A contributed perspectives piece by Dave Briggman
Let’s be direct about something most local coverage of Valley Interfaith Action won’t tell you: this organization is not what it appears to be. It is not a collection of concerned neighbors who got together at a church potluck and decided to fix childcare and transportation. It is a calculated, methodical franchise operation — a local node in a national ideological network built on the organizing philosophy of Saul Alinsky, whose manual for manufactured social revolution, Rules for Radicals, remains one of the most influential — and deliberately deceptive — political documents of the last century.
You may not recognize Alinsky’s name. But you will recognize his disciples. Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College in praise of Alinsky and maintained a personal correspondence with him. Barack Obama didn’t just admire Alinsky — he was trained as a community organizer in Chicago using Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation methods, and later taught those same methods to others. These are not fringe figures. They are the mainstream face of a movement that has spent decades quietly embedding itself in American communities under the guise of compassion, one “listening campaign” at a time.
That movement is now in Harrisonburg. It’s called VIA.
The Mask of Localism
VIA presents itself as organic and community-driven. They’ll tell you they conducted over 1,500 conversations with Rockingham County residents. What they won’t tell you is that those conversations were guided by trained IAF organizers who already knew the destination before they asked the first question. The Alinsky model doesn’t discover what communities want — it manufactures consent for what the network has already decided to deliver.
The Industrial Areas Foundation, which VIA belongs to as a dues-paying affiliate, operates 65+ organizations across the country. They train the organizers. They write the tactical playbooks. They pressure elected officials into making “public commitments” — a signature Alinsky pressure tactic designed to box officials into positions before opposition can organize. They have done this in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Fairfax County, and dozens of other communities. The script is identical everywhere they land. One member of the Board of Supervisors, Dewey Ritchie, wrote a letter to Governor Youngkin seeking millions of dollars for VIA, which thankfully, was not given a dime for his efforts.
Childcare first. Transportation second. Then comes the rest of the agenda: living wage ordinances, immigrant legal defense funds, housing mandates, criminal justice overhaul, gun policy. It is not speculation — it is their documented track record in city after city.
The Fraud Exposure Nobody Is Talking About
Beyond the ideology, there is a cold, practical danger in what VIA is building.
Government demand-response transit programs — the dial-a-ride model VIA is pushing — are among the most fraud-prone in American public spending. Federal watchdog reports have flagged Medicaid transportation programs, which operate on the same reservation-based model, as chronic sources of phantom ride billing, ineligible trip claims, and operator revenue manipulation. VIA’s answer to the abuse question in their own FAQ amounts to: “operators will notice patterns.” That is not oversight. That is an invitation.
The VEER childcare program carries the same risk. The federal Child Care and Development Fund — the subsidy pipeline VEER is designed to tap — has been on the Department of Health and Human Services’ high-risk improper payments list for years running. Ghost enrollments, phantom children, and providers billing for services never rendered have drained hundreds of millions from these programs nationally. VIA isn’t building a safeguard against that history. It is building the local infrastructure to draw those same dollars — and those same vulnerabilities — directly into Rockingham County. In fact, a recent inspection by the Virginia Department of Education revealed two violations and only 14 students, a remarkably-low number of students considering VEER’s website shows that they have eight (8) staff members.
And once that infrastructure exists, it will not go away. No government-adjacent program ever does, regardless of what VIA’s FAQ claims about the transit demonstration project “going away” if unsuccessful. Financial dependency, political investment, and institutional inertia always win.
This Is What Sinister Looks Like
Sinister rarely announces itself. It doesn’t show up wearing a black hat. It shows up wearing the face of a neighbor, speaking the language of community, operating out of a church fellowship hall. It asks you how your family is doing and whether childcare is hard to find. It listens, takes notes, and feeds your answers back to you as its own ideas. That is Alinsky’s genius, and it is precisely what is happening here. In fact, two of the sponsoring organizations are headed up by two former employees of Nexus Services.
Rockingham County has never needed a national political machine to tell it how to care for its families. We have churches, businesses, neighbors, and local government that have done that work — imperfectly, but honestly — for generations.
The question is not whether childcare and transportation matter. They do. The question is whether we are willing to hand the keys to people whose ultimate agenda was written in Chicago long before they ever heard of Harrisonburg.
The answer should be no….and no more corporate money for this communist-backed organization from Sentara or anyone else, please.
Read more about Valley Interfaith Action at stopvianow.com.
Dave Briggman is an Air Force Veteran/former police officer who lives in Keezletown with his wife, Lynn, a career school counselor. An observer of government, he successfully challenged the legal ability for the Harrisonburg and Rockingham County Public Schools to expel students who legally carried firearms in closed containers on school grounds (resulting in the passage of § 22.1-277.07:1 of the Code of Virginia); successfully challenged the alleged weapons policy at Blue Ridge Community College banning possession of concealed handguns on their campus; successfully challenged the former weapons policy at James Madison University resulting in a former Attorney General, Jerry Kilgore, firing JMU as a client because of the illegal policy enacted without authority by the University; successfully challenged non-attorney employees of both the Division of Child Support Enforcement and, later, the Virginia Department of Social Services from signing legal pleadings on behalf of those agencies; killed the Rockingham County School Bus Camera Program and caused the Board of Supervisors to rescind the operating ordinance allowing the School Board to operate that program; successfully challenged the legality of the Speed Cameras on the Route 33 overpass of I-81, the Harrisonburg Honey Pot; and currently working with others to rid the Shenandoah Valley of the Flock LPRs and cameras. When not observing government, Dave enjoys traveling with his wife.
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