Race, Religion and Rights
Election season heats up as town hall touches on social issues, racism in schools and the right to life
Rep. Cole Christensen hosted a town hall on Friday, providing a platform for some of the local candidates for various offices, ranging from county commission to district representative, to speak and make their cases for why they deserve your vote in the coming June 14 election.
Four candidates spoke: Barry Borg, running for county commission; Damian Johnston, running for the Valley City Public School Board; Phil Kleymann, seeking to oust Dwight Kiefert for District 24 representative; and Christensen himself, who is seeking re-election after his first term.
Borg
Barry Borg was born and raised in Barnes County, and has raised an impressively-large family, along with Red Angus cattle and farm cropland, in a farmstead just outside of Valley City. His platform includes a focus on road maintenance, a respect for private land rights, minimizing property taxes and respecting the Second Amendment.
“I’ve never done anything like this before, so you’ve got a greenhorn here in terms of politics,” Borg said. “But I think I bring some things to the table – we need some changes in Barnes County. Valley City, Barnes County, you all know there’s some powers behind the scenes that always seem to get what they’re asking for, with or without input from the people. That needs to change.”
Johnston
Valley City School Board candidate Damian Johnston’s rhetoric was noticeably more fiery during his speech at this town hall than previous appearances. He made it clear that he thinks there’s more than room for improvement for the standards of education in Valley City.
“I believe the Valley City Education Association has been failing its students and its teachers for long enough and it must stop. How many of you know that here in Valley City, 45 percent of our students are proficient in reading and math?” Johnston said. “That means that over half of our students cannot proficiently read and calculate. And the worst part about that is that our current school board sees nothing wrong with that. They’re fine with that. How is
that acceptable?”
In what earned him the most applause, Johnston spoke out against what he sees as a persistence of the controversial “Common Core” curriculum that had been ostensibly removed from North Dakota public education standards.
“North Dakota still has common core standards. It’s true, we do – the Department of Public Instruction out in Bismarck will tell you that ‘no, we did away with Common Core, we have North Dakota Standards,’” Johnston said. “All they did is take Common Core, shuffled the desk, and called it North Dakota Standards. It’s the same thing as we had before. They’ve been lying to us this whole time folks. Now, if I get elected to the school board, I’ll make sure that Common Core is not being taught in Valley City Schools.”
He also spoke out against the teaching of racist ideologies in schools.
“What about Critical Race Theory? That’s a hot topic … do you think your kids should be taught to be ashamed of their skin color?” he said. “I don’t. I think that’s morally wrong. That’s something we can’t allow to continue to happen, it must stop.”
He closed with a shot at the intimations made by other school board candidates, concerning reviving plans to build a new school facility.
“You’ve all heard of this new school you want to build, right? $90 million it will cost to build a school, that’s … if they build it today,” Johnston said. “Prices keep going up. It was $80 million when they first proposed the idea last August. That’s $90 million they want to strap Valley City and Barnes County with. That money, mind you, would go most likely to out-of-state contractors and developers. With inflation at the rate it is now, why would you want to build a new school … when our current school is structurally sound? Now, yes, it has some maintenance issues, but we can fix those for a lot less than $90 million. That $90 million could be used for our roads, our infrastructure … that money could stay here to be used for things that are actually needed. It’s unbelievable they are actually considering this … it’s lunacy, and it’s got to stop.”
Kleymann
Phil Kleymann’s speech focused less on his political candor and more on moral, spiritual and social issues.
“I’m a Christian. Right up front I’m going to tell you that, I’m a Bible-believing Christian, I see my world with a Biblical view and I’m so glad, because if I didn’t know the Bible I’d be in a bottle right now,” Kleymann said. “I’m going to give my time over to another man you may have heard of … his name is the Apostle Paul and when I think of social issues, Paul had some things to say. I think these are very very important.”
Kleymann proceeded to draw much of his speech from the contents of Paul’s first letter to the Romans.
“When you take the Bible and read the Book of Romans, you see Rome was an empire in decline,” Kleymann said. “She was dying. Great nations don’t die, they commit suicide … and that nation was dying, it had cancer within. Paul … shined a light on the social issues that were destroying that nation. If you haven’t read it lately please go home and get the Bible out and read Romans 1, because it’s like reading your newspaper. We are following right on the heels.”
Kleymann’s chief issues include matters of abortion, the sanctity of marriage and the moral character of the nation. As a representative, he pledged to go into the legislature as an unabashed man of his faith, intent on representing those selfsame values.
“I’m running for the House of Representatives and if you send me there, I’m going as a Christian,” He said. “I’m going there because I think the only hope we have is Jesus Christ, the Bible and the Constitution – and if you don’t believe in that, then don’t vote for me.”
He was especially evocative on the matter of abortion, an issue more sensitive than ever as the Supreme Court of the United States appears poised to overturn Roe vs Wade and return to the states the legal right to regulate or even ban abortion.
“You’ll turn your television on and women will be marching for the right to do what? Protect their children at any cost? Oh no. 62 million abortions,” Kleymann said. “Do you know, the Jewish Holocaust? If those people were to remember all the victims of the Holocaust, they’d be silent for 11 years. That’s nothing. If this nation remembered those innocent children as a silent scream in the womb … the scream that God heard? If we as a nation remembered each of those victims with one minute of silence, we’d be silent in this country for 120 years. What’s God going to have to say about that?”
He closed his speech echoing similar rhetoric to the other candidates.
“Why am I going to go out there? Because we’re in deep trouble. If you vote for me, I’ll go out there and I’ll vote against this prodeath abortion industry, against the forces that want to turn schools into social experiments, that want to turn teachers into sex counselors – I will vote against those things,” Kleymann said.
Christensen
The host of the event, Christensen gave the longest speech of the evening, touching on a variety of topics, ranging from his own record in his first term in the legislature, the role of government in people’s lives and the issues he intends to work upon should he be re-elected.
“We were thrown into unprecedented uncertainty due to the spread of COVID-19. I sat, watching in horror like many of you, as this virus was weaponized by opportunistic politicians,” Christensen said. “These politicians were consolidating our power and stripping our freedoms. This feeling of helplessness and fear … a lot of us had never experienced anything like this before … a lot of people were put out of work. The excessive government overreach at all these levels could no longer go unchallenged … I knew it was my time to step up and fight for our district in the state legislature. My goal is to restore the rights of the people as guaranteed in the state and federal Constitutions.”
Of his achievements, Christensen expressed the most pride in his consistent votes against excessive spending and the unanimous passage of a bill that recognized parents as the primary stakeholders in the education of their children – something North Dakota alone of the 50 states has passed.
“During my first session I introduced (a bill) that put restraints on lease-to-purchase agreements. My goal was to ensure local accountability to ensure your vote on these building projects was not circumvented,” he said. “As well as local accountability, there were a lot of spending bills that came to our attention and I voted against most of them. Many of you may ask ‘how could vote against funding for this and funding for that?’ Well, I actually read the bills … and voting against it isn’t saying ‘I don’t want flood protection’, I just don’t want half-a-billion dollars going to Fargo for flood protection, to create a diversion. For me, that doesn’t make sense.”
Like the others, he was open in his contempt for critical race theory, as well as mandates concerning maskwearing or vaccines. “I don’t want to give funding to these entities that are locking us down, that demand we mask up, or take a jab, in order to continue our job,” Christensen said. “I don’t want us teaching our kids that just because of the color of your skin, you are susceptible to being racist for decisions that were made generations ago.”
He also noted his young age, which was used as a point of criticism against him when he first ran, is something he now holds as a point of pride, as he encouraged the audience to get involved, step up and build relationships with their local leaders and politicians.
“I know that I’m young, but I wear that as a badge of honor because I showed up … and I earned my colleagues’ respect,” Christensen said.