California Representative [score]Doug LaMalfa[/score] (R-Richvale) endured a noisy, unproductive townhall on Monday night, as attendees shouted over him and prevented him from answering questions for more than two hours at the event in Oroville.
The townhall “bust” wasn’t about the tottering dam nearby, or at least not much. It wasn’t because of the dam that people at the townhall were worked up.
From all appearances, it was because a group of attendees was simply determined to keep LaMalfa from connecting with his constituents and getting anything done. Answer questions? They wouldn’t let him finish sentences. They just shouted slogans and rhetorical questions at him. Eventually, after trying for a couple of hours to actually give answers and engage in dialogue, LaMalfa gave up and left.
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Judging by their tactics and little pre-printed signs – red signs reading “DISAGREE” and green signs reading “AGREE” – the unruly shouters were activists with the area’s “Indivisible” group, Indivisible Women.
Back in February, we at LU had some of the first reporting on Indivisible, a heavily Soros-funded network promoting anti-Trump activism – a “resistance” – through everything from “direct action” tactics to new media, social media, and public broadcast programming. Their methods haven’t changed in the two months since. What I wrote about their appearance at townhall meetings in February could have been written about the LaMalfa townhall Monday night:
It’s quite obvious that protesters who show up to hoot and screech at a [score]Jason Chaffetz[/score] (R-UT) town hall for 80 straight minutes, preventing any real business from getting done, are not there because they have legitimate concerns. They’re there solely to be disruptive. That’s not what well-intentioned constituents do when they have concerns to convey to a congressman or senator. They may be upset, but they engage their representative. They don’t just keep shouting him down. …
They also don’t have a bunch of identical, professionally printed signs.
The local media in LaMalfa’s district either don’t know, or don’t want their readers to know, that the pre-printed identical signs being waved by the townhall attendees, and the ritual shouting, are archetypal tools of Indivisible. Whatever their reasoning, the local news didn’t even mention the signs.
But the signs are there. (User Fred Spenger at YouTube has a full set of videos from the 17 April townhall, if you’re interested.) And they’re exactly the same signs Indivisible is using in images at their website, depicting a mass deployment in some venue or other. (The signs are so ubiquitous in these images, they may be from a training event. I didn’t find a description of what was going on in these photos.) The images decorate their “Events” calendar, which shows how to get to the next LaMalfa townhall, in Redding, CA on 19 April – i.e., ride the Indivisible charter bus.
It’s instructive to review the Events calendar. It’s a laundry list of progressive-left activism topics, serving to confirm once again that the most visible activism on all of these topics is sponsored by a highly organized network, one that is neither grassroots nor spontaneous.
That doesn’t mean local people are not involved, of course. It does mean that they’re not a mass uprising of diverse citizens who share the same concerns. They’re a whole bunch of hard leftists plugged in with an ideologically motivated central organization.
Here’s a sampling of what Indivisible Women is planning to be there for in the coming weeks:
20 April: Earth Day rally at Sierra College
22 April: Indivisible Action Network’s “March for Science” (“environmental” demonstrations) at Lake Tahoe, and a sister “March for Science” in Sacramento
22 April: Single-payer advocacy training, described as follows:
This is training for advocating for single payer, whether it be doing presentations or lobbying or educating individuals. There will be a powerpoint presentation, education about the bill, exercises in messaging, and learning how to participate in the endorsement campaign.
23 April: Shut Down Creech (Air Force Base)! – Drone protest (sponsored by CODEPINK, among others)
27 April: Women and Men in Black Vigil for Palestine Justice
29 April: People’s Climate March (hosted by the Sierra Club)
1 May: Women’s March on California Solidarity Strike (labor and illegal migrants solidarity)
2 May: 50th Anniversary – Black Panthers Shut Down Sacramento
15 May: Immigrant Day 2017 in Sacramento
16 May: LGBT Advocacy Day
You get the picture.
The point here is not that these folks aren’t citizens who have a point of view, and a right to have it. Of course they are.
The point is that their perspective is an extreme one, and it is not shared by the majority of their neighbors or other fellow Americans. It’s not a manifestation of any upwelling of common feeling, when they take over a townhall by shouting and waving signs, and prevent anyone else from being heard – including the people’s representative in Washington. It’s a thuggish tactic.
CBS Sacramento interviewed a high school student at LaMalfa’s Oroville townhall, who had this to say:
A 16-year-old high school student offered his perspective.
“I think the immaturity is astounding,” said Greyson Reynolds.
Reynolds is an Oroville High School junior. He says he was at Monday’s meeting to thank LaMalfa for holding a similar Q & A at his high school. The atmosphere according to Reynolds was much different.
“Night and day. It’s hard to believe that these people are grown adults and those people, the people at my high school are children. You’d think it was the opposite,” said Reynolds.
It would be hard to disagree. Just keep in mind who was making all the noise at the Oroville townhall. It wasn’t Jack and Jill Average Citizen. They showed up to participate in a townhall – not to be prevented from doing so by hollering activists.
