Republican Plan to Make TN Centralized Nuclear Waste Dump for U.S.

TN’s governor, Bill Lee, approved a proposal on March 26 of this year that offered a detailed plan for making Tennessee the main U.S  “campus” for a nuclear “life cycle innovation center,” i.e., a “one-stop shop” for nuclear waste storage. 

Lee and his cronies sent the proposal to Trump's boys at the Department of Energy in hopes of landing another massive federal handout—the kind of federal welfare payment that “small government” Tennessee Republicans have come to depend on to keep the state functioning at least minimally.

. . . the State intends to transform the nuclear lifecycle by embracing fuel reprocessing and recycling as well as diverting critical materials and isotopes into other health, defense, and industrial uses. This substantially reduces the amount of material to be stored and reshapes the country’s needs for interim and long-term materials management solutions. The State remains interested in identifying and assessing candidate sites for interim storage and long-term storage of nuclear materials. Interim storage is already underway in Tennessee at current nuclear power generation sites, and the State is exploring innovative methods to expanding storage capacity with federal and private partners. The State has also identified next steps for site assessment and testing to identify a long-term geologic repository option in Tennessee.

. . . . Selection of Tennessee as a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus will allow the State to hasten planned development in this sector and benefit DOE and the country through establishment of a comprehensive, one-stop-shop for nuclear lifecycle management and reindustrialization.

With Bill Lee known nationally as one of Trump’s most loyal sycophants, this week Tennessee was named as one of the five finalists to be rewarded with fed dollars to become the research center and central depository for U.S. nuclear waste.  

More on the story from WKRN.

Trump Stooge, Gov. Bill Lee, Calls Special Session to Further Disenfranchise Tennesseans

Four in ten Tennesseans are Democrats, most of them concentrated in Nashville and Memphis.  Even so, Democrats controlled only two of the nine House seats in 2020, when Nashville’s electoral district was further gerrymandered to disenfranchise Nashville Democrats and deliver to the Gangster-in-Chief another House stooge.

That left one Congressional seat held by Dems in Memphis, where the African-American population is over 50 percent. 

With the recent evisceration of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Fascists Court, the Don has given his underling, Gov. Bill Lee, orders to call a special legislative session to chop up the Memphis electoral district before the Fall 2026 election in a desperate effort to steal the remaining House seat.  

If democrats and Democrats don’t mobilize now, this will mean no representation for 40 percent of Tennesseans in the U.S. House of Representatives. 

TN School Vouchers Are about Welfare for the Wealthy

CLEMMONS: “Please be aware — They’re trying to hide this data.” @jrclemmons.bsky.social calls out Republicans for killing McKenzie’s bill to require @GovBillLee to tell us how many voucher kids were already in private schools aka “WELFARE FOR THE WEALTHY” And now they want to double it

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) February 12, 2026 at 4:53 PM

TN Parents File Lawsuit to Stop Bill Lee’s School Voucher Privatization Plan

Lawsuit Alleges Tennessee's School Voucher Program is Unconstitutional nashvillebanner.com/2025/11/21/t...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) November 21, 2025 at 8:06 AM

Gov. Bill Lee: Punishing Poor Children and Lying About It

This year Tennessee and Indiana joined 13 other Trump Party states to opt out of a federal summer program to help feed schoolchildren whose parents need the help. Instead of telling the truth about his decision to shortchange children in need, Tennessee’s bible-waving governor, Bill Lee, chose to deny the facts.  From Truthout:

. . . In a statement provided to NBC News, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee described the Summer EBT [Electronic Benefit Transfer] program as a pandemic-era program, when in fact it grew out of a USDA pilot program launched in 2011. The USDA’s evaluation found the money reduced food insecurity among American children by a fifth. Tennessee even participated in it in its final year in 2018. 

Lee also said the program was “mostly duplicative” because other programs, like the Summer Food Service Program, already existed. That program typically serves free meals to kids at specific sites, but only about one in six eligible children receive meals through it. Couch, for example, works from midday until as late as 11 p.m. on some nights, leaving no time to take her children there. 

The existing programs “are not enough to serve the families who need support during the summertime,” said Signe Anderson, senior director of nutrition advocacy at the legal nonprofit Tennessee Justice Center. Some Tennessee counties don’t have any summer meal programs; those that do don’t always operate every day and may open in the middle of a work day. Less than 65,000 Tennessee children participated in summer lunch programs in 2023, compared to the 700,000 children served by Summer EBT last year.

Janice Cleveland’s 17-year-old granddaughter is one of the 700,000 served last year who now isn’t receiving any food assistance. Last summer, Cleveland, who gets by on disability insurance and Social Security income, was able to pay her bills and have enough to feed her granddaughter thanks to Summer EBT. But this year she was confused when the benefits didn’t show up. She called the number on the back of her card and was told her state wasn’t offering the program. “That was a big blow,” she said, adding that she hasn’t been able to afford soap and other necessities. She is unable to take advantage of the pre-selected food at summer meal sites given that she’s diabetic and has a sensitive stomach and has to be very careful about what she eats. 

Stories of families losing access to food are widespread. “We’ve heard from parents who haven’t been able to pay [their] bills,” Anderson said. “We often hear from parents who skip meals so their kids can eat during the summer time.”

Instead of participating in Summer EBT, Tennessee created its own program to send one-time $120 payments to 25,000 students in just 15 counties at a cost of $3 million. Running Summer EBT statewide, officials estimated, would have cost about $4 million, though that bill could have been smaller if the state had applied for a $1.1 million federal grant to cover administrative costs. 

“The economics of it doesn’t make sense when the state could have reached 700,000 kids across the state,” Anderson said. “It feels almost cruel to do something so limited when you know you could be serving so many more kids.”

Bill Lee Sits on $2 Billion Rainy Day Fund As Children Lose Summer Food Support

Lee's Legacy: Leaving More Kids Behind by Andy Spears

Lee lets hunger win to prove a political point

Read on Substack

Billionaires’ 2025 Plan to Bankrupt TN Schools, Part 1: From Amway to Bill Lee’s Way

Betsy Devos and her family amassed their billions by exploiting untold numbers of people around the globe with delusional schemes of becoming rich by buying in to the Devos family’s de facto Amway pyramid scheme. With promises of wealth and financial independence spouted during capitalist cult revival rallies, generations of the gullible and desperate have fallen prey to the siren song sung by agents of the corrupt, immoral, and unethical Devos clan and their army of recruiters and marketers. (Check out this NBC segment of Dateline here, or read the transcript here.)

Hoping to escape its international reputation as a corporate bloodsucker based on recruiting, exploiting, and discarding its distributors, Amway is now rebranded as Quixtar.  

Co-founded in 1959 by Richard Devos,  the enormously profitable Amway scam grew alongside the Devos patriarch’s extremist conservative political commitments and the family’s white nationalist religious fundamentalism.  Richard Devos was instrumental in founding and financially supporting the Council for National Policy (CNP), an ultra-right  John Birch Society spin-off that sought to “remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders” (Dallek, 2022). DeVos served as CNP's President from 1986-88 and 1990-93.

For the Devos clan, “pro-moral” translates to mean Christian nationalist.  As the school voucher movement failed to justify its existence on sound policy or empirical grounds, libertarian and fascist oligarchs like the Kochs and the Mercers turned to white Christian nationalists like the Devoses to sell their educationally-bankrupt and racist school voucher privatization scheme. After all, the Devos empire was built on a foundation of zealous propaganda, and these were exactly the skills needed to sell a voucher scheme that had been demonstrated inferior to public schools in terms of educational value. 

And so Betsy Devos was the “chosen one” for the Lout’s first-term Education Secretary, not because of any educational knowledge she had but, rather, for her already well-established and zealous connections to a right-wing infrastructure built to destroy public education, specifically because of public education's non-sectarian, humane, and democratic foundations.  Betsy’s leadership and support of voucher marketing organizations like American Federation for Children and Alliance for School Choice placed her front and center as the mouthpiece, albeit an ignorant one, for the latest fascist scheme to destroy public schools.

But the fascist oligarchs needed something else to sell increasingly unpopular school voucher schemes besides a theocratic billionaire zealot intent upon establishing her version of a white heaven on Earth. They needed willing politicians, either guided by greed, ignorance, and/or religious zealotry. 

Enter Tennessee Governor Bill Lee.  

Bill Lee Loses School Voucher Battle, Again

Two days after a stunning repudiation of the Governor by production workers who voted 3-1 for unionization at the VW plant in Chattanooga, Bill Lee has surrendered once again to the reality that parents, school boards, teachers, and students do not want taxpayer money going to fund private schools, de-fund public schools, breach the separation of church and state, and rebuild the apartheid system of education in Tennessee.

It seems that Lee's failure this year could be due to his plan to keep the voucher scheme details secret, even from the Republican legislature, until the last minute, thus avoiding scrutiny from the public.  With the Senate and the House in the dark about Lee's Christian Nationalist scheme, each chamber moved forward with its own version of school coupons, thus making it impossible for all parties to come together at the last minute to shove through the Koch Bro scheme:

While Lee announced his vision for the program in November, he delayed releasing specific details on the plan until well into 2024. By that time, House and Senate Republicans had devised vastly different versions of the plan, and each chamber appeared entrenched in their positions.

So its back to the heifer barn for Bill Lee, where he will stand by for new voucher plans to be devised by his brain trust at Backwards U.

VW Workers in TN to Governor Bill Lee: Suck It

Updated April 21, 2024

In 2014 when Volkswagen plant workers in Chattanooga held their first vote on joining the UAW, Senator Bob Corker (R) and Gov. Bill Haslam stuck their sharp dirty noses into workers' business ahead of the vote.  That vote failed.

Then in 2019 during the lead-up to a second vote, Gov. Bill Lee actively campaigned for international corporate interests and against the interests of workers in his own state.  Workers lost that vote by 57 ballots.  

So it was nothing new this month when Lee once against chose the side of the corporate elite against the workers of Tennessee.  On April 8, he publicly warned that a vote to join the UAW would be "a big mistake." This time, however, workers ignored the Republican fearmongering and voted in the best economic interests of their families. 

 A preliminary tally released by the company showed workers favored union representation by a count of 2,628 to 985, a nearly 3-1 margin. The landslide win gives the union a crucial toehold in the anti-union South.

And so VW Chattanooga becomes the first auto plant in the South to unionize by election since the 1940s. 

Congratulations, workers!

Bill Lee Breaks Law To Appoint Perjurer, Lizzette Reynolds

Even though Tennessee's unqualified Education Commissioner collects over $21,000 per month to wreck the State's public schools with Bill Lee's proposed school voucher scheme, she, nonethless, chose to lie on an official state document about her length of service in order to receive a tuition waiver from UT Martin, where she is now enrolled in order to gain certification as a teacher.  Reynolds became a state employee on July 1, 2023, and on August 14 she swore that she had been a state employee for six months.

Reynolds perjured herself a second time when she submitted another of the same form in November, 2023.

You see, Bill Lee made history by being the first Tennessee governor ignore and, thus, break state law by appointing someone as education commission who has no teaching experience, school admin experience, and who lacks certification in either:

According to the century-old law, the education commissioner “shall be a person of literary and scientific attainments and of skill and experience in school administration,” and “qualified to teach in the school of the highest standing over which the commissioner has authority.”

Part 2: TN Voucher "Plan" Features Big Government with No Fiscal or Program Accountability

As promised in Part 1 yesterday, Gov. Bill Lee announced his latest planned school voucher scam in Nashville.  Alongside him was fellow unholy-rolling governor, Sarah H. Sanders of Arkansas infamy. 

Today I would like to present some research findings that clearly show the negative effects of school voucher programs on student achievement and student well-being. We know that Bill Lee and his Tennessee Taliban legislative supermajority don't, or can't, read research, but I am hoping that someone will translate the findings into something they might understand: Them voucher thangs ain't workin'.

Some clips are below from Brookings, which includes links to the research studies, themselves:

Part of the push for ESA vouchers comes from the lingering frustration over the pandemic-era school closures and concern over learning loss as measured by standardized tests. But on that question, the last decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years. Those results were published across top journals for empirical public and education policy. Similar results in Indiana found impacts closer to -0.15 standard deviations. To put these negative impacts in perspective: Current estimates of COVID-19’s impact on academic trajectories hover around -0.25 standard deviations.

 Another link, with Executive Summary below:

Executive Summary
Vouchers to pay for students to attend private schools continue to command public attention. The current administration has proposed vouchers in its budget, and more than half of states are operating or have proposed voucher programs. Four recent rigorous studies—in the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio—used different research designs and reached the same result: on average, students that use vouchers to attend private schools do less well on tests than similar students that do not attend private schools. The Louisiana and Indiana studies offer some hints that negative effects may diminish over time. Whether effects ever will become positive is unclear. Test scores are not the only education outcome and some observers have downplayed them, citing older evidence that voucher programs increase high school graduation and college-going. We lack evidence that the current generation of voucher programs will yield these longer-term outcomes. We also lack evidence of how public schools and private schools differ in their instructional and teaching strategies that would explain negative effects on test scores. Both questions should be high on the research agenda.

From Time Magazine, with a clip below:

And it’s not just the academic results that call into question any rhetoric around opportunities created by vouchers. Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.

Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs. Special education children tend to need more resources than vouchers provide, which can be a problem in public schools too. But public schools are at least obliged under federal law to enroll and assist special needs children—something private schools can and do avoid.

When we look at all the challenges to accessing education with these programs it’s clear that actually winning admission to a particular private school is not about parental school choice. It’s the school’s choice.

 

TN Voucher "Plan" Features Big Government with No Fiscal or Program Accountability

Each of ruby red states in the new Old Confederacy has its own niche attraction for Westerners and Northerners looking to move to a fascist-friendly community where narrowness of thought is highly valued if it happens to run in the same rut as the white male protestant power structure.  While all of the red states offer haven for white nationalists, anti-intellectuals, and conspiracy theorists, Florida is particularly attractive to those angry anti-vaxxers and anti-wokesters, while states like Tennessee and Arkansas draw thousands of Christian nationalist transplants each year who would be happy to jettison Constitutional guarantees against the establishment of a state religion. And as long anti-social media remains unhindered from expanding financial empires based the perpetuation of ignorance, divisiveness, and toxic myth, then the state of the Union will continue to suffer, even as disunion grows like cancer.

As Tennessee's governor, Bill Lee, seeks to further promote immigration of white Christians, a top governmental priority is the provision of state funds for parents to enroll their children in religious schools or other private schools at public expense. And so today, Lee will announce a proposed new program that will offer 20,000 parents next year a school voucher worth about $7,000 for tuition, books, uniforms, etc. In 2025-26, Lee plans to include all of 1 million students in Tennessee who are now eligible for free public schools, "regardless of income or previous school enrollment."

Now when we do a little back of the envelope math, you can see that the cost during the first year is going to run the State $140,000,000 on top of the normal allocation for public schools, including transportation, lunches, construction, maintenance, libraries, salaries, etc. 

Let's assume, after Year One, that 10 percent of the State's school-age parents decide to choose vouchers over public schools, where their kids now have athletic teams, theater, music, special ed, technical education--most of which will go bye-bye when their children enroll in the old Pizza Hut at the strip mall that has been turned into the Bill Lee Christian Nationalist Elementary School of Lee (Robert E.) County.

It's easy to see that the cost would be over the moon--$700,000,000 every year for 10 percent of TN's school children. That would be almost 15 percent of TN's contribution to the annual K-12 budget. All the while, the State must continue to fund the public schools that are not going away just because they lose 10 percent of the student body.  And it will lose most of the federal funding for the 100,000 students who end up in private schools.

What new taxes will be imposed on Tennesseans to pay for this fantasy thought disorder? 

And what about curriculum and standards?  

What about teacher qualifications?

Is Bill Lee prepared to put a resource officer in each of the Christian madrassas that he plans to open, just like in the public schools? 

Does Bill Lee have a plan to make sure children gain the necessary academic, social, and life skills to succeed at work and/or to go to college? 

Where's the accountability? Where is Bill Lee's and the Republican Supermajority's accountability?

It is way past time for the teacher unions, parents, grandparents, and other concerned citizens to fight, fight, fight the further erosion of another of our cherished institutions: public schools.  Let me know if you are engaged in an organized effort or would like to get involved: 

james.horn@cambridgecollege.edu

 

 

Jeb Bush and Reed Hastings' New TN Commissioner of Education

Though Gov. Bill Lee knows much more about welding and breeding cows than he does about governance, education, health care, etc., he has a coonhound's keen sense for picking up and following political money trails.  And having been seriously stung during his recent nosing around the "Christian" nationalists' hornet's nest at Hillsdale College, Lee is once again back on the main track to the money tree.  Having found that the MAGA trail ended at the edge of the cliff, it's obvious that Lee hopes to find a new big-dog enclosure to call home once this particular money hunt is concluded.

It's not surprising to see Bill Lee's that new Education Commissioner, Lizzette Gonzalez Reynolds, was most recently serving as a VP on the Board of ExcelinEd, a corporate education political sludge tank in Florida where failed corporate education reform misleaders and their retired political tools go to be rehabbed and promoted all over again for a new generation. ExcelinEd luminaries include Mr. McChoakumchild himself, Joel Klein, along with Jeb Bush, Chris Cerf, Eric Cantor, etc.

As you would expect, Ms. Reynolds (or is that Mrs. Reynolds?) is dedicated to corporate welfare charter schools, religious indoctrination schools paid for with public vouchers, testing, grade retention, and other corporate reform tools with proven records of demoralizing, humiliating, and oppressing the poor, brown, and black.

Ms. Reynolds has a bachelor's degree in PoliSci and has recently completed a four-year program at the Pahara Institute, where founder, Kim Smith (of New Schools Venture Fund Fame), and Reed Hastings (Netflix billionaire and education oppressor) prepare a new generation of misleaders schooled in the black arts of exploiting democratic institutions to perpetuate inequality, white privilege, and the unrestrained greed of American capitalism.

So be ready for the same old ed reform clown car, with more stale air pumped into its flat tires, along with new make-up and wardrobe for the same old clowns.  Will Margaret Spellings be the last one to climb out of the back seat and will she have named her own replacement??

TN's Law to Ban Drag Shows Gets Dragged by Trump Judge

To show you how fully authoritarian the Tennessee Taliban (once known as the TN General Assembly) has become, the outrageous bill that Bill Lee couldn't wait to sign has been put on hold by a federal court intervention initiated by a Donald Trump judicial appointee. 

Judge Thomas Parker had to remind TN's bible-thumping, gun-slinging legislative fascists that the First Amendment was not meant to apply to just white authoritarian males parading their toxic masculinity but also to other white males less enamored by narrow theocratic rule that bans and banishes those think and act outside puritanical constraints.  

Trump-appointed judge, Thomas Parker concluded:

“If Tennessee wishes to exercise its police power in restricting speech it considers obscene, it must do so within the constraints and framework of the United States Constitution. The Court finds that, as it stands, the record here suggests that when the legislature passed this Statute, it missed the mark. Ultimately, the Statute’s broad language clashes with the First Amendment’s tight constraints . . . "

How to Make Sure Christian Nationalist Charter Schools Stay Out of Your State

For now, Larry Arnn and the Christo-fascists of Hillsdale College have retreated from Tennessee after local citizens in three different counties showed up to say "we don't want your Bircher propaganda schools here."

The other reason for the hasty retreat has to do the enduring scrutiny of Governor Bill Lee's central role in plans to turn over taxpayer funds to establish and maintain the re-education schools intended to radicalize the next generation of anti-democratic authoritarians at public expense.

But you can bet that Hellsdale will be back knocking on Nashville's door after the election if the hereford-pestering Bill Lee is re-elected as governor of the state.  So how do you keep the pseudo scholar at Hillsdale out of the state?  

Get to work electing a decent man, Dr. Jason Martin, who supports public funds for public schools, citizens' rights to make their own health care decisions, expanding health and dental care to those who now qualify for Medicaid funds that are blocked by TN Trumpists, and the renewal of American democracy to include everyone, regardless of disability, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or religion.

Why White Nationalist, Larry Arnn, Says Professional Teachers Are the "Dumbest"

In 2011 the neo-conservative website, Human Events, published its list of the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.  Coming in at #5, right between The Kinsey Report and Das Kapital, was Democracy and Education by John Dewey.  While it may be obvious why wealthy white supremacists would flag Marx and Kinsey, why John Dewey, you may ask.  

The giveaway is in the title, of course, because Dewey's posited that the American democratic aspirations made explicit in the Bill of Rights and other founding documents might be achieved only through the practice of democratic living, which would include, of course, democratic schooling. 

Rather than modeling an embryonic form of democratic living, as Dewey would have schools do, elite paternalists like Arnn want schools to promote an extreme conservative mash-up of protestantism, capitalism, and jingoistic patriotism.  And since 2011, conservatism has become even more narrow, more strident, and more hostile to public institutions that promote democracy.  

The conservative movement has known for decades that the inevitable browning of America and the continued secularization of the Western world would eventually endanger America's 400-year rule by white protestant male elites, and so it comes as no surprise to see Arnn's employer, Hillsdale College, pushing hard to 1) seed its right wing corporate charter schools in as many parts of the country as possible, and 2) attack, diminish, and smear the concept and practice of public education whenever possible.

Before coming to Hillsdale College as President, Arnn spent 15 years as President of the Claremont Institute (1985-2000), which is the intellectual home of John Eastman, who most recently provided the "legal" argument upon which the 2001 Trump insurrection was based. Today Hillsdale serves as a training ground for future Institute "scholars" like Eastman and his fascist collaborators at Claremont.  

This closed circuit between Claremont and Hillsdale that Arnn now oversees constitutes the politically-indecent pseudo-intellectual circle jerk that remains one of the leading threat to American democracy and the rule of non-sectarian law in this country.

Arnn also serves as education advisor to Tennessee's governor, Bill Lee, who you will see in this video sitting quietly on the stage and sipping from his water bottle as Arnn entertains a closed-door meeting of like-minded crusaders with the most outrageous insults and lies about teachers, teacher preparation, and public education in general.  

Since Arnn's comments last month, Lee has said nothing to repudiate Arnn's insults. Last Wednesday Lee did say that he has conversed with Arnn since then, and that "he talked, and I listened." Sounds about right. 

Hillsdale College Proudly Published Putin Paean

Just after Putin helped elect D----- T---- as President, higher ed's highest bastion of Trumpism invited Christopher Caldwell, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, to deliver the keynote at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona on February 15, 2017, less than a month after the T---- inauguration (remember the record crowds?).

The speech was entititled "How to Think about Vladimir Putin." The President of Hillsdale College leadership was so impressed that, when he returned to campus, he had the College's ideological organ, Imprimis, to print an adapted version of the speech.

Below is a tiny excerpt, but it offers a strong whiff of the corrupt, xenophobic, white nationalist, anti-intellectual stench that attracts corrupt, xenophobic, white nationalist, anti-intellectual governors like Bill Lee from hundreds a miles away:

Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his country’s prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international system that seeks to erode sovereignty in general and views Russia’s sovereignty in particular as a threat.

. . . if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time. On the world stage, who can vie with him? Only perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey.

. . . .

Why are American intellectuals such ideologues when they talk about the “international system”? Probably because American intellectuals devised that system, and because they assume there can never be legitimate historic reasons why a politician would arise in opposition to it. They denied such reasons for the rise of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. They do the same with Donald Trump. And they have done it with Putin. They assume he rose out of the KGB with the sole purpose of embodying an evil for our righteous leaders to stamp out.

The Hillsdale Curriculum: Adult Mythology as Children's History

For the antiquarian curriculum crafters at Hillsdale College, it's never too early for children to start absorbing the lies and distortions that have warped American history to conform to the self-imposed ignorance of white Americans who refuse to admit the truth. Therefore, the mythologized glories of our past are to be administered beginning in kindergarten and continuing throughout high school and college. Below is the Introductory page from the K-2 unit on the Civil War era:

Now if all this seems a little ambitious for first graders, you'd be right, of course.  But child development is not a specialty or even a concern for the classical masters who reconstructed this 19th Century historical mythology for the special "benefit" of kindergartners who end up unfortunate enough to be enrolled in schools that utilize the kind of blatant propaganda that Governor Bill Lee would like to feed to Tennessee schoolchildren.  

This curriculum is built on discarded and/or discredited renditions of America's past that seek to sanitize the American history, beginning with the American founders and their Puritan forefathers.  You may see for yourself by downloading the curriculum for free.

Below is an example of the developmentally inappropriate "approaches" that the curriculum wizards at Hillsdale have put together.  I have circled one of the many examples of discredited and discarded historical distortions that minimize the systemic nature of humans owning other humans and the role that that reality played in slave owners' desire to go to war to preserve the perversity of that economic and social arrangement. 

In this example below, teachers are urged to take the "approach" with K-2 children, no less, that most Southerners were not slaveholders and that they were actually fighting to preserve "states' rights."  I know, you probably thought that rotted chestnut had been discarded. Think again.

This is what Governor Bill Lee wants Tennessee elementary school teachers to provide our students. 

Just for the record, the 1860 U. S. Census shows that 30 percent of Southern families owned other humans.

Who Gave $184 Million to Hillsdale College in 2019-2020?

 Below is a clip from Hillsdale's 990 for the period ending June 2020:

Really? $184,000,000 in contributions and grants in one year to a small "liberal arts" college in a single year? Where, oh, where could all that money have come from?

We do know that the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity has an interest in Hillsdale's "classical" education model, as seen in this interview by AFP Foundation Florida's Lee Dury as he finds out more about Hillsdale's Barney Charter School Initiative from Hillsdale's Assistant Provost, Dr. Kathleen O'Toole. The money trail remains a mystery, however.

The same year that Hillsdale reported $184 million in contributions and grants on its 990, Governor Bill Lee traveled to Hillsdale to find out more about the Hillsdale Charter School Model. According to Hillsdale's President, Larry Arnn, Lee was so impressed that he asked Arnn to bring Tennessee some of that white Christian 19th Century book learning:

All of the classical schools with which we are involved, which number close to 50 now, pursue the aims in this Honor Code. There are wonderful citizens all over the country who have taken the lead in founding these schools alongside the College. Some of them are in public office, and here I single out Governor of Tennessee Bill Lee. About two years ago, he visited Hillsdale College to sit in my Aristotle seminar for two and a half hours and to learn more about our work with K-12 education. With the encouragement of the governor, we have undertaken to found several dozen schools in Tennessee alone. This is a mighty work. We will continue to help extend it everywhere.

Who sent Aristotelian Gov. Bill Lee to Michigan with an order for 50 new charter schools that Lee would like to place in TN public schools, rent free? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

TN's Bill Lee Plans $32 Million for White Christian Nationalist Charter Schools

 . . . [Hillsdale] College values the merit of each unique individual, rather than succumbing to the de-humanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called “social justice” and “multicultural diversity,” which judges individuals not as individuals, but as members of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups in divisive power struggles (Hillsdale College 2018-2019 Catalog, p. 15)

Located since 1853 in Hillsdale, Michigan, Hillsdale College (HC) is a small Christian liberal arts college (think Greek, Judeo-Christian, and American traditions almost exclusively) with just under 1,600 undergraduates.

On the Hillsdale College 2021 catalog page headed "Hillsdale College Faculty Statement On Academic Freedom," the page is heavy with references to the College's commitment to "ordered liberty" and "moral order." Though "ordered liberty" is never defined, context clues point me to conclude that faculty are free to practice academic freedom as long as it coincides with the dictates of an administration bound to uphold a politically-conservative view of Trump-approved Christian principles and a staunchly Spartan conception of ordered liberty:

Hillsdale College affirms that academic freedom is bound up with a valuable legacy of other freedoms and duties. Among these are the following aspects of ordered liberty to be considered with their related moral and social obligations: freedom of worship; freedom in work; freedom in politics; freedom in the economy.

Hillsdale College affirms that all these freedoms are dependent upon the maintenance of a moral order; and that academic freedom in particular requires attachment to a body of truth, made known through the order and integration of knowledge. Of such truths the College is the conservator and renewer, and the primary function of the College is to transmit, through these truths, some measure of wisdom and virtue.

In short, if you want your students to read Marx, rather than a Hillsdale-approved detractor, you'd better ask the President first. 

Back in the good old days when white patriarchy, unregulated capitalism, and scientific racism went unquestioned, Hillsdale College, which was given its name by Freewill Baptists in 1853, was free to run the lives of its students as Baptist clergymen saw fit. Male and female students, for instance, who wanted to walk together on campus during the 1850s, had to first seek permission from the College President or the Dean of Women to do so.

In some ways, though the upstart Hillsdale College in the early days was a progressive outlier.  Its founders were largely abolitionist teetotalers, and one faculty member was active in the formation of the Republican Party in 1853. More importantly, anyone, "irrespective of nation, color, or sex" could seek an education at Hillsdale. Many of its students fought for the Union Army during the Civil War, and Hillsdale was the first in Michigan and the second in the U. S. to “to admit women on an equality with men.”  

Today, enrollment numbers show pretty equal representation between women and men (just under 1,600 total), even though 90 percent of students enrolled in Hillsdale's only PhD program in Political Thought are men.

By the 1960s and 70s, however, any vestiges of progressivism were swept away when students at Hillsdale and elsewhere began receiving federal college assistance.  With federal aid came requirements for federal record keeeping and accountability, which Hillsdale refused to do when faced with the mandate to file reports required under Title IX.  

Hillsdale went to court, and in 1984 the College was handed a final defeat in the courts on the matter of federal reporting requirements. Having grown increasingly hostile to federal reporting requirements, the Trustees decided to cut ties with any federal funding, which included refusing student attendance when that attendance required students to pay their way with federal grants or loans.

You can imagine how this decision made Hillsdale's white student body even whiter. But we really don't know how white, unless we go there and do a head count, since HC does not report any racial or ethnic numbers publicly. (After a search through most of the web pages of HC's website, I could find zero photos of black or brown students, though I did see one Asian student).

In terms of faculty diversity, HC ranks 3,627 out of 3,790 American colleges, according to College Factual--which puts HC in the bottom 10 percent.

Today, the progressive outlier that was once Hillsdale has morphed into and defensive bastion of white right-wing Chritian activism.  Its early Republican founders who were largely abolitionists have been replaced by Goldwater, Nixon, and T---p era Republicans devoted to preserving white rights under the guise of liberty and freedom, which is essentially anti-government when government is involved in enforcing federal statutes and regulation in ways that chafe against the "freedom" to discriminate . 

Here is some representative rhetoric from HC's page, "Civil Rights in American History:"

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Rise of Affirmative Action

The understanding of civil rights in America has been transformed fundamentally since Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The view that every individual has a right to equal treatment under the law has been replaced by a system of affirmative action that demands race be taken into account in the pursuit of equal group outcomes.

Identity Politics Today

Identity politics holds that America is fundamentally and irredeemably racist. This ideology, which has become dominant in American public life, requires discrimination in order to elevate and privilege the identities of the oppressed.

To alleviate any doubt about the partisan nature of Hillsdale College's efforts to free itself from the bondage of federal mandates such as the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, ADA, U. S. Equal Employment, LGBT protections, etc., here is the latest affirmation of Hilldale's hostility to any such encumbrance.  Note that the Obama Administration is called out, specifically:

Resolution of the Board of Trustees

WHEREAS the Board of Trustees and Administration of Hillsdale College have been entrusted with, and are determined to uphold, the original and great principles and mission of the College as set down over 165 years ago by its founders; and

WHEREAS those principles and that mission require the College to provide “sound learning” to all willing students, and to do so in a way that perpetuates the “blessings of civil and religious liberty” and “intelligent
piety” in the land; and

WHEREAS the entanglement of the federal government in the financing of colleges and universities, and the consequent regulation of these institutions by federal agencies, violate the idea of limited government embodied in the Constitution; and

WHEREAS such violations are inherently corrupt, as seen in attempts of the Department of Education to compel Hillsdale College to count its students by race, in direct violation of the noblest principles of the College and of America; and

WHEREAS the Obama Administration and Congress today appear, even more than the worst of their predecessors, bent on extending federal control over American higher education and other areas of American life; now therefore be it

RESOLVED that Hillsdale College will continue zealously to defend and uphold, against all threats and inducements, its independence from federal government financing and federal government regulation; and be
it further

 
RESOLVED that the Administration of Hillsdale College, with the support of the Board of Trustees, will continue to provide not only the finest liberal arts education, but also national leadership in promoting the principles of liberty across the land, and to pursue these aims in strict avoidance of all subsidy from the federal taxpayer.

Now it is obviously difficult to square this high-sounding resolution, especially the last sentence, with the College's tax-exempt status, which relieves it from federal and state tax obligations on any of its net assets worth more than $1.25 billion. There's lots of dark money going to Hillsdale each year.

Hillsdale College's president is Larry Arnn, who was paid $1.2 million in salary and bonuses in 2019.  Arnn received his Masters and doctorate from Claremont Graduate School.  After being granted a PhD in 1985 from Claremont, he founded and served President of the right-wing Claremont Institute for the next 15 years. He remains a Trustee of the Heritage Foundation.

Hillsdale's resolve to pursue "strict avoidance of all subsidy from the federal taxpayer" is particularly puzzling, since Hillsdale is now providing the T_____-approved curriculum and instructional model for charter schools that could not exist without the public per-pupil expenditure that the Hillsdale Model charter schools receive.

Do you remember the 1776 Report, which was the work of T____'s 1776 Commission to attempt to undercut the 1619 Project?  The 1776 Report provided a partial K12 social studies curriculum that was meant as the whitest of whitewashes on the Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project, which had successfully spawned a K12 curriculum that includes the actual history of slavery in the story of America's past.  

Besides conservative ideology and a palpable animosity to cultural diversity, affirmative action, and social justice, what pedagogical expertise undergirds the 1776 Curriculum? And what is the connection to Hillsdale?  To the first question, we must answer, not much; to the second question, almost everything.  

T----'s Chairman for this 1776 Report was none other than Hillsdale President, Larry Arnn, who chose Carol Swain, retired right wing Vandy professor of law (think Clarence Thomas in a dress), as his Vice-Chair.  The Executive Director is Arnn's right-hand man at Hilldale, Mathew Spalding, who is Hillsdale VP in charge of Hillsdale's DC operations.

The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission
Larry P. Arnn, Chair
Carol Swain, Vice Chair
Matthew Spalding, Executive Director
Phil Bryant
Jerry Davis
Michael Farris
Gay Hart Gaines
John Gibbs
Mike Gonzalez
Victor Davis Hanson
Charles Kesler
Peter Kirsanow
Thomas Lindsay
Bob McEwen
Ned Ryun
Julie Strauss

The 1776 Report provides the ideological foundation for the 1776 Curriculum, which is meant to provide an antidote to the fact-based inclusive portrayal of American history.

Dr. Kathleen O’Toole, Assistant Provost for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College, gave NWEF a statement about the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum: 

“The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum represents a culmination of the endeavors of decades of forming and honing curriculum at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale Academy, and its dozens of associated K-12 charter schools, bringing together and producing a content-rich curriculum that covers both American history as well as American government, politics, and civics,” O’Toole said.

If you haven't already figured out why Gov. Bill Lee would choose this particular outfit as his unqualified choice to lead his new charter school initiative that would drain 32 million pubic dollars from the public schools just to get 50 new charters up and running, then you haven't been paying attention to Lee's complete subservience and unqualified fealty to the former President. Lee believes that schools must produce more patriots, and patriots must be miseducated by conservative propaganda.  

Bill Lee must be sent packing in November.  You think?