CRT Outrage Isn’t About Concerned Moms, It’s A Manufactured Crisis Fueled By Dark Money, the Kochs

The election of Donald Trump was a backlash against the first Black president, among other things. Likewise, so is the regressive political agenda that we now see in this nation, manifesting at the grass roots level of school boards and county council meetings. America saw a lot of progress in eight years of Obama and now the GOP is doing everything that it can to claw it back. The fact that Joe Biden is in office, after a disastrous four years of Trump, only means that the focus of the agenda has shifted from the Oval Office to local politics. Trump isn’t in office to do anything and it’s debatable where the GOP will be in 2024, so the sure bet for now is on the down ballot and the local.

And look for a player called “IWV” Independent Womens’ Voice. Truthout:

Today’s “mothers of massive resistance” appear to represent an organic local uprising of “concerned parents,” but the outcry is being stoked by dark money groups like IWV.

Attacks on public school curricula can serve many purposes, including undermining teachers’ unions, promoting school privatization and impacting elections, like Virginia’s. They also conjure outrage among the most racist elements of the Republican base.

Proposed legislation prohibiting discussions of systemic racism (which Republicans are misrepresenting as “critical race theory”) could be far-reaching, potentially banning pedagogically fundamental terms like “anti-racism,” “diversity training,” “patriarchy” and “whiteness” from schools, as one bill that recently passed the Wisconsin legislature did.

The manufactured outrage toward discussions of racism in schools is largely fueled by women-led astroturf groups, such as Parents Defending Education (which has deep ties to the Koch network), Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and the Free to Learn Coalition (funded by the Leonard Leo network, who orchestrated the packing of the courts under Trump).

These astroturf groups are a reminder yet again that the white nuclear family is one of the most powerful forces for reproducing white supremacy. Part of the way this works is through hoarding resources, something even some liberal and progressive white women do when they declare their support for policies like school desegregation and then refuse to send their white children to integrated schools. “Tracking,” the designation of separate paths for students based on educational performance, sometimes called “modern-day segregation,” is another way.

So how have right-wing women’s groups, funded by anonymous donors, come to take an oversized role in local school politics as concerned moms?

As historian Nancy MacLean has shown, men like economist James M. Buchanan and billionaire Charles Koch, who funded Buchanan’s center at George Mason University (the impetus for which was Buchanan’s antipathy toward school integration in Virginia), have sought to intentionally hide the political nature of their libertarian-minded organizations for decades.

Make no mistake. The name of the game is still Follow The Money. Do that and play Connect The Dots and you won’t find Charles Koch or his ilk too many steps removed from what appears on the surface to be a spontaneous uprising by upset parents suddenly drawn into the culture war crossfire.

What’s going on at the school board level is anything but spontaneous. Franklin Graham has been advocating that Christians run for school boards for quite a few years. All of the noise that you hear at the school board levels these days, and it is toxic and deafening, is because this is a front in the culture war where the smart money thinks it can gain a foothold.

Charles Koch never takes his eyes off the prize. Let’s see that we don’t.