By my dogs that love gravy this is so asinine I really doubted it could be true. First the trend by religious people to think they have the right to push their god and religious driven opinions on everyone else is increasing to a level that is stunning. That a judge thought it was OK for a religious Christian woman to spam and harass her co-workers with her church views and offensive pictures is also something I don’t understand. The judge was appointed by trump if that helps to understand she is a fundamentalist Christian nationalist. But what really scares me is the actions of the judge who went full fundamentalist Christian on the defendants to the point of forcing a religious indoctrination on them. HOW IS THAT LEGAL? Forcing a nonbeliever on threat of the court to not only attend forced religious indoctrination, but to also pay for it. Plus it seems a large part of the woman’s story was made up as it is becoming increasingly a tactic by religious fanatics to get their cases in court. Plus the religious hate group was no way involved with the case but the judge forced his fundamentalist views and support of the religious hate group to force them into the case. What has Texas and this country become? Hugs
The lawyers must take religious freedom classes from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the right-wing Christian group that has systematically rolled back civil liberties.
KENT NISHIMURA/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGES
Kristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, speaks to members of the press outside the Supreme Court on December 5, 2022.
A Trump-appointed Texas judge has ordered three senior Southwest Airlines lawyers to take eight hours of “religious-liberty training” from the far-right Christian hate group Alliance Defending Freedom.
In his late Monday ruling, U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr specifically mandated the lawyers take the training as part of court-ordered sanctions for religious discrimination. He described ADF as one of several “esteemed non-profit organizations that are dedicated to preserving free speech and religious freedom.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated ADF as an extremist hate group.
The mandated hate-group training is the latest phase of a lawsuit brought by flight attendant Charlene Carter, who sued Southwest for firing her in 2017 after she sent confrontational anti-abortion messages to her union’s former president. Carter argued she had been discriminated against based on her religious beliefs, and U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr sided with her in December, ordering she be reinstated.
Starr, who was appointed by Donald Trump in 2019, also ordered Southwest to issue a statement telling its employees that the airline “may not” engage in religious discrimination against them. Instead, Southwest said that it “does not” do so, prompting Carter to demand additional sanctions against the company.
Carter had made no request for Southwest to undergo religious liberty training. ADF is not representing Carter, nor is it otherwise related to the case at all, so it’s unclear why Starr felt the need to involve the group.
It’s hard to overstate ADF’s role in rolling back civil liberties. One of its lead lawyers is Erin Hawley, who is married to far-right Senator Josh Hawley. ADF helped overturn Roe v. Wade and then sued to remove mifepristone, one of the drugs used in medication abortions, from the national market. That case is still in limbo, as the Fifth Circuit Court has yet to issue a ruling.
ADF also represented the plaintiff in the recent Supreme Court case 303 Creative v. Elenis. Web designer Lorie Smith was suing to have the right to refuse services to LGBTQ people. The design request she claims she received that prompted her suit appears to have been entirely fabricated.
The judge, a Federalist Society member, worked for Texas AG Ken Paxton before being appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2019.
NEWS: Federal judge in Texas orders airline lawyers to take "religious-liberty training" from the extremist advocacy organization, Alliance Defending Freedom, in issuing sanctions in an employment case on Monday. https://t.co/onHycu5zmfpic.twitter.com/WE6cuJDr5d
If upheld, Trump Judge Brantley Starr's order would let courts force lawyers to undergo religious indoctrination sessions from an extremist group that may well contradict their own deeply held spiritual beliefs and freedom of speech. This cannot possibly be legal.
Yes, this is even worse than the state requiring attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous, which many courts have held violates the Establishment Clause:
A number of state Supreme Court and federal circuit court cases–including Arnold v. Tennessee Board of Paroles (1997), Griffin v. Coughlin (New York, 1996), Warner v. Orange County Dep’t. of Probation (2nd Cir. 1997), Rauser v. Horn (3rd Cir. 2001), and Kerr v. Farrey (7th Cir. 1996)– have defined Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and other treatment programs based on AA’s 12 steps as religious in nature.
Yeah, and I also wondered how it was legal for the State of Florida to contract out supervision of those on probation to a group like The Salvation Army, but it has been that way in several FL counties for a very long time.
While the rest of the country wasn’t paying attention, evangelical Christianity became the de facto national religion. Expect the US Supreme Court to make it official any day.
1. Wear rainbow shirts, pro-choice shirts, etc. 2. Put on headphones the entire time, browse phone. 3. See how long you can hold up a middle finger during the lecture.
I followed the link to this article from Ten Bears post. This is a serious plan from the republican right wingers to weaponize the government against their enemies just like the Jim Jordan / Matt Gaetz / Boebert types keep screaming that the left is doing. The difference is Biden is keeping hands off of the DOJ, letting justice be the rule of law. Instead the right has the plans below to target and attack those who have different opinions while allowing themselves to break the laws at will. Hugs
The thrice-indicted former president and his allies have long been drawing plans to undo Smith’s investigations, as well as to punish everyone involved
A man with a plan [that’s deeply corrosive to the rule of law] JEFF SWENSEN/GETTY IMAGES
DONALD TRUMP IS a long, long way from winning the GOP primary, let alone retaking the White House. But he always has revenge on his mind, and his allies are preparing to use a future administration to not only undo all of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s work — but to take vengeance on Smith, and on virtually everyone else, who dared investigate Trump during his time out of power.
Rosters full of MAGAfied lawyers are being assembled. Plans are being laid for an entire new office of the Justice Department dedicated to “election integrity.” An assembly line is being prepared of revenge-focused “special counsels” and “special prosecutors.” Gameplans for making Smith’s life hell, starting in Jan. 2025, have already been discussed with Trump himself. And a fresh wave of pardons is under consideration for Trump associates, election deniers, and — the former president boasts — for Jan. 6 rioters.
The preparations have been underway since at least last year, with Trump being briefed on the designs by an array of attorneys, political and policy advisers, former administration officials, and other allies. The aim is to build a government-in-waiting with the hard-right infrastructure needed to turn the Justice Department into an instrument of Trump’s agenda, according to five sources familiar with these matters and another two people briefed on them.
Trump’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
One idea that has caught thrice-indicted former president’s attention in recent months is the creation of the so-called “Office of Election Integrity,” which would be a new unit inside the Justice Department. It would be tasked not only with relitigating Trump’s lies about his 2020 election loss, but also with aggressively pursuing baseless allegations of election “fraud” (including in Democratic strongholds) in ways that Trumpist partisans believe the department has only flirted with in the past.
This idea was recently pitched to Trump by a longtime Republican activist and an attorney who’s known the ex-president for years, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. (Republican officials have also begun voicing their own support for state-level offices of election integrity. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made the proposal a reality in his state. Officials in Tennessee, Missouri, and Wisconsin have proposed the offices, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, proposed a similarly named office.)
And when it comes to Special Counsel Smith’s office — which just handed Trump his third indictment, this one related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election — the former president and his fellow travelers already know what they want: They want the FBI and DOJ to name names.
This year, close advisers to Trump have begun the process of assembling lists of the names of federal personnel who have investigated the former president and his circle for years, and are attempting to unmask the identities of all the DOJ attorneys and others connected to Smith’s office. The obvious purpose of this, according to one source close to Trump, is to “show them the door on Day 1 [if Trump’s reelected]” — and so “we know who should receive a subpoena” in the future.
Such subpoenas would of course be instrumental in Trumpland’s vows to its voters that, should he return to power, Trump and his new attorney general will launch a raft of their own retaliatory “special counsel” and “special prosecutor” probes to investigate-the-investigator, and to go after their key enemies. As it were, Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official and a central figure in Trump’s efforts to subvert the legitimate 2020 presidential election results, has been on Trump’s informal shortlist for plum assignments, including even attorney general, in a potential second administration.
Sources familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone that Trump and his close ideological allies — working at an assortment of MAGA-prone think tanks, advocacy organizations, and legal groups — are formulating plans for a wide slate of “special prosecutors.” In this vision, such prosecutors would go after the usual targets: Smith, Smith’s team, President Joe Biden, Biden’s family, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray. But they’d also go after smaller targets, from members of the Biden 2020 campaign to more obscure government offices.
“There are almost too many targets to keep track of,” says one Trump adviser familiar with the discussions. Trump and members of his inner orbit have already outlined possible legal strategies, examining specific federal statutes they could wield in a Republican-controlled Justice Department to go after Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who delivered Trump’s first indictment of this year.
The FBI’s investigation of over a thousand rioters who breached and trashed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — officially the largest criminal investigation in Justice Department history — is another area where Trump has stated he would like to reverse course. “I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control,” Trump told host Kaitlan Collins during a CNN town hall in May.
When the broader topic of possible second-term pardons has come up behind closed doors, Trump has at times said that such pardons should be signed at the start of the term, not saved for the later on, according to those who’ve heard him discuss it since last year. Aside from the rioters themselves, Trump has also privately floated issuing a wave of pardons to higher-ranking figures who were scrutinized in Special Counsel Smith’s two main investigations.
“This would be like hitting the delete-key on all of DOJ’s work on these investigations,” a person intimately familiar with the conversations toldRolling Stone in March. In the past several months, when confidants have quipped to Trump that he may have to “pardon yourself,” should he return to the Oval Office, the ex-president has sometimes simply smirked and replied that they’ll have to wait and see.
Another major focus of some of these counter-probes would be “grand jury violations,” says one person familiar with the matter. The counter-probe of those alleged “violations” is the surest sign yet that in a second Trump administration, the Justice Department would seek to investigate the special counsel’s use of grand juries in the Mar-a-Lago and January 6 cases. (Indeed, Trump has already vowed to sic a special counsel on President Biden if he beats him in 2024.)
Some of these “special prosecutors” wouldn’t even be based out of the Justice Department, as special counsels typically are. In some of these private Trumpworld legal plans, some of the “special counsels” would be based out of places like the White House. This idea is nearly identical to the controversial position that Trumpist lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell tried to convince then-President Trump to give her in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Some lawyers and operatives close to Trump have pitched themselves for these kinds of roles, telling either Trump or some of his closest advisers that they’d be more than happy to take the gig in Trump’s possible return to power in 2025.
And along with having dreams of sweeping retribution and purges, the upper ranks of Trumpworld have spent years putting together projects to vet and prepare a new generation of appointments — for “special prosecutor” posts, as well as much else — and administrative talent.
In this informal vetting for Justice Department candidates, former senior Trump aides and well-connected activists have sought lawyers with a track record of loathing DOJ, particularly what they deem its supposedly “liberal,” “left-wing,” or “Marxist” elements. Between these different Trump allies, different private spreadsheets have been created in recent years, some laying out dozens of possible contenders, while some include upwards of a hundred names, sources with direct knowledge of the situation say. Former top Trump White House policy adviser Stephen Miller and other key Trump diehards have contributed names to several of these lists.
Rolling Stone has reviewed one of these internal spreadsheets that has circulated among Trump lieutenants, and the roster is heavy on individuals connected to America First Legal, the Center for Renewing America, and other Trump-backing entities.
Prominent allies of the former president are open about plans to tie the Justice Department more tightly to the White House.
“I recall talking to a senior official in the Trump administration, who said after all of [these investigations] are over, we’ve got to think of a way to bring the Justice Department back into the government,” says Tom Fitton, president of the conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch and a close ally of the former president.
The Justice Department has typically enjoyed a degree of insulation from White House control, a norm aimed at avoiding the politicization of prosecution. But Fitton argues that the department should be more “responsive” to a president’s priorities, a belief that Trump and various influential conservatives embrace enthusiastically. “Is the Justice Department going to operate as an entity outside the White House as opposed to an entity that’s controlled by the president, as the Constitution requires?” he says.
Putting it another way: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russ Vought, a former top Trump official who heads the Center for Renewing America, toldThe New York Times in a story published last month.
“I think there’s an argument that what the Justice Department’s doing to Trump now is criminal,” Fitton tells Rolling Stone, suggesting — of course — that a future administration should launch an investigation into Special Counsel Smith’s work.
Fitton also says the department should revisit Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the FBI probe of the Trump campaign in 2016. Durham, he argues, was a “failure” and acted only as “a glorified inspector general.”
Once, Special Counsel Durham was supposed to be Trumpworld’s savior, someone who Trump, his allies on Capitol Hill, and large swaths of conservative media were counting on to expose and imprison “Deep State” foes. But when the Durham probe ended earlier this year with lackluster results for a vengeance-hungry GOP, he became much less a hero and more a cautionary tale to the right.
As one conservative lawyer who has discussed “special prosecutor” ideas with Trump in recent months tells Rolling Stone, the guiding principle of this project is simple: “No more John Durham’s — never again.”
Tonight, a judge ruled in favor of the 15 women who sued Texas after the state’s abortion ban put their health and lives at risk. Travis County District Judge Jessica Mangrum issued a temporary injunction that will stop the law from being enforced against doctors who provide abortions using “good faith judgement” that a pregnancy is unsafe for the pregnant person, or that a fetus is unlikely to survive.
Texas will definitely appeal; but for now, people in the state with dangerous or doomed pregnancies should be able to get care.
I am so grateful for the women who laid their pain bear in public for the chance to change this law just a little—but so distressed that they had to fight so hard to be given this bare minimum of humanity. It makes me feel a bit ill, to be honest, that these are the kinds of ‘wins’ we have to hope for.
The lawsuit, brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights, required women to relive the horrors they were forced to endure because of the state’s abortion ban. One woman, Samantha Casiano—who was forced to give birth despite the fact that her baby had anencephaly and was missing parts of her brain and skull—ended up vomiting while recounting her experience. She said that talking about what happened “just makes my body remember and it just reacts.”
Lawyers defending the state, meanwhile, were extraordinarily cruel. One attorney said, “Plaintiffs simply do not like Texas’ restrictions on abortion.” Another not only frequently interrupted as the women spoke about their experiences, she also asked each one individually if Attorney General Ken Paxton had personally denied them an abortion. Plaintiff Amanda Zurawski, who nearly died after being denied an abortion, said, “I survived sepsis and I don’t think today was much less traumatic than that.”
There is a reason Texas tried to stop these women from telling their stories: there is no arguing with their experiences, no turning away from the horror these laws have caused. As happy as I am for the people in Texas who might be able to get the care they need as a result of this decision, I keep thinking about Terry—the young woman I spoke to in June—and how this ruling came too late to help her:
An American Nightmare: Young, pregnant & living in Texas
A New Jersey theater manager called the police on a mom who took her non-verbal autistic son to the bathroom, accusing him of being trans, saying “this is not a transgender bathroom.” Her son isn’t trans, rather, he needs her assistance to use the bathroom. This is one of many stories that demonstrate how anti-LGBTQ hate is so widespread it’s harming non-LGBTQ people too.
Thanks to Ali for the link to this article. As the article mentions, the trans scare is simply because some people are not manly enough or feminine enough to fit in with other random people’s ideas of what men or women should look like. As I have posted that leads to cis women being accused of being trans and assaulted trying to use the bathroom. Hugs.
The Barbie movie was fun, but the right-wing reaction to it shows that we’re living in a scary time for anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into a box.
I finally saw the Barbie movie over the weekend. I liked it! Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie are both fantastic, and it was good fun all around.
But today, I want to talk about something tangentially related to the movie (I promise that this will be my last post about Barbie or Oppenheimer… probably, at least). So, if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll probably recognize this actress as Doctor Barbie.
Hari Nef attends the World Premiere of “Barbie” at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall on July 09, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage)
That’s Hari Nef. She’s transgender. This doesn’t come up at all in the movie. Still, Fox News went so far as to claim that Barbie was pushing a “trans agenda” by… uh… allowing a trans woman to have a job. “They gave Barbie the Bud Light treatment,” said a Fox guest, who was both upset that a trans woman was in the movie and upset that the movie’s marketing didn’t involve mentions that Nef is trans (though, I’m sure if the movie had included that in the marketing, she’d have complained about this being shoved “in her face;” the truth is that these ghouls just don’t want trans people to exist in society at all).
And this was kind of an ongoing thing on the right… though it created a few funny situations. For instance:
“Last I checked the Barbie movie is promoting biological women,” wrote Dom Lucre (a.k.a. Dominick McGee) on Twitter X. “I can’t disagree with little girls being influenced to remain a girl.” Attached to the tweet post was a photo of six of the film’s Barbies, including Nef (2nd from the right, wearing the sailor hat).
Here’s a clearer picture:
People were quick to note that a.) you have to be truly deranged to see a movie and immediately try to shoehorn it into your obsession with trans people1, and b.) that there is literally a trans woman in this very photo. Har har, he he, etc. Very funny stuff.
But I wasn’t interested in his post so much as I was interested in the specific genre of unhinged responses from his supporters.
Lots of his followers correctly deduced that there was a trans woman in the movie. What they didn’t do was accurately identify which character was being played by a trans woman. Let’s look at some examples (click the images to expand them).
As you can see, you’ve got a mix of people convinced that the actress playing the character on the left in the green dress, Ana Cruz Kayne, is trans. Others are convinced that Margot Robbie, herself, is transgender. And then, just for good measure, there were people insisting that not only is Robbie secretly a trans woman, but that Ryan Gosling, who has been on TV since he was 13 years old, is secretly a trans man.
None of those people are trans. It wouldn’t be a big deal if they were, but they’re not. This is awkward, yet instructive.
Are you familiar with “transvestigators?”
If not, buckle up, because it’s going to be a ride.
You may see the certainty of the people in the above screenshots calling Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling secretly trans and think, “Oh wow, what strange one-off claims!” And it’d be nice if that were true. Unfortunately, there’s a whole bunch of people on the internet who are absolutely convinced that pretty much every person in Hollywood is trans.
Here’s a video by Jamie Raines, a trans man, about the “transvestigator” conspiracy theory:
And here’s a longer video, by trans woman Mia Mulder, that contains even more examples and gets at the core beliefs of the conspiracy theorists:
And as Mia and Jamie both highlight in their videos, the targets of these sorts of “transvestigations” are often some of the world’s most attractive people. Like, oh, Brad Pitt was born female? And Angelina Jolie is male? Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady, both trans? Sure! Why not?
Here’s the kind of stuff “transvestigators” will post online as evidence of someone’s transness. It’s pretty bizarre stuff. In an effort to out secret trans people, they begin seeing trans people everywhere they look. When all you have is a hammer…
A collection of “transvestigation” screenshots from Mia’s YouTube video (above)
But setting aside how weird and creepy it is for people to be staring at photos of complete strangers like, “Oh yeah, as you can see from the shoulder-to-hip ratio, that person is clearly…,” you may be wondering why this matters. After all, the “transvestigator” conspiracy theorists are a very small group of people. They’re not representative of your typical person who is opposed to trans rights, and they’re certainly not representative of society. That’s true. Still, this all ties together.
“We can always tell” … except for when they can’t.
The seemingly common belief that one can “always tell” who is and isn’t transgender is not only flawed but dangerous when combined with rising anti-trans sentiment and policies. And it’s not just harmful to trans individuals, but to anyone who doesn’t look “man-enough” or “woman-enough” to be a “real” man or woman — something that is itself a moving target that’s changed throughout history.
Transphobia affects anyone who doesn’t look enough like complete strangers’ ideas of what a man or woman should look like, and that’s why we all should care about just how intense the anti-trans sentiment is getting right now in society.
Transphobia is a belief that is being used to police bodies, scrutinize appearances, and justify discrimination and violence — all in the name of “safety” or faux concern for “the children.” This is all by design, since the current anti-trans movement has never actually been just about trans people. It’s all part of a larger effort to roll back rights for the broader LGBTQ community, women, people of color, the disabled community, and more.
Just look at this June 2015 “Issue Analysis” for “Understanding and Responding to the Transgender Movement,” put out by the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council. Right from the start, it calls feminism, the gay rights movement, and the trans rights movement part of the same “assault on the sexes.”
Florida education officials William Allen and Frances Presley Rice, members of the group that crafted the standards, released a statement in response to the backlash. “The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted. This is factual and well documented,” the pair wrote. “Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history.”
The statement includes several examples of such historic figures, including blacksmiths, shoemakers, fishing and shipping industry workers, tailors, and ironically enough, teachers. But, it appears these Florida educators didn’t do their homework.
As critics were quick to note, many of the “examples” listed in the statement were never slaves, or they launched their respective professions only after gaining their freedom. The Tampa Bay Times pointed out several examples, including Booker T. Washington, listed in the statement as a teacher. “Washington was enslaved but did not gain his skills until after being freed at age 9,” the paper notes.
Right Wing Watch had written about Rice years ago when she was chairman of the National Black Republican Association, an organization that once ran radio ads and erected billboards falsely claiming that civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. “was a Republican.”
In 2008, the NBRA produced a series of radio ads declaring that “the Democratic Party is a racist party” and attacking then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for being “an arrogant elitist who turned his back on poor blacks and his own country.”
In the wake of Obama’s election, the NBRA took it upon itself to issue a “White Guilt Emancipation Declaration” in which the organization unilaterally declared that all “white American citizens are now, henceforth and forever more free of White Guilt” because the nation had elected “a socialist who does not share the values of average Americans and will use the office of the presidency to turn America into a failed socialist nation.”
Here is Frances Rice claiming that the GOP's Southern Strategy "was designed to get the fair-minded people in the South to stop discriminating against Blacks … Those fair-minded ones who migrated to the Republican Party did so. They joined us. We did not join the racists." https://t.co/2LE1TZWaHjpic.twitter.com/K6caIWAGtz
Amateur and professional historians are shredding a list of "examples" Florida educators cited to show how some Black people benefited from skills they supposedly acquired while enslaved. https://t.co/4hsDCN79vs
Half of the examples were not slaves and others only as children. They came up with 16 examples to cover over 200 years of slavery for hundreds of thousands. — Benefited from slavery? Critics say some of the state’s examples were never even slaves. https://t.co/BTTS10toPZ
Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during the Family Leadership Summit, July 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
PUBLISHED: July 26, 2023 at 1:25 p.m. | UPDATED: July 28, 2023 at 4:43 a.m.
Long before Moms for Liberty, there were the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Their passion and influence kept generations of Southern children ignorant of how slavery had caused the Civil War and how cruel it had been. The “war between the states” was rather over “states’ rights” and tariffs. Confederate soldiers were the heroes of a “Lost Cause.” Kindly masters had been considerate to contented slaves.
Reconstruction was bad. The Ku Klux Klan was a benevolent civic organization.
The Daughters didn’t have to pull the truth from shelves. Its influence with state boards kept offending books from ever being printed or bought. When a University of Florida professor wrote that the South had been more in the wrong in the Civil War, the Daughters of the Confederacy got him fired.
In Florida, more than a century later, Southern revisionism is at it again.
Here’s one of them: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Another is worse: “Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to (the) 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C., Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre” (emphasis added).
Andby?
In each of those massacres, Black residents were not the instigators. It is a fraud on history and a libel on them to imply that they were. There were cases where residents of African American communities took up arms to defend their homes, their families and themselves. But they were guarding against armed mobs, seething with racism, bent on arson and murder.
Feeding a fiction
From Donald Trump on down, contemporary Americans playing on race for political advantage have been trying to denigrate the Black Lives Matter movement by accusing it of responsibility for violence. The “and by” phrase, unnecessary and gratuitous and now officially part of the Florida social studies curriculum, feeds that fiction.
Stephen Hudak/Orlando SentinelWilliam Maxwell, a Vietnam-era veteran and resident of Ocoee for two decades, kneels at the gravesite of July Perry in Greenwood Cemetery. Perry, who encouraged Blacks to register to vote, was lynched by a white mob after the Ocoee Massacre in 1920.
The mob that ravaged Ocoee in Orange County, where 25 homes burned and at least eight people died, was incited by two Black men attempting to vote. The massacre at Rosewood, which erased the settlement, was set off by a married white woman’s claim that a Black man had attacked her. The official state history cites Black survivors, who said the assailant was a white lover. (For a link to the Sentinel’s 100th-anniversary coverage of the Ocoee Massacre and images of our 1920s coverage, please visit our web site at orlandosentinel.com/opinion. We’re making that historic coverage, along with other fascinating local history, free for everyone this week.)
For Black history, Florida’s previous standards were extensive and objective, unlike Southern propaganda of the 1900s.
1 of 5
These images reflect the contemporary coverage of the Ocoee massacre by the Orlando Sentinel.
But one rotten apple can spoil a barrel, and this one has two. There was nothing beneficial about slavery, except to the masters. When slaves learned a trade, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, or caulking wooden ships, as Frederick Douglass did, it was not for their benefit but for the convenience and profit of their masters. And many of them arrived on these shores with those skills already mastered.
Vice President Kamala Harris accurately described slavery in her speech at Jacksonville, which was aimed at DeSantis without mentioning him.
“Adults know what slavery really involved,” Harris said. “It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity … It involved subjecting to people the requirement that they would think of themselves and be thought as less than human… How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities … that there was some benefit?”
A defense from DeSantis
After DeSantis first said he “wasn’t involved” in writing the standards, he is now defending them.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality. https://t.co/LQwYSaqhPw
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 23, 2023
This would be a good time for him to begin admitting he was wrong. His critics are feasting on this one.
DeSantis owns this horrific mistake, even if he didn’t personally write the standards. It is his education department, run by his appointees.
Cues are obvious in the dog whistles he’s sent. He banned critical race theory in schools (where it wasn’t even being taught.) He signed a law meant to banish all talk of the relevance of past or present racism from Florida schools and workplaces. He’s made it easier to purge school library shelves of innocuous books some people found to be objectionable because they reflected other cultures or talked about the history of civil rights.
The Department of Education’s attempt to document the “personal benefit” issue backfired. Of the 16 historic Black people it cited, as many as half had never been enslaved, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Others, notably the educator Booker T. Washington, acquired their skills after they were freed.
Douglass’ master kept most of the money he earned caulking ships in the Baltimore yards. Fearful of being sold South, Douglass made his escape to become an eloquent, world-famous advocate for the millions in chains.
His memoir recalled how the master, Hugh Auld, rebuked his wife for teaching him the alphabet when he was 11.
Literacy would “forever unfit him for the duties of slave,” Auld said. He should “know nothing but the will of his master and learn to obey it.” This harsh reality, which viewed high-quality education for African Americans as a threat to Caucasian control of society, echoed for decades as Black students were forced into segregated schools. Even now, some schools in high-poverty areas with large minority populations can lack access to options such as advance placement or International Baccalaureate programs.
This is the hideous legacy DeSantis is trying to revive. And no matter how much he squirms and dodges, he can’t erase the stain his actions are leaving on Florida’s reputation.
Coming later this week
DeSantis’ attempts to weaponize racism are turning Florida into a laughingstock and, at long last, turning fellow Republicans and donors against him. Why did it take so long?
The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.
So many of the horrible things happening in America right now, like teaching our children slaves were lucky to learn skills, or allowing women to bleed out in hospital parking lots, or pushing migrants into rivers to drown, could be stopped by the women who look exactly like me.
KENT NISHIMURA/LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGESKristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, speaks to members of the press outside the Supreme Court on December 5, 2022.
Scottie's Playtime 