Randi Weingarten Aft
kicks ass --> target TRIFECTA
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7 26 misgender spk = child abuse
multicultural tick box oppressed minority
parental rights
fear conspir despair ethnic studies scholastic publ kneel anthem collective grievance malc x maya ang
students pawns in govt school, danger in traffic
anti AI, do not care about getting performance up
amend 11 cardiac post vax clots
Education advocate Corey DeAngelis joins PragerU CEO Marissa Streit to discuss the National Education Association’s 2026 agenda and what it reveals about America’s largest teachers union. Instead of focusing on academic excellence, the NEA is prioritizing progressive activism, including efforts to impeach President Trump, oppose ICE, defend anti-Israel activism, and support trans legal services. Together, they break down how the NEA is built to influence your children, with an agenda that flows into book publishers to teacher training to the lesson plans in your child’s classroom.
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gmail 9 24 ~ coup
Eight months into President Donald Trump’s second term, it’s clear that public education and our democracy are in peril. Trump and his allies are abolishing the US Department of Education and gutting funding for programs that public schools rely on—and the big ugly budget bill (which Trump signed into law in July) creates a nationwide voucher program, even though we know vouchers harm students. This administration has abandoned the nearly 90 percent of American students who attend public schools, and it has continued the far-right campaign to demonize teachers, from claiming they indoctrinate kids in woke ideology to calling them groomers.
Why? That’s the question I aim to answer in my new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers. I wrote this book to expose the coherent, well-funded strategy behind the vilification of teachers and the war on knowledge. And I wrote it to lift up teachers. My book is a love letter to teachers and to all that teachers do to help kids thrive.
This issue of American Educator opens with an excerpt in which I explain that authoritarian leaders smear teachers because they don’t want children to learn to think critically. They want to erase truth, knowledge and history and to fracture society. They fear critical thinking. And they fear the other thing teachers do so well: creating a safe and welcoming environment for all kids. As Vladimir Putin has said, “Wars are won by teachers.”
The peril we face is even more evident when we look at this moment from historical and global perspectives. This issue of American Educator has articles by the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who explains that Trump’s attacks on knowledge, science, medicine and children are in keeping with authoritarians from the past 100 years, and by the political scientists Eli G. Rau and Susan Stokes, who show that around the world, as income inequality rises, so does the probability of democratic decline.
One of the most troubling symptoms of that decline is the recent increase in political violence. Let’s be clear: Violence is never the answer. Never. Not on January 6, and not the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It is antithetical to democracy and to our values as a union of professionals that fights for a better life for all.
Weaponizing this moment is also antithetical to democracy. Of course, no one should celebrate another person’s murder. But using this tragedy to encourage the doxxing, censorship and firing of people for their opinions—including educators’ private opinions shared during their personal time—is wrong.
In our communities and our national rhetoric, it’s time to come together, to de-escalate and to condemn all forms of violence. But it’s not time to stay silent. We can end the hate and the smears while recommiting to the right to civil discourse, to critical thinking, to open inquiry, to some of the founding principles of our nation.
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and George Washington championed public education as a public good. Our public schools are where we create opportunity and community for all, not just for some. We must not let the likes of the current president abandon public education, and with it the underpinnings of our democracy.
In unity,
Randi Weingarten
AFT President
Fall 2025American Educator
Strengthen, Don’t Abandon, Public Schools
By Randi Weingarten
Union Highlights: Resolved to Fight for a Better Life
Why Do Fascists Fear Teachers? Because We Teach Critical Thinking
By Randi Weingarten
The Trump Administration Is Trying to Wreck Our Democracy: We Can Fight Back
By Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Economic Inequality Threatens Democracy
By Eli G. Rau and Susan Stokes
Standing Up and Standing Out: AFT Members Are Fighting Back to Protect Their Students...
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an 9 25
Florida Attorney GeneralJames Uthmeier (R) has announced the launch of a new tool for members of the public to report “acts or threats of political violence" as well as social media posts of public school teachers, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
Uthmeier, chairman of the ironically named far-right "Florida Freedom Fund" political action committee associated with Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL), has the backing of Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas, who, recently sent a letter to public school superintendents threatening teachers who publicly express negative opinions about deceased far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
In a statement attached to Uthmeier's announcement, Kamoutsas said that “any educator who makes vile, despicable comments celebrating and encouraging violence in schools will be investigated and held accountable.”
According to The Tallahassee Democrat, Uthmeier said that "while the First Amendment will be upheld, threats of violence won’t be tolerated."
In the wake of Kirk's death, several Florida public school teachers have lost their jobs and status or been put on leave, including Karen Leader, an associate art history professor at Florida Atlantic University, placed on leave for posting about the right-wing podcaster's history of hate speech.
A retired University of Florida professor lost his honorary title after posting about Kirk, “I did not want him to die. I reserve that wish for Trump," and other professors' posts are under investigation by the state along with teachers at several K-12 schools throughout the state.
“I didn’t say anything or do anything that encouraged violence at all,” Leader told Hyperallergic.“I did not say or do anything that celebrated his death, that said he deserved it, that in any way, shape or form, condoned violence.”
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mma
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rww 6 25 NO KINGS MARCH
06/14/2025
by
Christian-right media outlets, which function as an unofficial public relations operation for President Donald Trump, set out this week to smear in advance the ‘No Kings’ protests being held across the country on Sat. June 14 to protest Trump’s authoritarianism and defiance of the law and Constitution.
“As America prepares to honor the birthday of President Donald J. Trump on June 14,” began a screed that ran on the right-wing “America Faith” platform and was republished by the Pentecostal-oriented Charisma News—not even bothering to sustain the official fiction that Trump’s military parade is more about honoring the armed forces than a presidential exercise in self-glorification.
The diatribe was written by right-wing southern California pastor Phil Hotsenpiller, who founded American Faith after Trump was defeated in the 2020 election.
In this week’s column, Hotsenpiller warned of the “disturbing agenda” of the No Kings rallies: “to crush Donald Trump’s influence, undermine constitutional authority, and destabilize American sovereignty.”
“Let’s be clear,” wrote Hotsenpiller, “this is not about preserving democracy—it’s about preventing Trump from returning to power.”
Huh? Trump has already returned to power and is flagrantly abusing that power. That’s why Americans are rallying to defend the rule of law and the constitutional checks and balances Trump’s team is working so hard to dismantle.
Hotsenpiller spun a conspiracy theory about the “Walton-Weingarten Nexus”—WalMart heiress and philanthropist Christy Walton and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, two “dangerous” women “merging to push a vision of America that looks more like socialist Europe—or communist China—than a constitutional republic.”
“June 14 is not just a protest,” Hotsenpiller ranted. “It’s a declaration of war—against populism, against Trump and ultimately against the America our Founders envisioned.”
While MAGA religious leaders portray themselves as the voice of American Christians, many Christians and other faith leaders are urging Americans to participate in peaceful No Kings protests—and have been on the front lines this week protesting the brutality of the administration’s militarized anti-immigrant operations.
Trump has threatened “very heavy force” against anyone who protests his parade. No Kings organizers have not planned an event in D.C., encouraging locals to join a flagship rally in Philadelphia, participate in Virginia or Maryland events, or take part in DC Joy Day.
American Faith hosted the ReAwaken America Tour, a traveling cavalcade of far-right conspiracies, Christian nationalism, and pro-Trump propaganda. Last year, Hostenpiller’s Influence Church hosted Christian nationalist MAGA activist Charlie Kirk, who used the occasion to rail against seminaries “infiltrated with wokeism, social justice nonsense” and “overly feminine ‘pastor-men.’” Hotsenpiller has also teamed up with MAGA musician Sean Feucht.
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5 25 email
the AFT, along with AFT-Maryland, the American Sociological Association and Eugene (Ore.) School District 4J, has won a temporary pause on the Trump administration’s threat to take funding away from universities and school districts that teach lessons referencing race and racism, or provide support to students through diversity, equity and inclusion programming. The preliminary injunction addresses a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education that required institutions to demonstrate compliance or lose funding. Read more here.
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6 25 wonkette
...Mike Lee also had another tweet about it that said “Nightmare on Walz Street.” Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno — another Republican dude with a lot in common with Vance Boelter — tweeted this, a retweet of another right-wing liar connecting “No Kings” fliers found in Boelter’s car with Randi Weingarten and teachers unions somehow.
no lnx
Alternet
The devastating truth about the GOP's war on education
Thom Hartmann December 31, 2024
“Those who control the present, control the past; and those who
control the past control the future.” —George Orwell, 1984
From outlawing the polio vaccine to ignoring the scientific consensus on gender dysphoria to refusing to wear masks in hospitals to trying to strip evolution and science from our schools, stupid has become fashionable in today’s GOP.
When Republican politicians want to score points, they criticize their opponents as having had “elite” educations; the GOP’s war against Ivy League colleges was particularly evident during the student protests of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Congressional Republican inquisitors voices' dripped with scorn and contempt as they grilled university presidents.
It wasn’t always this way.
I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled.
That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system:
“With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead, invest it in the right places--and do all this, not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women!”
In less than a year Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured piles of money into our public schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids.
I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959: by the time I left elementary school I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I’d had two years of foreign language and two years of experimental music instruction. IQ tests were all the rage: mine was 141 and my best friend, Terry, was 142, something he never let me forget.
Most all of those programs died over the following decades as a result of Reagan’s war on public education, which began with his bringing private religious school moguls like Jerry Falwell and bigots like Bill Bennett into the White House.
Repudiating Eisenhower’s embrace of public education, Reagan put Bennett in charge of the Department of Education, which Reagan had campaigned on shutting down altogether. Bennett is probably best known for defending his proclamation that:
“If you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”
Much like Bennett back in the day, the catch phrase among white supremacists and their fellow travelers today is that “Western Civilization” is either under attack or at risk because we teach history, tolerance, and critical thinking skills in our public schools, which are often racially integrated. The answer, Republicans will tell you, is to defund our public schools.
When Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal share of total education spending in America was 12 percent; when he left office in disgrace in 1989 amid “Iran/Contra” rumors he’d cut a deal with the Iranians to keep the American hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, that share had collapsed to a mere 6 percent. (It’s 3 percent today.)
Reagan also wanted to amend the Constitution to allow mandatory school prayer, and unsuccessfully proposed a national tax credit — a sort of tax-system-based national voucher system — that parents could use to send their kids to religious schools like Falwell’s.
Reagan made anti-intellectualism a political weapon, repeatedly criticizing colleges and professors throughout his political career. When asked why he’d taken a meat-axe to higher education and was pricing college out of the reach of most Americans, he said that college students were “too liberal” and America “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”
Four days before the Kent State Massacre of May 5, 1970, Governor Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” adding, as The New York Timesnoted at the time, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”
Before Reagan became president, states paid 65 percent of the costs of colleges, and federal aid covered another 15 or so percent, leaving students to cover the remaining 20 percent with their tuition payments.
That’s how it works in many developed nations; in most northern European countries college is not only free, but the government pays students a stipend to cover books and rent.
Here in America, though, the numbers are pretty much reversed from pre-1980, with students now covering about 80 percent of the costs. Thus the need for student loans here in the USA.
Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold:
- Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America,
- Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians),
- Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions,
- End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and,
- Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom.
Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.”
“Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”
Instead, multiple Republican-controlled states are now actively gutting their public schools with statewide voucher programs, and instituting mandatory bible instruction or posting of the Ten Commandments. Book bans and panics around queer kids using bathrooms or playing sports are the new wedge issues.
There is no more powerful urge we humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money. So if you’re a politician looking for an issue to motivate voters, just tell them their children are under attack. It’s cynical, but effective.
In an interview for Semafor, Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid it out:
“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”
Just a few months ago, Donald Trump laid out his plan to deal with the “major problem” America is facing. That problem, he said, is:
“[W]e have ‘pink-haired communists teaching our kids.’”
Turning the Constitution upside down and arguing the Founders intended to protect teaching schoolchildren religion, Trump elaborated, arguing that mixing religion, politics, and education was the intention of that document:
“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it’s resembling an established new religion. We can’t let that happen. For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue intentional violations to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”
As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:
“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”
George W. Bush followed the trend, bragging about his pathetic performance in college at Yale’s 2001 commencement:
“To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States!”
Similarly, JD Vance gave a speech in 2021 titled Universities Are The Enemy.
This isn’t the first time elected officials have used public education as a political weapon. In 1844, 25 people died and over 100 were severely injured in riots in Philadelphia over whether there should be daily Bible readings in that city’s schools. Two churches and several city blocks of homes were burned to the ground.
The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 didn’t provoke riots, but was a major event in the history of public education. Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of the crime of teaching evolution. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in passing laws making such instruction a crime that stood until the 1967 repeal of the Butler Act.
While Republicans across the country successfully rode a wave of white outrage about Critical Race Theory in November’s election, polls suggest the issue is really only meaningful to a fragment of the American electorate: an anti-science “Christian” subset of white Republican voters.
The annual PRRI American Values Survey found:
“Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past (92% vs. 5%).
“There are no substantial partisan differences, though Republicans favor excluding aspects of history slightly more (7%) than Democrats and Independents (both 4%). There are few differences across religious traditions or demographics. This consensus holds up across different levels of exposure to critical race theory: 92% of those who have heard a lot about critical race theory, 94% of those who have heard a little, and 93% of those who have heard nothing about it state that we should teach children the good and bad of history.”
Nonetheless, they note:
“[A] majority of Republicans (54%), compared with 27% of independents and only 7% of Democrats, believe that teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children.”
America spent $794.7 billion on primary education last year. For-profit private schools and megachurches that run schools look at that pile of money and drool. Republicans are committed to delivering as much of it to them as possible, regardless of the damage it does to our nation’s kids.
Their strategy for privatizing our public schools is pretty straightforward, and echoes the plan of action Republicans are using right now to replace real Medicare with the privatized Medicare Advantage scam.
First, they falsely claim that they’ll deliver a better product at a lower cost. In the education realm, we see this with Florida and several other Red states now offering vouchers that can be used at private or religious schools to every student in the state.
(Nearly 2,300 private schools in Florida accept vouchers, but “69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious, and nearly one-third are for-profit.”)
As more and more students use the vouchers to flee public schools, the public schools sink into deeper and deeper financial troubles. Those cut the quality of teaching and upkeep of the school buildings, causing even more students to use the vouchers.
Because the vouchers never cover the full cost of private school tuition (typically they pay for half to two-thirds), the truly poor can’t use them: the result is the public school system becomes ghettoized, leading to even more flight by middle- and upper-class (mostly white) people.
Once the public schools are dead and the state has transitioned entirely to private schools, the state will claim budget problems and begin to dial back the amounts available for vouchers. (The same will happen with Medicare Advantage once real Medicare is dead.)
This will widen the relationship between the educational and wealth divides; the racial and class cleavage will become so great that the state will have effectively gone back to a “separate but equal” educational system. Which, of course, is the GOP’s goal and has been since 1954.
Republicans are generally convinced — and surveys show they’re right — that when people have a good, well-rounded education they will vote for Democrats, who explicitly value science and egalitarian social values.
Thus, keeping our kids ignorant and destroying one of America’s largest unions, all while helping their education and religion industry friends get rich, is a complete win-win.
Much of this battle is playing out in state houses around the country, but there’s a huge and well-funded effort to take control of local school boards as well.
Driving this ethos with a constant flood of anti-intellectual, anti-science propaganda are an army of rightwing podcasters, YouTubers, hate radio hosts, and the billionaire-owned Fox “News” network (among others). They argue, essentially, that “stupid is the new smart.”
Barely coherent politicians like Tommy Tuberville and Marjorie Taylor Greene are their heroes. Donald Trump, who still refuses to release his grades, is their avatar. Bob Kennedy is their avenging angel. And people with college educations — and teachers/professors — are their enemies.
Bottom line: the Republican war on public education and science is real, and if we want to stop it we must get involved. Show up for your local school board meetings and, if you have the time and ability, run for a position on the board.
Lobby your state legislators and support pro-science and pro-education politicians. It’s time to make smart cool again!
Our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are literally at stake.
NOW READ: Poor Trump supporters are about to get a rude awakening — but we shouldn't be celebrating
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-editor-hannah-grossmans-yearlong-obsession-demonizing-educators-and-chaos
no lnx pix twt?
fox News’ Hannah Grossman has written nearly 100 articles in the last year that target specific teachers, schools, administrators, board members, or other staff, largely regarding the discussion of gender, sexuality, or systemic racism in the classroom. Multiple educators named in her reporting have been doxxed, harassed, fired, hit with lawsuits, or forced to resign.
Grossman is an associate editor at Fox News who, according to her Fox News webpage, “currently focuses on education” and covers “the U.S. Department of Education, the Pentagon's schools, teachers' unions and K-12 public schools.” She’s previously published articles on a variety of topics, often attacking the Biden administration, mainstream media, and “wokeness,” but shifted to mostly publishing articles about education in May 2022.
In March, The Daily Dot's Claire Goforth reported that after Grossman published five articles attacking one trans teacher in California, both the teacher’s classroom and the school district offices received bomb threats. Media Matters analyzed all of Grossman’s published articles over the last year (from May 1, 2022 through May 1, 2023) and found that Grossman’s attacks on individual teachers and schools go well beyond one California school and one trans teacher.
In fact, Grossman has published 33 articles targeting specific teachers, librarians, or other school staff by name, 52 articles targeting specific schools, districts, administrators, or board members, and 10 articles targeting specific colleges or universities, staff, or professors — accounting for nearly half of all of Grossman’s articles in the last year. Grossman has also published 20 articles targeting federal education officials. Other articles included broader attacks against teachers and teachers unions, public education, state and federal education departments, and education-related organizations. Fox News spread many of these articles across Facebook, where they earned thousands of total interactions.
Grossman’s numerous attacks on teachers are part of Fox News’ growing war on public education — and inclusive education in particular — in which the network has demonized and encouraged violence against educators, LGBTQ people, and those who support or affirm them. Fox hosts have even leveraged their fearmongering to call for the demolition of the public school system.
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Grossman has written 33 articles targeting teachers, librarians, or other school staff by name, several of whom have been doxxed, harassed, threatened, fired, or forced to resign
Over the last year, Grossman wrote 33 articles targeting specific teachers, librarians, or other school staff, largely for discussing gender, sexuality, or systemic racism in the classroom. In fact, 14 of these articles targeted LGBTQ teachers in particular.
Several subjects of Grossman’s attacks have been doxxed, harassed, threatened, fired, or forced to resign:
More than 300 people reportedly attended a school board meeting the month after Grossman published a January 25 article targeting a nonbinary teacher from California, with some attendees calling the teacher “evil” and demanding for them to be fired. Grossman’s article was written in response to a New York Times article about trans students that featured the California teacher, and her piece falsely accused them of boasting about “changing students' genders without parents knowing.”
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In December 2022, Grossman wrote an article attacking two LGBTQ teachers and fearmongering about “social transitioning” — a process that often involves changing one’s pronouns, first name, hairstyle, and/or clothing. The article was the first of at least three that Grossman would write targeting one of the teachers, whom Grossman accused of “hiding students' gender transitions from parents.”
The teacher had reportedly made a TikTok explaining that some students have asked them “not to disclose their [trans] identity” to family or other students, saying, “That’s a promise I always honor.” Grossman attacked the other teacher in multiple articles for using stuffed animals to teach students about gender identity.
Both teachers had reported receiving threats even before Grossman targeted them.
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In September 2022, Grossman wrote an article amplifying Oklahoma Education Secretary Ryan Walters’ calls to revoke a teacher’s license, falsely accusing her of providing students with “access” to “pornographic material.” The teacher told CNN that following the passage of Oklahoma’s HB 1775 she covered the books in her classroom that “could be at issue” with paper as instructed, but labeled them “Books the State Doesn’t Want You to Read,” and placed a QR code linking to the Brooklyn Public Library “Books Unbanned” page on the paper.
The parent of one of her students complained, including on local television, where she said the teacher “should not have access to children now, or in the future. She should be stripped of her certifications. To be perfectly frank with you, she should have criminal charges against her.” The teacher was subsequently placed on leave, and then resigned.
Three days after Grossman's article amplifying calls to revoke this teacher’s license was published, The Daily Beast reported that the teacher had told authorities that since her story went viral, she’d been doxxed and was “worried people may show up to her apartment.” She’d also reported getting messages saying she “should be lynched” or “sterilized” so she can’t “breed.”
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CitationFrom an August 26, 2022, KOKH report
Grossman has written 52 articles targeting specific schools, districts, administrators, and board members, and some of the targeted LGBTQ board members have faced death threats and lawsuits
Beyond targeting specific teachers, Grossman has also written 52 articles over the last year targeting specific schools, officials, and school board members. Some have subsequently faced death threats, lawsuits, and calls for their removal. Grossman has written numerous articles highlighting the chaos that has ensued at school board meetings across the country — much of which has been encouraged by Fox News’ dishonest and inflammatory reporting about alleged left-wing indoctrination of children in school.
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She’s also written multiple articles targeting board members, school districts, and their administrators:
Grossman wrote at least 10 articles about specific school board members, 4 of which came in March of this year and targeted an LGBTQ school board member in Arizona.
In February, this Arizona board member suggested the board reconsider extending the district’s longstanding contract with Arizona Christian University, citing concerns about anti-LGBTQ bias, noting that the university’s website claims it seeks to promote “biblically informed values” including “traditional sexual morality and lifelong marriage between one man and one woman.”
On March 3, Grossman wrote her first article targeting the Arizona board member, mocking her for “wearing cat ears during a meeting,” and suggesting that she and the board have a “bias against Christian beliefs.” This board member subsequently received death threats, and dozens of parents reportedly attended the next board meeting, some of whom pushed for her to resign.
Arizona Christian University is now suing the school district and board — which has multiple LGBTQ members — with the help of extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom.
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Grossman has also written 15 articles targeting specific school and district administrators, such as superintendents — seemingly contributing to at least one superintendent facing calls for his removal from state lawmakers.
In March, the Arizona Capitol Times reported that an attempt to remove the superintendent of Scottsdale Unified School District had “spilled over to the Capitol after Fox News reported this year on an interview” he gave “to a progressive Michigan blog in 2019, a year before he was hired in Arizona.”
Grossman had published two articles on the subject targeting the superintendent earlier this year.
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Grossman has also written 20 articles targeting specific school districts and 6 articles targeting specific schools.
Grossman has written 20 articles targeting education officials at the state and federal levels
Over the last year, Grossman wrote 20 articles targeting federal education officials by name, including 15 articles specifically targeting Kelisa Wing, a former diversity, equity, and inclusion chief at the Department of Defense Education Activity. The pieces falsely accused her of anti-white racism and of indoctrinating the children of the nation’s military personnel with Marxism. As Grossman — and right-wing media more broadly — targeted Wing, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) advocated for Wing’s removal.
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Grossman also wrote eight articles that targeted state and local departments of education. For example, she wrote multiple articles targeting New York City’s Department of Education and the Oregon Department of Education, accusing the departments of pushing a “woke agenda” and “transgenderism.” Grossman also wrote five articles attacking the United States DOE, including attacking Education Secretary Miguel Cardona as “equity-obsessed.”
Grossman Embed 7
mma 5 23
New York Times Magazine recently dedicated a multipage spread to the conservative war on public education, often legitimizing the political right’s advocacy for school choice vouchers and crusade against obscure concepts like "critical race theory.”
In doing so, the magazine placed a target on the back of public education advocate and teachers union leader Randi Weingarten, gratuitously framing right-wing attacks on education as an organic result of the political climate, rather than as a manufactured onslaught spurred by conservative media.
On April 28, The New York Times Magazine published an article on the continued attacks on the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), one of the largest teachers unions in the country. The article details recent fights surrounding public education such as those over school voucher programs, COVID-19 mask mandates and school shutdowns, and culture war topics. While the cover of the April 30 edition of the magazine displays a fake picket sign reading “STOP RANDI WEINGARTEN!!” and thestory appears to be framed as a profile of the AFT leader, it quotes her only sparingly.
In its characterization of the AFT and Weingarten, the magazine amplifies multiple right-wing talking points that attack public education and teachers unions, which ultimately frame Weingarten as the scapegoat for larger social issues well out of her or teachers unions’ purview.
For example, the article’s headline describing Weingarten as “the most dangerous person in the world” was taken from former President Donald Trump cabinet member and staunch election denialist Mike Pompeo. The article goes on to declare that Pompeo “had nevertheless put his finger on something” in targeting Weingarten and concludes, “Maybe Pompeo hadn’t been wrong.”
Pompeo later bragged about his inclusion in the magazine piece, tweeting, “Even the New York Times has to agree with me sometimes.” But as MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan wrote, adopting Pompeo’s “ridiculous and offensive attack” on Weingarten was “shoddy.”
The New York Times has repeatedly mischaracterized extreme attacks on public education and framed discriminatory education policies as a question of electability rather than highlighting the harm caused by this rhetoric and the policies it generates. In recent years, the Times has also whitewashed figures who have been driving forces in the attacks on public education, such as right-wing anti-CRT activist Christopher Rufo, giving a national platform to his extreme viewpoints.
In addition to sanitizing the right’s war on education, The New York Times has legitimized other conservative culture wars. Last year, the Times helped fan the flames of rising anti-trans rhetoric by repeatedly suggesting that trans youth are being rushed to transition prematurely, featuring anti-LGBTQ extremists, and fearmongering about increasing rates of trans identification. The Times has also had a history of inadequately covering right-wing extremism and amplifying ahistorical right-wing rhetoric such as “tough-on-crime” policies, which has been used as a racist dog whistle throughout American politics.
Given the publication’s national readership and widespread circulation, the Times bears a great responsibility in giving its audience accurate reporting that reflects reality, not distortions crafted by right-wing media. Here are just some of the ways that the Times magazine elevated bad-faith right-wing messaging about education.
Framing Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as successful in leveraging attacks on education
It was not Glenn Youngkin’s plan to turn Virginia’s 2021 governor’s race into a referendum on America’s battles over education. Initially, he was just hoping to prevent his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, from owning an issue that historically favored Democrats. “We couldn’t afford to let them take the fight to us,” Jeff Roe, one of Youngkin’s chief strategists, told me. By almost every measure, Youngkin, a former private-equity executive with no political experience, was the underdog.
Throughout his election campaign, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) leveraged right-wing culture wars on education, namely going after the conservative boogeyman “critical race theory” and threatening LGBTQ protections in schools. In its description of his gubernatorial campaign, the magazine paints Youngkin as an education warhawk who successfully used CRT to turn out the vote in addition to invoking other concerns plucked directly from conservative media. In reality, the effect of CRT in his race was likely much more subdued. As Vox wrote, voting patterns across Virginia did not appear to be “consistent with a CRT-focused explanation” but rather indicated the state took a “uniform swing against McAuliffe, not an especially strong backlash in areas where CRT was an especially prominent issue.” The Times further fails to mention that Youngkin has little to no experience with public education as a private school attendee and a parent who sent his own children to private schools.
Giving credence to right-wing advocacy for “school choice”
Did the pandemic and the culture wars reveal the indispensability of these [public] schools to their communities and to the broader fabric of the nation, or did they only underscore their inherent limitations — in effect, making the case for school choice?
The promotion of school choice policies has become a way for right-wing figures to push anti-public education sentiments and promote private and charter schools, and it has enabled de facto primary and secondary school segregation. The Times piece gives credence to the right-wing belief that school choice is a popular education policy by constructing the narrative that there is widespread disappointment in public schools. However, according to one of the Times' own surveys, conducted in 2022, 66% of parents with at least one school-aged child are satisfied with their local public schools, and 77% are satisfied with their own child’s education. While polls show that public support for school vouchers has increased in recent years, FiveThirtyEight notes that several of these surveys are sponsored by school choice advocacy groups that “may be incentivized to word their poll questions in a way that encourages respondents to indicate support for the programs.”
Blaming teachers unions for pandemic public school closures and learning loss
There was already early research showing that students were suffering academically from remote learning. Schools across Europe had begun reopening without any major outbreaks, and many of America’s private and parochial schools were making plans to resume in-person learning at the start of the new school year. A lot of public-school parents wanted their children to be back in the classroom, too. But many teachers seemed resistant to the idea.
Throughout the article, the Times blames teachers and teachers unions for needlessly delaying the return to in-person public schooling. At one point, the magazine cites a study from Brown University suggesting that “Democratic districts, with correspondingly strong teachers unions, returned to in-person learning more slowly and gradually than Republican districts with weaker unions.”
However, data from the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress found that pandemic learning losses were still significant in “areas that returned to the classroom quickly” while “cities — which were more likely to stay remote longer — actually saw milder decreases than suburban districts.”
Referencing groups such as Moms for Liberty without acknowledging their right-wing dark money connections
In Brevard County, Tina Descovich, the incumbent, was in favor of an immediate return to the classroom and opposed mask mandates. She was challenged by a public-school speech-language pathologist, Jennifer Jenkins, who called for a more cautious approach, including a mask mandate for all but the youngest children. Jenkins easily won the late-August election, but Descovich was just getting started. She called Tiffany Justice, a fellow school-board member in nearby Indian River County, to suggest that they create their own parents’ rights group, Moms for Liberty. “We’ve got to do something here,” Justice recalled Descovich’s telling her. “We have to help these parents because they’re trying to step up and speak out, and the schools are just slamming them at every turn.”
Moms for Liberty has gained traction in national discussions on education for portraying itself as a supporter of “parental rights” in public schools – a frame the Times uncritically adopts. In reality, Moms for Liberty is a right-leaning organization that has prominent ties to right-wing and far-right groups that are also seeking to privatize education and attack school boards and administrators. Moms for Liberty has also been found to harass and threaten violence against school administrators and board members for not supporting anti-LGBTQ educational policies. In its neutral framing of Moms for Liberty, the Times is whitewashing anti-public education figures and characterizing them as underdogs against Weingarten and the AFT, despite Moms for Liberty’s close ties to Republican politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Glossing over the origins of the right’s CRT and LGBTQ fearmongering
Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist who manufactured the obsession with C.R.T. two years earlier, was now on Fox News railing against another crisis — the “academic queer theory” that he charged was being “mainlined” into America’s public schools — while Republican candidates condemned the “grooming” of children to identify as different genders in the nation’s classrooms. Many Republican candidates pledged their allegiance to a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” requiring schools to provide information on reading lists, curriculums and whether a family’s child used another name or pronoun in school.
Though the Times magazine mentions concepts like critical race theory and so-called “academic queer theory” as targets of conservative backlash, the article largely glosses over the way such grievances were engineered by right-wing activists to misleadingly gin up resentment toward public schools. CRT came to conservative prominence in the spring of 2021, with right-wing media and figures trying to erase its roots as an academic concept typically taught at the graduate level to make it a blanket term used to decry lesson plans that embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion. Conservatives have also tried to sound the alarm about alleged “academic queer theory” taught in public schools pushing vaguely defined gender ideology.
While the Times’ on Weingarten initially comes off as a profile on the AFT leader, the lack of voice given to educators on the frontlines of the right’s manufactured war on education is telling. Rather than giving a national platform to the teachers affected by the right’s crusade on the conventional classroom, amid the Times’ amplification of right-wing education policies and demonization of public schools, the magazine somehow found its villain in teachers and teachers unions.
CNN gave Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin a town hall to spew right-wing talking points about education
03/10/23 5:27
National media coverage fails to accurately cover DeSantis’ dystopian crusade against public education
02/09/23
The New York Times helped fuel an anti-trans panic in 2022. Will 2023 be any better?
02/08/23
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JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST):Randi's a viper, isn't she? Isn't she a vicious woman? If you're supposed to be all about the children, wouldn't you want to work with every governor? And thatgovernor down there in Florida, he did right by the students. Florida students probably did the best of any of the students. He didn't shut down any of the schools. And then he let the parents decide whether or not they were going to mask or not.
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White House Declares Teachers “Essential Workers” as Unions Threaten Strikes over Coronavirus
Teachers’ Union Prepared to Strike If Schools Aren’t Made Safe from Coronavirus
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/erik-prince-recruited-ex-spies-to-help-infiltrate-activist-groups-hostile-to-trump-agenda-report/
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Erik Prince recruited ex-spies to help infiltrate activist groups ‘hostile’ to Trump agenda: report
Written by Common Dreams March 8, 2020
An explosive New York Times report revealed Saturday thatnotorious war profiteer Erik Prince recruited former American and British spies to work with the right-wing group Project Veritas to infiltrate at least one Democratic congressional campaign and organizations “considered hostile” to President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“Secretary DeVos’ brother was directly involved in a spying scheme in her home state against a teachers’ union she’s been hostile with for years. If this doesn’t clear the bar for an immediate Congressional investigation, nothing does.”
—Derek Martin, Allied Progress
Prince is the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater. Through a spokesperson, he declined the Times‘ request for comment on the piece, which is based on interviews and documents obtained by the newspaper, including internal Project Veritas emails.
“Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump’s aides and family,” the Times noted. “Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trump’s agenda.”
The results of the Times‘ investigation were described by readers on social media as “chilling,” “stunning,” and “insane.” Jacobin magazine assistant editor Alex Press declared, “My paranoid fantasies are all true!” In response to a tweet about the reporting, author and activist Naomi Klein simply wrote, “Read.”
The consumer watchdog group Allied Progressresponded with a statement Saturday night, calling on the House Oversight Committee to conduct an immediate investigation into what DeVos knew about Prince’s activities.
“There’s not a lot of dots to connect here,” said Allied Progress director Derek Martin. “Secretary DeVos’ brother was directly involved in a spying scheme in her home state against a teachers’ union she’s been hostile with for years. If this doesn’t clear the bar for an immediate Congressional investigation, nothing does.”
“We already know Secretary DeVos is no friend of public education, but if she gave the go-ahead to enlist former intelligence officers to steal documents from public education advocates that she disagrees with, it steps well beyond policy disagreement and into criminal territory,” Martin added. “If Secretary DeVos was in any way involved, it will confirm that she stops at nothing to undermine public schools.”
According to the Times:
One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.
Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former CIA officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.
Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians, and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation—detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union—has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.
The Times reported that it is unclear whether Seddon was involved in the Spanberger operation and the former British intelligence officer—who is married to American diplomat Alice Seddon—did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.
James O’Keefe of Project Veritas told the Times that his group is a “proud independent news organization” and “no one tells Project Veritas who or what to investigate.” Although he declined to discuss the details of the report, he also claimed that various sources are “providing confidential documents, insights into internal processes, and wearing hidden cameras to expose corruption and misconduct.”
Past targets of Project Veritas have included the nonprofit healthcare organization Planned Parenthood, the political group Disrupt J20, and recently, David Wright, a 20-year veteran political correspondent at ABC News. Project Veritas has also recorded undercover video of a Times editor and approached the Washington Post with a false story about Roy Moore, a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama.
The Project Veritas operative inside AFT Michigan was Liberty University graduate Marisa Jorge, according to the Times. O’Keefe and Seddon used the code name “LibertyU” for Jorge when discussing the operation over email. Jorge, who also reportedly infiltrated the Spanberger campaign by posing as a volunteer, did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment. The federal lawsuit that AFT Michigan brought against Project Veritas is scheduled to go to trial later this year.
In a statement to the Times, AFT president Randi Weingartensaid: “Let’s be clear who the wrongdoer is here: Project Veritas used a fake intern to lie her way into our Michigan office, to steal documents and to spy—and they got caught. We’re just trying to hold them accountable for this industrial espionage.”
Weingarten added on Twitter Saturday, “They didn’t succeed in their attempt to hurt our union but note what the right wing will do to try to eliminate workers’ voice.”
The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill—who released the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army in 2007—wrote on Twitter Saturday that with this piece, the Times “pushes the 2017 story from [The Intercept‘s Matthew Cole]? forward about Erik Prince attempts to infiltrate liberal groups via Project Veritas.”
Last year, Cole published an article for The Intercept titled “The Complete Mercenary: How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback.”
Noting that Trump gave Project Veritas thousands of dollars through his foundation and met with O’Keefe shortly after announcing his run for president, Cole reported:
It is unclear if Trump’s support of Project Veritas spurred Prince’s interest in the group, but in late 2015 or early 2016, Prince arranged for O’Keefe and Project Veritas to receive training in intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining that the Veritas group wasn’t capable of learning. Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.
In the winter of 2017, Prince arranged for a former British MI6 officer to provide more surveillance and elicitation training for Veritas at his family’s Wyoming ranch, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. Prince was trying to turn O’Keefe and his group into domestic spies. For his part, O’Keefe posted photos on Instagram and Twitter from the Prince family ranch of himself holding a handgun with a silencer attached and wearing pseudo-military clothing. He described the ranch as a “classified location” where he was learning “spying and self-defense,” in an effort to make Project Veritas “the next great intelligence agency.”
“Erik was weaponizing a group that had close ties to the Trump White House,” said the former White House official familiar with Prince’s relationship with O’Keefe and Project Veritas.
Cole acknowledged the Times reporting on Twitter Saturday and highlighted a summary of it tweeted by The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer:
Currently, the Times noted, “Prince is under investigation by the Justice Department over whether he lied to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws.”
Former FBI assistant director and current NBC News national security contributor Frank Figliuzzi shared the Times report on Twitter Saturday and commented that “there are likely numerous criminal violations here.”
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/23/project-veritas-lawsuit-american-federation-of-teachers/
a MICHIGAN JUDGE issued a ruling late last week granting the American Federation of Teachers the right to discovery in an ongoing legal battle with Project Veritas, the sting group launched by conservative provocateur James O’Keefe.
The escalating fight, which is being played out in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, began last September, when the teachers union filed a lawsuit accusing Project Veritas of infiltrating and illegally gathering proprietary information from its Michigan affiliate.
Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group known for releasing undercover video exposés of liberal organizations like ACORN and Planned Parenthood, has taken a special interest in targeting teacher unions over the last eight years. The group has been accused of routinely doctoring its videos, and last year it was caught trying to feed a false story about Roy Moore, then a U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, to the Washington Post. The discovery in the Michigan case may shed new light on its internal operations.
according to the September complaint, which was filed in state court, Marisa Jorge, a political operative for Project Veritas, presented herself as a University of Michigan student named Marissa Perez who was interested in becoming a teacher. She applied for a summer internship with AFT Michigan and was hired in May 2017. For the next three months, she allegedly gathered a wide range of confidential information on the teachers union. The lawsuit claims that on multiple occasions Jorge was found alone in other employees’ offices, accessing information she, as an intern, had no right to see. In other cases, she requested to attend bargaining sessions, was given access to internal databases, and secretly recorded conversations, according to the complaint.
A Michigan judge responded to the lawsuit by issuing a restraining order against Project Veritas in September, barring the group from publishing or disclosing any materials it may have collected from the union. The next month, following a motion by Project Veritas, the case was moved from state to federal court. In December, U.S. District Judge Linda Parker lifted the restraining order. Parker said the AFT had not sufficiently demonstrated it would be harmed by what Project Veritas had collected. In her decision she wrote that “a preliminary injunction most certainly will infringe upon Defendants’ First Amendment right.”
The union went back to court in early May to try once more to prevent Project Veritas from releasing any documents or videos it had obtained from its Michigan affiliate. Parker denied the AFT’s second request, again citing First Amendment concerns.:{
}::{
}:Project Veritas began releasing information from AFT Michigan immediately thereafter. In its first post, headlined “BREAKING: Alleged Child Molester Paid Off in Union Negotiation by Michigan American Federation of Teachers,” Project Veritas boasted of releasing documents and undercover footage “which reveals that the union protected a teacher after accusations of sexual misconduct with a seven- or eight-year-old girl arose.”
AFT president Randi Weingarten and AFT Michigan President David Hecker released a joint statement following the video’s release, calling it a “heavily spliced” smear tactic intended to undermine educators and their unions.
“In this particular case, following accusations of a teacher’s misconduct with a child of a woman he was dating years before, the union and district officials worked together to separate a teacher from service and make sure students were protected,” Weingarten and Hecker stated. “To this day, the teacher denies the accusations, and no charges have been filed.AFT Michigan continues to prioritize the well-being of students and the promise of high-quality public education in Michigan.”:{
}:
PARKER’S NEW RULING, issued on Thursday, allows the AFT to amend its legal complaint to include information about the video Project Veritas released in May. It also paves the way for the union to begin requesting information through the discovery process.
“It’s going to get interesting now because we have the opportunity to dig pretty deep into Project Veritas and their activities,” AFT Michigan attorney Mark Cousens told The Intercept. “We can discover not only how they work, but what they did in Michigan.” Cousens said the union, through discovery, might request information on Jorge’s relationship to Project Veritas, background on Jorge, and what materials she may have taken while working as an intern.:{
}::{
}:Weingarten said in a statement that her union is “committed to holding Project Veritas accountable for its unlawful misrepresentations, infiltrations, and splicing and dicing of unlawfully obtained material to smear teachers and public schools.” Weingarten pledged to “move forward in our efforts to bring to light the deceptive, unscrupulous distortion tactics Project Veritas is known for.”
Marco Bruno, a spokesperson for Project Veritas, dismissed the decision. He told The Intercept that the AFT “is winning only the highest award for delusional self-congratulations. Contrary to its claims, AFT’s reckless efforts throughout this lawsuit to censor a Veritas publication failed repeatedly. As far as the case goes, they have won nothing, and their latest pleadings are as weak as their previous complaint. AFT is wasting union members’ dues on a frivolous lawsuit that it has no chance of winning.”
Project Veritas has long targeted teacher unions. In 2010, O’Keefe, the group’s founder, infiltrated a New Jersey Education Association leadership conference and produced a project called “Teachers Union Gone Wild.” His group produced another video:{ last summer that purported to show a New Jersey teacher offering journalists cocaine at a union convention. After that video was released, O’Keefe went on the radio to say his teacher union exposés }
:{. “I don’t ever, }::{ever}::{ expect the institutions to hold people accountable, so it’s up to exposures,” O’Keefe said, promising that “we have more coming out.”}:
And indeed, they did. In May, on top of its AFT Michigan work, Project Veritas released two more undercover videos of New Jersey union officials discussing how to protect teachers accused of abuse, which subsequently led to the suspension of two union presidents. New Jersey Democrats, including state Senate president Steve Sweeney and Gov. Phil Murphy, have since called for investigations into the union’s behavior.
The NJEA released a statement in response to the videos, saying it “does not, in any instance, condone the abuse or mistreatment of children or the failure to properly report allegations of abuse.” The union also announced it would be commissioning an independent review of its local affiliates to ensure that staff and leaders “understan[d] and clearly communicat[e] the responsibility of all school employees to report any suspected abuse of children.”
While the NJEA charged Project Veritas with being a political group “with a long history of releasing deceptively edited videos that later prove to have been dishonest and misleading,” Sweeney did not back down. “They can attack the videos and who did the videos all they want,” he told NJ Advance Media,referring to the union.“But those words were real, those actions were real, and they need to be dealt with.”
Also in May, Project Veritas released another video, showing teachers union officials in Ohio discussing how they would defend educators who abused students. State union officials called the videos doctored and edited to fit the organization’s agenda.
O’Keefe hinted at more videos in the future. Following the Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio videos, Project Veritas promised to release “more undercover videos of teachers unions from ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY in the coming days and weeks.”
https://XXXtheguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/15/rightwing-thinktanks-secret-plot-against-unions
Rightwing activists are launching a nationwide drive to persuade public-sector trade union members to tear up their membership cards and stop paying dues, posing a direct threat to the progressive movement in America.
Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that a network of radical conservative thinktanks spanning all 50 states is planning direct marketing campaigns targeted personally at union members to encourage them to quit. The secret push, the group hopes, could cost unions up to a fifth of their 7 million members, lead to the loss of millions of dollars in income and undermine a cornerstone of US progressive politics.
“Well run opt-out campaigns can cause public-sector unions to experience 5 to 20% declines in membership,costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in dues money. This can affect the resources and attention available for union leaders to devote to political action campaigns,” the internal documents say.
The anti-union marketing drive is the brainchild of the State Policy Network (SPN), a coast-to-coast alliance of 66 rightwing thinktanks that has an $80m war chest to promote Donald Trump-friendly regressive policies such as low taxes and small government. The group is funded by such billionaire conservative donors as the Koch brothers and the Walton Family Foundation that stems from the Walmart fortune. ...exposed by the Guardian has revealed the political motives behind the network’s attacks on unions. It aims to “defund and defang” public sector unions as a means to “reverse the failed policies of the American left”.
The goal, the group said, was “permanently depriving the left from access to millions of dollars in dues extracted from unwilling union members every election cycle”.
The Guardian has now obtained what SPN is calling a “toolkit” of advice to its followers on how to go about fomenting “union reform” – a euphemism for draining unions of members and cash. The “toolkit” sets out four “tactics” for depleting their power – “effective union reform”, in its language.
“To get employees to opt-out of their union,” the documents say, “they first need to know they have a choice. A direct marketing campaign to union represented public employees that combines mail and digital outreach helps raise awareness and raise opt-out rates.”One of those tactics is the opt-out campaign.
The SPN blueprint sets out how to acquire the private details of union members through state freedom of information laws so that opt-out propaganda can be targeted directly at them. It says: “Access to lists of union members is essential to this project. The most common means of obtaining lists is through requests made under state public records laws.”
The toolkit is being circulated at a vital moment for public sector trade unions. The wave of school teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and elsewhere has reinvigorated the labor movement as a key part of the resistance to stagnating wages, waning resources and a hostile White House.
More perilously, the US supreme court is poised to deliver its ruling any day in Janus v AFSCME, one of the most important trade union cases in recent times. If the five conservative justices on the highest court vote in favor of the anti-union plaintiff, as many expect, they would deal a severe blow to organized labor by giving employees the right to opt-out of paying their share of the costs of collective bargaining even though they benefit from negotiated higher wages and improved conditions.
That in turn would give the green light to conservative groups like SPN to step up their efforts to encourage mass resignations of union members. As a clear statement of intent, SPN invited Mark Janus, a child support worker in Illinois who is the named plaintiff at the center of the supreme court case, to speak at its annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas, last August.
Carrie Conko, SPN’s vice president of communications, said that “workers should be able to decide for themselves if payment of union dues and fees is a good use of their hard-earned money or if their money is better spent elsewhere”. SPN’s aim was not political, rather it was “simply about protecting free speech”.
Public-sector unions had created a problem for themselves, Conko said, by leaving some workers to feel they were being used. The Janus case might actually help government unions improve their standing with members as “they will need to prove their worth by providing better representation to earn the voluntary dues”.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the Guardian documents revealed the extent of secret planning by rightwing groups in advance of the supreme court’s Janus ruling. “These documents make clear that Janus v AFSCME is not a case brought by individuals trying to have a voice, it’s a case brought by wealthy forces to eliminate worker voice and power.”
She added that rightwing billionaires such as the Kochs “know working families only have power through their unity as a union, and they will stop at nothing to destroy that. But we have seen unprecedented support for our unions and the opportunities they enable for a better life – when the Janus decision day comes, we will stand united, ready to act and fight back against the forces that want to silence workers.”
One of the SPN thinktanks, the Freedom Foundation in Olympia, Washington state,has already begun campaigning and fundraising on the back of a Janus ruling that goes against the unions. It has been mailing out to supporters in which it says “we are gearing up in a major way to launch an extensive education and activation campaign to take full advantage of a favorable ruling in this historic case”.
The foundation goes on to say: “The consequences of a favorable ruling are huge. Imagine tens, even hundreds, of millions of dollars currently used to push damaging leftwing causes and candidates … vanishing.”
In 2016 the Freedom Foundation ran a brazen campaign in Washington and Oregon in which it went knocking on the doors of more than 10,000 childcare and home care workers telling them that under a previous US supreme court ruling they could opt out of paying union dues. In the document obtained by the Guardian, SPN boasts that the foundation’s operation cost the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in those states $8.8m in lost dues and legal fees.
==
http://www.alternet.org/education/vouchers-shameful-history
At the exact time I was giving a speech last week to 1,400 educators about ensuring that all children have access to a powerful, purposeful public education, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was addressing the American Legislative Exchange Council—a group of corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators who are working to privatize and defund public education, and cloaking their efforts as school “choice.”
It’s no surprise; no matter the question, for DeVos, the answer is choice. When schools struggle, the “solution” privatization advocates invariably propose is “choice,” with the coda that poor families should have the same educational choices as more affluent families. But that innocuous word belies the record—both the academic results of private school choice and the way it was used historically to continue school segregation after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
After the Brown v. Board of Education decision, many school districts, especially in the South, resisted integration. White officials in Prince Edward County, Va., closed every public school in the district rather than have white and black children go to school together. They opened taxpayer-funded private schools where only white parents could choose to send their children.
Members of the American Federation of Teachers sent funds and school supplies. And some traveled from New York and Philadelphia to set up schools for black students, in keeping with the AFT’s tradition of fighting racism and injustice, which includes expelling our local unions that refused to integrate.
And what about the schools DeVos appallingly called “pioneers of school choice”—historically black colleges and universities? HBCUs are vital institutions, but the truth is that they arose from the discriminatory practices that denied black students access to higher education.
Make no mistake: The real “pioneers” of private school choice were the white politicians who resisted school integration.
DeVos’ preferred choices—tuition vouchers and tax credits, and private, for-profit charter schools—actively destabilize our public schools. They can—and many do—discriminate, because private schools do not follow federal civil rights laws. They drain funds from public schools and increase racial and economic segregation. They lack the accountability that public schools have. And, after decades of experiments with voucher programs, the research is clear: They fail most of the children they purportedly are intended to benefit, children who are disproportionately black, brown and poor.
An analysis of the Washington, D.C., voucher program by the Department of Education found it has a negative effect on student achievement. The Louisiana voucher program has led to large declines in kids’ reading and math scores. Students in Ohio’s voucher program did worse than children in traditional public schools. And for-profit and online charter schools have similarly troubling results.
These choices move us further away from the choice every child in America deserves—well-supported, effective public schools near his or her home.
But Trump and DeVos are not backing off their support for vouchers, for-profit charters and other privatization schemes. They have proposed spending billions of tax dollars on vouchers and tuition tax credits, paid for by cutting federal education spending that goes directly to educate children in public schools by $9 billion.
Make no mistake: This use of privatization and this disinvestment are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation. The same forces are keeping the same children from getting the public education they need and deserve. And how better to pave the way to privatize public education than to starve public schools to the breaking point, criticize their deficiencies and let the market handle the rest—all in the name of choice.
That’s how a democracy comes apart.
Defenders of democracy must not only call out what doesn’t work and resist injustice, but fight for and act to reclaim the promise of public schools. Public schools are not perfect, and every one doesn’t always work for every one of its students. But, as far as I am concerned, our only choice is: Do we, as a nation, strengthen and improve our public schools, or don’t we?
DeVos went on the attack after my speech. I’d like to think that an education secretary is capable of and interested in learning from history and evidence, and that someone in that position would support, not decimate, the public schools that 90 percent of our kids attend. A good start would be backing off the DeVos-Trump plan to strip $9 billion directly from education services for kids.We know what works to accomplish this: investment in and a focus on the four pillars of powerful, purposeful public education. These pillars are children’s well-being, powerful learning, educators’ capacity, and collaboration. They are in place in every public school that is working as it should, and they can and should be present in every school.
DN saudi activists death sent 14 ppl, one had us student accept
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