MAGA vs. the minority

There's some fascinating left vs. right gamesmanship going on.

This is what the local Indivisible crew could muster up for its “Day of Action” in January 2019, after they won an election. Maybe the rest were working because jobs were plentiful by then?

I have to give Indivisible some credit - they have lasted longer than the TEA Party did.

But one issue that did in the TEA Party was that it was a bottom-up organization that had a number of concerns, both local and national, so keeping them together was tougher than herding cats. Moreover, to be quite honest, it was made up of productive people who eventually returned to their real jobs as economic conditions slowly improved out of the Great Recession. A Venn diagram of government workers and TEA Party regulars probably wouldn’t have much of an intersection.

Look at the photo above. Indivisible got its start and became more powerful in a time of relative plenty. (I took that photo on my lunch break, at a 2019 Indivisible rally that I covered - quite well, I may add - for my predecessor website.) On the other hand, when they didn’t have jobs because one party decided to “abandon free-market principles to save the free-market system” while the other party said, “gee, thanks, you did what we wanted to do and now you’ll get the blame for it, suckers,” those who started the TEA Party got royally pissed and showed up in the cold and rain, as evidenced by the photo below from April 15, 2009.

The side of right put Indivisible’s puny turnout to shame. The same would be true for real America.

Both photos were taken in Salisbury at the Government Center, which has seen its share of parties and protests over the years in the heart of downtown Salisbury.

As I noted, though, even though they’re small in numbers, Indivisible has had staying power because they’ve always had one bogeyman: Donald Trump. Also, they’ve always had a small, tight-knit group of leaders, the public face of whom has been the married couple Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg. While it claims to be grassroots, Indivisible is a very top-down organization as befits a statist philosophy like theirs. Yet they soften their edges by presenting leadership as just another growing family of concerned Americans: Levin and Greenberg have two young children, photos of whom are often featured on their monthly newsletters. Conversely, the TEA Party was often portrayed by an unfriendly media as being lone wolf cranks from the fringes of society.

As you may have gathered as a longtime reader of my work, I am on the Indivisible mailing list (and have been since pretty much day one.) It’s always good to know what the opposition is up to and their latest project (besides shaking down a few gullible leftists for money like the Republicans do to their folks) is called “Project 2024: Majority over MAGA.” (Pretty presumptuous, considering our side is the silent majority.) As they described it:

Project 2024 is based on a simple theory: If we can define the election on our terms and make sure every voter knows the stakes, we’ll win.

We’re not going to sugarcoat this. The 2024 election is an uphill battle for Democrats. The Senate map leaves no room for error. To win, we will need to make sure voters are focused on the issues where Democrats hold a competitive advantage: fighting MAGA extremism on democracy and abortion.

That means shaping the narratives and stories that will guide voters this election. It means investing in the local Indivisible groups who’ll do the work on the ground to reach their communities. And it means talking to voters -- a LOT of voters -- about the threat we’re facing and what’s possible if we win.

We’ll be working with Indivisible groups and activists in battleground Senate states and House districts to define our MAGA opponents, highlight what’s at stake, and turn out the vote for pro-democracy candidates. (Link mine: it shows their “heat map” of races they’re most worried about.)

It’s a pretty simple definition I’m giving to them: since they can’t really run on “it’s the economy, stupid” because the current economy is in worse shape than it was during the pre-pandemic days of 2019, nor can they point to any real gains on the immigration, foreign policy, or federal deficit fronts, they are going to make this election about two issues: J6 and abortion. Trump gets blamed for both: it’s obvious for J6 and the whole litigation of the stolen 2020 election, but also because his three appointed SCOTUS justices rightfully helped pull the plug on Roe v. Wade, making abortion a state issue as it always should have been.

(As an aside, abortion is not “choice,” it’s “denying basic rights to our most vulnerable population.” Let’s call it what it is. There’s also more and more evidence that the 2020 election should have been disputed, and reforms put in place for 2024.)

But the hilarity really began the other day when Indivisible came out with a missive claiming that they were “living rent-free in Donald Trump’s warped little brain.”

Apparently Trump posted on Truth Social a link to a lengthy Breitbart article full of research about Indivisible. (Actually, I found the researcher did a pretty good job tying together a lot of stuff I already knew about and some I’d forgotten, plus a couple things I learned. Nice grassroots effort because I doubt she was on anyone’s payroll.)

What I laughed about from Indivisible’s response was this howler:

…while this kind of right-wing smear campaign tends to pick up during the election season, it’s not new. And what I’ve come to realize over the years is it always follows roughly the same formula. Some right-wing hack takes a look at our website (or our strategy guide PDFs), slaps a giant caps-lock "REVEALED" label on the public communications we’ve already pushed out, and breathlessly reports about how they’ve blown the lid off a huge conspiracy. They claim that they’ve "DISCOVERED" materials on our website, or that they "CAUGHT" us on video at a meeting that had us on the public agenda. They get on our email list and "EXPOSE" what we’re saying to a million people.

It’s funny to me because that’s pretty much what the mainstream media did to the TEA Party for years. Swap out “left” for “right” and it’s a pretty accurate description. Besides, when we on the right side of the spectrum “expose” you, it more than doubles your circulation.

Their “secret weapon” for this election: talking to their neighbors. Well, more specifically, it’s a GOTV operation for “soft Democrat” voters, who probably don’t have to worry in certain blue states because there’s a mail-in ballot already filled out and turned in for them. (I say this with tongue only somewhat in cheek.)

Nor does it matter whether it’s Trump vs. Biden, Harris, Newsom, or Obama - if it’s the latter three, you can bet they would have and will maintain the same policies we’ve been saddled with the last three-plus years. The reason Indivisible and the rest of the statist Left is making their campaign about J6 and abortion is to keep young women on their plantation by scaring them into it. It’s great to have “reproductive freedom” until they figure out the other chains which have been placed on them by an oppressive government whose underlying philosophy is that of “you’ll own nothing and be happy.”

There are a lot of freedom fighters out here and we can talk to our neighbors, too. All that they’ve heard over the last eight-plus years is “mean Tweets” and “orange man bad” but I can assure you that the alternative would be way worse.

Give them the picture of any big Democrat-run city that’s put out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants and handcuffed their law enforcement officers as a representation of their side. Then present an image of a nation of energy independence, restrained government, a secure border with allowances for legal entry, and an America-first foreign policy and we’ll find out who the majority really is.

And remember: you can Buy Me a Coffee since I have a page there.