MY SAY: CAPITAL LOSSES

From June edition of Mideast Outpost http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/capital-losses-by-ruth-king.html

Promises! Promises! One cannot count the number of times that our leaders, from the White House to Congress, have issued the call to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital city Jerusalem. Those empty words fill the air during election cycles. Nonetheless the American Embassy remains in Tel Aviv.

What is an American Embassy on foreign soil? Here is how the State Department describes it:

“The mission of the United States Embassy is to advance the interests of the United States, and to serve and protect U.S. citizens. An embassy is the nerve center for a country’s diplomatic affairs within the borders of another nation, serving as the headquarters of the chief of mission, staff and other agencies. …“Embassy staff interact with host governments, local business and nongovernmental organizations, the media and educational institutions, and private citizens to create positive responses to U.S. policy and the U.S. in general.”

There is absolutely nothing here that precludes placing the American embassy in Israel’s capital. Moreover, an embassy implies recognition of a country’s sovereignty and its status as a nation.

The United States currently does not have embassies in North Korea, Iran, and Bhutan. In Taiwan, there is no longer an embassy, but, rather, an “American Institute in Taiwan” located in the capital Taipei. Here hangs a cautionary tale for Israel, demonstrating how an embassy’s location impacts a host nation’s legitimacy.

In order to appease China’s tyrants, heeding Henry Kissinger’s advice, Nixon visited China in 1972, accepted mass murderer Mao’s “one China” policy and opened the door to more diplomatic ties. These were fully implemented in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan and moved our embassy in Taipei to Beijing. In short order Taiwan lost its seat on the Security Council and was ousted from the United Nations. Its security and sovereignty have thus been weakened.

Out of the 192 UN member states, 161 currently recognize Israel. Thirty-one Arab/Moslem nations have no diplomatic exchanges with Israel.

There are currently over 86 embassies in Tel Aviv (not including honorary consulates). Due to America’s implied pressure, of the thirteen nations (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Netherlands, Panama, Uruguay , Venezuela) that had earlier established embassies in Jerusalem, none remain.

As justification, the U.S. State Department claims that Jerusalem is “disputed territory.” This is balderdash, and the fully staffed United States embassy in Kosovo proves the hypocrisy of this argument.

In Kosovo, although 114 nations offered recognition in 2008, there are only 21 embassies in Pristina, the U.S. among them. Many nations question the legitimacy of Kosovo which was historically part of Serbia, and is considered “disputed territory.” Accordingly, Kosovo is not a member of the United Nations.

Why does the U.S. have an embassy in Pristina and not in Jerusalem? This upside-down diplomacy can only be explained by a stubborn anti-Israel bias that has always existed in the State Department swamps.

President Trump made lavish promises to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem. Will he do it?

The Trump-Haley Effect at the United Nations What caused the UN Secretary General and Norway to call out depraved Palestinian behavior? June 1, 2017 Ari Lieberman

It has become routine for Palestinians to name public places, including streets, schools, parks and public squares after hard core terrorists convicted of the most heinous offenses. Over the years, Israel has vigorously protested these outrages to the European Union, the United Nations, and the United States. The latter, particularly under the Obama administration, offered faux sympathy and little else, while the UN and EU were routinely dismissive of Israel’s objections. In the eyes of the UN and EU, the Palestinians could do no wrong and the Obama administration, by its deafening silence, gravitated toward this obscene position. This shocking inaction further encouraged the Palestinians to engage in what can only be described as depraved and aberrant behavior.

But on May 28, something strange but surprisingly decent happened at the UN. UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued a stinging rebuke to the Palestinian Authority for naming a women’s center after Dalal Mughrabi, a notorious terrorist. In 1978, Mughrabi along with seven other Arab terrorists commandeered a bus packed with civilians and mercilessly murdered 37 people, including 12 children.

For the Palestinians, this act of debauchery warranted praise and Mughrabi was elevated to the status of heroin and martyr. On May 26, the watchdog group, Palestinian Media Watch revealed that a women’s center named after Mughrabi in the Arab town of Burqa was constructed with funds provided by the UN and Norway. A prominent sign posted on the building bore the logos of the Palestinian Authority, the UN and Norway. Worse yet, PMW quoted a village council member who stated that “the center will focus especially on the history of the struggle of Martyr Dalal Mughrabi and on presenting it to the youth groups, and…constitutes the beginning of the launch of enrichment activities regarding the history of the Palestinian struggle.”

Upon learning of the outrage, a spokesperson for Guterres released a statement that termed the naming “offensive” and “unacceptable” and described it as a “glorification of terrorism” and an “obstacle to peace.” Guterres also demanded the immediate removal of the UN’s logo. Just two days prior, Norway issued a similar rebuke to the Palestinian Authority demanding not only the removal of the Norwegian logo but the return of all Norwegian funds earmarked for the project.

The Revolution’s Angry Children From Evergreen to Middlebury, the circular shooting party continues. Seth Barron

Videos from Evergreen State College in Washington state show mobs of students—mostly but not only black—haranguing their professors and accusing them of racist abuse. The college president, George Bridges, is heckled, insulted, mocked, and ordered to stand with his arms firmly at his sides because his gestures are considered threatening to the students, who have invaded his office and refused to leave. Bridges complies meekly with all demands, including buying gumbo for his captors.

It’s tempting for anyone who cherishes the liberal (in the original sense of the word) purpose of the university to view the outrage at Evergreen (and Middlebury, and Berkeley, and Claremont McKenna, ad nauseam) as an American recurrence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when students were encouraged by the ruling class to torment any teachers suspected of reactionary deviance. But the modern college campus is staffed and led by progressives, who have created the conditions for, and invited, students’ PC tantrums. In Marx’s classic formulation, history is repeating itself, but as farce.

By academic training, George Bridges is a sociologist whose work has focused on the criminal-justice system from the standpoint of race theory. In one of his most cited articles, “Racial Disparities in Official Assessments of Juvenile Offenders: Attributional Stereotypes as Mediating Mechanisms,” published in 1998 in American Sociological Review, Bridges observes that white youth are excused for delinquency on the basis of “external factors,” such as poverty or family problems, while black youth in similar trouble are blamed for “internal factors” like poor impulse control or inherent criminality. Thus, according to Bridges, black youthful offenders unfairly receive harsher punishments than their white counterparts. Judges and probation officers, he says, should second-guess their professional judgement through the lens of critical race theory, which holds that the doctrine of white supremacy influences every aspect of society and the legal system.

In the Evergreen videos, we see Bridges struggling to be as passive and compliant as possible with the crowd of angry students occupying his office. When he is yelled at for saying “Please,” he apologizes. When he admits to having a claustrophobia-induced panic attack, he is derided and told to “get to work” transcribing the mob’s demands. Bridges could have called the campus police at any time to end the illegal occupation of his office and his imprisonment, but he ordered them to stand down—presumably because, according to his own academic doctrine, police intervention is necessarily fascist and racist.

The spectacle of Bridges’s humiliation is initially horrifying, but it isn’t clear that he disagrees with the students. In fact, he seems to appreciate, or even enjoy, being forced to submit to what he, after all, likely acknowledges as a just cause. In an August 2016 op-ed in The Seattle Times, Bridges condemned the dean of the University of Chicago for dismissing the importance of “safe spaces” for students on campuses. “Trigger warnings can alert students to genuinely distressing content that could otherwise cripple their learning,” he wrote, worrying that students “often lack confidence in their capacity to succeed, believing that they don’t belong at a major college or university (the so-called ‘impostor syndrome’).”

The Left’s Unilateral Suicide Pact After the Manchester bombing, the Left once again avoids the obvious. Heather Mac Donald

Liberal ideology conceives of “safe spaces” in the context of alleged white patriarchy, but there was a real need for a “safe space” in Britain’s Manchester Arena on May 22, when 22-year-old terrorist Salman Abedi detonated his nail- and screw-filled suicide bomb after a concert by teen idol Ariana Grande. What was the “progressive” answer to yet another instance of Islamic terrorism in the West? Feckless calls for resisting hate, pledges of renewed diversity, and little else.

A rethinking of immigration policies is off the table. Nothing that an Islamic terrorist can do will ever shake the left-wing commitment to open borders—not mass sexual assaults, not the deliberate slaughter of gays, and not, as in Manchester last week, the killing of young girls. The real threat that radical Islam poses to feminism and gay rights must be disregarded in order to transform the West by Third World immigration. Defenders of the open-borders status quo inevitably claim that if a terrorist is a second-generation immigrant, like Abedi, immigration policy has nothing to do with his attack. (Abedi’s parents emigrated to Britain from Libya; his immediate family in Manchester lived in the world’s largest Libyan enclave outside Africa itself.) Media Matters ridiculed a comment about the Manchester bombing by Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt with the following headline: fox news host suggests ‘open borders’ are to blame for manchester attack carried out by british native.

Earhardt had asked how to prevent “what’s happening in Europe, with all these open borders, they’re not vetting, they’re opening their borders to families like this, and this is how they’re paid back in return.” Pace Media Matters, a second-generation Muslim immigrant with a zeal for suicide bombing is as much of an immigration issue as a first-generation immigrant with a terrorist bent. The fact that second-generation immigrants are not assimilating into Western culture makes immigration policy more, not less, of a pressing matter. It is absurd to suggest that Abedi picked up his terrorist leanings from reading William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth, rather than from the ideology of radical Islam that has been imported into Britain by mass immigration.

The Washington Post, too, editorialized that “defenders of vulnerable immigrants and asylum seekers, who in Britain as elsewhere in the West remain the targets of populist demagogues, could take some comfort from the fact that the assault apparently did not originate with those communities.” Well, where did the assault originate from—Buckingham Palace?

Since liberals and progressives will not allow a rethinking of open borders policy, perhaps they would support improved intelligence capacity so as to detect terror attacks in the planning stages? Nope. The Left still decries the modest expansions of surveillance power under the 2001 Patriot Act as the work of totalitarianism. Former New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly sought to gather publicly available information about dense Muslim neighborhoods in New York in order to monitor potential radicalization; his discontinued initiative is still denounced as anti-Muslim oppression. Internet companies protect encrypted communications from government access, to the applause of civil libertarians and the mainstream media. The National Security Agency’s mass data analysis, done by unconscious computer algorithms, is still being challenged in court.

What about using ordinary police powers to try to hinder terrorism? Islamic terrorists in Europe have moonlighted as crooks, engaging in drug dealing, robberies, vandalism, and theft. The U.S. should have zero tolerance for any criminal activity committed by aliens: break the criminal law and you’re out of here. Deporting alien criminals is both an anti-crime and an anti-terrorism strategy. Yet mayors and police chiefs in sanctuary jurisdictions across the country continue to release alien criminals back into the community from jail in defiance of requests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold the criminals briefly for removal proceedings. The New York Police Department defied every ICE detainer request it received in the first four months of 2017, instead releasing 179 alien criminals back into the streets, according to the New York Post.

Kathy Griffin’s Jihadist Anti-Trump Fantasy Leftists come to the defense of an unfunny comedian. Matthew Vadum

Comedian Kathy Griffin’s gruesome, Islamic State-inspired, photoshoot with the fake severed head of President Trump is an unsettling reminder of both the depravity of the Left and the lengths to which some radical activists will go to make a political statement in our information-rich age.

The Left, American history shows, is inherently violent in both word and deed, but conservatives, despite a fondness they share with Democrats for military metaphors in politics, are rarely moved to commit actual violence. Conservatives’ natural disinclination towards political violence is why Hillary Clinton authorized Robert Creamer and Scott Foval to pay leftist agitators, the homeless, and the mentally ill, to cause melees at Trump rallies as part of the DNC’s officially authorized “conflict engagement” program. After all, the leftist lie that Trump and his supporters were deplorable thugs wouldn’t have gained traction without news reports of Trump fans getting physical with Trump haters.

Plenty of left-leaning, anti-Trump comedians have subordinated their comedy routines to their politics. Almost always they end up being not funny. People who expect comedy from their comedians don’t like being tricked into taking in political sermons.

The tedious sanctimony junkie John Fugelsang is one example of a comedian whose political rants have supplanted actual jokes. Liberal comedians bombed at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner this year (the preachy Hasan Minhaj) and last year (Larry Wilmore). Stephen Colbert and John Oliver aren’t funny when they’re trashing Trump. Bill Maher is seldom funny nowadays. Samantha Bee has never been funny. Jon Stewart, who has described himself as a socialist, used to be funny sometimes but the laughs faded as he became increasingly immersed in political commentary. His replacement on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” affirmative action hire Trevor Noah, is almost never funny, especially when blathering on about politics.

And there was nothing courageous about Griffin’s photo. She wasn’t speaking truth to power. There was no controversy or political issue addressed. She was being grotesque for the sake of being grotesque. She was pandering to her elitist left-wing friends in Hollywood who enjoy comparing the Republican Party to the Taliban.

Greg Gutfeld opined on “The Five” Wednesday that Griffin did this to try to move from the D-list up to the B-list, a reference to her reality TV show, “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.”

Griffin is attempting to “take the express train to political relevance,” even though “she’s about as funny as syphilis,” he said.

President Trump agrees. “Kathy Griffin should be ashamed of herself,” Trump tweeted yesterday. “My children, especially my 11 year old son, Barron, are having a hard time with this. Sick!”

The first lady also weighed in.

“As a mother, a wife, and a human being, that photo is very disturbing,” said Melania Trump in a statement. “When you consider some of the atrocities happening in the world today, a photo opportunity like this is simply wrong and makes you wonder about the mental health of the person who did it.”

Initially, Griffin tried to justify participating in the photoshoot. She tweeted that she was “merely mocking the Mocker in Chief.” She later deleted the tweet.

Then as the firestorm she created spread, Griffin posted an apology video online. In it, she said:

Hey everybody, it’s me, Kathy Griffin. I sincerely apologize. I’m just now seeing the reaction of these images. I’m a comic. I crossed the line. I move the line and then I cross it. I went way too far. The image is too disturbing. I understand how it offends people. It wasn’t funny, I get it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career. I will continue. I asked your forgiveness. Taking down the image. Going to ask the photographer to take down the image. And I beg for your forgiveness. I went too far. I made a mistake and I was wrong.

Samantha Power Unmasked Why would a diplomat need to know the names of Trump officials?

Barack Obama in 2014 made a large to-do about his reforms of U.S. surveillance programs to “protect the privacy” of Americans. We may soon learn how that squares with his Administration’s unmasking of political opponents.

The House Intelligence Committee Wednesday issued seven subpoenas as part of its Russia probe. But the three most notable demanded that the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation turn over records related to the Obama Administration’s “unmasking” of Trump transition members.

We know that U.S. intelligence agencies routinely eavesdropped on foreign officials who were talking about or meeting with Trump aides. Much less routine is for political appointees to override privacy protections to “unmask,” or learn the identity of, U.S. citizens listed in a resulting intelligence report.

The new subpoenas seek details of all unmasking requests in 2016 by three people: former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. Democrats claim Ms. Rice needed to unmask names to do her job, though this is questionable given that she wasn’t running counterintelligence investigations. They have a better claim with Mr. Brennan.

But Ms. Power’s job was diplomacy. Unmaskings are supposed to be rare, and if the mere ambassador to the U.N. could demand them, what privacy protection was the Obama White House really offering U.S. citizens? The House subpoenas should provide fascinating details about how often Ms. Power and her mates requested unmaskings, on which Trump officials, and with what justification. The public deserves to know given that unmasked details have been leaked to the press in violation of the law and privacy.

Meantime, we learned from Circa News last week of a declassified document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which excoriated the National Security Agency for an “institutional lack of candor.” The court explained that Obama officials had often violated U.S. privacy protections while looking at foreign intelligence but did not disclose these incidents until the waning days of Mr. Obama’s tenure.

“The Oct. 26, 2016 notice [by the Obama Administration] informed the Court that NSA analysts had been conducting [queries that identified U.S. citizens] in violation of [prohibitions] with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court,” read the unsealed document, dated April 26, 2017.

All of this matters because Congress will be asked by the end of this year to reauthorize programs such as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for spying on bad guys and is a vital terror-fighting tool. Even Mr. Obama endorsed 702’s necessity. Congress needs to keep the program going, but it has every right to know first if Team Obama eavesdropped on political opponents.

What the House Subpoenas of Rice, Brennan, and Power in the ‘Unmasking’ Probe Mean It’s not all about Russia. By Andrew C. McCarthy

The House Intelligence Committee has reportedly issued seven subpoenas in connection with its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and of the Obama administration’s potentially illegal use of the government’s foreign-intelligence-collection power for the purpose of monitoring Americans — in particular, Americans connected to the Trump campaign and transition.

The news was broken Wednesday afternoon by the Wall Street Journal.

The most intriguing detail of the subpoenas is the demand for any information related to requests for unmasking by Samantha Power, President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.

“Unmasking” is the revealing in intelligence reports of the identities of Americans whose communications (or information about whom) have been “incidentally” intercepted during foreign-intelligence-collection operations.

Of course, the fact that a subpoena demanding information is issued does not necessarily mean the information exists. Nevertheless, the issuance of a subpoena implies that the issuer has a good-faith basis to believe it does. On that score, it has previously been reported that the committee’s chairman, Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), has reviewed intelligence reporting and detected instances of unmasking.

Were there to be information indicating that Ms. Power was involved in unmasking American identities in intelligence reports, significant questions would be raised. As ambassador to the U.N., Power, a long-time Obama adviser, held a diplomatic position. She was not an intelligence analyst. It is not immediately clear why the U.N. ambassador would be involved in the disclosure of American identities in intelligence reports — after the agencies that collected and analyzed the intelligence had decided such identities should be masked.

The Journal report further indicates that committee subpoenas demand any information related to unmasking requests by Susan Rice and John Brennan. Ms. Rice was President Obama’s national-security adviser (a White House staff position), and, as we’ve noted, previous reporting has tied her to unmasking activities. Brennan was Obama’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is in the business of gathering and analyzing foreign intelligence outside the United States. In that capacity, the CIA routinely makes judgments about whether identities of Americans should be unmasked.

The House Intelligence Committee is investigating both a) Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, an inquiry that entails thus far unsubstantiated suspicions of Trump-campaign collusion, and b) the use of intelligence authorities to investigate the Trump campaign, an inquiry that focuses on whether national-security powers (such as those codified in FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) were used pretextually, for the real purpose of conducting political spying.

The Old German Problem Germany’s negative attitude toward the U.S. long predates the rise of Trump. By Victor Davis Hanson

Berlin — Germans do not seem too friendly to Americans these days.

According to a recent Harvard Kennedy School study of global media, 98 percent of German public television news portrays President Donald Trump negatively, making it by far the most anti-Trump media in the world.

Yet the disdain predates the election of Trump, who is roundly despised here for his unapologetic anti–European Union views.

In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey of European countries, Germany had the least favorable impression of America. Only about 50 percent of Germans expressed positive feelings toward the U.S. Former president Barack Obama, who visited here last week to lecture the world on diversity and tolerance, never changed negative attitudes much from the unpopular George W. Bush years.

Germans apparently do not appreciate that fellow NATO member America still subsidizes their defense. Nor do they seem appreciative of their huge trade surplus ($65 billion) with the United States.

Germans seem to have forgotten that American troops for 45 years kept the Soviets from absorbing all of Germany. The Berlin Airlift is now premodern history.

Why, then, do confident Germans increasingly dislike the United States?

It is complicated.

Since 1989, Germany has worked hard on its post-unification image as a largely pacifistic country. It is eager to teach other nations how to conduct themselves peacefully and to pursue shared global goals such as reducing global warming or opening national borders to the world’s refugees.

Implicit in Germany’s utopian message is that postmodern Germans know best what not to do — given their terrible 20th-century past, with the aggressions of imperial Germany and later the savagery and Holocaust perpetuated by Hitler’s Third Reich.

Yet being guilt-ridden does not equate to being humble (never a German strong suit).

The same conceit of an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally uniform state that drew Germany into conflict with the U.S. (whose late entry into both World War I and World War II helped ensure German defeats) has never quite disappeared.

Instead, German condescension merely has been updated.

The Accumulation of Vibrations By Shoshana Bryen

In the movie, the Allied commandos sneak through Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia to the bridge they were assigned to blow up. After the requisite setbacks, our heroes enter the internal machinery of a dam upstream of the bridge and detonate their explosives. Then… nothing. Unperturbed, the explosives expert says, “Wait. It is the accumulation of vibrations that does it.” Indeed, the smallish explosion causes cracks; the cracks cause more cracks; water begins to seep through the dam. Then, more water, more pressure, more cracks, more water. The bridge sways, and then collapses with a satisfying crash, sending the Nazi tanks and their crews into the drink.

Friends of Israel have known for years that regardless what the Palestinian Authority (PA) says in diplomatic circles, in truth it rejects the legitimacy of Israel in the region and encourages violence against Israelis. The evidence is easily accessible: the Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI) translates material from across the Arab world into English. NGO Monitor tracks nongovernmental organizations and their support for Palestinian violence and intransigence. Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) studies Palestinian society through its media and textbooks.

Those are the vibrations, and in the presence of a blunt American president, they appear to be accumulating. President Trump’s White House statement to PA President Mahmoud Abbas laid down an unmistakable American marker:

There cannot be lasting peace unless the Palestinian leaders speak in a unified voice against incitement to violence and hate. There’s such hatred. But hopefully there won’t be such hatred for very long. All children of God must be taught to value and respect human life, and condemn all of those who target the innocent.

Abbas responded that Palestinian children are “raised in a culture of peace.” That was demonstrably false and was so demonstrated. By the time the President went to Bethlehem, it appears that he had seen enough to lambaste Abbas for lying to him. The President also, “raised concerns about the payments to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails who have committed acts of terrorism, and to their families, and emphasized the need to resolve this issue,” according to the White House press secretary.

Another crack in the dam and the water is beginning to rise.

PMW had already documented the Palestinian Authority’s veneration of Dalal Mughrabi -– a female terrorist involved in the Coastal Road massacre in which 37 civilians, 12 of them children, were killed and more than 70 others wounded. PMW notes that in the West Bank, there are three schools and a computer center named after her, and Abbas held a birthday celebration for her. But when the “Martyr Dalal Mughrabi Center: A cultural and social center and youth center in partnership with the Burqa village council and the Women’s [Technical] Affairs Committee,” was found to have Norwegian government and UN money behind it, the bridge began to sway.

Indivisible: With Liberty and Justice for Some By Janet Levy

The radical Left is so incensed and horrified by the advent of a Trump presidency that it has been driven to adopt what it considers to be the tactics of a grassroots movement it abhors and accuses of being racist, homophobic, anti-government, anti-woman, nativist, and Islamophobic along with the array of other epithets reserved for conservatives and flag-waving Americans. Led by five former Democratic congressional staffers, the recently birthed progressive organization Indivisible admits to modeling its strategy to “resist” the Trump administration after the tactics employed by its perceived nemesis: the Tea Party.

Operating from the conviction that presidential power is not unlimited and that pressure on Congress can reverse Trump’s potential damage, the Indivisible Team has launched a movement mainly for progressives, although disgruntled conservatives or anyone who opposes Trump may apply. The idea behind Indivisible is to resist the Trump agenda by diverting members of Congress, especially conservatives, from accomplishing their goals and preventing them from undoing many of the progressive policies put in place by the Obama administration.

Ironically, the current protestations vis a vis “presidential power gone wild” is incongruous with the absence of complaints from the Left when it came to the Obama administration and its many secretive actions, executive orders, and congressional bypassing, despite unrelenting claims of transparency. The uncontested shift in Washington over the past eight years away from a constitutional republic and congressional legislative responsibility toward more of a bureaucratic, administrative government run without Congress’ intervention belies the sincerity of these assertions.

Characterizing the ideas of the Tea Party as “wrong, cruel and tinged with racism,” the Indivisible Team pledges to protect their values of “inclusion, tolerance and fairness” with an equivalent level of resistance and fervor.

Following the January publication of a guide posted to Google Docs that went viral, the founders reported that within three weeks they had amassed 105,000 interested parties and 2,400 registered groups, one in every congressional district. Today, the Indivisible website boasts close to 6,000 Indivisible groups, at least two in each congressional district.

Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda refers to Trump as “the biggest popular vote loser in history to ever call himself President Elect.” In their inaugural document, Indivisible’s architects reveal their defensive, ostensibly Tea Party-templated strategy to thwart the policies of the incoming administration. Positing that Trump will “attempt to use his congressional authority to reshape America in his racist, authoritarian and corrupt image” even though he “has no mandate” from the voters, the Team presents a methodology to “stand indivisibly to defeat Trump and the members of Congress who would do his bidding.”

In defense of their position, Indivisible’s founders rationalize that if a “small minority in the Tea Party could stop President Obama, then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump” and prevent him from “victimizing us and our neighbors.” They characterize Trump’s agenda as one that “explicitly targets immigrants, Muslims, people of color, LGBTQ people, the poor and working class, and women.”