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.
Progressive dems have been cleaning up over the past year. Hopefully the DNC doesn’t plug it’s ears and ignore the obvious. There’s certainly a good number of corporate democrats trying to make this out to be a nothing.
They’re really trying to ignore it. It’s going to be up to voters to make themselves heard in the primaries.
They’re really trying to ignore it.
Man, they suck at ignoring things…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Nk7RcZh7k
I’ve never tried to ignore something so hard that I travelled back in time two weeks ago to retroactively support it.
Maybe the DNC really is all powerful, I mean, they got a time machine
You serious? Nothing in that source contradicts anything I said. They don’t discuss the progressive policies of the candidate at all, Ken Martin just plugs his strategy of focusing on smaller races. The fact they don’t bring up his policies, just like how they always try to make Mamdani’s popularity about his personal charisma instead of his policies, reinforces that they’re trying to ignore progressivism’s popularity.
They don’t discuss the progressive policies of the candidate at all, Ken Martin just plugs his strategy of focusing on smaller races.
Because this is a “smaller race”…
just like how they always try to make Mamdani’s popularity about his personal charisma instead of his policies, reinforces that they’re trying to ignore progressivism’s popularity.
That’s not true either, and luckily I have a print quote for that one so we don’t have to argue over timestamps:
One is, he campaigned for something. And this is a critical piece. We can’t just be in a perpetual state of resisting Donald Trump. Of course, we have to resist Donald Trump. There’s no doubt about it for all the reasons we just talked about. But we also have to give people a sense of what we’re for, what the Democratic Party is fighting for, and what we would do if they put us back in power.
And that’s really critical. And I think that’s one of the lessons from Mamdani’s campaign, is that he focused on affordability. He focused on a message that was resonant with voters, and he campaigned for something, not against other people or against other things. He campaigned on a vision of how he was going to make New York City a better place to live.
But, if you think his opinions on policy matter, then you don’t understand how he’s running the DNC, even tho he’s very open about it.
If these candidates were piece of shit neoliberals, they’d get all the same support from the party, minus a few nice soundbites in interviews
That’s the strength of Martin, that he’s legitimately non-biased. All progressives need is a fair primary, and that’s what Martin gave Minnesota for a decade.
If you’re focusing on what he says on policy, you’re just not looking at the right thing.
Hopefully the DNC doesn’t plug it’s ears and ignore the obvious.
As soon as Mamdani won his primary, the DNC chair said we need a candidate that not only emulated his charisma, but also the popular policy position Dem voters want…
That was months ago.
It’s been a year since that chair was seated.
I think the problem isn’t that anyone is plugging their ears, just that the billionaire owned media doesn’t want people to be engaged with the DNC now that they no longer control it.
I mean, here’s the DNC chair talking about this race two weeks ago…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Nk7RcZh7k
But you didn’t hear about it.
The DNC rallied hard against Bernie. They’re really quite insidious.
Go TX!
Just waiting for them to come up with a version of this bill that keeps all these same restrictions but which adds an alternative of using digital identity verification processes administered by third parties. Then they can just approve Xitter and the like as verification partners, making the easy route available through platforms their side controls, all with no transparency or accountability.
