Maurice Cunningham is a political science professor at U of Mass who specializes in following the money, especially Dark Money, where the donors are anonymous.
The Koch-Walton backed National Parents Union is experiencing turmoil at the top and severe mismanagement with two boards of directors featuring revolving directors and a disappeared co-founder..
The organization is holding a convening on May 15 and its members should demand some answers.
Here are questions they should be asking the leadership. Any media member who would like to learn about who is pulling the strings at NPU, feel free.
1. National Parents Union has two boards of directors, one board listed on the NPU webpage, and another on record with the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s Corporations Division. The website board CONTINUE READING: Maurice Cunningham: Questions for the “National Parents Union” | Diane Ravitch's blog
Maurice Cunningham is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts. He specializes in unmasking Dark Money groups.
He writes:
Radical Right Ramps Up War on School Boards, Superintendents, Principals, and Teachers
A new professedly “grassroots” group called Parents Defending Education has joined the right wing assault on public education. It combines white supremacy with a vicious plan to launch personal attacks on elected officials, administrators, and teachers. Just another day in corporate education reform.
This group says it is fighting to restore “healthy, non-political education for our kids.” What they mean is anything that critically examines America’s racial history or present. 1619 is out, Trump’s 1776 project to promote “patriotic education” is in. Ibram X. Kendi and anti-racism? Definitely out. Wally and the Beav, in.
Parents Defending Education is a campaign to direct and manage attacks on educators who candidly CONTINUE READING: Maurice Cunningham: The Rise of an Astroturf Rightwing “Parents” Group | Diane Ravitch's blog
Two of the important props of the far right in America are Christian conservatives and economic royalists like the Waltons and Charles Koch. Those ties are becoming evident in school privatization including in financial support the Massachusetts Parents United has offered to a Christian right group and in National Parents Union’s funding from a Koch-Walton joint venture that partners with a far right Christian home schooling network.
Here’s the Massachusetts Parents United $1,000 “sponsorship” from its Form 990 tax return for 2017:
Here are some headlines about National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and its leader Pastor Samuel Rodriguez from Right Wing Watch:
Samuel Rodriguez: New General in Global Anti-Gay Culture War
Samuel Rodriguez: Getting Conservative SCOTUS Trumps Immigration Reform
The Preachers on Trump’s Inaugural Podium (Pastor Rodriguez prayed at Trump’s inaugural).
Samuel Rodriguez Says Trump’s Supreme Court Will Save Religious Liberty
Sam Rodriguez Has ‘Disagreements’ With Harsh Anti-Immigrant Bill but Calls It a ‘Positive Development’ (also identifying Rodriguez as a “promoter of the Libre Initiative,” the Koch political outreach program to Latinos).
Samuel Rodriguez Joins Bid to Rebuild GOP Power in California
In short, Samuel Rodriguez and his National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference are cogs in the religious right’s alliance with the Republican Party.
The religious right-economic right connection is a component of conservative political power, as Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson recently argued in Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. The Waltons and Charles Koch fund MPU’s allied organization National Parent Union through a joint venture called the VELA Education Fund. VELA announced a grant to NPU on August 3, 2020, NPU having established a track record of nearly seven months. VELA has also given CONTINUE READING: Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, and the Christian Right
