'Real Time' guest says school board meetings got crazy because of the big money funding privatization

An expert on the far-right explained the big money behind the chaotic scenes at school board meetings across America.

The host interviewed Nancy MacLean, a distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University. MacLean is the author of the book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.

After David Leonhardt of The New York Times discussed how calling people pedophiles makes public policy more difficult, MacLean offered her analysis.

"I'd like to add a little larger context here too, which is that — yes, there are these individual issues to be discussed and worked out, we could do in nice, sane school boards, as some things used to be," she said.

"But as someone who studies — a historian who studies — the radical right, I have a lot of trouble taking the discussion of what's been going on and the attacks on school boards over the last year out of the context of the radical, donor-funded right that has been funding these parents groups, that's been driving the attacks on school boards, that sees in parents' anxiety after covid and in the current moment as something they can leverage to get turnout in the 2022 midterms and also to privatize schools," she says.

"And Laura Ingraham has said it on Fox News, why you send your kids to public schools, that's where they're groomed for these things," she said. "It all sort of comes together and if you start to follow the money, you start to see a much larger agenda that isn't just about parents being concerned about their kids and their kids' classes."