In 2022, Secretary of State Ed Buchanan sought to enforce a Wyoming Statute requiring someone who spent more than $500 campaigning to file a campaign report with the Secretary of State.
Wyoming Gun Owners (WYGO) filed a lawsuit in federal court saying the Wyoming Campaign Finance Law was an unconstitutional infringement on their First Amendment Rights to keep their donors confidential.
Federal District Court decided the election reporting statute unconstitutional and allowed WYGO to avoid disclosing their sources and uses of funds to the campaign electorate.
Even though the Federal Court allowed WYGO to keep the names of their donors secret, knowing more about WYGO might be helpful to discerning voters wanting to make informed choices about candidates.
According to the WYGO’s December 2023 filing with the Wyoming Secretary of State, the principal office of the company is 1740H Dell Range Boulevard #447, which is a mailbox at a UPS Store in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The addresses of the Officers and Directors of the company, Theodore D. Ball, Cal Henderson and Aaron Dorr are also that mailbox. It’s a pretty crowded mailbox.
For the second time in as many months, a group politically aligned with Secretary of State Chuck Gray has been allowed to utilize an post office box as the principal place of business.
The mailing address for WYGO is Northwest Registered Agent Services, Inc., reputedly the home of thousands of corporations and LLC’s in Sheridan including three recently revoked North Korean companies.
WYGO’s tax returns for 2022 and 2023 have not been posted on the IRS website. The tax return for 2021 showed $147,186 dollars in contributions to the organization, and $105,730 in contributions in 2020. The contributions are not insignificant by any stretch of the imagination.
WYGO’s website claims “Wyoming Gun Owners has been a hard-hitting, no compromise, boots-on-the-ground gun rights organization here in Wyoming since 2010.”
Additionally, the WYGO website claims affiliation with several other gun rights organizations.
The organizations affiliated with WYGO are from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Coincidentally, those organizations are also affiliated with a group of brothers named the Dorr brothers.
The four brothers, Arron, Matt, Chris and Benjamin, portray themselves as staunch defenders of the Second Amendment rights -- being akin to the Founding Fathers and as patriots in the process of Saving Red America.
The Dorr brothers are either principles or officers of each of the above organizations, and others associated with political causes, including vaccination and transgender issues.
Apparently, the Dorr brothers provide “consulting services” to each of the nonprofit entities with which they have an association.
Donations come to the nonprofits lobbying organizations.
The nonprofits pay the Dorr brothers for consulting services. One could presume the money goes into the Dorr brothers pockets.
Scott Hubay, a nonprofit attorney in Ohio, conducted an analysis of the Dorr Brothers network. In an article in the Daily Beast, dated June 23, 2020, entitled The ‘Scam Artist’ Brothers Tearing the Gun Movement Apart, the article reported:
At the center of the Dorrs’ efforts is the brothers’ own for-profit consulting firm, which has received huge sums of money from their tax-exempt organizations, fueling allegations that the brothers are deceiving their supporters.
“What they’re doing is raising a lot of money by setting up nonprofits and latching onto various conservative, hot-button issues,” said Scott Hubay, an Ohio attorney who specializes in nonprofit compliance and examined findings compiled by The Trace and The Daily Beast. “But instead of spending that money on what they told the public their purpose was, they appear to be using it to enrich themselves.”
Aaron Dorr is the primary spokesman for the Wyoming Gun Owners.
No evidence could be located that Mr. Dorr is a Wyoming resident. A public records search for Aaron Dorr in Wyoming comes back with “no records found.”
Dorr’s website Aarondoor.com talks about Dorr’s home-state being Iowa. However, a public records search for Aaron Dorr in Iowa reveals Aaron M. Door, 44, owns a million-dollar property in Silex, MO.
The public records report also shows he owns property in Bloomfield, NY. The same public records search reveals that Aaron Dorr is registered to vote as of October 30, 2019 in New York.
Dorr, while not a resident of Wyoming apparently, evaluates candidates in Wyoming.
He is apparently the “boots on the ground” as claimed by the WYGO website.
Wyoming Gun Owners has mined an extensive email list, as well as having huge presence in social media. Dorr creates videos evaluating candidates in Wyoming.
Initially, the videos were cheesy, but more recently, the videos have become more sophisticated -- containing flame effects, testosterone charged thrashing guitar music and other special effects.
Wyoming is not the only state in which Dorr creates these videos.
Dorr stands in front of a white board, with a map of each state taped to the side of the board, and he purports to honestly evaluate candidates. Dorr creates videos for several states, including Iowa, Indiana, Georgia and Wyoming.
In addition to candidate evaluation videos, Aaron Dorr conducts interviews and provides news updates from several locations.
In the screens shots below, Aaron Dorr provides news updates from New York, Missouri, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
On Aaron Dorr’s personal website, he offers political consulting services, based on his extensive experience with nonprofit entities.
He offers training courses on targeting legislators, how to expose bad legislators, how to set up email lists, how to react to political threats, scoring the legislator and pouring on the pressure to legislators.
His tactics are akin to commando battle plans which force elected officials into acting a certain way.
While confrontational, his tactics are sophisticated. They have changed business-as-usual in Wyoming.
One example of Dorr’s tactics is his video on how to disrupt a legislator’s town-hall meeting using the “diamond formation”.
Dorr argues that if you are hostile to a legislator, don’t go into the meeting with your four buddies with your arms crossed and sit in back of the meeting.
Instead, he argues to utilize the diamond formation with a battle plan.
The diamond formation battle plan includes teamwork in disrupting the meeting. One person gets the microphone and asks a question.
The other three go into action spreading flyers, cornering media and engaging other participants.
Dorr’s tactics are often adversarial and coercive. His videos are hormonally charged battle plans more akin to Steve Inman WWE narrations than working in a civilized society.
They are the antithesis of Disagree Better program sponsored by the National Governor’s association.
If one does an internet search with the term “dorr brothers scam," several articles appear accusing the Dorr brother of running an elaborate scam. This column does not go that far.
To the contrary, the Dorr Brothers’ operations are quite sophisticated and calculated.
WYGO’s endorsements appear to have a one-to-one correlation with members of the Freedom Caucus – which seems to imply that candidates who are not members of the Freedom Caucus are not in favor of firearms rights.
That implication is preposterous. Opposing the Dorr brothers does not mean opposing firearms rights.
We should not let our passion to protect our firearms rights allow activists to take advantage of us for their own gain.
Before we believe everything we see in email blasts or social media videos, we should know who the out-of-state actors are, what their motives are and whether or not they are trustworthy.
Given this additional information about Dorr’s commercial activities nationwide, each reader will have to be the judge of their credibility.
For those of you sending money to organizations like this, was this the business model you intended to fund?
Tom Lubnau served in the Wyoming Legislature from 2005 - 2015 and is a former Speaker of the House. He can be reached at: YourInputAppreciated@gmail.com
