AG and other GOP politicians spread lies, half-truths about Anchorage schools

Enough already with the latest right-wing hysteria campaign in Alaska ginned up by the Alaska Republican Party—the charge that the Anchorage school district doesn’t believe in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and is telling students to do the same.

The claims are asinine.

The biggest offenders in this exercise are Alaska Attorney General Stephen Cox, a politician from Texas, and former Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor, who is in the herd of gubernatorial candidates.

Cox and Taylor wasted no time in thought before blabbing that they had stumbled onto a civic disgrace—using their legal minds to claim the Anchorage School District had dissed the founding documents.

“This is deeply concerning,” claimed Cox, who opined on the matter first and promised to investigate later.

With no evidence or justification, he suggested that elected officials of the Anchorage School District are violating the oath of office and “something has gone terribly wrong.”

Yes, something has gone terribly wrong. When we have an attorney general, who picked up his license to practice law in Alaska in May, exposing his sloppiness and over-politicized and partisan approach to one of the most important jobs in state government.

This is not at all about believing in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

It is about how Hillsdale College mixes its own propaganda with those documents. It’s also about what Hillsdale College wants students in the Anchorage School District to believe about those documents.

Any information submitted from an outside organization that gets sent home to public school students in Anchorage is supposed to carry a boilerplate disclaimer that says, “The Anchorage School District does not endorse these materials or the viewpoint expressed in them."

Hillsdale put the disclaimers on the documents, the school district said.

The disclaimer on the Hillsdale College booklet is an outrage, according to Cox, Taylor and many other politicians in the Alaska Republican Party who are always looking for a reason to get angry and stomp their feet.

The disclaimer is proof that “leftists and their failed policies are destroying our neighborhoods and schools,” according to GOP chair Carmela Warfield.

Had the general, the former general and the chair bothered to inspect the contents of the publication distributed by Hillsdale College, even they might have recognized that the disclaimer belonged on the cover.

Hillsdale College wasn’t just supplying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It included its political spin and advertising.

“In recent decades, the way our government operates has departed from the Constitution,” Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn lectured Anchorage students in his introduction to the declaration and Constitution.

He said government “has become less limited, and our liberties less secure. At the same time true civic education in America—education in the Constitution—has largely died out.”

Arnn, who is on the board of the Heritage Foundation, went on to tell Anchorage students about Hillsdale College as the place to learn about the founding of our nation.

Make no mistake, the Hillsdale interpretation of the Constitution promotes a particular right-wing point of view.

Under his leadership, Hillsdale’s ‘fund-raising strategy is predicated on stoking outrage, with communiqués warning of “Marxist-inspired critical race theory” and an “emerging corporate-socialist totalitarianism,” the New York Times reported.

Arnn, who has ridiculed public school teachers and repeated Trump’s lies about the 2020 elections, is entitled to his opinions. But his views on the Constitution and how to teach it shouldn’t be passed off as the voice of God by a school district.

Arnn believes that constitutional government has almost been overtaken by the administrative state. “The worst evils stem from it,” Arnn claims.

In the Hillsdale course outline about the Constitution promoted in the booklet, the college attacks the New Deal and claims that in the U.S., “an elite and insular administrative class rules without the consent of American citizens.”

“Moreover, administrative rule is both anti-constitutional and pre-constitutional, because it replaces the rule of law with unaccountable regulatory agencies,” according to the Hillsdale course promoted in the booklet.

The publication is a promotional tool for Hillsdale, which says it distributed 3 million copies in 2022 alone.

After the low-information Alaska Republican leaders generated a fresh dose of anger and outrage, the administration apologized for the disclaimer.

No apology was necessary. The disclaimer was entirely appropriate.

Your contributions help support independent analysis and political commentary by Alaska reporter and author Dermot Cole. Thank you for reading and for your support. Either click here to use PayPal or send checks to: Dermot Cole, Box 10673, Fairbanks, AK 99710-067