5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Hire The Freedom Foundation To Plan Your Next Party

Last month, the anti-worker Freedom Foundation (Opt Out Today) struggled to manufacture a celebration around the anniversary of last year’s Supreme Court Janus decision, which overturned 40 years of precedent by attacking collective bargaining rights. As with so much the Freedom Foundation tries to accomplish, things did not go as planned. Here we’ve cataloged the top gaffes and missteps from the Freedom Foundation’s sorry efforts.

1. Dude, where’s my plane?

It seems the Freedom Foundation paid a pilot (likely a sizable amount) to fly a propaganda banner over Seattle on June 27th, the one year anniversary of the Janus decision. The only problem was, confused staff seemingly couldn’t find the plane, and were forced to plead with social media to send photo proof of its existence. This was a huge error, as the only reason they pull stunts like this is to snap pictures and send to their out-of-state billionaire donors.

2. A good reporter would finish my sentences for me

Ashley Varner, the communications person for the Freedom Foundation who does not live in the Northwest, must have stayed up awfully late the night she whipped up this press release. In it, she asked reporters to “please consider incorporating the information provided below,” but failed to end multiple sentences with last words, or even punctuation. Unsurprisingly, no legitimate press ever picked up their release, so we decided to offer Varner some free proofreading and copy editing.

BONUS: Is anyone in the office good at grammar and spelling and stuff?

This isn’t the first time the Freedom Foundation has failed to use the English language properly. Most recently, their employee Aaron Withe had the misfortune of having his face stuck above a grievous spelling error. With all the millions coming in from out of state donors, you’d really think the Freedom Foundation would invest in some proofreaders.

3. The shortest canvass in the West

As part of their ruse to fool workers into dropping out of a union, the Freedom Foundation likes to print misleading signs and pretty brochures to share at work sites. Maxford Nelsen, a “policy director” with the group, did some canvassing himself on the 27th, proudly invading the lobby of the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries, in Tumwater. Within thirty minutes, the Washington State Patrol shooed Max and his camera assistant back outside and off the property. Turns out, harassing workers in state building lobbies is a no-no, a safety “policy” that Nelsen forgot to study. Historically, brief spurts of canvassing are par for the course for these folks, as it’s really just about having time to take snapshots to please their out of state donors.

4. Hashtag #Fail

For those in the know, applying a hashtag (#) before a phrase in your social media post makes it searchable across the whole platform, and in a best case scenario gets picked up and spread by others. If only the the anti-worker Freedom Foundation could be so lucky. They thought themselves very clever coming up with the term #Janiversary as a way to brand their messages online, but it fell entirely flat with practically zero circulation. Meanwhile, their big brothers at the State Policy Network came up with a different hashtag they thought was very clever, #Janusversary. The Freedom Foundation then scrambled by posting both hashtags, with similarly embarrassing results. Tweeting is hard.

5. Do we at least get a participation award?

Normally, anniversaries celebrate an accomplishment. Not so much for the Freedom Foundation this year. Tasking themselves with “defunding” labor unions and turning “blue” Washington, Oregon and California into “red” states, the Freedom Foundation has failed to do either, and things are getting worse for them. As union membership in Washington state increases, pro-worker Democrats land in office and more family friendly legislation rolls out along the entire West Coast, the Freedom Foundation must be answering a lot of hard questions from their out of state union-busting funders. “Yeah, things didn’t go so well this year, but have a piece of cake, we’re celebrating.”