|

|

Who’s Behind “Indivisible”?


Originally published by The Kennedy Beacon

Last Tuesday, a progressive activist group called Indivisible Action announced its endorsement of incumbent Joe Biden in his bid for re-election in 2024. 

As covered by The Hill, the organization held an internal vote that found 97% of its leaders and membership in favor of supporting Biden’s re-election effort. It has not been revealed which candidate gained the support of the remaining 3%, or if those dissenting members were excommunicated.

With that endorsement came a promise from Indivisible’s Executive Director Leah Greenberg, who pledged to “do what it takes to reelect Joe Biden and to send the forces of Donald Trump and MAGA extremism back to the dustbin of history.”

Strikingly absent from the announcement was any mention of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, or the primary race in which he continues to gain momentum against the increasingly unpopular Biden.

Indivisible is yet another in a string of well-funded, Democratic Party-aligned organizations working hard to usher in a second Biden term, regardless of what the party’s voters want. Just like with Progressive Turnout Project’s campaign to “BAN RFK Jr.” from the ballot, and Media Matters’ attempt to paint Kennedy as racist, sexist and anti-Democratic, The Kennedy Beacon decided to take a deep dive into the people and institutions behind Indivisible so as to better understand the network determined to undermine Kennedy at every turn.

The “Indivisible movement” is actually a network of interrelated organizations that appeared following Donald Trump’s surprise election in 2016. On December 11, 2016, a Google Document titled, “Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Resisting the Trump Agenda,” was distributed among liberal activists, authored by a group of former Congressional staffers. According to POLITICO, the goal was “to channel their post-election heartbreak into a manual for quashing President Donald Trump’s agenda.” In other words, revenge.

Specifically, the guide offered tips on a number of aggressive tactics, like tracking down the location of Republican lawmakers; monopolizing Q&A opportunities at town halls; and putting pressure on venues not to host pro-Trump events, suggesting activists “use social media to express [their] disappointment.” 

This is not unlike what recently happened to Kennedy, with the New York Society for Ethical Culture’s last-minute cancellation of his scheduled event in late July, addressing the Jewish community. Kennedy suggested on Twitter that the venue was “evidently under tremendous pressure” to disallow him a platform to defend himself against accusations of antisemitism.

Rather than seek to understand what led half of the country to unexpectedly vote for Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton, the authors vowed to “stall the Trump agenda” and “stand indivisibly opposed” to everything attached to it.

Despite relying heavily on a perceived “grassroots” approach to activism, Indivisible’s founders and leadership are firmly rooted in the permanent political class that occupy and direct the Democratic National Committee (DNC). As mentioned, several of the authors of the original guide were Congressional staffers, while others had achieved their own variety of political success by the time of the 2016 election. 

Take, for example, Indivar Dutta-Gupta, who was on the Democratic staff of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support from 2007-2011. Prior to that, he completed back-to-back internships in the public and private sector, starting with the office of Senator Dick Durbin. He then moved into training at Freedman Consulting, a firm whose robust roster of clients reads like a “Who’s Who” of national and international political and corporate power brokers. It includes Barack Obama, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Clinton Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (where Dr. Anthony Fauci is Vice Chair), Ford Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1996 Bill Clinton/Al Gore campaign. He then consulted for John Podesta’s Center for American Progress and several other prominent NGOs.

Even Jennay Ghowrwal (another of the Indivisible guide’s authors), who was just about to start her doctorate at the time of the 2016 election, had already cut her teeth with the “best” of the NGO/government/industrial complex. Her first job was in 2006 as a staff assistant with the elite Fulbright Commission, a federal academic non-profit funded by the State Department and British Government. She interned the following two years with Women Thrive Worldwide, a global feminist advocacy network funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her next gig was with the Population Reference Bureau, which—coincidentally—is also heavily funded by the Gates Foundation. As its name suggests, the PRB has played a role since its inception in 1929 in studying and advancing the eugenic merits of population control. Today, the organization focuses on the mass collection, organization and analysis of data and statistics related to the environment, population demographics and health––for example, tracking the “percentage of the total population fully vaccinated against COVID-19” worldwide. Unsurprisingly, the PRB is subsidized by the pharma-friendly World Health Organization, as well as vaccine developer AstraZeneca.

Then, there’s Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, the husband-and-wife duo that co-founded the Indivisible Project and its affiliated organizations. Greenberg first worked as a lobbyist for Humanity United, a non-governmental organization founded by eBay mogul and “fact-checker” benefactor Pierre Omidyar. From 2011-2015, Greenberg held various advisory, fellowship and public affairs positions in the Obama administration at the Departments of State and Defense. She then worked in the House of Representatives for Democratic Congressman Tom Porriello, including as policy director for his 2017 run for Governor of Virginia. Porriello, who acted as officiant at Greenberg and Levin’s wedding, then became the “top man” at Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Leah’s father, Mark Greenberg, is also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Leah returned to work as investments manager for Humanity United, which had, among other things, been working with half a dozen departments in the Obama administration.

Just like his wife, Ezra Levin’s career spans government and NGO positions. After volunteering at the San Jose Department of Housing through the federal AmeriCorps VISTA program, Levin worked in Congress as Deputy Policy Director for Rep. Lloyd Doggett, and as field director for Doggett’s 2010 re-election campaign. He then jumped to the Obama White House in 2012, working “directly with the Deputy Assistant to the President and with other senior White House staff” as part of the White House Domestic Policy Council. Levin next became Associate Director of Federal Policy for Prosperity Now, a non-profit advocacy group with close ties to the financial industry, federal agencies and NGOs. Its many donors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, Bank of America, Citi, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Kaiser Permanente, Morgan Stanley, PayPal, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Wells Fargo; the government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which are agencies of the federal government.

One of the most concerning funding partners of Prosperity Now is BlackRock. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has highlighted in multiple recent campaign videos, BlackRock is one of a handful of gargantuan corporations that have been systematically buying up homes, sometimes right out from underneath buyers after they’ve already placed an offer. The fact that Prosperity Now works so closely alongside the FDIC and CFPB suggests the stranglehold corporations have on public systems meant to protect the public is much stronger than most people realize.

Levin was working at Prosperity Now when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, leaving the organization in January 2017 to co-found Indivisible with Leah Greenberg. This, combined with the personal vendetta that appears to have driven the authors of the Indivisible Guide – annihilates the false and misleading claim that Indivisible is a “grassroots” effort on the part of Democratic voters.

Finally, it’s worth touching on the three primary organizations that make up Indivisible. The Indivisible Project is a 501(c)(4) organization, designated as a “social welfare organization.” It works alongside its charitable arm, Indivisible Civics, registered as a 501(c)(3). In May 2018, Levin and Greenberg announced the launch of Indivisible Action, a political action committee (PAC).

Between these three organizations, Indivisible has received funding from some of the usual suspects which we’ve identified as running the DNC in previous articles. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is a major donor, and he personally funded the creation of a “fact-checking” project within Indivisible called “The Truth Brigade”, which (predictably) went after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. following his inclusion on the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.” Open Society Foundations also discloses multiple grants to the organization, continuing the trend of George Soros’ outsized influence on the Democratic Party. Beyond that, however, Indivisible has largely declined to reveal who provides the majority of their funding, leaving Americans in the dark as to who is paying to usurp the country’s progressive values.

Unfortunately, this lack of transparency follows the example that the DNC itself is setting in the context of the 2024 presidential election. As both Kennedy and his campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, highlighted this past week, the DNC is actively changing the rules of the primary process in order to block any potential challengers to incumbent President Joe Biden, “effectively disenfranchising Democratic voters from having any choice in who becomes the Democratic nominee.”

“We live at a time in American history when a lot of Americans think that democracy is broken, that the political system is rigged, and that there’s not really any democracy. And unfortunately, the DNC is taking a lot of steps that confirm that outlook.”