Answered my own question. Somebody is at the hearing with bags of cash and pieces of paper telling the "protesters" what to scream. Here's your money, here's your script, now get in there and interrupt the people's process.

from Real Clear Politics, some Texas doctors saw the process play out:

TOM SCHLUETER, TEXAS: Hello, I'm Dr. Tom Schlueter from Texas, we came here to participate in the hearings, to get in the line. They told us to be here at 8:00, 8:30 at the latest, to get in line to go inside and hear the hearings. We got here at about 8:15 and there was already 100 people in line, and most of them would be probably classified by me as 'opposing everything going on with Judge Kavanaugh,' and so we began to see a process of things unfolding as we were standing in line that kept the line from going ahead.

One thing was there were people who had come along... who had a bag of money, and people would hand them a piece of paper, and then they would give them money. So we know money was exchanged for some of the people to be here, just to protest.

There was no depth to what their understanding, they were just here to be a disruption, protesters. They were actually told, we heard them say this, 'when you go in, we want you to yell, to scream, and even possibly to get arrested.' So that was some of the processes we saw happening...

...

DOCTOR CHRIS DUNDAS, CORPUS CHRISTI: Hey guys, I'm Dr. Chris Dundas from Corpus Christi in Texas, we're up here for these hearings. I gotta tell you, it was very sad. This is a very time-honored institution in the past, and these young people (mostly young people, but some old people) they seem to have no heartfelt convictions about why they are here. If you have to pay somebody to protest, that's a good tell... Being arrested and being proud of it. Some women came back from these hearings and they seemed disappointed they were not arrested...

DOCTOR BURTON PURVIS, ARLINGTON: Good afternoon, I'm doctor Morton Purvis from Arlington. This experience I shared with these other three guys was quite an enlightening one. I took off my credentials and walked among the people to get more information and be more acceptable to those around us. It was quite interesting as we listened to their attitudes and actions about why they were here and what they wanted to do.

The most telling thing was listening to them giving names and addresses, so when they were arrested, they were keeping a record and celebrating who got arrested, without any regard for any open discussion or even the possibility of being convinced of anything, it was just for the purpose of disruption and to have some kind of disruption of the process.

---