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.”