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.
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.