FOX (Faux) News reported that a new group of “education reformers” aspires to become the NRA of education. Since the NRA has actively blocked common sense gun control and has indirectly (or directly) contributed to the murder of children and teachers, you can imagine how helpful this group will be.
EXCLUSIVE – An organization that wants to reform school boards across the country is launching what they call “the new NRA for education.”
“The 1776 Project PAC … was extremely successful over the last, I guess, four years now, electing over 250 conservatives to school boards across the country,” Ryan James Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, told Fox News Digital. “We’ve seen that after they were elected, a lot of them wanted further help and outreach to sit there and talk about policy.”
Girdusky added that “The 1776 Project Foundation is going to meet that role and fill that void that is desperately needed as far as public policy goes when it comes to public schools and school boards.”
Founded in 2021, the 1776 Project PAC, says their mission is “Reigniting the spark and spirit of that revolution by reforming school boards across America.”
An embargoed press release from the 1776 Project PAC says the new foundation, “is an off-shoot of the 1776 Project PAC.”
“Since 2020, the 1776 Project PAC has led the conservative fight to win conservative school board seats and own the education issue, from ending remote learning to championing a return to classical education,” the release reads. “Over 250 of their endorsed candidates won elections. They have a majority of small donors and are currently #22 on Win Red….”
Aiden Buzzetti, president of the 1776 Project Foundation, told Fox News Digital that they want to be the “intellectual backbone” of education reform.
“There are so many school board members in the United States, there’s over 80 to 100,000 individual board members,” Buzzetti said. “And that is very important that those with an eye towards education reform are organized and are able to get the resources they need to implement the right policies or even review the policies that the current board has already put in place.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In Canada, Conservative groups in education tend to flare up mainly over LGBT issues but then fade away.
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It sounds like another attack on truly grassroots participation in schoolboards. “Outside” money, organizations, and people come into neighborhood situations, or “appropriate” only those who will tow their doctrinal line, then they buy their way into the bells-and-whistles media to overwhelm and “primary” potential grassroots participants. Sounds kind of like how cancer works. CBK
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It’s about what it’s always been about — converting education into a tax-gobbling private industry.
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Jon: Yes, that, but also about control of curriculum, e.g., what they see as “woke” propaganda is just providing a good education. And they want THEIR propaganda.
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I think it’s critical to after all this time to understsnd that the corporate interests couldn’t care less about the cultural issues except insofar as they can exploit them to pound wedges into the common interests and create as much chaos and division as possible.
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Jon: Well, you also have the other faction (among others) of the religious right who, after all, are informed by their secret connections with God Almighty and so who think it’s okay (for them) to infringe on others’ freedoms. But my guess is they are also all hyper-capitalists under the sheets. CBK
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The Christian Nationalist Theofascists (CNF) want to control the curriculum, much like the Imans control what is taught in Iranian Schools.
When I start seeing that the CNFs being mentioned, condemned and/or otherwise vilified for what they are doing by daily references in either mainstream or “new” media, I’ll begin to think that we have started to regain our grip on reality as a country.
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On the surface “a classical education” sounds a lot better than young people being chained to online multiple choice questions and data collection for most of the day. However, I tend to agree with Catherine. Anything right wing extremists propose is bound to be a biased Trojan Horse of right wing brain washing pretending to be a classical education.
Did Trump have a classical education in his fancy private schools? Why is he one of the most ignorant presidents in modern history? Even when we discount his numerous manipulative lies, so many so-called facts are totally wrong. It started with his inauguration when he claimed the patriots stormed the airports during The American Revolution and continues to this day. He does not know history, geography (Alabama) or science (inject with bleach to attack Covid). Too bad a decent public school didn’t save Trump from his failing private education.
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From their site: ” Resolution to Promote Biological Sex Recognition and Eliminate DEI Initiatives
This resolution aims to enforce President Trump’s executive order on biological sex.”
Of course the CONVICTED FELON is an expert on biological sex/gender differences.
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I will not be surprised if we looked under the hood of this new demonic NRA for schools and find some familiar names who launched similar extremist organizations to remodel the US by burning it down and had to start over when we discovered what they were up to.
What does NRA stand for
Nutcase Raving Angry lunatics for change
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Trump had an education that included being sent to military school. In the military one learns, essentially, how to give orders or take them. One tends to learn discipline–which it seems is why Trump’s parents sent him there.
Of course, military “training”–let’s call it that, as distinguished from “education”–also includes strategy. In the military we were taught how to divide and conquer, how to kill, etc. It’s a not very healthy education. To be realistic, we do need a military in this world, but military leaders are generally quite limited.
I don’t speak as a military leader, but as an ordinary citizen-soldier, drafted during the Cold War. In the Army I saw several officers who were good military leaders, but not many I’d vote for to hold a non-military public office.
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The sort of “military school” Felon47 attended has about as much relationship to real military discipline as a dude ranch has to being real cowhand. Mostly one learns how to lie, cheat, steal, and tolerate among you those who are best at not getting caught at it.
—Voice of Experience
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Trump probably was sent to military school because he was undisciplined. The practice in his era was to do that. One of my brothers–Trump’s age–was sent to military school to “straighten him out.”
Never forget that Trump was a draft dodger. Five times he was called up and five times he presented a note from a podiatrist saying he had bone spurs.
The podiatrist was a tenant in a shopping center owned by Donald’s father. He did the old Trump a favor.
So when you see the tweets–all over Twitter–of a cowboy wearing a T-shirt saying “Trump Tiugh–remember that Trump’s a draft dodger. Whenever I see those ads, I write: “This is a gay cowboy. #brokebackmountain” “Trump was not tough. He was a draft dodger.”
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Correction:
“One tends to learn MILITARY discipline–which it seems is why Trump’s parents sent him there.”
Discipline ≠ military discipline. Two separate things.
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POLITICAL POWER FLOWS UPWARD,
NOT DOWNWARD
This “new” reform group is just another iteration of a plan of action that was set in motion immediately after Barry Goldwater was trounced in the 1964 presidential elections.
My first encounter with this movement was in 1989 when I was a member of my teachers’ union board of directors. I had gone to San Diego to listen to Ralph Reed, then head of the “Christian Coalition”, talk to a group of Republicans about the upcoming 1990 elections.
Reed laid out a plan of gaining political power that was based on the strategic political truism that “Political power flows upward, not downward.”
Back then, the Christian Coalition set up a nationwide strategy to go “under the radar” and win large numbers of elected positions that the Democratic Party felt too insignificant to bother with. The Coalition’s leader Pat Robertson had declared that the group’s goal was “to place Pat Robertson people on city councils, school boards, water district boards, sanitation district boards, and county agencies and government across America.” The Coalition was going to take over political power “one neighborhood at a time.”
That strategy succeeded in San Diego County in 1990 and then went nationwide…and went right over the head of the clueless Democratic Party, which has NEVER learned the lesson that political power flows upward from having control of all the “small time” political infrastructure that the Democratic Party ignores.
In 1992, they came after the school board in my District, Orange Unified School District (OUSD) in Orange County, California.
They gained majority control of the board, and I began a recall campaign. My recall campaign was even opposed by the California Teachers Association as being “too extreme” and “confrontational”.
But by 1999 when I was union president, 25% of the teachers in OUSD had left the District and were replaced by “teachers” on “temporary credentials” — which meant the District was hiring anyone who could breathe to put into the classrooms to “teach”. That finally ignited the voters, and in 2001 a successful recall was held.
But, the thing that most characterizes the movement that elected those ousted board members in the first place is that they are patient and relentless. So, by the early 2020s they had again gained control of OUSD…a long and hard fought recall was able to oust them again, but only after children, the community, and teachers had suffered more years of damage.
And…they’ll be back. They are relentless, relentless, relentless. There is no such thing as a final victory over them.
And the main reason they are able to come back again and again, and the main reason so many school districts, city councils, water districts, sanitation districts, and other elements of local government are so long in their control, is because the clueless Democratic Party has STILL failed to learn the lesson that POLITICAL POWER FLOWS UPWARD, NOT DOWNWARD.
Control of the below-the-radar political infrastructure is what gives these groups the political power to elect state governments and members of Congress…and Presidents.
And STILL, local Democrats beg in vain for the national Democratic Party to recognize the reality that POLITICAL POWER FLOWS UPWARD, NOT DOWNWARD. Party money must be spent on local under-the-radar elections in order to win the grass roots political power that makes statewide and national political power possible.
Take the time to read the following…ALL of the installments:
http://www.theocracywatch.org/biblical_law2.htm
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The one single-word coverall description governing all of last century and this one is: PROJECTION. CBK
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Not sure at all what you are trying to say with that statement. Please explain. Thanks.
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Duane, by projection, I mean the utter commonality of seeing one’s own self and one’s own qualities and failures, or even experiences, in others, and then acting like that’s the entire reality, when in fact others may not and probably don’t share those qualities and/or failures. Such a mentality also is predictive of the end of one’s questioning and of consequently deepening one’s understanding of others–because we think we already know.
On a writ-large scale, it’s a westernized (or eastern, or religious, cultural etc.) mentality that thinks that’s the way everyone thinks and, again, where nations can set policy by that fallacy instead of trying to understand further and know better how to relate to other nations and cultures. CBK
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LOL another astroturf ‘privatize everything’ load of rubbish!
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I think it’s critical to understand that the corporate interests couldn’t care less about the cultural issues except insofar as they can exploit them to pound wedges into the common interests and create as much chaos and division as possible.
There is nothing new about that idea — it’s one of Max Weber’s core insights as it’s — the way Capitalism capitalizes on the psychodynamics of religious belief.
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