The “Indivisible Guide” has come to Cary, North Carolina. A town hall is being hosted tomorrow evening in Cary by a group called Indivisible Triangle Daily Call To Action.

The event targets North Carolina Senators Tillis and Burr and is being held to, “allow voters to speak directly to the Senators about issues of concern to them such as immigration, climate change, education, voting rights, and press freedom.”

Chuck Tryon, a Holly Springs resident, was named by the event page as the contact for media interested in the event. American Lens reached out to Tryon, however, no reply was received by publication time.

The event will take place at 6 pm at the Herbert Young Community Center in Cary, NC.

The Indivisible Triangle Daily Call To Action group takes part of its name from the “Indivisible Guide”, which is a ‘how to’ manual for getting the attention of national-level politicians. The Indivisible Guide, however, seems to be less about getting the attention politicians and more about protesting and pressuring them when they are not supporting the desire progressive agenda.

On February 15th, Duke University sponsored an event which used the Indivisible Guide as a training tool for students. Mandy Carter, an “LGBTQA activist”, led a session called, “Ideas for Activism in the Time of Trump.”

Themes of the Duke sponsored event included a heavy emphasis on social justice and, “How our North Carolina Moral Monday Movement can be a model of a diverse coalition that brings together social justice people to take a stand against the Trump Administration.”

As of this article, there are 62 Indivisible Guide groups within a 100-mile radius of Duke’s campus.

What is the Indivisible Guide?

The full title is The Indivisible Guide: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.

The Indivisible Guide started as a document created by Democratic Congressional staffers and was shared first as a Google document. Left-leaning activists and Democrats who were upset by or are refusing to accept the results of recent election latched onto the guide and started passing it around.

The guide lays bare in its opening statement that this is about President Trump:

“Donald Trump represents a grave threat to liberal democratic values.”

All the events the guide proposes are window dressing. The ultimate target is the President.

Perhaps the authors are unaware of just how myopic that statement is.  A big reason why we have a President Trump is because of “liberal democratic values” being shoved down the throats of Americans at every turn over the last 8 years.

The document is very also clear about who this guide is for — progressive Democrats and anyone who opposes President Trump.

Image via Indivisible Guide on Facebook

WHO IS THIS DOCUMENT BY AND FOR?
We: Are former progressive congressional staffers who saw the Tea Party beat back President Obama’s agenda.
We: See the enthusiasm to fight the Trump agenda and want to share insider info on how best to influence Congress to do that.
You: Want to do your part to beat back the Trump agenda and understand that will require more than calls and petitions.
You: Should use this guide, share it, amend it, make it your own, and get to work.”‹

Contributors include Angel Padilla, Billy Fleming, Caroline Kavit, Ezra Levin, Gonzalo Martínez de Vedia, Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Jennay Ghowrwal, Jeremy Haile, Leah Greenberg, Mary Humphreys, Matt Traldi, Sara Clough, and Sarah Dohl.

When it comes to the question of who is funding this group, George Soros can be tied to most of these people, particularly the main founders Ezra Levin, wife Leah Greenberg, and Angel Padilla. The SEIU connections of the group’s treasurer, Matt Traldi, would also be a likely source of funding.

It’s Padilla who has the most direct ties, working for the National Immigration Law Center (NICL), which is funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundation. In 2009 NICL raked in $200,000. In 2012, a whopping $630,000.

NICL was involved in organizing the airport protests over President Trump’s Executive Order dubbed by progressives as a ‘Muslim ban’.  The organization was also one of the groups along with the ACLU suing over the Executive Order.

On the national level, the Indivisible Guide is using ACT Blue to collect funds. ACT Blue is one of several components of Catalist, an invasive data collection machine used by the Obama election campaigns. Local groups formed as a result of the guide have been using GoFundMe or other fundraising websites to raise money for their efforts.

The creators of the guide saw it gaining traction, started an official website, started making plans to turn it into a non-profit and quickly hired a film group, Brave New Films, to do a slick video promoting it.

There’s nothing particularly earth-shattering in the Indivisible Guide; it’s actually just putting into writing what activists have done for decades to engage politicians. How it’s being used it another story.

The Indivisible Guide says they are ‘taking lessons from the Tea Party’s rise’. The recommendations are that those using the guide develop a, “local strategy targeting individual Members of Congress (MoCs).”

The guide also says that this is to be a, “defensive approach purely focused on stopping Trump from implementing an agenda built on racism, authoritarianism, and corruption.”

The focus is allegedly supposed to be defensive, yet the groups utilizing the document seem to be using it to both go on offense and generally cause a scene.

At town-hall or public events held politicians and effectively hijacking the event by shouting at the politician and chanting things like, “do your job!”  The other tactic being employed is ambushing politicians and shouting them down.

In an interview with the New Yorker, Ezra Levin said, “We aimed to balance that acknowledgment by being very clear that we’re not endorsing the Tea Party’s horrible and petty scare tactics.”  Ironically, petty scare tactics seems to be the main theme.

This article was first published at American Lens News on February 21, 2017.