EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Romy Carver for doing some research and shedding some light on the sources of the postcards and flyers appearing in our mailboxes. There are a lot of candidates on the ballot, and voters need to do some research. Learn about the candidates and what they support. There is the Pioneer’s Voter’s Guide and see the link below for the upcoming MooVoter online candidate forums.
By Romy Carver
Anyone get one of these election flyers in the mail recently? I suspect many rural Oregonians did, and based on the formatting, only the towns and names of the candidates were changed.
The gist of the flyers is that Oregon schools are basically corrupting the youth, and adopting an ideology of “early sexual experimentation,” and uses a collage of sensational and out of context headlines to support that theory.
If you talk to as many Tillamook School District staff and students as I have, you know that’s ridiculous. They also accuse our school districts of withholding “vital mental and physical health information from parents.”
Obviously there are state laws governing the schools and they have to follow them, so that doesn’t really hold water with me. They proclaim that “the last line of defense is local school boards.”
Actually that’s a lie because local school boards must also follow state laws, a lesson many school boards learned during COVID, when they decided to defy state masking mandates and the Oregon Department of Education.
I had to wonder who was behind this flyer full of propaganda, so I did a little digging and what I found might interest you:
The organizations that endorse these candidates have wholesome, respectful sounding names, such as the Parents Education Association, Oregon Family Council, Oregon Small Business Association, etc. Sounds like down home rural people like us, right?
Wrong.
I went to the Oregon Secretary of State website and looked these organizations up in OreStar. Every one of them is a Political Action Committee and they are mostly based out of the Portland Metro area and run by wealthy political operatives.
The main contact organization on the flyer, Oregon Liberty Alliance, is run by a guy named Jack Louman, who also runs the Oregon Family Council.
It’s also run by Tim Nashif, a pastor of a Portland mega church called MannaHouse Church (formerly City Bible Church). He is president of Gateway Communications and Hoffman Research Group. The Oregon Family Council describes itself as a “Christian service organization that provides registration, voter information, and education to churches and Christians throughout the state of Oregon.” It also describes itself as a charitable organization, but I’m having a very difficult time finding where they spend their money and who they help. If they are using churches to spread their political message, then those churches should lose their tax exemption for violating the law that governs that.
There was one Rainier woman whose name was affiliated with four of these PACs and she is a Republican Political Committee Compliance Consultant. Nothing folksier than that.
As for the Oregon Anti Crime Alliance, which was founded by Kevin Mannix, they weren’t even registered with the state. I went to their website and their most recent post was in 2018. Their contact page has a non working form. They don’t even seem to exist. Is it even legal to list them as an endorser?
The Parents Education Association’s stated nature of their PAC on the state’s website is “to articulate a biblical perspective in our support or opposition of ballot measures and candidates.” Nothing about parents or education. And it’s disturbing that they are trying to influence school board elections in public schools in defiance of the constitutional separation of church and state. In fact, it appears their primary goal is to privatize schools. It shows their director in OreStar as Dennis Tuuri, a retired Director of Advance Liberty Site. He founded Parents Education Association and supposedly changed the name to Advance Liberty Site, but the other name probably sounded better on the flyer.
This is only part of what I found, but it was fascinating how about a dozen people created these organizations (Advance Liberty Site apparently rakes in $1-5 million annually) that overlap and are being used to manipulate rural voters.
I think it’s disgusting that they think rural voters are gullible and dumb. I looked up every one of the “organizations” on this flyer and found nothing but shadiness and deep pockets. They apparently use this money to make up lies to get voters upset about things that aren’t actually happening and they ought to be ashamed.
Just thought you should know they’re trying to play you. Go talk to actual school district staff for the truth. And don’t take my word. Go look them up for yourself.
