In mid June, a film crew from Turning Point USA came to Reno. They were there to confront the school board over library books they said were too obscene for students.
With them that day was Karen England, president of Sacramento-based Capitol Resource Institute. Trustee Adam Mayberry acknowledged her during public comment.
“Hello, Miss England. Welcome,” he said as she approached the podium. “Thank you for making the trip up here to our community.”
“Absolutely,” she replied, before launching into a list of grievances with the district.
England followed John Amanchukwu, a North Carolina-based pastor who’s been working with Turning Point to activate evangelical Christian voters for former president Donald Trump. He read aloud from a salacious passage from the 1991 horror novel, American Psycho, prompting trustees to call a recess.
During England’s turn at the microphone, she read a passage from Identical, a young adult novel about survivors of sexual abuse. She told KUNR she wants books like these to be removed from school libraries, in order to preserve the innocence of any student younger than 18.
“Constitutionally challenging pervasively vulgar books in public school libraries, for minors, with public tax dollars,” she said. “That is our focus.”
England presents herself as a grassroots activist. But researchers and community members say she’s really a high-level political operative, who’s drumming up local controversies to drive votes in national elections.
England lives in Tennessee now, but still makes frequent trips to the West Coast. If you ask why she spends so much time on the road, England will tell you she’s just going where she’s called.
“People in this movement know of our work, and we are kind of the premier ones that are tying the specific books to the specific schools,” she said.
In reality, England is a member of one of the most powerful – and secretive – right wing groups in the country: The Council for National Policy (CNP).
According to investigative journalist Anne Nelson, whose book Shadow Network describes the CNP’s history and impact on modern right-wing politics, the group unites strategists like England with wealthy donors, like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk is also a member.
“The way the Council for National Policy works is that it has these various components,” she said. “They get together, and the billionaires have little powwows with the people who work on strategy.”
The CNP was founded more than four decades ago by a small cabal of leaders from the Christian and political right. Nelson explained one of their chief goals has been to undermine public institutions, including libraries and schools.
England is one of the group’s leading on-the-ground strategists in that effort, Nelson said.
“[England’s] been very involved in activities around schools and state level operations, and these have been going on for quite a while,” she said.
England’s membership in the CNP goes back to at least 2014, according to a leaked membership list published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. By 2017, she was on the organization’s Board of Governors, alongside former U.S. Representative Tom DeLay (R–TX), influential judicial activist Leonard Leo, and Cleta Mitchell, who spearheaded efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election on behalf of the Trump reelection campaign.
In an interview with KUNR, England confirmed her membership in the CNP.
“I am a member. That's all I will say about it,” she said.
According to leaked internal memos published by the investigative journalism outlet Documented, the CNP has a strict privacy policy.
England said she doesn’t get any money from the billionaires in the group. But in a leaked recording from a Feb. 2019 CNP meeting, also published by Documented, she appeared to solicit donations.
“I want to ask you: Join the fight with us on the ground,” she told the audience to applause. “If we really want to build the party, [and] reach out to the minority communities – the mama bears whose kids are being exposed to this, is where we need to start.”
Public education advocate Kristi Hirst first encountered England in 2018, when she started showing up at school board meetings in the Chino Valley Unified School District, in Southern California.
“Karen came through in this anti-sex ed movement,” Hirst said. “She was sort of spearheading it here in Chino.”
Hirst is cofounder of Our Schools USA, an activist network that opposes books bans across the country. She’s also a former teacher in Chino Valley USD, and her three kids go to school in the district.
At the time, England was pushing the board to pass a policy that would let parents opt their kids out of sex ed classes – which they could already do.
“First, [they] scare parents,” Hirst said. “Here's what she really wanted: She didn't want kids to have to learn about families that had two moms or two dads.
That policy didn’t pass… and England disappeared. But Hirst said that fight inspired her to continue her activism.
Six years later, England’s active in Chino Valley USD again. With her support, far-right school board trustees have passed controversial policies, like a “forced outing” requirement that teachers must tell parents if their child uses a different gender expression at school.
Activists say that puts students at risk, because transphobic violence can happen at home.
And although England told KUNR she’s just defending parents’ rights, Hirst believes she’s really focused on undermining public institutions.
“All of these policies have a theme. And the theme is: You can't trust your teachers and your school,” Hirst said.
Author Ellen Hopkins agrees.
Hopkins, who lived in Washoe Valley for decades, writes young adult fiction that addresses dark themes, like sexual abuse, addiction, and crime. She says her books aren’t written for shock value, though. Instead, she wants them to be cautionary tales for teens navigating a complicated world.
“I want us to be able to recognize victims. I also want victims to know there's hope on the far side of that they can come out of whatever they're experiencing,” she said.
England has used some of the grittier passages in Hopkins’ work to argue school librarians are trying to sexualize young people.
“What's going on now is this real drive from a certain sector that wants to dismantle or cripple public school education,” Hopkins said. “That's why they're driving teachers away from teaching. They're driving librarians away from being librarians.”
Hopkins has also suffered personally from England’s scapegoating of her work.
“When she starts throwing around terms like pornography, that's a real problem – and especially calling me a groomer, and a pedophile, and a pornographer – because I am none of those things,” she said. “I've dedicated my life to trying to make life better for young people.”
But according to journalist Anne Nelson, England and her allies in the CNP are really using school board controversies to gain votes in Tuesday’s election. If they succeed, she said, they’ll be able to rely on a friendly administration to help them weaken the federal bureaucracy – and replace it with their own institutions.
“They recognized, in the last national election, that white, suburban women were tending to react badly to Trump,” she said. “And they developed a strategy, that would be using the school boards to touch a nerve.”
