Thread by @DanielBiss

THREAD: A weird story about @UChicago, @HarrisPolicy, and right-wing dark money organizations.

A friend of mine is taking a course called “Winning Issue Campaigns” at the Harris School. The class has a “Campaign in a Day” project where students would quickly design a campaign and get evaluated. They asked me to be a judge and I said sure.

Then I started looking more closely at the material they sent, and it was all hosted at this website of an organization called “American Majority” and I was being asked to coordinate with American Majority staff.
americanmajority.org/campaign-in-a-…

What’s American Majority? Well, according to their website:
"The Progressive Left is set on flipping states that have been reliably ‘red’ into liberal-leaning ‘blue’ states…We fight it. Every single day...We are the nation's premier conservative training organization...”

They brag about doing this training at the Forge Leadership Summit (“creating the next generation of conservative leaders”), Liberty University (a very right-wing institution), and…@HarrisPolicy.

This training isn’t an extra-curricular activity or something. It’s a required part of a for-credit course, being taught by a right-wing operative who @UChicago is paying to do this.

By the way, they’ve since deleted it, but this event used to be publicized on the American Majority website, right next to an event at a “right-to-life” conference:
americanmajority.org/events/univers…

And though that event was deleted, they’re still bragging about the one they did back in 2018, described as the American Majority training being brought to @HarrisPolicy:
americanmajority.org/events/chicago…

So…I dunno what happened here. Did @AM_National pull a fast one? Or is this the sort of program that @UChicago and @HarrisPolicy intentionally sought to include in a for-credit course? Why did the web page get deleted?

It’s interesting that notwithstanding all the claims of left-wing propaganda on college campuses, this is what goes on. I’m doing some adjunct teaching at @HarrisPolicy but I’d never dream of trying to slip an @rbrtraining program into non-partisan coursework.

I can’t help but wonder about a partnership between a right-wing dark money organization and a university that takes hundreds of millions from Ken Griffin and has an awful track record of union-busting, something they're doing to this day with help from Trump administration.

It’s true that faculty and students at universities lean left, but as long as donors and administrators are on the right, there’s plenty of conservative influence on what goes on at universities. /thread