Trickle-Down Extremism
Estimated Read Time: 11 minutes
In March 2022, Salon published a series of three articles that provided a deep dive into how a small Christian college in Michigan, Hillsdale College, is driving the assault on public education by right-wing extremists. This is highly recommended reading for anyone who wants to gain a comprehensive understanding and background of this movement and how it’s manifesting in communities across our country. The links to the articles are below:
There's not much to add to this thorough and very well-researched series of articles. But within them are many talking points and tactics that we repeatedly hear and see from some of the loudest and most prominent Kids First supporters in Douglas County.
Come On – Nobody Takes These People Seriously, Right?
It’s quite easy to dismiss extremist language and actions as just more noise that nobody really takes seriously. Oftentimes, it appears to be one or two outliers making an outrageous comment or suggestion. A good example are these comments from Mike Peterson’s now-defunct candidate Facebook page, Mike4DCSD, just after the November 2021 school board election. (This page, along with the candidate pages for Christy Williams, Kaylee Winegar, and Becky Myers were recently deactivated, coincidentally just after future DCSD Superintendent Erin Kane’s presence at the “training weekend” event attended by all four Kids First board members – before they were officially sworn in – became public knowledge and started attracting the wrong kind of attention.)
Two people here are advocating for book bans (and there are some blog posts about this on the DougCo Collective page that go into greater detail on this topic), but a third person – to their credit – pushes back against the idea of censorship. So OK, there are some extremists out there with pretty radical ideas, but surely, they’re not the majority, right? Nobody really takes them seriously, right? Actually, yes, they do. A disconcerting number of people take them seriously, and in some cases, feel emboldened and empowered by hateful rhetoric.
From Hillsdale College to DCSD
Many of the moves in the Hillsdale College playbook are on display right here in DCSD. You don’t have to look very far, or very hard, to find their strategies being utilized, and their talking points being parroted by members of our community. Here are just a few examples.
January 6th and Vladamir Putin
From Hillsdale College…
The article states that, “The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular. It has featured lectures describing the Jan. 6 insurrection as a hoax and Vladimir Putin as a "hero to populist conservatives around the world."
Putin is also referred to as “perhaps the pre-eminent statesman of our time,” in an article in Imprimis, a publication owned by Hillsdale College.
To DCSD…
Douglas County resident Joe Oltmann, founder of the right-wing extremist group FEC United, which has been flagged as an anti-government group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was a guest speaker in Washington, DC, on January 6th. In addition, on his podcast Conservative Daily in late February, he threw his support behind Putin and his invasion of Ukraine when he said, “I’ll stand on the side of Russia right now, 100%, twice on Sunday.” Oltmann has very well-established connections to the Kids First candidates and their deep-pocketed donors. In addition, PIN Business Network, which was founded by Oltmann, was paid a combined total of $86,100 by all 4 Kids First candidate committees in 2021 for “media expenses.” [This information was gathered from TRACER.]
Betsy DeVos and School Choice
From Hillsdale College…
We all know Betsy DeVos, of course – Secretary of Education during the Trump administration. Just before the 2020 election, she gave a speech at Hillsdale College where she once again championed her pet cause of “school choice” (aka vouchers) and stated that “government should have little role in education and parents should be able to direct taxpayer funds to private schools.” (This is a quote from the article, not from DeVos herself.)
To DCSD…
During the 2021 campaign, all four Kids First candidates repeatedly avowed that they had no interest in resurrecting the voucher program that was ruled unconstitutional by the Colorado Supreme Court and canceled in 2017 after the first Reform board was voted out. However, not even 24 hours after the polls closed on November 2, 2021, Mike Peterson breathed new life into the voucher program when he stated in an interview with the Colorado Sun that “anything is possible down the road,” when asked about vouchers.
Diversity and Equity
From Hillsdale College…
Imprimis published an essay defending Trump’s notorious kids-in-cages policy in 2018, stating that he was, “taking a stand on behalf of the nation-state and citizenship against the idea of a homogenous world-state populated by ‘universal persons,” and that, “Any honest observer must admit that diversity is a solvent that dissolves the unity and cohesiveness of a nation.”
To DCSD…
The Kids First majority issued a resolution to the DCSD Equity Policy on March 25, 2022, which diluted the Equity Policy adopted in September 2021. That policy was developed over the course of several years, with significant community involvement and input, under the guidance of highly respected Highlands Ranch High School principal Dr. Christopher Page. Worth noting is that progress reports on the equity policy were provided to the District Accountability Committee (DAC) on a regular basis, during BoE Director Christy Williams’ tenure, where she had many opportunities to voice her concerns about it. There is no indication that she ever did.
Will Johnson is the Douglas County chapter leader of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). This is a crafty acronym for a national organization that boasts, among others, former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and Christopher Rufo, architect of the anti-CRT narrative, as members of its board of advisors. This group’s Facebook page was originally named “Wokebusters of Douglas County,” so that should be considered when evaluating how much things like standing against intolerance and racism actually factor into this organization’s mission.
Johnson authored a screed, published on the Complete Colorado blog (which is owned by The Independence Institute, another far-right organization) which was an itemized list of his objections to the new social studies standards proposed by the Colorado Department of Education. He was adamant that when discussing things like the history of slavery in the U.S., it must also be pointed out that slavery is also part of the history of other cultures and civilizations too. He’s quite distressed about the notion of sixth graders being asked, “How do groups of people become marginalized?” He issues dire warnings about students being coerced into activism. Most interestingly, his grievances are all somehow related to any mention of what he refers to as the six “identity groups” of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Indigenous Peoples, Latinos, LBGTQ, and religious minorities.
Curriculum
From Hillsdale College…
In 2010, Hillsdale College rolled out its Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI), which is based on the conviction that progressives have betrayed America’s founding principles. Suggested titles in one of its teaching guides are books such as “New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Destroyed America,” which just happens to have been written by a former Hillsdale College history professor.
And guess who is the mastermind behind the 1776 Curriculum – the education tool of choice among many right-wing extremist state and local elected officials? You guessed it: Hillsdale College. It states that “America is an exceptionally good country,” and further depicts America’s founding fathers – even those who owned slaves – as closet abolitionists. It also contends that the activists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – who brought attention to things like sweatshops and child labor – were anti-American. And guess what? According to the 1776 Curriculum, systemic racism was vanquished by the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
[We at DougCo Collective believe that loving one’s country includes teaching its history honestly, and acknowledging the good, the bad, and the opportunities to continue making it better for everyone.]
To DCSD…
Ascent Classical Academy of Douglas County is listed on the Hillsdale College website as a Hillsdale College Member School. It is worth noting that Ascent is no longer part of DCSD after it chose to arm its teachers and staff, breaking DCSD policy, and it is now chartered by the state.
[We at DougCo Collective believe that charter schools, when implemented strategically and effectively, provide alternatives for DCSD students to ensure a quality education that meets their needs.]
Supersized Campaign Contributions
From Hillsdale College…
Although not specifically nor directly related to Hillsdale College, a charter school in Orange County, California, the Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA), another school that has adopted the BCSI curriculum, had its petition approved in 2019. It was a contentious fight, and their petition was approved by four conservative members of the seven-member board who received virtually their entire campaign budget from a PAC affiliated with the California Charter Schools Association. The three minority members opposed the petition, and among their objections were that the school’s founders were not professional educators and had no relevant teaching experience.
In attendance at that combative board meeting was a retired federal judge who pointed out the glaring conflicts of interest burdening the four majority board members. “If you ask anybody, anywhere, which way you might lean if you get almost 100 percent of your money from one donor and the donor is a party to a decision you’re going to make, it’s not rocket science,” she said.
To DCSD…
This sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? The Kids First candidates collectively received more than $400,000 in campaign contributions, with over 75% of those donations made by fewer than 10 individuals or families. And DCSD’s new superintendent Erin Kane has no background as an educator or experience in a classroom.
Demonizing Teachers and Teachers’ Unions
From Hillsdale College…
The OCCA founders (discussed in the section above) brought more than 100 supporters to the meeting where the school’s petition was approved, and the opposition – comprised mostly of members of the teachers’ union – was reliably labeled as “antifa” by the right-wing extremist publication Epoch Times.
Addressing the overall Hillsdale strategy, a school board member in Florida stated, “They get to kill the teachers’ union – that one can’t be stressed enough.”
To DCSD…
The entire Kids First majority has relentlessly attacked and excoriated Douglas County Federation (DCF), the DCSD teachers’ union, since being elected to the Board of Education. Kaylee Winegar told Fox News that “We see the union as the bullies, as the power grabbers,” on February 7, 2022. Mike Peterson weirdly and lasciviously referred to the teachers’ union as a self-licking ice cream cone at a Lincoln Club of Colorado meeting on March 30, 2022, where he was the featured guest speaker. [A self-licking ice cream cone is defined as “a self-perpetuating system that has no other purpose than to sustain itself” But given Peterson’s sanctimonious dismay during that same event when he alleged that inappropriate sexual material was ‘creeping’ into classrooms, it was an extremely odd juxtaposition of phrasing.]
And the vilifying of teachers’ unions – and teachers themselves – have played out across Douglas County in more and more extreme and distressing ways in recent months. Teachers have been doxxed by parents who don’t approve of them, and someone submitted a CORA request [that was later rescinded] for the names of the nearly 1,500 teachers who took a sick day on February 3, 2022, the day of the collective action organized to protest the unethical and illegal firing of former DCSD Superintendent Corey Wise. And that’s just two examples.
Peterson and his fellow Kids First board member colleagues don’t seem to understand that the teachers’ union is overwhelmingly composed of… teachers. So, disparaging the teachers’ union as an evil force that must be vanquished by any means necessary in one breath and then singing the praises of teachers themselves in the next, as they have done on many occasions, suggests that there is some level of cognitive dissonance at work.
A Concerted and Coordinated Effort
One similarity in these tactics and strategies is a coincidence. Two will maybe raise an eyebrow. But more than that is a pattern, and evidence of a sinister, widespread, and very well-funded effort to destabilize, dismantle, and defund the public education system. This is real, this is happening, and it has infiltrated our community and our school district.