While the Washington Examiner story explains the #dontgo Movement from the GOP side of the story, I would like to take you into the much larger, much more privately organized “outside the beltway” part of the movement.

Indeed, far left groups and blogs are frothing at the mouths to proclaim this grassroots movement an “astroturf” campaign with strings being pulled by Republicans and Big Oil Companies.

The mistake the left uses, however, is the ignorant assumption that this “movement” exists solely in the beltway. Note to OpenLeft… the folks protesting in your pictures are people who LIVE and WORK in Washington. Are you that dense that you would completely overlook the fact that people in D.C. represent a very small portion of the #dontgo movement? Or is this just your way of spinning the story to fit your anti-free market agenda?

I won’t hold my breath waiting for an answer…

Even more important with regards to this “astroturf” allegation, is the fact that not one single “D.C. Insider” or operative from within the beltway had anything to do with the beginning of the online part of this movement. Not one!

In fact, this entire thing was started by myself and good friend Allen Fuller. The Twitter #dontgo Twitter hashtag, now the brand of the entire movement, was the idea of Allen. After he instant messaged me the tag, I went straight to Twitter with it and starting using it to follow the House revolt.

A few minutes later Allen informed me that he purchased the domain name, dontgo.us. We decided to install Wordpress, I created some graphics and wrote some petition language, we took the site live, and we began sending the link out to folks we know.

THAT is how the grassroots side of this got going. The GOP in Congress acted, and we moved to promote it. We didn’t get a call on some oil rig shaped secret phone, we didn’t get a check in the mail, we didn’t get a call from the President. No, we just decided to act, and we acted.

On Saturday, good folks like Media Lizzy helped push this to the next level. Media Lizzy, joined by an army of Twitter users, along with the dontgo.us website were able to keep the thing alive and well throughout the weekend.

By Monday morning the online messaging machine was in place and we found ourselves at the reigns. I’m still not sure exactly how it happened, but it did.

On Tuesday morning I decided to launch www.dontgomovement.com to help create a hub for the online excitement that was swelling. It wasn’t more than a few hours after throwing up a splash page that I was contacted by reporters from several major media outlets, including CNN.

The CNN story went live just after the site was opened up, and the story was followed by The Next Right, Red State, Politico, Michelle Malkin, HotAir, Washington Examiner, and scores of bloggers. This wave of attention sent more than 60,000 unique visits to our site within 24 hours.

Yesterday I spent hours and hours trying to answer email all day long, and the support we have received has been nothing short of encouraging in every way possible.

Now we have an e-mail list that is well over 10,000 strong, our e-mail RSS subscriber list is about 1,200 strong, and we have a Twitter army that simply has yet to be matched in size.

I’m proud to be a part of this movement, and I’m proud to say that we have had ZERO influence from anyone outside of our homes.

THAT is something very few on the left can claim.