Don't fall for bogus claim they are a "grassroots movement"
Maurice Cunningham
As the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, I have been following billionaire-backed education interest groups for more than a decade. Since big money lacks public credibility, it often masquerades as organizations claiming to represent the interests of “parents,” “moms,” “educators,” and “families.”
The concocted stories about how these groups were created are often repeated by
an incurious press, which misses the opportunity to tell its readers a more
interesting story: how billionaires and right-wing activists pour money into
upbeat-sounding organizations to further their aim of privateering our public
school system.
These astroturf operations have been proliferating resulting
in serious negative impacts. Consider the havoc wreaked
on some school boards by Moms for Liberty (M4L). M4L even got into presidential
politics in 2024, boosting Donald
Trump, at the behest of the donors, who co-founder Tina Descovich termed as
M4L’s “investors.”
Consider a November 2024 Washington Post story on
Linda McMahon’s nomination to be secretary of education. The article contrasted
remarks from National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle with
an alternative view from Keri Rodrigues, founding president of the National
Parents Union (NPU), which the reporter Laura Meckler called “a grassroots
group,” thus giving the impression that NEA and NPU are similar organizations.
They are not. NEA is a well-established teachers’ union that
credibly claims 3
million members and is governed by a democratic structure. NPU
appeared on the scene in 2020, surfing in on millions of dollars from the foundations
of American oligarchs, including the Walton family, Mark
Zuckerberg, and Charles Koch.
In 2024, Rodrigues, a fixture at education privateering
groups, told
the Boston Globe that NPU could get its message to “250,000 families
to vote against” a ballot question sponsored by the teachers’ union and would
“put that network to work.”
There is zero evidence that this extensive network exists or
that it did anything on the ballot question. There is also no proof to validate
Rodrigues’s claim that
the organization has 1.7 million members nationally.
A 2021 Washington Post article introducing Moms for Liberty chronicled its claimed rapid rise without raising questions about how it grew so fast. The story simply provided the M4L narrative of its creation story, centered around former Florida school board members Descovich and Tiffany Justice. It omitted M4L’s third co-founder Bridget Ziegler, though it did quote her husband, Christian Ziegler, about the group’s political potency.
Bridget Ziegler served briefly on the M4L board and was
replaced by GOP campaign consultant Marie
Rogerson. Christian Ziegler was then the powerful vice-chair of the Florida
Republican Party and a key
Trump supporter. (In 2023, the Zieglers became famous for a threesome scandal.
She quickly resigned from her executive position with the Leadership Institute,
an established training institution for right-wing activists. Christian
was removed from
his perch as chair of the Florida Republican Party.)
The Post October 2021 story featured a
photo of Descovich pulling aside, Superman style, a white jacket to reveal the
group’s logo t-shirt while posing next to an American flag. The questions about
the group’s ties to the Republican Party and suspicious financing were laughed
off by the founders of M4L. The Post followed up a month later by printing
an op-ed by
Descovich and Justice.
NPU, M4L, and similar groups organize as nonprofit
corporations under sections 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue
Service Code. As nonprofits, their Form 990 tax returns are made public but
only in November, following the tax year. The information is skimpy but
valuable. Journalists can access the Form 990s by requesting them directly from
the nonprofits or from the ProPublica
Nonprofit Explorer, which helps trace donors as well.
These groups leave clues that no reporter can miss:
1. Don’t buy the phony origin stories: These
organizations all claim to be about moms joining together to improve education.
But in no time, they have access to millions of dollars in donations and have
the services of elite law firms, pollsters, media consultants, and often, ties
to the Republican Party.
2. Follow the money: It isn’t easy in the first two
years of a nonprofit’s existence, but there are signs: easy access to
right-wing media, hiring expensive consultants, and big-budget conferences.
3. Watch how these groups work: The founding leadership
usually consists of veteran right-wing operatives or communications
professionals with years of experience in privateering organizations.
4. Get the big picture: Right from the beginning, M4L
had obvious ties to Republican and right-wing organizations that often went
unreported.
5. Keep following the money: When nonprofit tax forms
finally become public, they’ll reveal how much was donated and can help
identify the top contractors and how much they were paid.
Let us expand on these insights to show how these secretive
operations can be exposed right from the beginning by using Form 990.
Don’t Buy the Phony Origin Stories
The typical “moms” or “parents” creation story goes
something like this: outraged by some aspect of their children’s public school
education, two or three “moms” band together to attract other like-minded
parents to cure the deficiencies of the system, which are always the fault of
the teachers’ unions. In truth, the “moms” are agents of far-right billionaires
often tied—like M4L and Parents Defending Education (PDE)—to the secretive
Council for National Policy, which seeks to
privateer K-12 for profit, expand Christian education, and promote
homeschooling.
According to the billionaire-funded online
publication the
74, NPU “is the brainchild of two Latina mothers,” Keri Rodrigues and Alma
Marquez, who “had disappointing experiences with education, both as parents and
students, and with advocacy groups.”
To its credit, the 74 was candid about
the funding of NPU: the foundations of billionaires, including Bill Gates, the
Walton family, the late Eli Broad, and Michael and Susan Dell, and
organizations like the City Fund, which gets its money from
Reed Hastings, John Arnold, and Walton family members, inheritors of the
Walmart fortune.
Nonetheless, the tenor of the story was of a grassroots
moms’ start-up. Other news outlets ignored the 74’s detailing of billionaire
funding. An online search through the New York Times website supplemented with
a library search through Gale OneFile showed 13 NYT stories or columns that
mention the National Parents Union since the group’s public launch on January
1, 2021. Only one column by Michelle Goldberg noted that
“The National Parents Union is funded by the pro-privatization Walton Family
Foundation.” The Waltons are, however, the only funders Goldberg mentioned.
The New Yorker came closest to the truth in a June 2021 piece:
“The Walton foundation set up the National Parents Union in January 2020, with
Rodrigues as the founding president.” A review of Form 990s for NPU and the
Walton Family Foundation from 2020 through 2023 that I reviewed shows that NPU
accepted more than $11 million in contributions. The Walton Family Foundation
donated around $3 million of that amount.
The media is failing to cover the single most important fact
the public needs to know about “parents” and “moms” groups: who is supplying
them with millions of dollars in funding.
As for M4L, although a few media outlets wrote it had three
founders, most followed the practice of CNN,
which in December 2021 omitted Bridget Ziegler and described “the two women
behind Moms for Liberty, a
group of conservatives that came together in January,”
downplaying the fact that at that time, the state GOP vice-chair’s wife was also one of the co-founders. By January 9, 2021, soon
after its incorporation, M4L’s online store
was offeringmagnets,
t-shirts, and hats, and a “Madison Meetup” package of right-wing materials.
While mainstream media was valorizing M4L’s origin story,
right-wing outlets produced a steady stream of propaganda about the
organization. Later in January 2021, Descovich appeared on the Rush Limbaugh
Show (guest-hosted by Todd Herman). Media Matters for America found that,
by July 2022, M4L “representatives have been regulars on right-wing media,
appearing on Fox News at least 16 times and Steve Bannon’s “War Room” at least
14 times.”
Another supposedly grassroots parents’ group that has an
origin story grounded in deception is PDE. In lodging a civil rights complaint
against the Columbus, Ohio, public schools in May 2021, PDE President Nicole
Neily toldthe
Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, “We just all work from home… We’re all working moms.”
In fact, Neily is a well-compensated political
operative in the Koch network. According to the Koch-connected
Speech First’s Form
990 for 2019, which was available after November 2020 and thus before PDE
was founded in 2021, Neily was paid $150,000 in 2019.
Follow the Money
Due to the barriers to tracing the funding of such groups,
it can be hard to follow the money, especially in the first two years of
operation. But in 2021, an article in
the New Yorker described how the VELA
Education Fund, a partnership of the Walton Family Foundation and the
Charles Koch Institute, had given NPU $700,000 in 2020 to “help people with
fewer resources,” including promoting homeschooling during COVID-19. This is
despite the fact that NPU was not familiar with homeschooling.
Press outlets have also overlooked funding sources of M4L.
In 2021, co-founder Descovich told
CNN that M4L had raised more than $300,000 through t-shirt sales,
small donors, and fundraising events. However, one such event was a gala featuring
former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly in June 2021, six months into M4L’s
first year. The top tickets went for $20,000. The Celebrity Speakers
Bureau pegged Kelly’s
speaking fee as between $50,000 and $100,000. The event raised at
least $57,000.
In July 2021, Descovich appeared at
a Heritage Foundation virtual town hall on “Preserving American History in
Schools.” By October 29, 2021, M4L was referring members
to the Leadership
Institute for training and sending members to the Heritage
Foundation for events and other resources. Both these organizations
have been part of the right-wing political firmament since the 1970s. A bit of
digging showed that
M4L was deeply embedded in far-right politics. But most press accounts ignored
that evidence and the public remained largely in the dark.
In April 2021, PDE headed by Neily, brought on Elizabeth
Schultz as a “senior fellow,” who had worked under Trump’s Education
Secretary Betsy DeVos during his first term and was a vocal anti-LGBTQ
activist.
Watch How These Groups Work
These groups can be intertwined. PDE, M4L, and another
faux-grassroots group, No
Left Turn in Education (NLTE), all came on the scene around the same
time, with NLTE being founded in 2020. PDE’s website includes a map called “IndoctriNation”
with lists of affiliates across the nation. The April 15, 2021, listings (the
website appears to have gone live only in March 2021) showed that
most of its allies were chapters of M4L and NLTE with few actual members,
according to my research in 2021.
Media reports seemed content to accept the “moms working
from home” creation story despite the obvious early support from well-resourced
groups.
NPU held its organizing meeting, which it claims drew
representatives from all 50 states, in New Orleans in January 2020. To promote
the event, NPU employed Mercury
Public Affairs, an international public relations firm. To draw press
attention, NPU also commissioned polling from Echelon
Insights, a Republican pollster that has also worked
for the Walton family.
In the same year of its founding,
in 2021, PDE published detailed
plans, such as “How to Create ‘Woke At’ Pages,” that instruct parents on how to
use secrecy to attack “woke activists” in the education system. PDE also began
initiating lawsuits against
local school boards, represented by the Republican law firm of Consovoy
McCarthy.
William Consovoy, who passed in 2023, was in the Federalist
Society, the nationwide network of conservative lawyers that helped
form Trump’s picks for the U.S. Supreme Court. Consovoy had been
a law
clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and represented
Donald Trump during a congressional investigation. The firm also
represented Trump in 2020 as he tried to intervene before the Supreme
Court to
stop the vote count in Pennsylvania. When PDE’s 2021
Form 990 became available, it showed PDE paid Consovoy McCarthy
$800,000 in legal fees.
Get the Big Picture
The clues kept coming, only to be ignored by the press.
In 2022, M4L held its first national summit in Tampa,
Florida. In its reporting of the event, NBC
portrayed the group as a political powerhouse, reporting that
attendees “browsed booths set up by conservative groups, including Turning
Point USA, the Leadership Institute and Heritage Action, and the evangelical
Liberty University” without describing these organizations for what they
are—the critical infrastructure of Christian nationalism.
Media reports on the event generally ignored who the sponsors of
the summit were or the amounts of their donations. The Leadership Institute
donated $50,000.
The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America provided $10,000 each.
And PDE chipped in $10,000. Meanwhile, Descovich was still peddling the story that
M4L was getting by on t-shirt sales, even though an aide to Leadership
Institute’s Morton Blackwell bragged about
how the institute had provided the relevant training to help the group “become
a national force.”
When there were questions
raised about how M4L could fund such a lavish event with t-shirt
sales, M4L denied any connections to deep-pocketed right-wing groups, and most
news reporters presented a simple “he said, she said” account and moved on.
Reporters generally missed the bigger story that the institutional right was
creating and passing off phony “moms” and “parents” operations.
Keep Following the Money
Once Form 990s were filed, the deception became obvious, but
that didn’t mean it got covered by big media outlets.
The 2022
Form 990 for NPU showed that Keri Rodrigues was paid $410,000 from NPU
and a sister organization. She paid her husband, the chief operating officer of
both organizations, $278,529. Yet, in August 2024, CBS Morning News presented Rodrigues
as a typical parent worried about back-to-school shopping.
PDE’s Form
990 for 2021 was even more revealing, as exposed by
True North Research’s Lisa Graves and Alyssa Bowen for Truthout in 2023. Graves
and Bowen showed that PDE is deeply tied with far-right Supreme
Court fixer Leonard Leo, even paying $106,938 to his for-profit consulting
firm.
PDE, a brand-new operation, raised
$3,178,272 in its first year in 2021. It paid Neily, who is also on
the board, a total compensation of $195,688 for her 40-hour work week.
According to Speech First’s Form
990 for 2021, Neily put in an additional 20-hour week for Speech First,
earning another $86,117 and a total of $281,805 from both Koch- and Leo-funded
operations combined. In 2023, PDE pushedNeily’s
base salary and other compensation up to $341,400. This is quite an income for
a stay-at-home working mom.
The trail from NPU leads back to the Walton family and
billionaire allies who have been working to undermine teachers’ unions and
siphon public money to charter schools for years.
Scratch the surface of groups like M4L and PDE, and you find
the Heritage Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and Leonard Leo—the elite of
far-right politics who work
to replace public schools with for-profit schools, religious schools,
and homeschooling. These details make for a very important story that most
journalists have overlooked.
Stop Being Fooled
Reporters should not be fooled by the techniques used by
these fake “mom” and “parent” groups on behalf of their extremist overseers. As
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway show in Merchants
of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco
Smoke to Global Warming, these techniques have been used by “scientific”
nonprofits created by the same conservative groups, including the Heritage
Foundation, to contest climate change.
Many have tracked the
origin of these techniques back to the tobacco industry’s fight to protect
their profits from the growing body of research linking their products to
cancer and other health problems.
In 1994, tobacco giant RJ Reynolds created the
industry front group Get Government Off Our Back to advance a “smokers’ rights”
campaign to fight against the tsunami of scientific evidence exposing the
health risks of tobacco. Reynolds kept its backing a secret while promoting it
as a movement of “grassroots” smokers.
Meanwhile, in his farewell address, former President Joseph
R. Biden warned about how the wealthy are a big threat to democracy:
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme
wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our
basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
For years, the same oligarchy that threatens basic rights
has been threatening our freedom to have access to a high-quality system of
public education. There is no reason they should be aided by credulous
reporters from trusted news sources. If we can question our moms on whether
they really love us, we can question the authenticity of these moms and parent
groups.
(This article was produced by Our Schools. Maurice Cunningham PhD, JD, retired in 2021 as an associate professor of political science at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and is the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.)
