Correction, Aug. 2, 2026: An earlier version of this column placed the Aug. 1 Save Heritage Indiana rally in Greenfield, in Hancock County. The tent was pitched outside Thorntown, in Boone County. Indy Politics regrets the error.
by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was an age of wisdom and an age of wetness, and it was Saturday in Hamilton County, and Hancock County, and Boone County. Three counties. One event. We’ll come back to that.
In one corner, Fishers Resists put roughly a thousand people on the ground at Holland Park and walked them a mile to the Municipal Center in broad daylight, under their own name, at an address they published in advance. They started on time, finished on time, and were home before the sky opened up.
In the other corner — well, that’s the thing, isn’t it. Nobody knew where the other corner was. Including, it turns out, the people who bought tickets to it.
Save Heritage Indiana spent three weeks selling America’s first mass deportation rally in Fishers, Indiana, at $50 a head, with a $500 VIP experience in Carmel the night before, because nothing says reclaiming the heritage of the small town where kids rode bikes quite like a ticketed reception in the 46032. The location was a secret. Threats, they said. Free-speech opponents, they said. Ticketholders would be told where to go when the organization decided they had earned it.
What the organization decided they had earned, at the eleventh hour, was a parking lot in Greenfield.
And what they got after the parking lot in Greenfield was a cornfield outside Thorntown. Not Hamilton County, where it was advertised. Not Hancock County, where they were told to report. Boone County, sixty-odd miles northwest of the lot where they had just presented identification to a stranger.
Not a ballroom. Not a banquet hall. A tent. In a field. In the rain. Attendees were instructed to gather at that lot, show ID, and proceed to the site in small groups, which is either operational security or the world’s most self-serious hayride, depending on how much you paid.
The dress code, I should mention, was business professional. Suits for the men, dresses for the ladies. On grass. During a thunderstorm. Somewhere a tent rental company is still counting the money and shaking its head.
The organizers had promised a packed house of patriots. Photographs from inside the tent show something closer to a well-attended retirement party for a mid-level insurance executive. When one X user suggested the whole thing was a grift, the group’s own account replied with a cash-register noise and a row of money-bag emojis, which I have to admit is the most honest public statement anyone associated with this event has made.
Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith and Attorney General Todd Rokita were on the program. Neither was in the tent. Their remarks were pre-recorded and played to the faithful off a laptop, onto a television bolted to a truss frame, in QuickTime. You could see the dock. Two statewide officeholders who cannot stop talking, suddenly available only in .mov format. Profiles in courage, rendered at 1080p.
I want to be fair here, because the obvious comparison is not entirely fair. This was not Children of the Corn. Children of the Corn had a bigger turnout, better weather, and a deity who showed up in person. He Who Walks Behind the Rows never once sent video remarks.
Behind the podium hung a banner quoting John Jay in Federalist No. 2 — the bit about a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion. They put it on a banner. In eight-inch type. And then they told reporters the whole thing was about small towns and bicycles.
Here is my favorite part. All that secrecy, all those ID checks, all that moving-in-small-groups, and the entire evening was documented and published by the people they let in. One attendee streamed forty minutes of it live to Facebook. Another handed out photographs. Turns out when you sell a hundred people the thrill of being an insider, a hundred people would like everyone to know they were inside.
The new line, I’m told, is that Fishers was never real — a deliberate decoy to lure the protesters while the true believers gathered in the corn. Which would mean they lied to their own paying customers for three weeks. Given that the customers then got sent to Greenfield before ending up in Boone County, I’ll let the organization decide which of its locations it would like to stand behind.
It was a far, far wetter thing than they had ever done before.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He was married in a Hamilton County cornfield in front of 400 guests, so this is not a column about the cornfield.
