show consisted of the WAB guys knocking back a few beers on the air and just saying whatever they thought. No holds barred. Exactly what they thought. WAB knew things that no one else knew because they were insiders. They knew exactly how bad the state’s finances were because they got the briefings. They interviewed citizens getting screwed by government; the stories were amazing. No one else was saying the things they were saying.

The number of downloads grew each week. It was becoming a pretty big deal. Most of the listeners were in Washington State because they described facts specific to that state, but they were noticing downloads from computers in other states, too. Rebel Radio tapped into something out there: rage at increasingly unjust government. They had fans, at least among the little people out there getting screwed, who had no one else telling them exactly how things were.

Rebel Radio wasn’t loved by all, however. It made the State Auditor’s Office look bad because that agency was supposed to be helping people, but Rebel Radio described why they weren’t. The people in the State Auditor’s Office made no secret that they would shut down the podcast if they could. It frustrated them that they couldn’t. They were so angry at the criticism that it was a little creepy. They really, really hated the people doing Rebel Radio, especially Grant. Despite the voice synthesizer, they suspected that Grant was one of the podcasters and hated him for sharing his inside knowledge of their failures.

The Governor’s Office openly talked about how they could legally shut down Rebel Radio. No one in state government could come up with a way to shut them down. Things were getting mean. In the past, it would have been absurd to say that the Governor’s Office would be talking about how to silence criticism, but things were getting nastier and nastier.

The state budget deficit was ballooning. The “recession” meant less economic activity, which meant less tax revenue. Despite far less taxes coming in, the state kept spending money. And more money. Washington State was a smaller version of California: chasing out businesses, falling tax revenue, and massively increasing spending.

The people doing it were being re-elected by huge margins. The voters loved having more stuff. They could not comprehend the debt they were running up. Besides, the “rich” paid for it all, right?