Money, outside consultants are changing local elections

By KAREN PARKER

Retired County Line publisher

Remember when local school board elections were quiet events mostly with candidates who occasionally had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the race? Remember when we fought about teacher pay, bus routes and maybe, very occasionally, the books in the library?

In that earlier time, you likely had no clue how your neighbor or the guy down the block voted. Was he a Democrat or a Republican, or did he even vote at all? 

Alas, things have changed. Not only do folks load up the yard with signs revealing their political preference, but also they collect and wear candidate swag. Trump was surely the king of swag, but I saw a few Biden-Harris hats as well. And there is social media. Where once folks stayed away from politics and religion, they now blab on Facebook. I imagine many Facebook followers would like to only cute cat videos instead.

It was all bad enough in national and state races, but local boards? 

Yes, things were mesmerizing in the Norwalk-Ontario-Wilton School Board race, but the real action was in Sparta, including a hotly contested referendum, threats of physical harm to current board members, and a group of four conservative candidates determined to wrest control of the board. You could probably hop from one end of Sparta to the other on election signs and never touch earth.

Where did all this political activism come from for races that normally generate little interest and produce abysmally low turnouts?

We might find a clue in the recently revealed campaign finance report of the Sparta Citizens for Real Progress. State law requires such reports when over $2,000 is spent on a campaign and political action. 

According to the treasurer of the group, rural Cashton resident Emily Diefenbaugh, the group amassed contributions of $21,360 and spent $11,836.

Wow, that is a lot of signs! Oh, but wait, there’s more. The big winner was Copperhead Consulting of Ocheyedan, Iowa. 

Clearly local folks are not talented enough to argue over the merits of a school referendum. Glory be, what is really needed is a convincing preacher from Iowa to provide guidance in Sparta, Wis. 

As it turns out, Copperhead Consulting is the brainchild of Paul Dorr, who also operates Rescue the Perishing. According to his recounting, he was a successful banker who found Christ and became convinced “of two major public and personal sins — the immorality of fiat money and of population control, also known as child-killing by abortion (surgical and chemical).”

Okay, so what has that got to do with a school referendum in Sparta, you may ask? 

Hm, good question, as they say over and over on talk shows.

On his website, Mr. Dorr (http://www.rollbacklocalgov.com) touts his success in  defeating referenda and saving taxpayers $175 million.

But dig a bit further on his website, he reveals he has 11 children, all of whom were home-schooled. Lots of folks prefer home schooling for a variety of reasons. But Dorr is clear about why public education must end:

“The statist bureaucrats in education (affectionately known as “educrats”) are and have been self-consciously on a mission to destroy liberty in this nation by destroying the founding Christian faith that made it possible and replacing it with their humanist group think ‘New Jerusalem.’”

His most enlightening web page is titled, “Why I Defeat Government School Bond Levies at the Ballot Box and Do It for a Profit.”

The Sparta Citizens for Real Progress wrote checks to Copperhead Consulting for roughly $6,500. Dorr probably needs the money. In 2019, he burned three public library books in Orange City, Iowa. Dorr claimed it was his First Amendment right to speak out against the books, which featured LGBTQ topics. He also has been arrested and jailed multiple times for protesting and trying to shut down abortion clinics.

He has helped to defeat dozens of school referenda throughout the Midwest, including one in Worthington, Minn., on behalf of a group called Worthington Citizens for Progress (ah, the irony of it). 

Dorr said he rarely shares the same goal as his clients, who mostly just want to fight rising taxes for public schools, while Dorr wants to eliminate them entirely. Public schools will, as he says, “one day be gone, and restore education back into the hands of families, the parents and the Christians.”

It’s hard to know if those who donated to the group knew any of this. 

But I thought our readers might want to know. Hey, you can’t make this stuff up. 

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