I Took Hillsdale College’s Trash Citizenship Course

Three Republican governors embrace Dr. Larry Arnn as a stalwart foe of “wokeism” and “left-wing ideology” in schools.

Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee has entered into a “partnership” with Arnn to open dozens of new charter schools there. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has enlisted Arnn to help formulate a new civics curriculum in his state and offered a $3,000 bounty to teachers who train in it. And, along with commissioning an Arnn-inspired curriculum, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has offered to build a satellite campus in her state of the Michigan college that he heads.

To get a firsthand sense of what Arnn might be serving up to the schoolkids of Tennessee, Florida, and South Dakota, I took a free online course on citizenship offered by Hillsdale College, where he has served as president since 2000. The first lecture in “American Citizenship and Its Decline” is delivered by Arnn himself. He has a collegial and collegiate manner, and he sounds mainstream as he cites Aristotle’s definition of citizenship as a partnership for the common good.

“Citizenship is the duty you owe to your country,” Arnn says, seeming to be as balanced and reasonable as you would expect from an educator.

But Arnn takes a hard right turn when he says that this arrangement is being “replaced increasingly by a world state governed by one particular form of government, the bureaucratic form.”

“That’s the appointment of experts to make detailed rules about every area of life,” he continues. “And then we all live under those rules and the society is supposedly made more harmonious and better-functioning.”

The video shows the face of one of these supposed world state bureaucratic rule makers. He appears in a photo-within-a-photo on a large screen behind a vacant podium marked “Office the President Elect.” His face is flanked by two much smaller, masked figures, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

“Try to reason with Anthony Fauci or even understand what he says,” Arnn says.

Actually, Fauci is widely known to have remained particularly reasonable as he saved hundreds of thousands of lives during a half-century in public health. And one of his proven gifts has been to communicate what science indicates is the best course of action at a particular moment. Fauci’s advice may shift, but that is in accordance with the latest scientific findings.

In Dr. Fauci We Trust

Arnn suggests that such experts are not needed in the small town from which Hillsdale College gets its name.

“There’s a big spirit around here that we ought to fix our problems ourselves,” he continues, “and that is responsibility and authority coming to everybody in the town.”

Idea is becoming ideology as he proposes that allowing an outside expert to step in disrupts that collective sense.

“If citizenship dies, what follows is not unity; what follows is a form of chaos and a form of division because it starts mattering a lot who’s on top, who gets to regulate,” Arnn contends. He says the pandemic is “the latest example.”

“Then bureaucratic agencies of every type are competing to contribute to it and get money from it and get authority from it and get prestige from it,” he says.

Arnn appears to be speaking about Fauci again, along with other frontline generals in the fight against a virus that has killed more than a million Americans. The truth is that the vast majority of the combatants at all levels in this fight were seeking neither fame nor fortune but rather simply to prevent as many people as possible from suffering a horrific death, too often isolated from their loved ones. But Arnn describes these public health champions as a malevolent force.

“You reduce everyone to some common form of rule that degrades people, because people have a right to govern themselves,” he says.

Arnn here seems to be referencing mask and vaccine mandates, which were necessary for the common good on the most essential level if you accept that includes being alive and able to breathe.

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Any ICU nurse who was working at the height of the pandemic can tell you that there is little that is more degrading than a COVID death in quarantine. And nobody can reasonably argue that people have a right to endanger others just to avoid the minor inconvenience of a mask or the slight hazard of a jab. And mandating vaccination during a pandemic is no more an infringement on freedom than the immunizations that have long been required by schools and summer camps, as well as the military.

One disadvantage of taking the course online is that you cannot ask questions. But there is a section to the right of the video where you can make an online comment such as, “What about the chaos resulting from bogus experts who aggressively spread medical misinformation? And what about President Trump’s musings that the virus could be defeated by injecting bleach or somehow shining an ultra strong light inside the body?”

It is no surprise that Arnn does not speak negatively about the now former president who appointed him chairman of the 1776 Commission during his final days in office. That was a body devoid of historians charged with establishing the framework for a “patriotic education” on “core principles of the American founding and how these principles may be understood to further enjoyment of 'the blessings of liberty.’”

At least the subsequent seven lectures of the online course are delivered by a Stanford-educated historian, Victor David Hanson. His book The Dying Citizen is the inspiration and basis of the course.

“One of the greatest historians and thinkers of our time,” Arnn says of Hanson.

The title is not a reference to those who perished from COVID. The great thinker cites another threat, one presented by progressives ranging from California Gov. Gavin Newsom to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“While there is an existential danger from the virus, we have to be very careful that elected officials do not take measures to combat the virus that in the end will be more deleterious to our freedoms and indeed our way of life than the virus itself,” Hanson says.

Hanson maintains a quiet, authoritative mien akin to that of a historian in a Ken Burns documentary about the Civil War. You can almost forget his right-wing ideology as he posits that a dark progressive agenda is behind the influx of immigrants on the southern border.

“There are 2 million people scheduled to cross the border of the United States between Mexico and America,” he says. “It’s just simply a large influx, sort of a late Roman Empire migration, solely for the purpose of enhancing the progressive agenda and the Democratic Party, or the idea that these are going to be new constituents.”

Hanson exudes such scholarly confidence that you might fail to see the nuttiness of his narrative that Democrats are allowing undocumented immigrants into the country in order to bolster their ranks.

An advantage of taking the course online is that you can pause the lecture to check the facts. A quick Google search shows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has made a record 1.82 million arrests at the southern border so far this fiscal year, up from 1.66 million in the previous fiscal year ending in September 2021.

But Hanson contends, “We have no border and there is no immigration law. And the president of the United States who swore an oath to faithfully execute the law simply doesn’t believe the law even exists.”

At the same time, Hanson seeks to minimize the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. He says that “we all deplore” the attack and that anybody convicted of breaking the law should be punished, but…

“As I speak, we have people in confinement who are apparently charged with organizing a riot or an armed insurrection,” he says. “But here’s the problem. No one has been charged with organizing an insurrection because it was not an insurrection.”

Eleven Oath Keepers have been charged with seditious conspiracy and two have pleaded guilty. It is still too early to tell how many other people may have been involved in an effort to stop the orderly transfer of power. Hanson fails to note that many of them headed for the Capitol at President Trump’s urging with the false belief that the election had been stolen. Hanson says simply that the rioters were “angry over the election.”

Hanson cites the months of rioting that followed the death of George Floyd but fails to mention the long history of deadly encounters between the police and people of color. And taking to the streets is not the same as taking the Capitol to prevent the certification of a presidential election.

The final lecture, “The Global Elite and the Great Reset,” suggests that America itself is under threat. But Hanson says he wants to end on a note of “optimism as well.” He reports that despite the many “challenges to traditional citizenship” that include “the deliberate top-down efforts of the elite,” he feels confident that “a majority of Americans respect and want to keep the Constitution as it is.”

“And they feel that they’re the luckiest people in the world because they’re American citizens,” he says. “As long as we remain the majority of Americans and we remain vigilant, the power under our system is in our hands and we can speak out and stop this erosion of citizenship and have a new birth of an American citizenry.”

Sounds like MAGA goes to college.

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