No More Culture Wars? The NJEA Has Stopped Funding Mendacious Michael Gottesman’s NJPEC: Parents Are Now the NJEA’s “Partners.” But Gottesman Keeps Up His Mendacity.

We’re hoping that this is one of the last times we ever comment on Mendacious Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman. The progressive zealot and founder of the (now formerly) NJEA-funded New Jersey Public Education Coalition (NJPEC) looks like he’s on his own now after the NJEA shut down Education Truth Project (ETP), its dark-money intermediary for funding NJPEC. Apparently the NJEA has decided that fighting parents in school board elections was not a winning cause and now claims parents as “partners” (see below). Perhaps if there are no culture wars to be fought against parents, the NJEA has no need for the scorched-earth tactics of Gottesman. Meanwhile, Gottesman has been reduced to soliciting paid subscribers on Substack. But in his recent interactions with Sunlight, he’s still the same Mendacious Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman.

More mendacity from Gottesman. But before we can wave goodbye to Gottesman, we must highlight more of his habitual mendacity. Sunlight challenged Gottesman to refute two (of many more) examples of his mendacity: 1) his claim to the Star-Ledger that “hundreds of millions of dollars” were flowing to New Jersey parents groups; and 2) his claim in NJEdReport that neither NJPEC nor ETP were NJEA-funded. We went to his Substack page to challenge him directly in the Comments section and his response was typically mendacious.

Gottesman’s “Hundreds of Millions” excuse doesn’t pass the smell test. As for the “hundreds of millions” claim, Gottesman responded in the Comments section that he was “misquoted” by the reporters. Here’s the exact quote from the Star-Ledger:

“The other side has hundreds of millions of dollars being donated to them in the state of New Jersey,” [Gottesman] said, adding that his organization [NJPEC], a group of educators and citizens seeking to protect public schools from what they consider right-wing extremism, could never raise that kind of money on their own.

“We’ve been able to somewhat level the playing field by engaging people in the conversation, and educating them, and getting them to collaborate, but when you have millions of dollars on the other side, pushing out to media and getting people on national TV shows, there’s a limit to what you can do without the necessary funding,” Gottesman said. [Emphasis added.]

Both those bolded statements are false. So was Gottesman misquoted twice? And if so, why did he not demand that the reporters correct the story? They do that all the time. Instead, he left his name publicly attached to these false statements for years. It’s certainly plausible he did that deliberately because wanted the media and public to (falsely) believe that New Jersey parents groups were being funded by millions — even hundreds of millions — from national conservative organizations. Gottesman’s excuse doesn’t pass the smell test.

Gottesman’s carefully crafted excuse for denying NJEA funding for ETP/NJPEC. As for the NJEA’s funding, Gottesman claimed to us that when NJPEC started up in September 2022, ETP’s founder, Matt Kazmierczak, who ran ETP out of his house, “funded the creation of our website out of his pocket.” Hmmm. Count us skeptical. But even if it’s true, ETP’s May 2022 ELEC filing anticipated funding of $100,000 (from unnamed sources) over the next year, ETP was in fact paid $105,000 by the NJEA, and Kazmierczak was almost certainly reimbursed. So it really was NJEA money all along. Gottesman’s carefully-crafted excuse doesn’t alter that truth, it just allowed Gottesman to conveniently claim in NJEdReport in June 2022 that neither NJPEC nor ETP were funded by the NJEA (at the time). Because this was all NJEA dark money, only Gottesman and Kazmierczak can know what really happened. We’re supposed to take the habitually mendacious Gottesman’s word for it.

Gottesman deliberately let his false statement stand uncorrected for years. And then there’s the fact that by 2023, Gottesman certainly knew that ETP was being funded by the NJEA because Sunlight uncovered the truth and went public with it. Even if we accept Gottesman’s excuse, he never corrected what he knew had become a false statement. So while Sunlight was loudly proclaiming that NJPEC was NJEA-funded, Gottesman’s unequivocal denial remained his only public statement on the subject for several years. As a result, the media never associated NJPEC with the NJEA and the general public never learned the truth about the connection — no doubt just as Gottesman and the NJEA intended with their dark-money scheme. To use Gottesman’s own definition of “mendacious,” Gottesman was “deliberately untruthful.” In a word, mendacious. Again.

At least Gottesman has finally been forced to admit that NJPEC was NJEA-funded. At least Gottesman has been forced to admit tacitly — but of course not forthrightly — that NJPEC was in fact funded by the NJEA. If it weren’t true, he would have denied it outright rather than put forth his carefully-crafted excuse. Sunlight was right all along.

He will always be Mendacious Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman. A final comment on the mendacious Gottesman. Sunlight wrote this entire refutation of Gottesman’s excuses in the Substack Comments section but he did not publish it, leaving his own comment as the final (mendacious) word. He also blocked Sunlight from his X page. That’s Gottesman in a nutshell: he’ll suppress the truth if it suits him. That’s why he’ll always be Mendacious Michael “Hundreds of Millions” Gottesman.