One month before the election, I was forwarded an email originally sent from an organization called “Backing America.” The email was presented by Backing America as “a message from our sponsor.”
The sponsor, Hillsdale College, wrote asking for tax-deductible contributions. Before getting to the purpose of the fundraising appeal, it’s worth recounting a bit of Hillsdale’s history.
Hillsdale College’s discrimination practices
Hillsdale College is well known for, as the email states, refusing “to accept one penny in taxpayer support — not even indirectly in the form of federal or state student grants and loans.” While that may sound like a noble proposition to some, the reason Hillsdale College doesn’t accept government funding is because in doing so, the college would be forced to abide by federal anti-discrimination laws.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the landmark legislation that prohibited discrimination in employment, housing and education. Specifically, Title VI says, in part, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
In a video produced by Hillsdale for its online course “Public Policy from a Constitutional Viewpoint,” the school asserts:
In the 20th century, the federal government began to require colleges to take race into account if they were receiving federal financial aid. That’s really what made Hillsdale and some other colleges, like Grove City College, challenge the Department of Education and their interpretation of the Civil Rights Act. This is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which said that any institution that receives federal financial aid, federal financial assistance, can’t discriminate on the basis of race. For Hillsdale that was really no problem because we’d say we’ve never discriminated on the basis of race. … But, once the bureaucrats began to define non-discrimination as (a) requirement that you take race into account, that you count the number of your students on the basis of race, that you adopt what later became to be called Affirmative Action, the college’s refusal to do that is what led to long litigation and ultimately, in the 1980s, the Supreme Court and Congress decided that if you don’t comply with this new Affirmative Action interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, you can’t receive federal financial aid. That’s why Hillsdale doesn’t.
While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the reason Hillsdale doesn’t receive money from the government, its refusal to allow its own students to receive funding via federal aid and student loan programs has a different history — one whose legacy is still reverberating.
“Its refusal to allow its own students to receive funding via federal aid and student loan programs has a different history.”
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Five years after the passage of Title IX, which opened up equal opportunities for women, students at Hillsdale were receiving federal funds to attend the school. As was required by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (the precursor to the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services), Hillsdale was supposed to file the “Assurance of Compliance with Title IX Regulations.” Rather than comply, Hillsdale challenged the requirement to comply with Title IX by arguing that the loans and grants its students received had nothing to do with the college.
Hillsdale sued the Department of Health, Education and Welfare after the agency threatened to cut off all federal funds to the college’s students. The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against Hillsdale in 1982. A similar lawsuit filed by Grove City College (cited by Hillsdale above) ended at the Supreme Court. In 1984, the court ruled against Grove City College in Gove City College v. Bell, affirming that any institution of higher learning that allows its students to receive federal aid must comply with Title IX.
Both Hillsdale College and Grove City College decided to prohibit their students from accessing government funds in order to skirt Title IX regulations.
More recently, two female students filed a lawsuit against Hillsdale College seeking to have the college’s nonprofit status revoked. The two students were raped in 2021 in separate instances on the school’s campus. Reporting sexual assaults on college campuses usually involve the Title IX office, but since Hillsdale has none, the women were left to navigate the aftermath and the school’s hostility on their own.
The school refused to provide the women with support, to provide documentation of the school’s investigation into the women’s allegations and to punish the assailants.
The school refused to provide the women with support, to provide documentation of the school’s investigation into the women’s allegations and to punish the assailants. In 2023, the women filed their lawsuit charging that while Hillsdale does not receive federal funds, the school’s “nonprofit status and accompanying tax exemption, among other benefits, require the school to follow Title IX.”
The lawsuit recently was dismissed by Michigan Federal District Judge Jane M. Beckering, citing a recent court ruling in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Buettner-Hartsoe v. Baltimore Lutheran High School Association that overturned a lower-court ruling. The Fourth Circuit found that “501(c)(3) status does not constitute receipt of federal financial assistance,” freeing the school from being bound by Title IX regulations. The plaintiffs in Chen et al v. Hillsdale College plan to appeal their case to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Who is behind the fundraising email from Backing America?
The email forwarded to me in October is purportedly from an organization called Backing America. They have a sparse website that seems to be someone’s blog with original writings as well as some reposted stories from Fox News.
When I looked to see who owned the website domain, I found it was registered to Domains by Proxy, LLC, a shell company that partners with GoDaddy.com and Wild West Domains. Domains by Proxy registers and holds domains for anyone wanting to hide their identity.
Wanting to know who was behind Backing America, I next searched online to see if the the email address from which the fundraising email had come showed up anywhere else. In doing so, I came across an archive of an email from the same email address and within the same month as the fundraising appeal. At the bottom of that archived email was the sender’s Post Office Box in Michigan. I then did a reverse-directory search on the address to find that the P.O. Box is registered to a limited liability company called Conservative Intel.
John Yob
A visit to Conservative Intel’s website revealed it to be yet another personal blog, athough a little more populated and fancy than the one for Backing America. Then a visit to Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs revealed who is behind the LLC.
Conservative Intel lists as its designated agent David Dishaw, a Republican operative within the network of operations owned by or linked to the controversial political consultant John Yob. The Detroit News in 2017 did a deep dive into Conservative Intel and Yob’s network. This network of glorified blogs like Conservative Intel present themselves as actual news sites and, in exchange for a fee, will post favorable “news stories” about a particular Republican candidate.
This quote from the Detroit News says it all:
“This network of glorified blogs will post favorable ‘news stories’ about a particular Republican candidate.”
Ethical issues may be at play if voters are “duped” into thinking they’re reading independent news that is indirectly linked to candidates, said Matt Grossman, a political scientist at Michigan State University and director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research. Democratic strategists have used paid or friendly bloggers to get out their messages in the past, Grossman said. But Republican voters appear more receptive to articles from sites like Conservative Intel because of their distrust of mainstream media, he said.
So this is who is behind the fundraising email attempting to raise money for Hillsdale College.
This raises a number of ethical questions.
Michigan, like many states, requires anyone who raises money for nonprofits to register with the attorney general’s office. Per the state’s Charitable Organizations and Solicitations Act, if organizations like Conservative Intel are going to solicit contributions in Michigan, they are required to register. The Solicitations Act also “requires licensing and bonding for professional fundraisers before soliciting, planning or carrying out a solicitation campaign in Michigan for a charitable organization.”
Unsurprisingly, when I searched the Michigan attorney general’s database of registered fundraisers, neither Conservative Intel nor its pseudonymous entity Backing America was listed as legally authorized to solicit donations on behalf of Hillsdale College or any other nonprofit. Conservative Intel skirted that law by having the donation link within the fundraising email go directly to Hillsdale College’s own fundraising page.
Hillsdale College and its curriculum
The fundraising email sent from Backing America (a.k.a. Conservative Intel) is signed by the president of Hillsdale College, Larry P. Arnn.
Larry P. Arnn
Hillsdale College is listed on the advisory board for the infamous Project 2025 published by the Heritage Foundation. Additionally, Michael Anton, a lecturer at Hillsdale College and a national security adviser in the first Trump administration, is listed as a contributor to Project 2025.
The fundraising email, after proudly proclaiming Hillsdale’s refusal to abide by nondiscrimination legislation and thereby forgoing government funding, states it is raising money to promote Hillsdale’s K-12 curriculum to “educators, homeschool families and concerned citizens nationwide.” According to Hillsdale, the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum will address what it sees as the “false narratives” being “constructed” and the content “being cherry-picked to fit an ideological (and frankly anti-American) agenda.”
“The Hillsdale curriculum emphasizes the idea of American exceptionalism.”
The curriculum is a response to the battle over what is taught to schoolchildren about America’s history. The Hillsdale curriculum emphasizes the idea of American exceptionalism — the notion that America is uniquely virtuous and divinely ordained by God. This notion of America’s special blessedness is the mother of Christian nationalism.
It is also shocking that an institution like Hillsdale College, which openly rejects the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, is now in the business of teaching civics to children.
Given the outcome of the election, we can expect some version of this curriculum to be pushed on our public schools. Parents and communities must engage with their state and local school boards to ensure that the history being taught isn’t some fairytale version of truth peddled by hucksters.
Mara Bim
Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as program director at Faith Commons. She is a spiritual director and a recent master of divinity degree graduate from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.
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Creators of Project 2025 now have a guide to acceptable ‘conservative’ universities
Amid jubilation over Trump victory, a call to rewrite history at the Smithsonian