In 2023, Derrick Wilburn and his slate of Advocates for D20 Kids stormed into power in Academy District 20 driven almost entirely by one message: our schools were peddling “pornography.”
He didn’t hedge. He didn’t qualify. He wrote it plainly in a May 1, 2023, op-ed in the Colorado Springs Gazette:
“Parents have every right to say that they don’t want pornography in their kids’ schools. In a world with one iota of moral sanity, that is not only non controversial, but it should be expected.”
He then brought the spectacle directly to children. At a student-led candidate forum at Chinook Trail Middle School, with elementary students in the audience, Wilburn read explicit passages from the novel “Push” by Sapphire. Passages so graphic that, in his own telling, local newscasts couldn’t air them.
What he didn’t acknowledge: Push was not sitting on every library shelf in the district. It was housed in a single high school library, available only to older students, yet Wilburn chose to read it aloud to an audience that included eight year-olds.
And if you think this was off-the-cuff, think again. In leaked Discord chats from that campaign cycle,
Wilburn and his allies talked openly about the strategy. Screenshots tell the story in their own
words. They knew what they were doing. They weren’t discovering a problem.
They were manufacturing one.
Rogers, Stevens, Guthrie & their ilk can’t stop the book banning narrative. They’re all in on it.
Cloninger just revealed how she wants to make sure kids have access to porn in schools. Here’s a superintendent who’d just as soon lose their job rather than remove filth from school libraries.
The work <@993280801171067033> is doing is absolutely pivotal and, I believe, will sweep in two new board members in Nov.”
The Lawsuit That Exposed the Fabrication
Fast forward. Bernadette Guthrie, a parent whose daughter was in that audience, called Wilburn’s stunt what she believed it to be: predatory behavior for political gain. Her daughter was, in her mother’s words, traumatized.
She demanded accountability.
Instead of taking responsibility, Wilburn sued her for defamation.
That case is now on appeal. And here is where the hypocrisy transforms into farce. On August 27, 2025, Wilburn’s lawyer filed an answer brief on his behalf:
“Mr. Wilburn certainly believes the language and subject matter of the books demonstrated they should not be provided to children at school, but he denies that any of the material he quoted was pornographic. ”
Pause. Read that again.
After a year of op-eds, campaign speeches, podcasts, and Discord rants calling these books “porn”, Wilburn now denies, in writing, that they were pornographic.
It’s checkmate. Either:
- He told the court he believed something he now does not;
- Or, he misled voters, smearing teachers and librarians to win an election.
There is no third option.
The second possibility, that his denial is true, is the one that matters most. It would mean voters were misled, whether intentionally or recklessly, about what Wilburn believed. And it would mean the primary campaign rhetoric used during the 2023 election in D20 was built on a falsehood.
The National Playbook: From CRT to Porn Panic
If this feels familiar, it should. Wilburn didn’t invent this strategy. He borrowed it.
Back in 2021, a conservative activist and former Heritage Foundation operative named Christopher Rufo weaponized a term most Americans barely knew: Critical Race Theory. He was blunt about the strategy: Take an obscure academic framework taught mainly in law schools, stretch it beyond recognition, and slap the label on anything that mentioned racism, equity, or U.S. history in ways that made parents uncomfortable, if not outraged.
The point wasn’t accuracy. It was to turn “CRT” into a toxic brand, a catch-all for grievances about schools, diversity, or even basic discussions of civil rights.
By repeating the term until it curdled into a cultural slur, Rufo gave conservatives a simple villain and a rallying cry, one that could mobilize voters through fear rather than facts.
It worked. Rufo’s CRT panic launched school board takeovers across the country, gave Fox News a nightly segment, and handed conservatives a ready-made villain.
By 2023, the formula was ready for its sequel. This time, the label was “porn.”
Moms for Liberty made “porn in our schools” a national talking point and Heritage Foundation-adjacent organizations wrote model bills aimed at purging so called “pornographic” content from school libraries. Wilburn carried the script into Colorado Springs. The Discord leaks show they weren’t responding to a crisis. The pattern suggests they were franchising one.
And now, 2025: The Trans Athlete Pivot
If 2021’s manufactured wedge issue was Critical Race Theory, and 2023’s was “porn,” the 2025 season has already been greenlit. The target this time: transgender athletes.
The facts in Academy District 20 are plain. At a June 17, 2025 board meeting, District Athletics Director Ron Alexander said:
“Since I’ve been in the district, we’ve only had two students wish to participate as a transgender student.”
Alexander was crystal clear, there were no controversies, incidents, safety concerns, or complaints from parents. The existing Colorado High School Athletic Association policy has worked quietly, competently, and without drama.
Yet days later, the extremist bloc on the D20 board, Derrick Wilburn, Amy Shandy, and Susan Payne among them, pushed through a resolution banning trans athletes and voted to spend taxpayer dollars joining Districts 11, 49, and others in a lawsuit against CHSAA, all to fight the same manufactured problem.
Not because of incidents. Not because of fairness. Not because of safety. But because it’s an election year. This isn’t about protecting girls in sports. It’s about winning elections.
And the strategy isn’t a secret. In a 2024 training video for Ziklag, a Christian nationalist network of billionaires and operatives, Lance Wallnau, an evangelical strategist known for political activism, laid it our plainly: “Transgenderism” is a wedge issue that can “deliver swing states.”
They’re not hiding it. They’re bragging about it.
Franchised Outrage
The pattern is undeniable:
- 2021: Rufo, CRT panic → national wave of school board takeovers.
- 2023: Moms for Liberty + Wilburn, “pornography” panic → school boards flipped.
- 2025: Heritage, Ziklag, Moms for Liberty → trans athlete panic.
It’s not organic, it’s franchised national outrage on a local level.
Pick a new villain. Inflate it into an existential threat. Distract exhausted parents. Harvest fear. Win elections. Repeat.
Meanwhile, real issues at our schools languish. Academy District 20 alone faces over $541 million in deferred maintenance: leaking roofs, unsafe playgrounds, failing HVAC systems. However, addressing those issues requires competence, compassion, and collaboration on the part of school board members. Manufactured crises? They only require a microphone and a scapegoat.
The Real Question
So, let’s stop pretending this is about kids. It never was.
In 2023, Derrick Wilburn told you there was porn in libraries. In 2025, he told the Colorado Appeals court there wasn’t. Both statements cannot be true. And yet, the same network of people is now asserting that trans athletes are an existential threat to girls’ sports.
Here’s the only question that matters:
If Derrick Wilburn, Advocates for D20 Kids, Moms for Liberty, Moms for America, the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network, and all the other peddlers of this “porn” propaganda misled the public in 2023, why would anyone believe a single word that any of them, or their Christian nationalist allies, say in 2025? They’ve already admitted the last crusade was hollow. The only people still fooled are those who want to be. This isn’t leadership. It’s not parental rights. It’s not Christianity.
It amounts, in my view, to political fraud.
The voters of Colorado, the parents, the students, and the exhausted community caught in the crossfire, deserve better.
Rob Rogers is an Agile leader and data strategist who writes at the intersection of education, civic tech, and politics. He explores how systems shape the way we learn, lead, and govern.
