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Another Twitter essay, this one on the national right-wing money going into local school board races.
There's a rightist effort going to distance from or leave the National School Boards Association, keying off their letter asking for help with "threats and acts of violence against public schoolchildren, public school board members, and other... district officials and educators."
Here's the NSBA letter in question.
The national organisation pushing against the NSBA over this is defendinged dot org and it and its commentators hit all the rightist talking points about "critical race theory" (meaning teaching about racism at all) and so on.
They've had 22 GOP-controlled states act on this so far, including New Hampshire, a few of which have left the organisation entirely.
One of the reasons I mention this is that while leftists ignore local, rightists and fascists are down for it _all the time_.
This is an example.
Another example?
The so-called "Students First PAC" ran an _attack ad_ in the Northshore News - a local weekly community newspaper - against the incumbents in the Northshore School Board election.
They're a GOP front, run by Republican media operative Joe Watkins, in Pennsylvania.
It's filled with the usual GOP mislead-and-misdirect bullshit, trying to make the school system look bad, and the school board particularly so, because they _really hate_ public education and have been monkeywrenching it for decades.
But they do this shit because it _gets results_.
Because they're kind of unopposed on this ground, because progressives kinda keep ignoring races like this, and leftists do that to but way, way more.
That's how you get 22 GOP state school boards distancing themselves from the national organisation over asking for help with violence.
And they've moved _right away_ to this whole teaching-of–the-reality-of-racism-and-race-history-in-America-is-treason.
It's a constant wedging and hammering to the hard-right, and it's basically unopposed. Certainly unopposed at the political organisational level.
And it's a huge - HUGE - factor in how they get wins.
Because liberals, progressives, and leftists don't really think these elections matter.
But they do, and national money is now going into them, and as far as I can tell, it's all from the hard, hard right.
Now, there's not one candidate for this particular board who is actually on board with these groups. There's one whose subtext ideas about privatisation probably sound good to them, but that's it.
But that's not the point, here. The point is to discredit, and shove to the right.
_Cause_ a problem, make it worse until you break the organisation, then say it's broken and must be handed to you for "reform."
Nudge, nudge, nudge. Wedge, wedge, wedge.
It's _national_ money, on a _national_ scale, and everyone else keeps ignoring it because it's not national.
LOCAL.
ELECTIONS.
MATTER.
Even the little ones. Maybe _particularly_ the little ones.
Like school boards.
Not every left/liberal/progressive group misses this. FUSE actually has some endorsements up, if you go looking for them. But they aren't national, they're state, and that matters, because scale of strategy matters. And mostly, this stuff gets ignored.
And until progressives, leftists, liberals realise this shit matters, it's going to keep being a disadvantage all the rest of the way up the ladder.
We have anti-vaxxers now, for fuck's sake. We have a fascist movement fueled entirely by _bullshit_ and _scams_ from pillow salesmen and money launderers.
It is a massive failure of education, and the people involved are dedicated to making it _worse_.
I've been going off about this for a long goddamn time - that you have to stop ignoring local and if you're the left in particular you have to _prioritise_ local _first_ - and getting nowhere with it.
But I'm right.
And the fascists know it.
There's a rightist effort going to distance from or leave the National School Boards Association, keying off their letter asking for help with "threats and acts of violence against public schoolchildren, public school board members, and other... district officials and educators."
Here's the NSBA letter in question.
The national organisation pushing against the NSBA over this is defendinged dot org and it and its commentators hit all the rightist talking points about "critical race theory" (meaning teaching about racism at all) and so on.
They've had 22 GOP-controlled states act on this so far, including New Hampshire, a few of which have left the organisation entirely.
One of the reasons I mention this is that while leftists ignore local, rightists and fascists are down for it _all the time_.
This is an example.
Another example?
The so-called "Students First PAC" ran an _attack ad_ in the Northshore News - a local weekly community newspaper - against the incumbents in the Northshore School Board election.
They're a GOP front, run by Republican media operative Joe Watkins, in Pennsylvania.
It's filled with the usual GOP mislead-and-misdirect bullshit, trying to make the school system look bad, and the school board particularly so, because they _really hate_ public education and have been monkeywrenching it for decades.
But they do this shit because it _gets results_.
Because they're kind of unopposed on this ground, because progressives kinda keep ignoring races like this, and leftists do that to but way, way more.
That's how you get 22 GOP state school boards distancing themselves from the national organisation over asking for help with violence.
And they've moved _right away_ to this whole teaching-of–the-reality-of-racism-and-race-history-in-America-is-treason.
It's a constant wedging and hammering to the hard-right, and it's basically unopposed. Certainly unopposed at the political organisational level.
And it's a huge - HUGE - factor in how they get wins.
Because liberals, progressives, and leftists don't really think these elections matter.
But they do, and national money is now going into them, and as far as I can tell, it's all from the hard, hard right.
Now, there's not one candidate for this particular board who is actually on board with these groups. There's one whose subtext ideas about privatisation probably sound good to them, but that's it.
But that's not the point, here. The point is to discredit, and shove to the right.
_Cause_ a problem, make it worse until you break the organisation, then say it's broken and must be handed to you for "reform."
Nudge, nudge, nudge. Wedge, wedge, wedge.
It's _national_ money, on a _national_ scale, and everyone else keeps ignoring it because it's not national.
LOCAL.
ELECTIONS.
MATTER.
Even the little ones. Maybe _particularly_ the little ones.
Like school boards.
Not every left/liberal/progressive group misses this. FUSE actually has some endorsements up, if you go looking for them. But they aren't national, they're state, and that matters, because scale of strategy matters. And mostly, this stuff gets ignored.
And until progressives, leftists, liberals realise this shit matters, it's going to keep being a disadvantage all the rest of the way up the ladder.
We have anti-vaxxers now, for fuck's sake. We have a fascist movement fueled entirely by _bullshit_ and _scams_ from pillow salesmen and money launderers.
It is a massive failure of education, and the people involved are dedicated to making it _worse_.
I've been going off about this for a long goddamn time - that you have to stop ignoring local and if you're the left in particular you have to _prioritise_ local _first_ - and getting nowhere with it.
But I'm right.
And the fascists know it.
