Many of the same people who promote The Big Lie about the 2020 election also just happen to be promoters of charter schools and vouchers.
Patrick Byrne is one of them. He is the CEO of Overstock.com.
Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld writes about him here.
Patrick Byrne has been back in the news. Remember him? If you’ve followed Indiana politics – especially education politics – for the past decade, you very well may.
Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, has as a prominent election denier trying to cast doubt on the fact that Donald Trump lost in 2020. He was part of an “unhinged” White House meeting Dec. 18, 2020, where he and others reportedly urged Trump to fight harder to overturn the results.
Byrne promoted the idea that 65% of all education spending should be in the classroom. A big, simple solution. George Will loved it. So did the governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, and the legislature so they passed a law mandating it.
Byrne has made big contributions to organizations pushing charters and vouchers.
Byrne spent eight years as board chair of EdChoice, the Indianapolis-based pro-voucher organization started by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman. He stepped down in 2019, the same year he left Overstock.com after his affair with a Russian woman who tried to influence U.S. politics became public.
Election denialism and school privatization: two big, simple ideas that are wrong.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Of course they are! Now that I know I will boycott Overstock! Thank you.
Thanks for the info, Diane. I will never order from Overstock again.
I’ve been telling everyone on here that for years. Byrne heavily supported vouchers in Utah and bankrolled much of the pro-voucher fight in Utah in 2007.
Makes sense. Those that promote vouchers and charters schools are greedy, power hungry liars so why not ally yourself with the bigger power hungry liar (literally and figuratively), Traitor Trump.
The congruence is not strange at all.
They believe liberals are out to get them and their children and take away all their freedoms and especially their guns.
They are the same folks who protest masks and vaccines.
And the same folks banning books.
“Own the Libs,” is the malicious taunt of the right wing.
Do liberals have a similar aggressive expression targeted at the racist, sexist, homophobic, conservative Christians of the right wing?
Hard to call a 50- 60 year effort strange. What is strange is that the populist backlash has been orchestrated by Oligarchs. Instead of Oligarchs being the target of the backlash. And then they refer to the Left as sheep .
Education has failed somewhere . On second thought that failure has been by design.
“Many of the same people who promote The Big Lie about the 2020 election also just happen to be promoters of charter schools and vouchers.”
And yet you only present one such example. Why make this a partisan thing? I can name plenty of liberal promoters of charter schools – Gates, Zuckerberg, Obama and Duncan prominently among them. It’s not a matter of partisanship, it’s a matter of cui bono? Rich people (and the politicians they donate to) who stand to profit from charters and vouchers tend to support them, regardless of party affiliation.
The home school crowd emerged during the pandemic as a right wing political force. Home schoolers used to be a small fringe group of religious zealots and quiet libertarians. Now they are operating as another political group that is pushing for ESAs so they can latch onto public dollars as well.
Nothing strange about it.
Simple corporate interest in destroying every part of the public sector.
The corporate machine hates its dependence on human labor, human creativity, indeed, humanity itself. That’s why we see its persistent effort to eliminate the human factor from every sphere where it encounters one-time human concerns.
Don’t forget the evangelicals and conservative Catholics.
The latter take credit for Indiana’s initiation and passage of vouchers. In some states, the Koch’s AFP co-hosts rallies for school choice with the state Catholic Conferences.
Media reported that the EdChoice VP in Ky is the associate director of the Kentucky Catholic Conference.
Actually the keynote speaker featured in your next post explains why this is not strange at all.
A perversely incongruent congruence.
Byrne may have been involved in Indiana, but his business was headquartered in Utah. He had a minion run for governor a few years back. In a rare moment of sanity, Utah voters rejected that well funded candidate in the primaries