
Join the conversation with Priscilla Ron as she delves into the state of American education, its misguiding narratives, and the lost understanding of our nation’s history. Featuring Michael Hancock, author of ‘Rules for Restoration,’ this episode challenges the activist formation prevalent in today’s schools and emphasizes the importance of teaching true heritage. Michael provides insight into the disconnections and false narratives taught in schools and discusses how we can restore foundational principles and values for a better future.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Ron. She’s a master educator and author leading the conversation to restore the American mind through wisdom, virtue, and truth.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Restoring Education in America. I’m your host, Priscilla Ron, and I’m so grateful that you’ve decided to join the conversation today. As we are going into the 2026 school year, parents are now looking at school options. and there are a lot of great options for parents. One of those great options is Excalibur Classical Academy. They’re a new private school that’s opening this fall in the Centennial area. So if you have a young child who is starting kindergarten through third grade, we invite you to go to their website, which is ExcaliburClassicalAcademy.org to learn more. Their mission and vision is restoring America’s heritage by developing servant leaders who are keepers and defenders of the principles of freedom for which our founding fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. So if you’re looking for a great option, a safe option for your children, please go to ExcaliburClassicalAcademy.org. And if you’re a teacher looking for a great learning environment to teach, please send them your resume. So, you know, there’s a lot of hot topics in public education today and even in society in general. And we’re seeing this big uprising in young people who really don’t understand our history. They don’t understand that we are a republic. They think we’re a democracy. And they don’t understand their rights, so they can’t defend them. So I have a really special guest, my dear friend, that I am going to bring to the stage. We’re going to talk all about it. Welcome to my friend, Michael Hancock. Hi, Michael.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey, Priscilla. How you doing?
SPEAKER 01 :
Doing great. Oh, so to the folks that are in Denver, not the mayor, Michael Hancock.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I typically refer to myself as the emperor.
SPEAKER 01 :
The other Michael Hancock, although you guys are actually related. People don’t know that.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s ironic. Well, I’m glad to have you, Michael Hancock, here. But before we go into our conversation, I’m going to share just a tiny bit of your bio with the listeners. Okay. Michael Hancock is the author of Rules for Restoration, a counter manifesto to radicalism and co-host of the Liberty Collaborative podcast. He writes a regular column for the Denver Gazette, publishes undercurrent on Substack, and has contributed op-eds to Colorado Politics and Rocky Mountain Voice. His work focuses on constitutional government, economic freedom, Christianity, and restoring strong civic institutions from the ground up. He’s an Air Force veteran, husband, data for, and grandpa.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, indeedy.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. So Michael, one of the first questions I always like to ask grandparents is what is your grandpa name?
SPEAKER 03 :
Pop-pop. They call me Pop-pop.
SPEAKER 01 :
Pop up. Everybody has their unique name, and I love it. And you have a beautiful family. Your wife, Stephanie, is a rock star on the Aurora City Council, working hard. I have to also mention, Mike, that you are a co-class of 2023 Leadership Program of the Rockies alumni.
SPEAKER 03 :
LPR. Yes, indeed.
SPEAKER 01 :
LPR. And for those people who don’t know anything about LPR, I encourage you to go to Leadership Program of the Rockies online. Check us out because it is such an amazing leadership course. What is something that you got out of that course that you want to share with our listeners?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I would say that all that stuff that you talk about that I’m doing, really LPR was the launching point for that. It really got me, most importantly, to begin to think about things in terms of our first principles, what the principles are that our nation was founded on. And wow, that just totally blew my mind. And I’ve been on a terror ever since.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I’ve been reading a lot of your writings. You’re incredibly smart, incredibly wise. But now you have this new book. Okay.
SPEAKER 03 :
Rules for Restoration.
SPEAKER 01 :
Rules for Restoration, a counter manifesto to radicalism. So since we have such a limited amount of time, I just want to dive right in and tell me what first prompted you, Michael, to write Rules for Restoration and why respond specifically to Alinsky’s work?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. You know, the thing that got me there was a couple of different things. One, for many years I’ve been sort of reflecting on what’s going on in our nation. It seems like everything’s getting worse every day. And then, of course, going to the LPR, uh into going into the lpr program i i realized that there was this big big disconnect between what our actual history is what the actual principles were are that our country was founded on and where we are today and so there’s all of these false narratives about history and everything else that our population has been fed, in particular, in our school systems. Our school systems today are such that we have a narrative and a history being taught to our kids that actually tend to drive them toward being anti-American, being against our own country. So, you know, in reaching that point, I decided that once I got the principles under hand, I said, look, I’ve got to get the message out that where we are today isn’t an accident. It’s been driven for almost 100 years to the point we are today. And that Saul Alinsky, if you take a look back at the 1960s and the civil rights movement, Saul Alinsky was the guy behind a lot of the what I would say the radicals, if you will, right? People that were bombing, that were protesting and creating riots and stuff like that. And so I decided that what I was going to do, and you see all of that same stuff going on today. Like, you know, I experienced it in Aurora City Council meetings where you have large groups of people show up and they’re protesting and they’re shouting at city council people, calling them racist and white supremacists and all that sort of stuff. That’s all classic Saul Alinsky. And so. I’ve written this book to, one, expose what’s really going on, but more importantly, to refocus people on what our founding principles are and to a couple, a few of which are, one, that all men are created equal. right two uh that our rights come from nature’s god from god in essence right and that the fundamental purpose of government the fundamental role of government is to protect our individual rights right you’ve got to start there and um so i wrote the book to uh based upon these principles to Tell people how we can get engaged on a local level to really start to transform this nation and restore it. And the interesting thing is when people see the word restoration, they say, well, when are you talking about restoring it? It’s not about a when, it’s about a what, right? Principles into our founding values.
SPEAKER 01 :
Michael, I love that you talk about young people and education. You had some educator write the foreword for your book, you know? I know. I don’t know about all that. But Alinsky framed politics as a power struggle where tactics often outweighed truth. Okay. And so you were talking about restoration. So what does restoration mean to you at a cultural level? Well,
SPEAKER 03 :
um restoration means to me that one we embrace our first and foremost embrace our creator right and understand that we were created by god in the image of god right and so a lot of what we find today and what saul olinsky was about is is saying that it’s not about god it’s not about what’s righteous and what’s right it’s about power Right. And so we’ve got to get focused back on what is it that we as human beings do to really uplift each other. Right. And it’s not about seizing power. And one of the things that you’ll see is that I just I saw a great video. I’ll send it to you very soon. But it’s this Chinese lady. Her name is Xi Van Fleet. And she wrote she was born during the time of and came up under the Cultural Revolution in China. Right. And what she does in the video and in her book is she talks about how what happened during the Cultural Revolution she sees happening right now. in the United States, right? And we need, so we need to awaken, especially our kids, because that’s the thing in the cultural revolution that happened is that they took the kids and shaped their minds. Why the kids? Because kids haven’t developed critical thinking skills yet, right? And so it’s so important. And I’m so happy that, you know, you’re doing what you’re doing with leading up the effort with the new school, because I know that in your hands, kids are going to be taught the things about this nation, taught the things about righteousness that will help create new leaders that can help transform and rebuild our country.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, I like to say at Excalibur, we’re not just teaching history, we’re teaching our heritage. It’s different. Like if you and I know our heritage, that’s more than just knowing the history of our people, the history of our nation. It’s critical. But you have this, okay, you end your book with this amazing chapter called Equip the Next Generation. And I’m going to read a little excerpt and I want you to unpack it, okay?
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, thank you.
SPEAKER 01 :
The second paragraph says the current landscape indoctrination masquerading as education. What passes for education in many places today is little more than activist formation wrapped in bureaucratic jargon. From kindergarten to college, students are taught to view history as a record of oppression, not achievement. Define identity by grievance, not responsibility. Reject objective truth in favor of lived experience. See America’s founding ideals as fundamentally flawed and treat biblical morality as bigotry and vice versa. What’s worse, many parents are too distracted, too overwhelmed, or too afraid to intervene. And in that silence, the state steps in to become both parent and priest.
SPEAKER 03 :
Whoa.
SPEAKER 01 :
Unpack that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, whoa, you just gave me a chill. Who wrote that?
SPEAKER 01 :
I mean, you’re literally explaining the state of education right now.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, you know, the thing is, we’ve just, you know, went to one of the local junior high schools here recently. And you go in there, there are no books, right? Which means that what they’re being taught is something that either some teacher or something that was given to the teacher to literally read. program our kids. The school that we went to, they were having this sort of mock debate about the Constitution. And when the kids were asked the question, well, how to get engaged in transforming our civic, yes, in essence, the government and stuff like that, the only answer that they had was we must protest, right? They don’t think about, well, run for the city council, understand what government is. And this is one of the big things. When I came up in high school, I took civics. So I learned about the three branches of government that they’re supposed to be co-equal. I really didn’t dig into the constitution at the time, but at least I got a framework and I understood that there’s a balance of powers and how the government works. Well, today, our kids are being taught that the government doesn’t work and that, in fact, the government was built off of people who were white supremacists, right, who owned slaves and disrespected their humanity or defined them as three-fifths of a human, all of which are lies, right? Education is so important in getting our kids back to the point where they actually have people that are teaching them who want to understand what the heck happened in this nation, what our heritage is, what the foundation is. But even those people who are teachers are being taught and misled about what our nation is and can be. It was built to be a more perfect union. And what has happened over time is that those principles have been lost, which is really the foundation of why we became a place that freed the slaves, right? All sorts of great things happened in this nation in history because of those foundational principles, and we’ve lost touch with those.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, you bring up a lot of really great points that history has been watered down so much that those nuances, as you mentioned, like the three-fifths clause, the three-fifths compromise, and people say, oh, Abraham Lincoln was a racist. No, he was trying to keep the union together. Right. Just understanding our history is so critical, but our students are not getting taught that. And so now we have a generation of educators who are mis-educating young people to the point that they’re going out into these ICE protests, not understanding immigration laws and the need to get hardened criminals with warrants off the street. I mean, okay. So anyway, I know this for a fact because this has been my ecosystem forever, but I To your point, for you and I, who are Black conservatives, Black Republicans, when we talk about, hey, we’re not oppressed. We’ve never been slaves. Yes, we might be descendants of enslaved Africans, but you and I are living the American dream. There is nothing that anybody can do that you and I can’t do. Look, we’ve both self-published our own books. We’re writing. We’re speaking. We’re learning. We’re sharing the things that we’ve learned with the masses. There’s nothing that’s holding us back. There’s no law. We’re living in the greatest nation in the world.
SPEAKER 03 :
Absolutely.
SPEAKER 01 :
Absolutely. So talk about why this book is so important and why people need to read it, especially if they’re in our community.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I think that important thing about my book is that it exposes people to the truth and it challenges people to think. One of the things that people don’t understand quite often is there’s a difference between free speech and freedom versus authoritarianism versus totalitarianism. Totalitarianism doesn’t want you to think at all. In fact, if you think, you’re going to have your head cut off. And what we see today is that we have many people protesting and no kings and all kinds of crazy stuff. And guess what? They don’t want you to talk. They don’t want you to disagree with them, right? The same thing that we see happening actually now being destroyed in Iran. The people that stand up and talk, well, over the last six weeks, 30,000 of them have been slaughtered in the street. None of these people at all ever speak up to that sort of thing that’s wrongdoing. So the reason that my book is important is that it’s a wake-up call. It wants people to wake up and understand what it really means to have a country where ideas and principles like free speech are really important. uh where a republic uh is only as good as the people that hold those we elect to office accountable so we have to stand up and one of the things that i think you made a a great point just recently you know for the most part parents who are in the middle of raising kids and stuff like that they don’t have a lot of time to understand what’s going on i i totally get that but there’s the grandparents And young people that are haven’t actually yet entered into the workforces. We’ve got to get those people aware of what the heck is going on and get them to begin to show up at city council meetings. Right. But my view is that you got to show up educated. You can’t show up just to protest. Right. You’ve got to know what the heck is that you’re fighting for if you’re going to get in the fight.
SPEAKER 01 :
You know, I’m finding it even more challenging for individuals on social media to be able to articulate their thinking and their reasoning. Mainly the problem is because they don’t know what their values are. They’re not basing any of their belief systems on principles. And when you don’t know what your principles are, you’re just responding emotionally. I try to be patient with people that I’m debating with on social media because I’m like, Priscilla, they just don’t know. They haven’t been taught. They’re adults and scary because a lot of them are teachers.
SPEAKER 03 :
OK, yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
And I and I ask them, so do you believe and then I’ll ask a question or like one simple question. Do you think it’s the proper role of government? And then finish the sentence. Do you think it’s the proper role of government to do? Yeah. To supply education. Do you believe it’s the proper role of government to give us safe borders? Do you believe it’s the, and people don’t know what the constitution says.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right.
SPEAKER 01 :
And therefore every answer is an emotional answer based on how they feel, but not understanding the constitution is the highest law of the land. You can’t just do whatever you want. And guess what? To tag on to that, Michael, that Constitution was written based on a republic. We sent our representatives to Congress to pass laws. So those laws that we have are from we, the people, if we, the people, want different rules and different amendments. then we tell our representatives to go make amendments to the Constitution. So it’s not like there’s this dictator making these laws like ICE is a dictator. No, that’s a representation of democracy. That’s what democracy looks like.
SPEAKER 03 :
Absolutely. You know, the thing that I find amazing quite often because I absolutely believe what you just said. If one knows the Declaration of Independence, knows the Constitution, and these are fairly short documents, it doesn’t take like a lifetime to really understand or to read what’s there. It might take a lifetime to really understand, right? If you really dig in, but if you don’t have that as a fundamental basis upon which you can look at the world and what’s supposed to be, then you’re just sort of lost. And so I’ve asked, I ask people all the time, I say, well, how much do you know about the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence? And especially African-American and Black folks that I ask, they’ll say, well, gee, obviously, I don’t know anything about that. That wasn’t written for me, right? which is so wrong, because if you see that from the very time slavery started in this country, there was always a debate about what’s the righteous thing to do, which is we should all be free, and those who thought that it was right to treat humans as property. And so that debate was always there. Even the Three-Fifths Clause is you know they’ll say well three-fifths clause was actually defining black people as less than human which is it had nothing at all to do with that right so people tend to just buy these lies that have been um targeted at them because the people targeting them know that they will act emotionally right and versus well let me go and investigate Well, what does it really say? And that, again, going back to LPR, that was such an eye-opener for me because I’ve been debating these issues with people for almost all my life, and they very quickly devolve into an emotional exchange. Well, looking at the principles, understanding the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and what it has to say and stuff changed all that for me. Right now I can sit down unemotionally and talk about principles. Right. What’s the principle? But here’s the funny thing. You want to talk about principles. They want to talk about Donald Trump.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 1 :
100%.
SPEAKER 01 :
And you mentioned like Saul Alinsky strategy is like ridicule, insulting, even the perception of power. You may not actually have power, but if he can get you to believe that you, that other people think that you have power, that’s also a strategy, you know, but to, to go back to, you know, reading, I know I have my right here. I love, okay. Everybody start building your personal library. There was a time back in the day before TVs that the wealthy were defined by having a library, the wealthy, the aristocrats, the intelligent, the elite had a library. The quickest thing you can do to become part of that elite is to read. Okay. Now, not a big fan of oprah but oprah did make a statement one time and i totally agree someone said you know if you don’t want black people to know something put it in a book insulting but there’s some truth to that right because we don’t like to read here’s the federalist papers the federalist papers helps you understand what our founding fathers intended when they wrote the constitution. So there’s that. Yeah. Okay. But I want to talk about your faith because it is such a big part of who you are and what makes you tick. But it’s also a critical part of our founding of our nation because we were founded as a Christian nation. And people say, oh, no, we weren’t. Yes, we were. And I will tell you why. We were not founded under Sharia law. Our laws don’t represent Sharia law. Our documents don’t reflect laws of other religions. and when you look at how we write our laws around justice okay those are very biblically based and when our founding fathers talked about our inalienable rights they were talking about god our rights come from the creator not from the government so talk about how you embed your faith into the work that you do and in your book
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, my family’s background is one of Christianity, right? My great-grandfathers on both sides of my family were, one was the, in Taylor, Texas, established the African Methodist Episcopal Church there. Another one established the first Black Baptist Church there. Right. And so I, you know, I came up going to Bible school and reading the Bible. In fact, I started reading the Bible when I was 15. I think around five years old. Okay. I remember very distinctly getting to that portion in Genesis where the serpent basically misleads Eve. And I’m thinking to myself, well, holy smoly, how is this possible? How can this serpent totally wreck God’s creation? It never made any sense, right? Until I, many years later, in my continual prayer and contemplation and seeking answers to that question, well, I understood that God created a perfect world. And without that separation, we would never have been put in the position of seeking a relationship with God, right? And so the Bible says, seek and ye shall find. And so I’ve been a constant throughout my life, a seeker of truth, a studier. And what I would say probably over the last 10 years, more than any other time in my life, have been a student of the Bible, right? And what I find is that the more I seek, the more answers come, the more I feel free, the more powerful I feel as a messenger of God, right? Because it’s not about me at all. It’s not about me, it’s about our Father. And so it plays a critical role in who I am, And who he is. Right. I’m just a vessel that that’s all. And so and I encourage, you know, I encourage people to really study the Bible. Right. Study the Bible. Study the Declaration of Independence. Study the Constitution. Right. The more you study these things, the freer you actually become.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, Michael Hancock, we’ve got to land our plane. We’re out of time. But thank you so much for sharing a little bit more about your book, Rules for Restoration. I encourage people to go to Amazon, buy your book. To my listeners, thank you so much for tuning in and catch me next time. And remember, educating the mind without the heart is no education. So seek wisdom, cultivate virtue, and speak truth.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for tuning in to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Ron. Visit PriscillaRon.com to connect or learn how you can sponsor future episodes to keep this message of faith, freedom, and education on the air.