A Placer County pastor tried to bully and bluff his way into public office. It didn’t work | Opinion
Matthew Oliver, the Placer County pastor and restaurateur who recently lost his campaign for Rocklin City Council, declared on Facebook last week that he had “humbly” conceded to his opponent, local lawyer Dave Bass. Yet Oliver’s campaign for public office was anything but humble.
The local religious leader ran an ugly, deceitful campaign that smeared not just Bass but also Rocklin Mayor Bill Halldin, the entire Rocklin City Council and others who dared criticize him.
Since losing, the pastor of The Family Church in Roseville has put his bitterness over the defeat on public display. A month after the election, the Facebook page for his Roseville restaurant, House of Oliver, shared a photo of two bizarre Christmas ornaments depicting Halldin and Rocklin City Councilwoman Jill Gayaldo as babies in prison outfits with black-and-white-striped hats that read “F Around” “& Find Out.”
“Bully Bill and Lying Jill!” the post reads. “Hahahahahah.”
The post epitomized Oliver’s cruel, childish and deservedly failed attempt at public office.
The pastor’s campaign was characterized by a series of vague and unsupported accusations of corruption against the City Council, including an inflammatory and baseless allegation that monetary bribes influence how the council votes.
Oliver also refused to entertain criticism of him and his campaign, blocking critics from his Facebook page and deleting comments condemning or disproving his claims.
Oliver’s campaign was compulsively dishonest. At one point, he thanked Halldin for a $50 donation to his campaign on Facebook, suggesting that he had the mayor’s endorsement.
“(Halldin’s) support and investment in the campaign means so much,” Oliver wrote on Facebook.
The mayor took to Facebook to clarify that the money was not a campaign contribution but rather the price of admission to an event Oliver had hosted in June. Oliver responded by trying to hide the correction.
“Mr. Oliver has launched a negative campaign against me and the rest of the Council,” Halldin wrote in September. “This morning he made a post to mislead voters into thinking I support him. I do not. After I posted a comment debunking Mr. Oliver’s post, he turned off comments so people couldn’t see it.”
Gutter politics
Oliver almost got away with lying and bullying his way onto the council. But he ultimately fooled fewer voters than he repulsed, losing to Bass by a few hundred votes.
Despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, Oliver maintains that he did not conduct a smear campaign.
“I never attacked families, faith, never delved into name calling or gutter politics,” he told The Bee.
Placer County has seen ugly campaigns before, but Oliver took nasty politicking to a new level of deliberate disingenuousness.
He claimed, for example, that the Rocklin City Council had refused to even consider alternatives to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. But according to Halldin, who was on the council at the time, he and his colleagues did study other utility options. They ultimately concluded that breaking away from PG&E could risk bankrupting the city given the power provider’s reputation for fighting localities that opt to do business elsewhere.
“His (Oliver’s) discussion on PG&E was knowingly false,” Bass said. “This was repeatedly explained to him by people that were close to him, and he ignored them to build a narrative that was complete misinformation.”
Oliver’s campaign also misrepresented Bass’ work as an attorney, suggesting on Twitter that his opponent had counseled clients to break the law, which Bass called a complete fabrication that was dangerous to his firm and his reputation.
“People that do not know me suddenly had opinions about who I am based on online and print hit pieces,” Bass said. “My kids’ teachers were getting these attack ads. You never know what effect they have on people.”
Bass’ campaign remained positive by comparison. And he said taking the high road paid off: A number of voters told him they changed their minds in his favor “because of how ugly the hit pieces got.”
“I think Rocklin deserves a lot of credit after being inundated with at least eight mailers and constant text messages either putting me or the council down and spreading misinformation,” Bass said of his win. “We had never seen this type of campaign before, and a lot of people that care deeply about the city and our democracy came together.”
Ugly campaigning
Even before the 2022 election cycle, Oliver’s reputation for provocation and misinformation preceded him. He kept his restaurant open for indoor service in the fall of 2020 despite state-mandated COVID closures, endangering workers and customers while raising his political profile as a critic of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
As a result, House of Oliver faced a penalty from the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Oliver repurposed the fine as hokey marketing, branding his establishment Roseville’s “rebel restaurant” and selling “rebels against tyranny” T-shirts.
Later, in the summer of 2021, Oliver offered religious exemptions from workplace COVID vaccine requirements to the public.
Oliver’s campaign similarly presented misinformation as insurgency. At a town hall event hosted by the Rocklin-based Christian advocacy group The American Council, Oliver accused Bass of being beholden to local developers.
“This really is a cynical attempt at exploiting citizen fear against development,” Bass later told The Bee. “These issues are difficult to explain, and accusations of corruption or being in someone’s pocket are easy accusations to make that do a lot of harm.”
Whether at the town hall, on Facebook or in a Bee Editorial Board meeting, Oliver circled back to the same vague claims of corruption within the Rocklin City Council. It was one of many such provocative claims unburdened by factual evidence.
Positive pays off
After Bass won the Council seat, Halldin publicly congratulated the lawyer for a “terrific, positive campaign” against an opponent who “went negative on both Dave and the council itself.”
Halldin and Bass weren’t the only critics of Oliver’s tactics. Roseville City Councilman Scott Alvord filed a defamation lawsuit against Oliver in October, accusing the pastor and the local political blogger Aaron Park of spreading false information, including that Alvord had forced vaccines and masks on children.
Seven former Rocklin mayors also urged residents to vote for Bass in a letter to The Bee.
“We need people like Bass, who will make well-thought-out policy decisions based on facts and civil discourse, not people who have never served in any volunteer capacity and who seem to take every opportunity to attack the city and its leaders with unfounded accusations,” they wrote.
But Oliver also had prominent supporters who didn’t appear troubled by his unscrupulous tactics. They included Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin, who was elected to Congress; Rocklin City Councilman Joe Patterson, who was elected to the state Assembly; Placer County Supervisor Bonnie Gore; and Lincoln Mayor Holly Andreatta, among others. All stood by Oliver even when he accused the Rocklin City Council and mayor of deception and corruption without providing evidence.
These politicians chose Oliver over their professional and personal relationships with Halldin and the City Council as well as over the good of the community. Perhaps they wanted to earn favor with Oliver’s congregants and customers, but they risked more than they gained.
“Smear campaigns and misinformation in general are not good for our community,” Bass said. “There was so much negativity from national and state politics, people like me were just sick of it. At the local level, we should just be speaking to the issues. This conspiracy and corruption stuff was just wrong, and most people saw through it.”
If Oliver’s tactics have finally caught up with him, he doesn’t appear to realize it. Last week, he posted a selfie to Facebook wearing a “Vote Matthew Oliver” hat with the caption “big news coming in the New Year.”
“The idea of (a) City Council election in two years or Placer County Board of Supervisors seat is not off the table,” Oliver told The Bee.
Placer County voters deciding where to eat, where to pray and whom to vote for should remember what this campaign revealed not about Oliver’s opponents but about Oliver himself.