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During a rush of year-end giving, starting on Thursday, December 19th, 2024, and ending on December 31st, 2024, U-Turn in Education received several year-end donations to its GiveButter campaign that has existed since August 2023. This campaign has languished without a recent gift since about nine months ago when they first received an anonymous gift of $500, then $1000 from Nexstar, the marketing company of KOLR10.
[KOLR10] is owned by Mission Broadcasting, which maintains a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Nexstar Media Group, owner of MyNetworkTV affiliate KOZL-TV (channel 27) and Osage Beach–licensed Fox affiliate KRBK (channel 49), for the provision of certain services.
In the last couple of weeks, over two thousand dollars have come into U-Turn from the Expedia Group, starting with a donation on the same day by Jeremy Hayes, the husband of Sheila Michaels (she ran for Western County Commissioner and applied for Library Board Trustee in Christian County).
Every donation tracked has been made through the platform GiveButter, which has various fees or donations (tips) to their platform, which can range from small to large.
Below are screenshots of U-Turns campaign on GiveButter. Please note the amounts from Expedia Group and Jeremy Hayes in particular. Also, note Nexstar the next time you watch KOLR10 and wonder if you should continue to watch KOLR10.
Key Individuals & Relationships
Senior Finance Officer at Expedia
Jeremy Hayes’ LinkedIn Profile.
Jeremy Hayes is currently at the Expedia Group as the Senior Finance Manager if his LinkedIn Profile account is up-to-date. As Jeremey hasn’t posted yet, it may not be.
U-TURN: Treasurer and Board Member
Jeremy Hayes is the UTurn in Education’s Treasurer. He acts as the financial officer for the non-profit he donated to the business and is the senior finance officer from which the donations were made.
Sheila Michaels (Jeremy Hayes' wife)
Sheila received the 2024 Humanitarian Award from the Community Foundation of the Ozarks. She also received other rewards that U-Turn was quick to point out. However, none of this would have been possible without her connections, activism, and problematic views on books.
In this article, before the November election, I highlight several reasons Sheila Michaels would have been a poor choice as a Christian County Commissioner. I explained in that article why her election to that position would have been a disaster for Christian County.
In none of her campaign material did I discover any disclosure about her relationship with U-Turn. While U-Turn often acted less like a non-profit and more like a PAC in how they promoted Shiela on Social Media, there was no indication she was directly linked by marriage to the organization.
Further, Sheila, after not winning a seat, tried to get the County Commissioners to appoint her to the Library Board as a trustee. Her primary goal is to position herself on the Library Board.
Donation Pattern & Structure
First Day:
On December 15th, Jeremy Hayes donated out of his funds $98.47. Then Expedia Group, on the same day, donated $821.79. The funds were both given in amounts to the hundredth place. Neither amount, even from Jeremy, was rounded to the nearest dollar or ten.
Twelve Days Later (all processed same day)
The Expedia Group donates the first $383.44, the second $361.66, and the third $479.30. Each amount is again processed to the hundredth. The total giving for the Expedia Group amounted to $2046.19.
Now, it might be that the fees have been subtracted, and we are only seeing the amounts donated minus fees. Usually, one would expect to see this payout schedule on the donor side as UTurn and not on the front-facing side as the donee. Furthermore, only the fees from Jeremy Hayes and the Expedia Group are listed to the hundredth cent like this.
Transaction Specifics
What can we determine from these transactions on GiveButter’s donation page?
All amounts are calculated to exact cents (two decimal places).
Each donation is processed separately on GiveButter.
Each incurred separate platform processing fees.
It could have been consolidated to save on fees.
All transactions kept under $1,000.
Multiple donations are processed on the same day instead of a single amount.
Fees add up to the donor, and Expedia Group might want to have a policy to minimize the cost of employee-matched funds by donating in one amount if going to the same foundation on the same day. Generally, they send a letter to the foundation explaining how much was donated by each employee so the foundation can send out a separate thank you letter.
The amounts were all under $1,000. There are strict regulations within corporations to manage spending, and smaller amounts would attract less attention for oversight and review.
Timing Context
I could not confirm the pay periods for Expedia Group. The first payments occurred on Thursday, December 19th. The payments happened two weeks later, on Tuesday, December 31st (twelve days later).
If Expedia Group practices a year-end Employee Matching Fund drive, this would explain Jeremy Hayes’ giving and perhaps one donation. If Jeremy Hayes donated three more times on the same day, it might explain the three other contributions. If he had spoken to three different employees and told them how great U-Turn in Education is, that might explain their giving. As a one-time gift, though, they all managed to stay under $1000 each. Yet, Tuesday doesn’t fall on a pay period if we assume Thursday does. If Tuesday does, then Thursday doesn’t. If they both fall on pay periods, then Expedia Group has a unique pay period calendar.
Undisclosed Elements Summary
What is the relationship between Jeremy Hayes, Senior Finance Manager at Expedia Group, and Jeremy Hayes, Treasurer for U-Turn in Education? Further, what is his relationship to his wife’s campaign manager or her application for Library Board Trustee?
Further, does his role at Expedia Group give him the authority to process or approve donations to non-profits? How does his relationship with U-Turn benefit the organization and his wife, Sheila Michaels?
U-Turns Origins
In an interview with Jay Howard on the podcast The Humanities District, Dr. Elizabeth Dudash-Buskirk reveals the origins of U-Turn, which began around a kitchen table with six people. She discusses around the 3:50 to 4:50 mark how the other group members feared community backlash for forming a group that protects “free speech” rights. So, as a tenured college professor, without concerns about the impact on her family, she became the face of U-Turn.
In her words, Dr. Dudash believed that whatever criticism she would face would be surmountable because she didn’t have to worry about losing a job or having her children insulted at school. Yet, the actions of U-Turn members have not been to be professional or to deal with people based on ideas. Often, their members have turned to smear campaigns against mothers, fathers, grandfathers, and people who are not organized and who do not belong to a non-profit or a political action committee.
Members of U-Turn have trolled accounts for me and Right To Win Ozarks for publishing news articles. The trolling became so disgusting that I had to report one member and block this member on social media and here. While they claim the fear of personal persecution, such as Dr. Elizabeth Dudash-Buskirk did at the last Library Board meeting, it is not persecution to expose their ideas as patently false or misleading as we have done through our work at HickChristian and Right to Win Ozarks.
In this same podcast, we learn much about U-Turn's purpose. Dr. Dudash-Buskirk upholds that Fun Home doesn’t have any problematic images. She claims at the 23:25 mark that she would never tell anyone what to do at a Junior High library because she has no education there. She is falling for a logical fallacy. One does not need education to know if something is right or wrong. This is the fallacy of authority. I do not need to be an expert in nuclear engineering to know that I should not irradiate an entire city with Cesium-137. One does not need to be an education expert to know that putting child porn into a Junior High or High School library is like putting Cesium-137 into the water supply. It will cause moral cancer to spread among young students.
Let’s look at Fun Home to understand what she claims she couldn’t see.
Fun Home isn’t just about a young girl who is seduced into being a lesbian at college who grew up with a gay father. It’s a graphic novel depicting sexual acts with graphic descriptions of sexual abuse. This isn’t material that is appropriate for the development of young minds. Dr. Dudash-Buskirk makes a complaint in the podcast. One complaint is that the parents who asked for the book to be restricted or removed hadn’t read every single word in this book. She assumes that the book must be maintained in the library if it has any literary quality. Cesium-137 also has a purpose and can be used for treating cancer or for industrial purposes. Just like sex has a purpose and does something necessary for us all, but sex in the wrong place at the wrong time is dangerous. Exposing children to sexually explicit material that condones or appears to celebrate sexual abuse will harm a child.
U-Turn in Education wasn’t formed to protect the Free Speech rights of a child to read any book a child wants to read, even if the book will harm a child irreparably. It was formed to protect the rights of Publishers to produce and distribute material like Fun Home in the taxpayer-funded libraries of our schools and communities. In many ways, U-Turn in Education props up a broken, crony market system that has moved from capitalism to fascism. Non-government organizations like the American Library Association give U-Turn in Education in-kind donation support through online material and training, which helps turn them into effective activists. The ALA are paid stooges who need the Publishers to exist but also work closely with the government to control how much people are learning. The goal is to remove classical books and replace them with this premodern literature that is focused on gender identity, sexual impulses, pagan idolatry, and Marxist ideology.
U-Turn represents one of the necessary tools in this new system. They are essentially cheap marketing and PR arms for publishers of books like Fun Home and Gender Queer. I do not know why women fill the ranks of organizations like U-Turn or why women see this as an existential fight to save marginalized communities and help them find their true selves. I don’t know their motivation and can only guess why U-Turn has decided to promote sexually explicit and racist books as a PR firm for Publishers and the ALA. Yet, they do and participate in propaganda to mislead their local communities because they believe they have moral justification for doing so. The next part is the nonprofits like Sheila Michaels Book Bag program.
The Removal of Classical Literature
Sheila Michaels positively gushes about the Book Bag program, her receiving the Nexstar’s Remarkable Woman of the Year Award for 2024 for Springfield (along with her other awards) in this video. The Book Bag program has been used to weed out many of the best books from the collection of our local libraries through the Friends of the Library.
The Friends of the Library take book donations to the library or older books the library has decided to curate from the collection and then sell them to the community. They then take the proceeds and return the money to the Library.
Yet, with the Book Bags program, the books are donated directly to children “in need” of books and period bags (for girls and possibly boys pretending to transition to girls). This seems like a fantastic idea for young children to get great, lightly used books to read.
However, the purpose is darker. The radical education of Dr. Dudash and others, as well as Dr. Dudash’s two YouTube channels (Kritik 1999), reveal a lot about both organizations' radical beliefs. To further understand what is occurring, here are the words of Lorena German, author of “The Anti-Racist Teacher.”
"So, let us be honest, the conversation really isn't about universality … . This is about an ingrained and internalized elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonization."
Though I don’t have direct evidence, I believe the local progressives wanted to curate these colonial books without being accused of censorship. Besides the comments by German, we have other examples of Libraries removing books published before 2007. I will credit them for being fiendishly clever in the conception of the Book Bag program–it is deviously brilliant. While Dr. Dudash has many YouTube videos, I could only find this one research article she wrote with two other authors in 2018 highlighting her radical academic feminism.
Until the social construction of woman-as-speaker changes discursively, and until this change is accepted, researchers will continue to question the success or failure of campaigns as hinged on gender stereotypes. Future study of mixed-gender campaigns as they are represented in the media may use the results found here as a place to start, with the rejection of essentialized gender differences and the acceptance of rhetorical constraints tied to the political act.
In the conclusion of their study, after starting with the premise that women can’t win because of the media, they conclude women can’t win because of the media. It’s ground-breaking research. I will find misogyny, and look, there it is. I don’t think it’s a stretch for me to conclude that the same people who speak out against Racism and Homophobia at the Library Board meetings start without the evidence and then easily find it because it must exist.
Books, the books that uplift us and make us better than we were, are dangerous. They violate the cardinal rule of the progressive leftist–make everyone into a base animal. The push of sexually explicit material is designed to lower our views of ourselves and others. Our horizon shifts from the noble purpose and higher calling of grand adventures to our groin. Our stomach compels us forward as we try to eat our ouroboros tail.
That is the purpose of postcolonial and antiracism in book curation. The Book Bag program started by Sheila Michaels isn’t about empowering young children with good books but removing, as quickly as possible, under the guise of charity, the best books in our community so they can replace them with books that leave us stunted and twisted goblins. The Book Bag program is a trojan horse for their activism, so most parents aren’t aware of what is happening, but they gratefully accept the books, believing their children are being lavished with gifts. This trojan horse is impoverishing the community of valuable books and materials paid for by the taxpayers.
Beware Purple-Haired Wokesters Bearing Gifts
U-Turn is closely tied to Sheila Michaels's Book Bag program, which created a fundraiser that helped them raise nearly $8,000.
On the one hand, you have the local PR firm for the ALA and the publishers operating alongside the Christian County Library (a government organization) telling you that these books don’t have sexually explicit material in them and that they are appropriate for children.
On the other hand, you have the Book Bag program working as a charity (without a 990 or 501(c)(3) that I could find), taking books out of your Community library to give away for the progressive purpose of decolonizing your library.
For example, should the Clever Library branch partner so closely with Book Bags, an associate of U-Turn in Education? What does that say about the relationships between a non-profit tied to the ALA and another non-profit working with our taxpayer-funded entity to remove books and hand out period products at a library? Would the period products be more appropriate at the health clinic? Why doesn’t Sheila Michaels go there and put her period products on display at that location?
It’s not about the books or the period products. It’s about virtue signaling. It’s about the Clever Library branch communicating with the community that we associate ourselves with the radicals in our community.
U-Turn and the Book Bag program are working closely together to gain recognition, success, and even awards, which lead to more non-profit gifts.
Following the money exchange between the powerful and the activists is essential. Dr. Dudash-Buskirk has complained about harassment in the community, though she hasn’t produced records. We have shown that the elite in the community have given thousands of dollars to U-Turn and to the Book Bag program. Outside groups have funneled money to them through the award programs that Sheila has received.
UPDATE [2/1/2025]
Remember what I said about post-colonial books? Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined is rewriting an important American classic, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. This is a direct example of the type of assertion I was making, but didn’t have evidence for at the time. The other books for teens are about DEI, violence, and witchcraft. While she served on a council with others to choose these books, she lent her voice and credibility to making the decisions that included these books on the award list.
The Nexstar Award provided social status and $1,000 to a Charity of Sheila Michaels’ choice. The Missouri Association of School Librarians provided an award, but it doesn’t appear to have a monetary award on its website. In 2023, Sheila Michaels was awarded the 2023 Young Adults Librarian of the Year Award, which awarded her $500 and $500 for her library. This was a gift from the American Library Association. In 2024, Shiela Michaels received the Community Foundation of the Ozarks Humanitarian of the Year award of $5,000. In the non-profit world, nothing attracts money like money. Winning awards and recognition will attract more money to your non-profit.
Dr. Dudash-Buskirk is also connected to the Community Foundation of the Ozarks through her Be Civil Be Heard (at KSMU) Foundation, which practices “polite conversations” or ways to suppress free speech in our community. Free Speech isn’t always polite or civil. Yet, Dr. Dudash-Buskirk is working hand in hand with the Community Foundation of the Ozarks to suppress our speech in our community.
The connections spread out to the Christian County Library which is tied to Missouri State University and Community Foundation of the Ozarks through podcasts and grants, all tied to staff and family members of staff. All of this is tied to the Communication Department taht Dr. Dudash-Buskirk works at at MSU. And it’s just a coincidence that she has become an activist at the CCL. Remember that conversation about the start of U-Turn? Who was at the kitchen table that she was protecting? Would it include library staff?
As recently as the last board meeting, I observed a staff member whispering to the KSMU reporter Chris Drew behind him in a close manner, signaling a friendship with each other based on the touch on the shoulder and the closeness of the two heads. The staff member in question is Nick Holladay. Is he related to Dr. Holly Holladay at MSU?
The genesis of U-Turn with six people at a kitchen table gives you an idea of how quickly a small group of people can affect their local community. Yet, U-Turn hasn’t won any significant battles. They have received outside funding, recognition, and support. The influential NGOs, publishers, and government agencies need U-Turn and Book Bag to win, but relatively disconnected individuals have stood against U-Turn.
What has connected those who have stood against sexually explicit material, the decolonization of whiteness (racism, folks, it’s just racism), and fascism has been faith and prayer. There is little more than that holding us together. So be encouraged. You don’t need to win awards from foundations with $427 million in assets to be effective, and you don’t need to require people to call you a Doctor.
The power of the individual is still a threat to the hive mind. The power of one lone person, willing to defiantly hold the banner of truth and deny the system its victory, is undefeatable. U-Turn and Book Bags will likely continue to receive awards and recognition for their brave and stunning work. They will likely continue to raise thousands of dollars in fundraising. Yet, their victories are all pyrrhic. They can’t cross the Rubicon–they can’t enter Rome itself and defy an Emperor with the truth like Paul and Peter. Not when they are helping Nero burn down the Imperial city and telling everyone they are the firemen sent to protect the looters and iconoclasts.
When the Rain Comes
There is hope that will squelch a fire, though, when divine rain comes down from Heaven on a parched land. Like a spider trying to climb a drainpipe in a storm, our local itsy-bitsy spiders find themselves in an increasingly precarious position. Each carefully constructed strand–from U-Turn's suspicious Expedia donations to Sheila Michaels' cascade of self-reinforcing awards–becomes visible when caught in the light of scrutiny. The web that once seemed so cleverly engineered now glistens with obvious intent: a pattern of self-enrichment masquerading as public service.
The delicate spider's most significant miscalculation wasn't in spinning such an elaborate web but in assuming the rain would never come. Yet here it is–not in violent revolution or dramatic expose, but in the steady drip of truth that reveals each connection, each donation pattern, each award ceremony for what it really is. The gossamer web that connects the CFO's $427M to MSU to Springfield Daily Citizen to Reporting on Christian County Library, that links Michaels' humanitarian awards to her husband's financial positions, begins to dissolve under this persistent storm of facts.
No desperate spider can flee up this waterspout. No amount of awards, no carefully structured donations, and no pretend proclamations of doing good can help them ascend against this torrent of truth. Like the itsy-bitsy spider of childhood rhyme, they may try again and again, but each attempt only makes their pattern of self-dealing more visible, their web of influence more obvious.
The sun they're waiting for–the one that would dry up all these inconvenient truths–isn't coming. Because the rain that reveals their web doesn't fall from natural causes but from divine purpose. We were meant to see this dangerous web, not to be caught in it, but to witness its existence and understand its intent. However, our role was never to destroy the web ourselves–that power belongs to a higher authority. Our assigned task was more straightforward yet profound: to recognize the trap through faith, to understand its nature through prayer, and to warn others who might mistake these silken strands for safety lines. What appeared at first as a potential disaster–our community's collision with their web of influence–was, in fact, divine revelation. The spider's web wasn't meant to catch us but to be caught itself, exposed in the cleansing torrent of heaven's rain.
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