Meet the Christian Reconstructionist Waging War on School Bonds

Have you heard about “bond buster” Paul Dorr? He works to defeat school bond increases in communities around the Midwest. He lives in Iowa, but people in communities around the Midwest hire him as a “consultant” to help them defeat ballot proposals intended to raise more tax money for cash-strapped schools.

As Minnesota Public Radio explains:

As voters in two southwestern Minnesota school districts prepare to decide on Tuesday whether to build new schools, the Worthington and Russell-Tyler-Ruthton school districts have been contending with a man some call the “bond buster.”

Referendum opponents in both communities have brought in Paul Dorr, an Iowa consultant who works to defeat school referendums across the Midwest. For at least 25 years, across nine states, people have hired him to defeat their school district’s bond proposals. He creates mailers, radio ads and Facebook pages telling residents to vote “no.”

Dorr effectively runs a propaganda machine aimed at ensuring that school-related tax proposals fail—no matter how reasonable and needed they are.

Just what is his motivation? About that.

Dorr wouldn’t talk to MPR News for this story, but has said his ultimate goal is the end of public education.

“I fight these purveyors of the moral destruction of Christianity that is the government school,” said Dorr in a YouTube video. “More so, I fight them as I see no Biblical warrant for them to even exist.”

I am familiar with this rhetoric. I grew up hearing it, in fact. There’s an entire segment of the far Right that opposes the existence of public education—reasons typically involve a mix of fundamentalist Christianity and anti-government libertarianism. It feels important to emphasize that Dorr does not oppose specific referendums because he believes those districts already have sufficient funding. He opposes any and all referendums because he doesn’t think public schools should exist. 

Dorr was recently given a misdemeanor, by the way, for publicly burning LGBTQ-themed library books.

Dorr drew national attention for a half-hour long Facebook Live video on Oct. 19 that showed him tossing the books into a burning barrel. Dorr, director of the Ocheyedan-based group called Rescue the Perishing, said he was protesting a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning celebration in Orange City, the introduction of sexual education into the public schools and some local churches’ reluctance to denounce homosexuality.

Dorr used students not from the school district on the radio, pretending to be students from the district. … He would have a radio spot with a student saying that she would not be getting a new bicycle because her parents had to pay taxes on the new school. They later found that the name of the child did not match any that were in school. … He had students write “Letters to the Editor”. One was from “Nicole Jamison”. After investigation they found she was not a student in the district. In fact, there was not a student by that name at any school in Iowa.

Dorr, by the way, homeschooled his children. He’s also a Christian Reconstructionist who is a big fan of figures like Rushdoony and North. He’s been interviewed by Reconstructionist radio shows. He’s aggressively anti-transgender. There are stories about Dorr peddling Y2K kits in the 1990s, and claiming that Budweiser promotes bestiality. There’s also this weird tale about a time his teenage son allegedly embarrassed the local board of education, and this bizarre story about a feud over ethanal between Paul Dorr and his brother Tom Dorr, who works in the agricultural department.

I am not an expert on political organizing, and I suspect that the farmers Dorr pitches his anti-school-bond services to are likely more conservative than your average person, and might not be bothered by some or all of the above. At the very least, it’s possible that pointing out that Dorr’s ultimate objective is to end public education entirely might be sufficiently off-putting to those predisposed to listen to Dorr. If nothing else, hopefully information sharing between districts will help school officials be better prepared to defeat the machine Dorr brings with him.

Growing up in a conservative homeschool community, I remember hearing that public schools were anti-Christian, and that the country would be better off if public schools were abolished and all children were either homeschooled or sent to any of a range of private schools. For us, this was just talk. We didn’t make it policy. Dorr makes it far more than talk.

Dorr, by the way, is far from alone in his opposition to public education. He’s a big fan of the Dutch Calvinist tradition from which Christian Reconstrucitonism initially emerged. If Dutch Calvinism sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Betsy DeVos comes from the same tradition.

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