About two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton – soon after proclaiming that she had recovered from the disappointment of her election defeat and was “back to being … part of the resistance” against the Trump agenda – launched a brand new activist organization called Onward Together. If that name sounds somewhat familiar to you, it’s because it is derived from Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign theme, “Stronger Together.”
Onward Together’s stated purpose is to “advance progressive values” by encouraging ordinary people to become politically engaged in grassroots opposition to President Trump’s policies. The organization’s Internet homepage features a quote where Mrs. Clinton instructs her political allies to “resist, insist, persist, enlist.” Moreover, Clinton has announced that Onward Together will actively support the work of five groups in particular that have recently emerged as part of a broad leftist movement opposed to Mr. Trump and his agendas. These groups include the following:
(1) The Indivisible Project: Established by five former Democratic congressional staffers in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s presidential victory, the Indivisible Project is devoted to providing leftists and liberals with strategies for countering the “radical, racist, and sexist” objectives of President Trump. Rejecting the very legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, the fledgling group’s flagship publication, _The Indivisible Guide,_ portrays him as “the biggest popular-vote loser in history to ever call himself President-Elect.” And because Trump “will attempt to use his congressional majority to reshape America in his own racist, authoritarian, and corrupt image” despite the fact that he “has no mandate” from the voters, the Indivisible Project pledges to “stand indivisibly opposed to Trump and Members of Congress [MoC’s] who would do his bidding.”
_The Indivisible __Guide_ instructs progressives to attend local “town halls” or public listening sessions held by Republican MoC’s and to make lots of noise there – i.e., applaud in response to one another’s questions and/or comments, and collectively boo in response to things said by the MoC. “Every time your MoC signs on to a bill, takes a position, or makes a statement,” says the Guide, “a little part of his or her mind will be thinking: ‘How am I going to explain this to the angry constituents who keep showing up at my events and demanding answers?‘” In short, the goal is to “stall the Trump agenda by forcing [Congressional Republicans] to redirect energy away from their priorities,” on the theory that “a day that they spend worrying about [rowdy protesters] is a day that they’re not ending Medicare, privatizing public schools, or preparing a Muslim registry.”
The Indivisible Project’s modus operandi is rooted in the organizing tactics of Saul Alinsky, the late community-organizing guru who wrote:
(2) Color Of Change: Founded by the revolutionary communist Van Jones to combat what he viewed as the systemic racism pervading America generally and conservatism in particular, Color of Change (CoC) supports race-based preferences in government contracting, college admissions, and hiring/promotion policies. Further, the organization favors the expansion of the welfare state and thus seeks to discredit initiatives that would restore limited government and rein in public expenditures.
In one of its longest-running initiatives, Color of Change has repeatedly smeared the Fox News Channel as a disseminator of racism and bigotry. In a similar spirit, CoC in 2010 began an aggressive effort to discredit what it called the Tea Party movement’s “venomous rhetoric,” “racially charged imagery,” and “paranoid conspiracy theories.” And in the spring of 2012, CoC and its allies tried to exploit the racial overtones of the recent killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin, who had been shot by a “white Hispanic” claiming to have acted in self-defense as permitted under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law.
(3) Emerge America: Lamenting that “American women are still vastly underrepresented at all levels of government,” Emerge America seeks to address this “big problem” by administering an in-depth, six-month, 70-hour training program for “Democratic women who want to run for public office.” By Emerge America’s telling, women as a whole are much better equipped, temperamentally, to hold public office than men are. Specifically, women in political positions “are more responsive to constituents” and tend, to a greater degree than their male counterparts, to “value cooperation over hierarchical power,” thereby making them better able to “engineer solutions in situations where men have trouble finding common ground.”
Among the more noteworthy members of Emerge America’s advisory board are:
(4) Swing Left: Launched on January 19, 2017—the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated as U.S. President—Swing Left (SL) describes itself as “an online community” whose mission is to thwart the Trump agenda and to help Democrats regain and maintain control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
SL’s modus operandi is to help pro-Democrat voters across the United States become politically active in the “Swing Districts”—defined as places where the last election was won by 15% of the vote or less—that are geographically closest to them. This activism may take the form of making donations, participating in fundraising efforts, spreading the word about candidates on social media, door-to-door canvassing, or working on a phone bank.
In an effort to provide “a financial head start” for Democratic nominees in the general House elections, SL has established a fundraising initiative called District Funds, which provides “pots of money, raised in advance, for the eventual Democratic nominee in each Swing District.”
(5) Run For Something: Incorporated in December 2016, Run For Something aims to “recruit and support talented, passionate young people who will advocate for progressive values now and for the next 30 years,” and who are willing to run in “down-ballot races” for offices like state legislatures, mayorships, and city council seats. Toward that end, the organization seeks out people younger than 35 who self-identify as Democrats and “progressives,” and who pledge to be:
In summation, the collective values and prioritries of these five organizations are precisely those that would have been advanced very aggressively by a Hillary Clinton Administration – or, for that matter, by the Administration of any other Democrat who might have won the presidency. Today’s Democratic Party no longer bears even the slightest resemblance to the Democratic Party of yesteryear. It is now engaged in a full-throated assault on the traditional American values of individual rights (as opposed to group rights and privileges), limited government, free-market economics, border security, and the right to self-defense. Repelling, delegitimizing, and crushing this Democratic assault ought to be the #1 goal of the Republican Party.
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