00:00This is one way to go slow.
00:03This is one way to go slow.
00:17My name is Ezra Levin.
00:19My name is Angel Padilla.
00:20My name is Leah Greenberg.
00:21On November 8th, I was watching the returns with Ezra and Leah.
00:25We had arranged a little house party.
00:28It was definitely the worst party that we will ever throw.
00:31It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
00:34You know, over the course of the night, it went from a very celebratory atmosphere to pretty grim.
00:40I don't know exactly what the seven stages of Reef are, but it probably went through, like, bargaining and anger
00:44and depression.
00:45I woke up at, like, 5 a.m. the next morning trying to think about, like, what are we going
00:50to do?
00:50What we thought was, hey, what if we release just an open source guide?
00:55Here's how Congress actually works. Here's how you can have impact.
00:58Congress is this giant black box. It's intended to be difficult to understand.
01:03Our goal with the guide was to demystify.
01:06We started writing almost the next day, you know, fleshing out an outline, putting together just sort of a document
01:12that was intended to be a 101 guide to really powerful local actions that can influence your elected representatives.
01:18It was modeled in large part on the Tea Party tactics. Lee and I were on Capitol Hill during the
01:25rise of the Tea Party.
01:26You know, we all just dismissed it entirely because it was just a bunch of angry, crazy people who were
01:31coming to D.C. or going to these town halls.
01:34But then it soon became clear that there was a lot of power in doing local grassroots organizing.
01:41I remember staffing a town hall that had a very organized Tea Party group attending.
01:47And I remember thinking, you know, it was almost like they had choreographed pieces of it.
01:51They were sitting in different places. They had questions that they had, like, clearly prepared in advance.
01:56I remember at that time thinking, like, how did they do that?
02:01And so, you know, in the process of writing the guide, we tried to sort of replicate a lot of
02:05that.
02:05We put it online as a Google Doc in December.
02:08And suddenly, within the first hour, emails started pouring in.
02:12And there were people saying, I've read the guide. I'm going to be using it.
02:16I want to organize and I want to start a group. How do I find other people who want to
02:19do this with me?
02:20There are now about 6,000 Indivisible groups, an average of 13 in every congressional district in the country.
02:26They're meeting in their own communities.
02:29They're planning actions to go to district offices or go to public events or do other innovative things.
02:34This is not a movement that's led in Washington, D.C.
02:36This is a movement that's being built and created by thousands of folks across the country who just decided,
02:42OK, I'm going to take control of my home turf.
02:44The unit of activism is not the individual from our point of view.
02:47The unit of activism from Indivisible's point of view is the local group.
02:51Donald Trump's agenda, his agenda does not depend on Donald Trump.
02:55It depends on whether individual members of Congress choose to rubber stamp it or choose to resist it.
02:59And those members of Congress respond not to Donald Trump primarily, but to their constituents.
