Voucher discussion

I am the chair of the Baum Mound Area Dems, and I'm going to introduce our co-host, uh Gina Daly from Lantana Dems. We welcome all of you. Gina, would you like to speak for them? Real quick. Hi, everybody. I'm glad to see all of you all of you

are coming out tonight. It's been a great program. Here you are on the leadership team for the question. There we go. Okay. So I am one on the leadership team for the Lantana Area Democrats. And I'm so glad to see so many faces here

tonight. And I welcome you all here. And it's going to be a great program. Thank you. I'll give her a minute. And I'm going to go ahead and introduce our candidates that are here. They're both here and not here.

And Denise Woodman. She's in the back there. HD 65, we have Dietrich Dubar. I don't know if he's here. HD 106, we have Dale Frey. I don't know if I don't know if Hobbit John. I don't see her. I don't see her.

Okay. Running against running for sheriff is Frederick Bishop. I consider this one of our best opportunities to replace the sheriff. Alright, I'm just going to talk really loud. So and then we also have um all right there we go. Okay, and running and running against Dan Parker for our

Senate District 12 is Stephanie Goldguden Draper. I don't believe she's here either, but we do have Jan McDowell from Congress from Congressional District 32. And we have Annette Cook uh who is here for Tommy Bedford. He is running against Burgess. And he and he and Sandy, she and Sandy Swan have signup sheets, so you know, so they don't have

to pay the fee to run. So if you haven't signed for um for uh the sheriff or for um uh Tommy, then please seek them out and um stand up, Sandy, so they know who you are. Thanks. Yes, but please seek them out afterwards. Okay, and um Gillia, do you want to stand up?

Hey, good evening, and thank you guys for coming. We are so excited to hear from the tickets. Did Tin County is the best Democratic Party in the DM. Not sure who you're waving at, but they don't come in. I I think Stephanie just walked into the room. Okay.

Wanna wait? This is our candidate against Pam Parker. We're gonna have more luck and okay. So this has been a long time in the making. We the first time we had the we had Chris Tackett on it right after COVID, it was on a video screen. I think we had like fewer than 10 people.

We've been wanting to bring both Tackets back to come talk to us. U,h just a little bit about them if you don't if you don't know them. Um, Chris Tackett started his activism with the school board as a school board trustee in Granbury. Um, he was wondering why his representative wasn't doing anything that they wanted the school district to do.

So he followed the money, and what he learned about who's controlling our uh Austin is really frightening and fascinating. You can't look away, but it's awful. And Mindy has made it her life mission to expose Christian nationalism and its influence on Texas politics. Both of them have done a lot of research, so they speak from a place of knowledge and hardcore facts born of intense investigation.

So I want to welcome them. Thank you. Oh, make sure I wouldn't see it. Maybe, yeah. All right, so I'm Mindy Tackett, and it's wonderful to see so many of you here. Thank you for coming out to hear the two of us.

Chris, my husband is here too. Um so I'm gonna kind of start out with with uh giving you guys some background about how all of this started and why we started talking to people. Um, back in 2014. Well, let me let me start further back than that. Chris and I both grew up in Granberry. We graduated high school there, uh, we moved back there

in 2008 with our children, and we thought, you know, what a great place to raise our kids. Our family was there still, and so we were active in the community. I volunteered with PTO and different things with the school. Chris ran the baseball and softball league for a few years, and in 2014, he said, I think I'm gonna run for school board.

And I said, I think that's a great idea. So he did run for school board Um it was at that time in 2014, school board races were still supposed to be nonpartisan, and so he went to all of the local clubs and groups to speak, but he came home after visiting the Republican club meeting one night, and he said it was the strangest thing.

The gentleman that they had as their key speaker for the evening said his entire speech was about how conservatives need to take over school boards, and that was back in 2014, and we were both like that is really odd. We've it's never been partisan like that, we've never heard that before. So that was a red flag for us.

Chris won his school board race and yeah, and uh and served. Um, but after he was on the board, we started seeing some just strange things politically happening in Granberry and Hood County that we hadn't ever seen before. Uh in 2015, there was a mom in town. Um she raised uh raised concern or wanted to have a book band, a couple of

them, at our public library, not the school library, but the public library, and these were a couple of LGBTQ books that were in the children's section. They were the sweetest little children's books. The werey picture books. They were right. Right? So that kind of became a thing.

We had a rock star librarian uh who is still a friend of mine today. and And she kind of led the way a lot of us in town organized, and we went to commissioners' meetings, and you know, we were successful in keeping those books on the shelves back in 2015. But one of the things that we saw happening was that some of the loudest voices in town that were

coming to the commissioners' meetings to speak out for banning the books were some of the local pastors, faith leaders. And we were like, that's just strange. Like we've never seen that sort of thing happen before. We know Ted's dad, right? Right. Ted's dad. Um there were local churches that were getting very involved

politically with very distinctive messaging, and it was messaging that we just hadn't seen or heard before. And then at that point, too, Chris had served on the board for a while, and the the board would talk to our newly elected house rep at the time. His name was Mike Lang, and they would speak to the to him about these are things that we would

like to see happen for public schools, or where we would request that you vote against this legislation in Austin because it's not going to help us as public schools. And every single time he voted the exact opposite of what was being requested of him, or what the board was communicating. And so at that point, Chris kind of started doing a little research.

Yeah, and before I started doing the research, I wanted to touch on one or two other things that were happening in the community while I was serving on the board. And again, school board had been nonpartisan, right? Had been this thing that you served because you wanted to serve your community, not advance an ideology. And the local pastor council started taking out ads in

the 2015 election before the 2016 election, saying in the in the local paper, saying they were looking for conservative Christians to run for school board that could expouse these certain ideals and bring them to the board. And it was shocking to us. Dave Welch from the U.S. Pastor Council was coming to town and advising the local chamber of commerce on how to carry certain things forward.

Right? And again, at this point, I think we've all seen that happening across our communities. This was just shocking to us because it was just antithetical to what we thought all of this was supposed to be and where we thought we were moving as a community and a country, right? This is not the direction we're supposed to be going.

So when Lange started voting against public education every single time, and he was telling us, oh, I'm pro public ed, right? It was like, why? Help me understand why this guy would be doing that. And I did the only thing I knew to do, which was dive into the Texas Ethics Commission and start pulling campaign finance reports.

Because the only thing I could come up with is it's gotta be money. Money has to be the reason why we're not being listened to. And Mike Lang was newly elected, right? Elected for the first time in 2016. And when I pulled his first chart, you see some big numbers, and if you've been to the Texas Ethics

Commission and tried to pull those reports, um, they're not overly user friendly, they're basically Excel or CSV files, which are Excel files. I love Excel. I geek out on it. I like my pivot tables and all those things. Um but it's hard to start to pull the information together because every single one of those reports, every time

they have to file, it's a separate file. It doesn't consolidate it easily for you to be able to see patterns. And I I I showed it, I saw big numbers and I freaked out, and I showed Mindy and I was like, okay, because I'm not a spreadsheet person. So it was just rows and rows and rows of data, and she was like, eh, do something different.

I can't tell what this is showing me. And so I made a pie chart. And then I was excited. Yeah, see? And all of a sudden, that pie chart showed that when all of the money that had gone into this guy, there were three big slices that made up basically 75% of the total money that this guy had taken

into his race. And we were, I mean, we were talking like $400,000, right? Was the the numbers he had taken in in his 2016 election set? And like 300,000 came from what looked like three people. And when I looked at those names, and again, I hadn't been political, I hadn't paid attention to what was

going on. The biggest slice belonged to a gentleman named Ferris Wilkes. Right? Fracking billionaire from Cisco, Texas. The next biggest slice was this group that I had never heard of called Empower Texans. And so 75% was coming from those three at that point, I thought unrelated individuals.

Because that's who's making sure he gets reelected. So I took my new fancy pie chart and I posted it on Facebook because that's what you do when you find cool things, or at least that's what you did in 2016, 2017, right? And talked about it. And I put it on Twitter and other places, and people around the state were like, okay, the thing you're

talking about that you saw with your rep, the not hearing.ing you at all, I'm see that too Can you make a pie chart for me? So I did it. I started doing them for people and races all over the state. And it got to where it was like, okay, I've got to get out of Excel because this is this

is killing me. Um and migrated, and then I took on the incredibly stupid and challenging thing of at this point, and I'm still doing it today, um, so whatever I'm talking about, you can you can absolutely go find it. Um, I ripped the entire Texas Ethics Commission database, and I drop it into a website that makes pie charts for like every single state level race.

Um you can you can get to it. Um the website I had been using was uh Chris Hackettnow.com. It still gets you there. It's not the most pretty site. Um and I'll I'll talk about another way you can get there that has even more cool information among other things we're gonna talk about uh in just a little

bit. But when you start to pull all the money, or at least money from races all over the state, now the real patterns start to show up. All of a sudden, this gentleman Ferris Wilkes, this pack empowered Texans, and this gentleman Tim Dunn, you start to see them show up on a whole bunch of other people's pie charts.

And when you start to then consolidate where are all these people going, you realize, okay, Wilkes and Dunn were the primary donors to empower Texans, right? And so those were really all the same ideology pushing things. And then it's like, well, where else are Wilkes and Dunn giving? And you start to find all these other political action

committees that they're the primary funders for, giving millions of dollars. Texas Right to Life, Texas Homeschool Coalition, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility. I mean, literally all of this whole entire web of political action committees. And we've all, when we go through an election season, you know the way your mailbox and your Facebook feed

and Twitter feed and everything else just gets inundated with political ads, right? You may be getting six, eight, ten, twelve mailers a day showing up. And you people, you're all you're on it, right? You know who the good ones are and who the folks that are like, yeah, I'm never gonna support them. But there's a ton of low information voters out there

who will hear the name over and over. And if it was only coming from the candidate every time saying, hey, vote for me, vote for me, they might go. But when you see six, eight, ten different groups all endorsing the same candidate, you go, well, there must be something here, right? And so maybe you tip into I'm willing to listen,

I'm willing to vote that way. And that's what was happening, right? They were taking what was a handful of billionaire oligarchs, were creating this web of not only political action committees, but also nonprofit organizations that they would sit on the board of that they were also influencing who were also sending email, not about candidates but about issues, and it's the same issues that the candidates were pushing, and that's

all dark money because it doesn't actually get reported to the candidate. So it makes it look like it's grassroots, and it's not grassroots at all. It's a handful of voices creating astro turf, right? That's truly what was happening. And look, the good news is we started making a lot of noise about Empowered Texans and Wilkes and Dunn.

Not just us, but people across the people in general, right? We were a tiny bit of the noise, right? But I mean, other people started talking about it. And in the 2018 elections, empowered Texans got their clock cleaned, right? I mean, they lost and lost bad in almost every election.

And we thought they're done, right? Because I mean, if you're if you're in this game for money and power, and you lose a lot of your money and you don't grab the power you want, at some point you push, you step away from the table, right? And you say, I'm done. And a lot of us were wondering will they be

done? And then Mindy started digging a little further. So I was well, Chris mentioned that Raphael Cruz was coming to town. We had Dave Welch, who was the U.S. Pastor Council uh leader go come to town. Um, we had some local churches giving some pretty questionable, in our opinion, sermons, um, going into like Seven Mountains

Dominionism and whatnot. And I was listening to these sermons that Raphael Cruz was giving in town, and he was telling the congregations that separation of church and state is a myth. He was telling people that public schools were indoctrinating children. He was just, you know, putting out all this nonsensical uh information, and so then we also began to see, aside from what was happening locally, we started

to see some bills popping up that were y'all remember we saw we saw the bathroom bill, the the CRT stuff, you know, as of late had had popped up. Um we had all these attacks on public educators beginning to creep up. There was the In God We Trust bill that came up the first time, and Chris and I knew from some of the research we had started doing based on

what we were seeing happening locally, that that in God We Trust bill was part of what's called it's a it's a it's a bill mill playbook basically called Project Blitz, and we knew as soon as we saw it that straight for Project Blitz. And if you looked at the bill that was filed in Austin and you looked at what was written by Project the folks who do Project Blitz who are not

right here in Texas necessarily, it was word for word verbatim. So we made copies and drove to Austin and of you know of the Project Blitz playbook, and we went to Austin and we didn't get to meet with legislators themselves, but we met with a lot of their staff members, and nobody knew what we were talking about. We could have shown up from Mars and been equally

as you know understood. And I'm sure as we met with some of the staff and were like talking about this is Christian nationalism, this is this playbook that's trying to again push an ideology across 50 states. They thought we were from Mars, right? I mean, this idea that what are you talking about? Right.

And so anyway, we we had been watching these things happen locally, statewide, and we were we were digging everywhere and reading everything we could to figure out what is this that we're seeing, right? And we did know at that point this is Christian nationalism. Um so to kind of stop right there, the first thing I want to do is give a disclaimer as

we talk about Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism does not represent all Christians, it does not represent all churches, and it doesn't represent probably anyone in this audience. So that is nothing personal when we talk about Christian nationalism, it's not representative of Christianity. So we always want to be sure that we're saying that so everybody understands and doesn't misunderstand what we're talking

about. Um I'm gonna give you the definition that Amanda Tyler uses. She's with uh the BJC and Christians Against Christian Nationalism. If you're not familiar with their organization, um, I would highly recommend you look them up online, they have invaluable information. And Amanda is here in Texas now as their head

organizer, she's been in DC, but at any rate, um, her working definition of Christian nationalism is it is a political ideology and a cultural framework that seek to merge Christian and American identity. In other words, Christian nationalists believe that if you're gonna be a good American, you have to be the right kind of Christian with a certain kind of Christian ideology and outlook, right?

Some very narrow-minded thinking. If you're gonna be a good Christian, you need to hold certain political views that align with these super conservative, very narrow views, right? Christian nationalism also seeks to elevate and privilege Christianity over all other faith traditions, or those who are, you know, or nuns, those who who don't subscribe, subscribe to a faith tradition.

So the whole idea of Christian nationalism is that you know you're basing laws and policy, and your elected officials are all coming out of this very specific and narrow Christian ideology that also plays into the political realm. And that's just not that's not American, that's not democracy, that's not what we do. That doesn't, our our constitution speaks very plainly to the contrary, that that's not what we do.

Um so, as you know, I was going to some of these voter engagement events. Um, I was listening very closely, and then Chris and I just began to try to, between the money and the information that we had gained from experts that have been studying this for a really long time, um, amazing people. We were trying to do everything we could to jump

up and down, wave our hands., and make as much noise as we could because we knew this is happening in Texas It's happening in local communities and it's happening statewide. And one of the areas that we saw the evidence the most was in public education, the attacks on public education. And we we advocate a lot for public education.

There's a lot of issues that go into Christian nationalism, but we do a lot of focus on public ed. And we have seen, I mentioned while ago, we had seen all of these different kinds of bills popping up, and the folks on the far right, and the Wilkes and Tim Dunn and multiple other people who are in their realm of donors subscribe to Christian nationalist ideology, and that's what they seek to that's that's

what they want for our entire state. And we could we could see that the money was translating to a tax on public education. They started with bathroom bills, they were they were bad-mouthing teachers. We got the bathroom bills and the the initial transgender bills didn't work. They went to CRT scare, right?

And and said, you know, history's being taught wrong, and so on and so forth. And now we're at library books. And you know, we ended up with a library book situation in our public school in Granbury ISD as well last year. But um the public education part of it is really important, and it's one of the areas that you can

see the most evidence. in the state of Texas because they want vouchers And I'm I'm I'm wearing my shirt tonight on ventures, so we'll we'll touch on that in a minute. But yeah, the attack on public education hits close to us, right? I mean, I served on the school board in the public school system, we were both public school kids.

Our families taught in public school. So I mean, it's this idea that it is the foundation of our democracy, right? This is where any kid from anywhere can go to a public school, get not only an education, but learn how to be a good human with others who are different to learn how to be successful out in the world, right?

There is a huge cultural element where you have to learn how to deal with difference, and when you think about public schools broadly, there's been disinformation campaigns about the effectiveness of public schools that have gone on for generations, right? And public schools aren't perfect, right? I'm not I'm not gonna say that you know, up front, they're not perfect.

There's things we should be doing to make them better and continue to work. And when you poll nationally and you ask people what do you think of public education, right? Are you is it favorable, unfavorable, whatever? It's usually polling favorable in the mid 40s, right? That's the number you see when you talk about public education at large.

But then when you ask the question about what do you think about your kids' school, right? Your local district, all of a sudden that number historically jumps up into the high 70s, low 80s favorable. So this idea of they're failing, it's this broad narrative that's out there. It's not my school because I know my school. I know how great the teachers are that my kids

are dealing with. I've gone to those parent-teacher conferences, I've been on the PTO. We know there's no indoctrination in our school. We know, you know, we know these people, we see them in our community, they're good folks. We believe in our public schools. So when you think about vouchers in Texas,

when your goal is to gut the public education system, when you see polling up in the high 70s, low 80s for public schools, it's hard to convince people to say we need to blow it up, that we need to go do something different. So, what do you do to make those numbers go down? You gaslight, you push propaganda, you force this narrative

that schools are scary places. And you underfund them. You did that too, right? All and and all of that becomes almost a doom loop, right? It's this perpetual cycle of well, they're failing because of this, and it's because we're not doing these things, or we're creating this situation where they can't succeed, so now

the next scary thing happens, or you start claiming there's porn in libraries and teachers are trying to indoctrinate kids and Marxism and anti or LGBTQ agendas and all these things, right? And then when you're underfunding and you're not paying teachers what they're worth, right, and the great ones start to leave the profession, and now it's this again, it's this doom loop of where you're at.

And now all of a sudden that high 70, low 80 number starts to in the community come down a little bit. People who've always been in favor of public education start to say, maybe if I had an option, I'd go somewhere else, right? That's what these folks are banking on as we're in our fourth special session talking about vouchers right now.

And the reality is when you talk about vouchers, you have to understand the root of where vouchers are really coming from, right? In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education came down from the Supreme Court desegregating schools. Immediately after that, Milton Friedman, noted economist, right, starts advocating that maybe

we need to take you know the public money out of public schools and just give it to parents in the forms of vouchers so that they can take money and go to the school of their choice. And he acknowledged in 1955 that Brown B Board had occurred recently and said, you know, if we give them all their money and they end up with all white schools, that's their choice, and that's okay.

If they're going to religious schools, that's okay. We'll let the market decide. And if people are really against segregated schools, then the market will adjust and we'll have desegregated schools. That's when the voucher push started. Segregation academies popped up all over the South and persisted for decades. And it was so much of it was about race

and racism. It was also about religion and the desire to indoctrinate kids, to do the thing they're accusing public schools of doing is really their agenda. And then the other element in all of this, it's the money, right? Somebody's making a profit. So when we think about and you follow the money,

right, and you you start to look at all of the people who are funding the agenda against our public schools, and they're the same ones driving the agenda against the LGBTQ community. They're the same ones driving the agenda trying to create this narrative about illegal immigration. They're the same ones driving the agenda, trying to continue to erode choice.

Not that there's much choice left, right? With with where we're at. They love national bands, right? The same people, when you start to look at the money behind it, it's the same people driving all of these things, driving this same broad ideology. But when you look at the individual billionaire and the individual oligarch, those pushing into the voucher space, and it's

it's Wilkes and it's Dunn, and it's people like Richard Weakley, uh, who runs Texans for Lawsuit Reform and some of his cronies, I mean H. Ross Perot plays in some of these places and things like that. The individual billionaire may hit one, two, or all three of these buckets I've got on my shirt and my shirts, vouchers, their choice since 1954.

Because it is, right? It's the desire to segregate, indoctrinate, or line somebody's pockets. That's why they're pushing vouchers. Now, individual parents will make decisions for vouchers on their individual circumstance. So when I'm talking about vouchers, I'm not talking about the people who take them necessarily, but it's more about

those who are driving that agenda of their necessary. Which the Texas Public Policy Foundation is affiliated with the broader Coke network of things, right? And they're a policy shop. So when Wilkes and Dunn were trying to get people elected with Empower Texans and all their money, um, they were counting on the Texas Public Policy Foundation to write the policies that they would try and pass, right?

Oh, and by the way, um, Tim Dunn is the vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and has been since 2008. But in 2021,, Kevin Roberts wrote a letter a fundraising letter that spelled out what the agenda was going to be against public schools in this next election and the next legislative cycle. Talked about the Marxism that was taking over our schools,

talked about the LGBTQ agenda, the broad indoctrination and Marxism that was happening every single day in our classrooms, and the need to elect people who would allow this educational freedom to occur so that those poor kids could escape all of that. Right? Vouchers.