It has been obvious for a while that the Overpasses movement has been too much about one person, James Neighbors. It should be about the people all across American doing the demos, as I have been trying to highlight them on this website. The demonstrators need to know that they are part of a active and growing group, so that they remain enthusiastic.
Neighbors “sob story” sounds frankly like a con from beginning to end. If the group only depends on one person, it is easily corrupted, bought-out, marginalized, blackmailed or intimidated. For the effort to be survivable, the leadership needs to be distributed down to lower levels. State and local leaders should be enabled and largely responsible for their own groups.
We see how vulnerable James is to financial pressures. It would be a disaster, if he turns the movement into a 501(c) non-profit organization, which allows unlimited contributions from anonymous donors. Large donors would expect the group to do their bidding and 501(c)’s are not by law allowed to be primarily about politics, endorsing or opposing politicians. It is the Government’s way of bribing you with your own tax money to give up your free speech rights.
No one person should be trusted blindly and it has become apparent that Neighbors does not have the necessary financial stability to head the organization in the first place. He should give up the donor accounts to someone, who can be responsible and accountable and whom everyone agrees is trustworthy, not to an unknown “CPA” of Neighbor’s choosing.
Neighbors did a great job rolling out the protests, but he did not originate the idea, we did in San Diego and Orange Counties in SoCal, where we started such demos on Inauguration Day last January, 2013. He has no right to total control of it. If he will not cooperate in resolving the current issues, the organizers should start going around him, as some are already beginning to do.