The Support Our Schools petition campaign has been a success. Repealing the terrible bill that gives enormous tax breaks to people who give money to private schools *will* go before the voters in Nebraska.
And so, the Lancaster County Election Commissioner now claims he’s been getting calls from people who want to remove their names from the ballot initiative petition. While he could just tell those people how to do that, he decided to issue a big press release about it and of course the local news has to report it because if it’s a press release, it’s news. So they just read the press release word for word on the air over and over again.
What’s the point of all this? Not to actually help people remove their names from the petition. Almost no one will do that, maybe no one even wants to. No, this is part of a well funded disinformation campaign by opponents of public schools to suggest that there must be some impropriety with the petition.
You get all the news stations to normalize this lie and by the time it’s election time people won’t remember shit about schools, they will only remember something shady happened and maybe they don’t want this schools thing.
This is the “flood the zone with shit” tactic that Republicans have used with great success lately. Lie, gaslight, confuse, both sides every issue. The media are willing accomplices because they are desperate for stories and they will grasp at anything so they can appear to be unbiased callers of balls and strikes.
This tax break scheme will hurt our schools and it’s massively unpopular. That’s why a half dozen state senators wrote gaslighting letters to the editor about it this week and it’s why the election commissioner fired off this press release. Because if this question hits the ballot without a ton of bullshit all over it, the citizens will repeal that garbage bill by a huge margin. As they should.
