MSNBC trying to link Koch brothers to school board elections through AFP support to Wake CARES

Do 2007 donations from the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity to Wake CARES during the mandatory year-round lawsuit constitute grounds for linking the conservative Koch brothers to the 2009 Wake County school board elections?

That's how the left-wing cable news network MSNBC is trying to tie the Koch brothers to the new school board majority that ended the diversity policy. It was part of a segment on Wake County schools titled "Repealing the 20th Century" that aired Thursday night on MSNBC's "The Last Word" show.

"Now there are multiple reports directly or indirectly linking the Koch brothers — those mysterious right-wing billionaires behind the Astroturf-group Americans for Prosperity — to the Republican school board members who are actively pushing to resegregate Wake County schools," said Melissa Harris-Perry, the show's guest host. "To be fair, it's not entirely clear just how much money the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity put behind the candidates in 2009."

The reports she highlights on screen are articles from a pair of liberal web sites — the Huffington Post and Mother Jones.

Then Harris-Perry brings up AFP's ties to Wake CARES to say that AFP is "speaking out of both sides of its mouth" when it says it didn't spend a dime during the 2009 school board races.

First, Harris-Perry says that all the Republican candidates elected in 2009 were endorsed by Wake CARES.

Harris-Perry then points to this 2008 blog post from Dallas Woodhouse, the state director of AFP, in which he writes that "Americans for Prosperity is on record as supporting the parents of WakeCARES, through significant financial contributions as well as other support."

Harris-Perry then brings up a 2011 Newsweek article in which Woodhouse is quoted as saying AFP did only voter education and volunteer work on the school-board campaign.

"Suffice it to say, the waters are murky," Harris-Perry says. "But a national group that supposedly has states rights libertarian ideals is meddling in a school board and that school board's district that was once a national example of how diversity and integration made every student better and it's now being hauled back to a pre-civil rights era status."

Woodhouse, in an interview today, said they only gave money to Wake CARES in 2007 to help with the legal fees for the lawsuit, not for any campaign work the group may have done in 2009.

Woodhouse quipped how he's glad AFP's donation to Wake CARES' legal costs helped thousands of low-income students to opt out, temporarily at least, from mandatory year-round school assignments.

As you guys may recall, the school system lost at the trial level to Wake CARES and wound up having to get parents to opt in to assignments at year-round schools. Low-income families accounted for a majority of those opting out. After winning at the appellate level, the old board changed it to an opt-out policy.

Wake CARES didn't play as much of a role in 2009 compared to the Wake Schools Community Alliance, which was acting as an umbrella group for several organizations.

As for the Newsweek article, Woodhouse says the quote in context was about the “long campaign” against school board policy, not the electoral campaigns of 2009.

Woodhouse also charges that MSNBC has not requested comment from his office or the national office of AFP, either for Thursday's segment or the one Monday on "The Ed Show" in which Robert Greenwald is interviewed about his new film.

“It is important to note that MSNBC and the film producers are now making arguments not made in the discredited film," Woodhouse said.

Heading back to Thursday's segment, Harris-Perry makes clear her personal views saying that as a former North Carolinian she was "proud to be from the state" that had voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008. She charged that "many Tea Party-backed North Carolina Republicans who came into office in 2009 have swiftly and viciously fought against the state's hard-won successes."

Harris-Perry closes the segment in what's arguably a national campaign pitch for Wake's Democratic school board candidates by saying the "end game in Wake County" is "to be decided."

"So in order to take back the majority, Democrats are going to have to win all five of those seats in the next election," Harris-Perry says. "That's an uphill battle, and it's still unclear exactly who, and more to the point whose money, will be trying to tilt the vote in one way or another in an attempt to repeal the 20th Century."

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