Elation as anti-extremists fight back against influence of billionaire megadonors through grassroots organizing
Chris Tackett started tracking extremism in Texas politics about a decade ago, whenever his schedule as a Little League coach and school board member would allow. At the time, he lived in Granbury, 40 minutes west of Fort Worth. He’d noticed that a local member of the state legislature, Mike Lang, had become a vocal advocate for using public money for private schools – despite the fact that Lang campaigned as a supporter of public education.
With a little research, Tackett found that Lang had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the Wilks brothers and Tim Dunn, billionaire megadonors whose deep pockets and Christian nationalist views have consumed the Texas GOP. Tackett published his findings on social media, and soon enough, people started asking him to create pie charts of their representatives’ campaign funds. These charts evolved into the organisation See It. Name It. Fight It.
“There’s so many people out there that are so busy with their daily lives, they’re walking past and not even seeing some of these bad things going on,” he says. “So that’s the first step: you have to see this thing.”
So as an outsiders, what I see most voters doing is what happened in 2020. Not everyone is terminally online and as plugged in to politics as we all are. So after 4 years of Trump enough was enough and more people went out to vote. You need hard times for this to happen.
But after 4 years of good, all those people thought things would carry on regardless not thinking, or that they don’t need to as it’s a home run no one would want to return to Trump. But you get enough people thinking they don’t need to vote, combined with apathy and voter intimidation and manipulation etc and you get trump back.
So now all the people are forced back out again.
I grew up in the '80s with Reagan and Bush. When Clinton won in '92 I breathed a sigh of relief and stopped paying attention to politics, thinking everything was going to be OK for a very long time. November 2000 was a rude shock when it became apparent that the world didn’t work the way I thought it did. Far more of a shock than 9/11 was.
For that matter, even the Clinton era was not what I thought it was at the time – although it was certainly much better than the current era.