When the Anchorage School District distributed pocket Constitutions provided by Hillsdale College, Libs of TikTok started an uproar by publicizing that the Constitutions had a disclaimer attached that the item was not endorsed or provided by the district. The Alaskan Attorney General picked up the story and fed the outrage machine with it. Except, as Blue Alaskan blogger Matthew Beck points out, the sticker wasn’t placed there by the district at all. And there’s more…
The issue here is the false claim that the Anchorage School District placed the stickers on the Constitution provided by the batshit Heritage Foundation-aligned Hillsdale College, whose goal appears to be radicalizing the next generation of insurrectionists. A correction issued by the Anchorage Daily News to its initial reporting confirms what we already suspected: the disclaimers weren’t added by ASD staff at all. They came that way, straight from Hillsdale.
As I pointed out in my initial piece, school districts across the country, including ASD, use disclaimers on materials provided by outside organizations or individuals to make clear that the district is not endorsing the viewpoint or messaging of those materials, which in this case came from a Christian college. The policy basically exists to help maintain clear boundaries between public schools and outside advocacy, religious, or political interests, while still allowing students access to a broad range of educational resources without implying district approval of any particular ideology or viewpoint.
I’ve obtained one of the actual pocket Constitutions distributed by Hillsdale College and discovered something that changes how you should view that “disclaimer” flap altogether.
Inside Hillsdale’s pamphlet, before you even reach the Declaration of Independence’s opening line, “When in the course of human events,” there’s a forward written by the college’s president…a tidy little sermon framing America’s founding through Hillsdale’s hard-right, partisan political lens.
You’ll also note that Hillsdale’s political propaganda comes with a section titled “Course in Politics,” which I’m pretty sure isn’t in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.
It is unquestionable proof of why disclaimers in schools are necessary in the first place. This wasn’t a straight copy of the Constitution, and thus, public schools have a legal and ethical obligation to clearly disclose when outside materials are bundled with someone else’s agenda or editorialized. In this case, the so-called “neutral” Constitution being waved around by Alaska’s rabid far-right movement came pre-loaded with an editorial…one that tries to sell Hillsdale’s brand of Christian Nationalism as patriotism.