Maurice Cunningham, retired professor of political scientist, has written an exposé of the well-funded fake “parent groups” that spring up overnight to disrupt school board meetings and demand control of books, curriculim, and COVID protocols. Who is behind them? Read the latest report from the Network for Public Education: “Merchants of Deception: Parent Props and Their Funders.”
They show up shouting at school board meetings with endless complaints. The press interviews them as though they are some “regular moms” looking out for their children, but they are not. They are a well-funded facade for the Koch, Walton, and DeVos families to disrupt and destroy public education.
In our new report, author and academician Maurice Cunningham pulls back the veil on the players, tactics, and funders. This must-read report identifies the who, how, and why behind “Merchants of Deception: Parent Props and Their Funders.”
Cunningham is author of the new book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.
So disgusting! Be better, billionaires.
The interesting thing about all these connections between conservative operatives is that they describe the very connections that the right has tried to pin on their opponents historically. Joe McCarthy used to regularly tie this or that witness called before his investigative committee to some communist “front organization “. Most of this was fiction, of course? But who keeps up?
This writer details connections between conservatives that exaggerate their political views in ways the Bolsheviks could only envy.
Ideological and idiotic forces that would denigrate or “both sides” this report as another example of conspiracism (conspiracy theory) fail to understand, or will not admit to comprehending, the empirical, factual nature of this and other connections. They are not made up out of whole bigoted, interest-driven cloth.
This is factual information linking doctrinaire fascists: those who would destroy American governance; billionaires who fund narrow, unproven and destructive interests; the elimination of support for public services, employees, and obligations made to past employees; creating unaccountable police state authority; and diverting all public resources to the military and policies that shift wealth to selected “winners and self-sufficient businesses.” The keystone to get all these goodies accomplished is the elimination of public education. Once that is accomplished, all the other interests will be accomplished with the rapidity and certainty of falling dominos. That’s why understanding and spreading the paramount importance of the basic arguments Diane Ravitch makes so clearly is literally a matter of our polity’s life or death.
Well said. Public education is the glue that binds people to information, critical thinking, logic and reason. Disruption that breaks those bonds makes it easier to billionaires to divide, conquer and transfer the public assets of the common good into their own greedy pockets. Democracy and civil society be damned!
Agreed!
The regressive xtian fundie reactionaries want all to believe that they are conservative. THEY AREN’T CONSERVATE. They seek to destroy public institutions so that they can control the private, almost always xtian fundie, replacements.
Xtian fundie faith beliefs and regressive reactionary political faith beliefs go hand in hand, they are betrothed, actually married at the hip, in a sick venture in pursuit of achieving an xtian theocracy and destroying our pluralistic society.
Why people refer to those regressives as conservative is beyond my thinking.
Most here are true conservatives who believe in what the Constitution says and who support and try to better our existing public institutions.
Sadly our response to those reactionaries who would tear down the public schools has been flaccid, toothless and “sin cojones” as shown by the willingness to use the regressive language of ‘reform’, to implement the standards and testing malpractice regime and to succumb to a false sense of the purpose of public education.
THEY AREN’T CONSERVATIVE
I’d say then ain’t! No how!
they…I know I wrote that. WordPress spellcheck is goofy.
“The press interviews them as though they are some “regular moms” looking out for their children…”
And herein lies the REAL problem. The media normalizes these folks and presents them as the most caring, concerned parents who only care about the well-being of their kids. A little digging would show how many of them don’t even have kids in the school, their ties with prominent right wingers, and the fact that they seem to have unlimited funding to push their agenda.
Meanwhile, any parent who opposes them is ignored — the media pretends they don’t exist, just like the media pretends there are no high performing African American students in NYC public schools and it is only because of the heroic and miraculous efforts of mostly white charter CEOs supported by right wing billionaires that any African American students excel academically.
These parents represent the interests not of a huge number of parents but of the billionaires that fund them. But the many, many parents who do NOT represent those billionaire interests are treated by the media ion the same way the media treats African American parents whose kids are thriving in real public schools. They simply do not exist for the education journalists who are highly rewarded when their laziness means that they make billionaires very happy.
It makes me laugh (really cry) when I see certain whining NYT journalists whining that they get criticized by the pro-charter folks, too. It reminds me of Maggie Haberman presenting her reporting as unbiased because Trump pretended not to like her while she kept mysteriously being the beneficiary of leaks straight from Trumpworld because Trump knew exactly how to play her.
It astonishes me how lazy education reporters are and how uninterested they are in doing anything but reporting what they are told is true. What Maurice Cunningham does is amazing. But no reporter is interested. They easily dismiss Maurice (and Diane Ravitch) as biased while they delightedly present the handful of parents funded by right wing billionaires as if they are just regular parents. No other parents seem to exist for them.
The adoption of a both-siderism mentality in the media and as the repeated used go-to tactic to explain anything is a great victory of American fascism. Question everything, even what you see, hear, or know is validated by the scientific method. The rhetorical ground of every political fight seems to fought on the ground and by the rules of the far right. Just restating your analysis to emphasize my agreement with it.
GregB,
We both see the dangers. It’s staring us in the face, and so many people don’t want to see how complicit the so-called liberal media has become.
Yesterday, two complicit reporters at the NYT proudly wrote a story about Speaker McCarthy ejecting two Democrats from the House oversight committee and framed the entire story of this as simply “a much-anticipated tit-for-tat”.
Because the Democrats giving consequences to 2 Republican legislators who promoted insurrection and violently overturning an election is just like Republican giving consequences to Democrats who give consequences to those who promote insurrection and violence.
When the neo-fascist Republicans seize power and start throwing Democrats in jail, those complicit journalists at the NYT will surely frame it as simply a “tit for tat” because those Democrats did support the prosecution of those who acted out violently to overthrow democracy. To the NYT reporters, it is fashionable now to claim there is no difference between punishing those who act out violently and punishing those who speak out against those who act out violently.
Here’s what most of people of our generation were taught about American government: People have different opinions about things, sometimes very different, and in our system they make their case, voters vote, you accept the results, and after a few years, you campaign for a point of view all over again. Sometimes you lose, which is very frustrating. Sometimes you win and hubris has a way of making itself comfortable. For better or worse, that’s how it kind of went, admittedly lots of glitches along the way, until 2015.
It was a trial run, we can now see in retrospect. Does anyone, regardless of whether one is right or left, think this system will endure after January 2025 if we have a President DeSantis, a republican Congress, and the Alito Supreme Court?
On January 29, 1933, conservatives were convinced that they could rein in Hitler and by making him chancellor the next day, he would begin to recognize the seriousness of his position and adjust. By June 1933 democracy was dead and one party rule was consolidated. At the end of 1933 there were 27,000 people in concentration camps. One year later there were 3,000. People fell in line quickly. May 1, 1933 was proclaimed a Labor Day of sorts, something that could never get done in the previous history of Weimar. Remember the flurry of chaos in the first days of the Idiot’s “administration”? Now they know where they went wrong. They’re not going to make those mistakes again. And the target is and always will be “the administrative state.” In other words, functioning government as we sometimes knew it.
Greg,
Did you mean to say in your comment about Germany that the number of people in concentration camps dropped from 27,000 to 3,000 in one year? Or is there a missing number?
No, it is demonstrative of how quickly the first phase of Gleichschaltung was; how rapidly people fell in line to the new order largely based on fear of state-sponsored terror. The first targeted groups intended for concentration camps were outspoken and elected Communists. Yes, it helped if they were Social Democrats or Jewish, but the primary targets were any who openly opposed Naziism since its founding more than a decade earlier. Although many of those 27,000 were tortured to death, the real goal was to treat them all brutally and then send them back into society as a warning to others of what might happen to them. This was incredibly effective. Workers districts that had been plastered with Communist flags in early March 1933 all had Nazi flags just two months later. When they saw their broken comrades and friends come back, they knew they either had to fall in line publicly and be very careful privately if they wanted to continue to resist.
Also, in 1934, Nazi leadership was trying to sort out how to reign in the SA, which was the organization in charge of the camps. They celebrated their brutality in the open, actually assaulting people with no consequences throughout Germany. This is what led to the Night of Long Knives, where many were murdered, the SA purged and most of its remnants were incorporated into the much more brutally bureaucratic SS, which was then being reorganized by a relatively new member of the party who stood out for his ability to organize brutality to support political power–Reinhard Heinrich. The nature of the camps changed under his leadership to first intensify the ability make people follow new rules and intimidate them up to the point of death if they did not.
So, as counterintuitive as it sounds, yes, there were only 3,000 in the camps by the end of 1934. This happened for two reasons: the overall size of original targets of repression shrank dramatically because the terror of the first year had been so effective, and it was a year of Nazi terror reorganization from a group of public thugs to one of an intricate bureaucracy that created thousands of Schreibtischtäter, literally desk-perpetrators. Eichmann became the poster boy for this concept. One who makes the decisions and orders but is far away from implementation.
Sorry for the many typos and WordPress-induced spellcheck errors. Wanted to get it out quickly, have to leave now.
As dangerous as any fascist-driven information:
https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2023/01/24/desantis-falsely-says-bivalent-booster-vaccine-increases-chances-covid-infection/
DeSantis is a zealot and a kook. His war against masking and vaccine mandates has caused thousands of unnecessary deaths in his state. I can’t think of enough ways to describe his war against public health measures: whacko, conspiracy theorist, nut job, irresponsible, merchant of death…….
In case anyone is interested in understanding how the Nazi SA acted to torture, kill, and then make sure all the details were filtered through the public, read up on Erich Mühsam, a poet and Bavarian political activist.
As one of the most hated intellectuals of the Nazis, he was brought to the Orianienburg concentration camp north of Berlin, where most of the Berlin Communists were kept. Mühsam was tortured in ways to ensure many heard or saw what was happening to him. He was humiliated in front of large groups of prisoners. He was worked to fainting exhaustion in areas where the most would see him. He finally died there on July 10, 1934. Excruciating details about his last year-plus of life filtered throughout the Berlin districts as prisoners were released to tell their stories. That’s called effective political control.
Billionaires are a billion times worse than millionaires.
Technically, as many as a thousand times worse!
The attack on public schools — in Virginia and across the country — is not some spontaneous “parent rights” outburst. It’s orchestrated. It’s being funded and set into motion by right-wing “Christians” at the Council for National Policy, a far-right group that had outsized-influence with the Trump administration.
Richard DeVos, husband of Betsy, has been president of CNP twice. Ed Meese, who helped Reagan cover up the Iran-Contra scandal, has been president of CNP. So has Pat Robertson. And Tim LaHaye.
Current and former CNP members include Cleta Mitchell, the Trump lawyer who was on that call to the Georgia Secretary of State demanding that he find Trump more than 11,780 votes, and Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA who bragged about bussing tens of thousands of people to the January 6th ‘Stop the Steal’ rally and insurrection. Two of the top peeps at the Federalist Society, Eugene Meyer and Leonard Leo, are also CNP members. (Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were high priorities for the Federalist Society and for CNP). Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a member. So is Stephen Moore, the wack-boy “economist” that Trump wanted to appoint to the Federal Reserve but ultimately didn’t because he owed his ex-wife $300,000 in back alimony and child support, and who was an “advisor” Glenn Youngkin in his campaign for Virginia governor even though he’s been dead wrong about virtually all of his economic predictions and who helped Sam Brownback ruin the economy of Kansas.
The Council for National Policy is interconnected to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network and Tea Party Patriots and a host of other right-wing groups. This is – in fact – the vast “right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton complained about. Glenn Youngkin made himself all very much a part of this.
Did this “new” Republican Southern Strategy work? Well, Youngkin won the Virginia governorship, and exit polls showed that Youngkin won 62 percent of white voters, and 76 percent of non-college graduate whites. And, Youngkin got way more of the non-college white women votes (75 percent) than his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe.
Here’s how the NY Times explained it:
“Republicans have moved to galvanize crucial groups of voters around what the party calls ‘parental rights’ issues in public schools, a hodgepodge of conservative causes ranging from eradicating mask mandates to demanding changes to the way children are taught about racism…Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate in Virginia, stoked the resentment and fear of white voters, alarmed by efforts to teach a more critical history of racism in America…he released an ad that was a throwback to the days of banning books, highlighting objections by a white mother and her high-school-age son to ‘Beloved,’ the canonical novel about slavery by the Black Nobel laureate Toni Morrison…the conservative news media and Republican candidates stirred the stew of anxieties and racial resentments that animate the party’s base — thundering about equity initiatives, books with sexual content and transgender students on sports teams.”
Republicans and racism. Who knew?
Lots of people.
Yale historian David Blight put it this way:
“Changing demographics and 15 million new voters drawn into the electorate by Obama in 2008 have scared Republicans—now largely the white people’s party—into fearing for their existence. With voter ID laws, reduced polling places and days, voter roll purges, restrictions on mail-in voting, an evisceration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a constant rant about ‘voter fraud’ without evidence, Republicans have soiled our electoral system with undemocratic skullduggery…The Republican Party has become a new kind of Confederacy.”
And this Republican “Confederacy” hates public education.