Exposed!

Don’t look now, my fellow snowflakes, but we’ve been found out. In what must have been an exhaustive two-month investigation (to find the resource that has been freely available online since at least December), Newsmax has uncovered the ‘source’ of these raucous town hall protests.

Newsmax has obtained a 26-page manual, dated January 27, 2017, that spells out a course of action for enemies of President Donald Trump and what it calls his “attempt to use his congressional majority to reshape America in his own racist, authoritarian, and corrupt image.”

Nailed it.

The only problem is they credit the manual and its authors for driving the ‘course of action’ from the top down. Their frame neglects the fact that so many of us started planning these town hall actions in the wee hours of election night. Here’s my own Facebook post from approximately 3:00 am post-election:

Based on friends’ response to this post and my social media feeds for days after, a lot of us had the same idea at the same time. We were literally searching for the blueprint with which to build our resistance. Persistent engagement with government was our goal, but for those of us new to the work, the task was daunting.

I first heard about the Indivisible Guide on the Michelangelo Signorile show during my commute home Jan. 3rd. I learned from the interview that the guide had been available as a Google Doc for a while, but was now enough in demand to warrant a website and a formal organization to distribute it. To emphasize, the demand came from the people, not the formal organization.

That’s how markets, even of ideas, are supposed to work. Apparently supply-side conservatives have difficulty grasping this concept, but the resistance movement wasn’t handed down from a powerful, moneyed Soros-class. It has been bubbling up from the marginalized and their allies, those who see government by the people as an equalizing force, and who expect their representatives to be accountable to them, not to corporate dollars.