Elation as anti-extremists fight back against influence of billionaire megadonors through grassroots organizing

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.”

  • cogman@lemmy.world
    991·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
      1·
      21 hours ago

      I think the attraction for many voters isn’t that these candidates are progressive, it’s that they are NOT a thousand years old.

    • ceenote@lemmy.world
      571·
      2 days ago

      They’re really trying to ignore it. It’s going to be up to voters to make themselves heard in the primaries.

        • ceenote@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 day ago

          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.

          • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
            31·
            1 day ago

            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.

            https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dnc-chair-on-the-path-to-winning-back-voters-and-lessons-democrats-can-learn-from-mamdani

            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.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      141·
      2 days ago

      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.