A clear easy to understand explanation of the difference between sex and gender, and how transitioning makes the body intersex. Which doesn’t determine gender. Also I like how he gives the medical information about how all fetus templates have the ability to be both sexes or somewhere between, and he asks how a trans woman and a cis woman who can not produce children are both still women. Hugs
I am sorry but the current way WordPress classic editor is working it is too hard to bold and color the articles. I am still trying to find a work around. The block editor only allows a limited array of colors that are weak and not bold enough to be useful. The block editor is designed for businesses and if you look at the WordPress plans and what they market themes toward is businesses. Built for business and to make businesses happy. Blogers no longer matter to WordPress and are being pushed out of their buisness model. If you have ablog like I try to do with videos, memes, and full articles I will run out of storage space very soon. Plus the block editor is designed to allow businesses to quickly and easily replace blocks as things on their websites change. The classic editor is still there but no longer works smoothly as it did to edit what you post. Wordpress support warned me a year ago they planned to phase it out by making it harder to use until no one would use it. At the time I did not believe them as it seemed to me blogging was a big thing. I guess all the bloggers are going to substack. So I again have to find a new host company. But until I do, this is the way I have to post. The article below is very important and even though it is long I hope you will read it. It talks of the republican / right war on education and why. They point out that the right is no longer concern with US youth keeping up with other countries youth in education but instead the right is entirely consumed with indoctrinated kids with the right wing ideology out of a need to stay in power. In other words the right / republicans are afraid if schools teach reality and allow the changes in society to be accepted then the right will keep losing young people who beleive as they do and they will go exstinct. What sets the current movement apart from these previous efforts is not merely its greater intensity but its focus. Academic-achievement levels are incidental to Republicans’ concern. Their main preoccupation is not the ways in which Chinese and Swedish kids may be outpacing their American counterparts. They are instead accusing schools of carrying out an insidious indoctrination campaign that, they believe, poses an existential threat to their party’s future and their way of life. When an audience member asked how he had been able to find common ground with people who disagreed with him, Corcoran responded, “I have fought … There’s no negotiation. I don’t think antifa wants to sit down and have a conversation with me about how can we make this society better.” Corcoran went on to compare America’s disputes over education to “the warring in the streets” in Germany before World War II between the Nazis and the communists. “The war will be won in education,” he vowed. “Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Our weapon is education.” So for republicans it is not about the good of the country or what is best for children, but instead entirely about keeping their party / their ideals in power. it is about keeping their lifestyle forced on the population no matter how wrong it might by. Notice part of that is teaching children not to question authority or what they are told to do. Hugs
Republicans have begun saying things about American schools that not long ago would have struck them as peculiar, even insane. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicts that “teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids,” will “take this republic down.” Against the backdrop of his party, Donald Trump, complaining about “pink-haired communists teaching our kids” and “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” running our universities, sounds practically calm.
More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.
Education has become an obsession on the political right, which now sees it as the central battlefield upon which this country’s future will be settled. Schoolhouses are being conscripted into a cataclysmic war in which no compromise is possible — in which a child in a red state will be discouraged from asking questions about sexual identity, or a professor will be barred from exploring the ways in which white supremacy has shaped America today, or a trans athlete will be prohibited from playing sports.
In the spring of 2021, Richard Corcoran delivered a fire-breathing speech at Hillsdale, a right-wing Christian college in Michigan, touting the agenda he had helped implement as education commissioner in Florida. When an audience member asked how he had been able to find common ground with people who disagreed with him, Corcoran responded, “I have fought … There’s no negotiation. I don’t think antifa wants to sit down and have a conversation with me about how can we make this society better.” Corcoran went on to compare America’s disputes over education to “the warring in the streets” in Germany before World War II between the Nazis and the communists. “The war will be won in education,” he vowed. “Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Our weapon is education.”
It is hardly novel for Republicans to emphasize the need to improve schools. Ronald Reagan’s administration published a report, A Nation at Risk, that inaugurated the modern education-reform debate. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, claimed he would be “the education president.” Bush’s son, George W., signed the No Child Left Behind Act, a historic education reform that used testing to hold schools to account. What little attention Trump paid to education when he ran for president in 2016 gestured in this direction, championing educational choice as a tool to lift student achievement. All these Republican executives saw education as a technocratic issue they could use to appeal to voters outside their base.
What sets the current movement apart from these previous efforts is not merely its greater intensity but its focus. Academic-achievement levels are incidental to Republicans’ concern. Their main preoccupation is not the ways in which Chinese and Swedish kids may be outpacing their American counterparts. They are instead accusing schools of carrying out an insidious indoctrination campaign that, they believe, poses an existential threat to their party’s future and their way of life.
Dubya once said, famously, “Rarely is the question asked, Is our children learning?” The complaint of Republicans today is not that the schools aren’t working but that they are working all too well at the objective of brainwashing children in left-wing thought. Education, as Corcoran reportedly put it, is “100 percent ideological.”
Media coverage of the Republicans’ education crusade has largely treated it as a messaging exercise. A New York Times headline from earlier this year, “DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, and Builds His Brand,” reflects the cynical assumption that this is mostly a way for him to rile up the Fox News audience. One progressive pollster recently told The Atlantic that for Republican voters, liberal control of schools “is a psychological, not policy, threat,” even as their elected officials strike back with policy. Some Democrats have mocked Republicans for pursuing arcane obsessions that fail to connect with voters’ concerns. And it’s true the voters are not driving this crusade: A recent poll found only 4 percent of the public lists education as the most important issue. Politico reports that “mounds of research by Democratic pollsters over the last several months” have found Republican book bans to be utterly toxic with swing voters.
You might wonder why Republicans would throw themselves into such a risky venture. The answer is that they aren’t looking to enrage their base or get their face on Fox News. They have come to believe with deadly seriousness that they not only must but can seize control of the ideological tenor in American schools, from the primary to the university level. If accomplishing this social transformation carries a near-term political cost, they are willing to pay it. And to imagine that they will fail, or grow bored and move on, and that the education system will more or less remain the same as it ever was, is to lack an appreciation for their conviction and the powers they have at their disposal to realize their goal.
Culture wars can break out over almost anything, but the political content of education is the most classic venue. Kulturkampf, the German word for “culture struggle” and the linguistic origin of “culture war,” describes a wrenching conflict over whether the church or the state would control the schools in 19th-century Prussia. Around the same time, France had a similar schism, largely between monarchists and republicans, both of whom believed that if they controlled the schools, they would own the hearts and minds of future citizens.
The nature of these fights is raw. Schools are a foundational institution for inscribing the value system of the state. Nothing enrages parents more than the idea that their children are being turned against them, and few things worry a partisan more than the fear the opposing party is using schools to inculcate its beliefs in the young. “Wherever two or more groups within a state differ in religion, or in language and in nationality, the immediate concern of each group is to use the schools to preserve its own faith and tradition,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1928. “For it is in the school that the child is drawn toward or drawn away from the religion and patriotism of its parents.”
France’s conflict eventually led to the Dreyfus affair, in which false charges of treason against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain, unleashed a torrent of antisemitism that pitted much of France’s secular republican left against the theocratic monarchist right. Germany’s Kulturkampf preceded … well, you know.
It was perhaps just a matter of time until the Republican Party’s perambulatory culture-war fixations, which have roamed from hippies to flag-burners to Muslims to gay marriage, landed on the schoolhouse.
Throughout American history, fights over the political content of school have broken out from time to time, usually centering on history textbooks and their treatment of racism, immigration, communism, and other social divides. Generations of conservatives have been shocked by the experience of their children reporting some unattractive facts about the Founders or the Civil War and came to suspect educators were plotting to steer children to some new worldview.
Some progressive education reformers embraced this very goal. George S. Counts, an educator and activist who went on to serve as head of the American Federation of Teachers and founded New York’s Liberal Party, wrote a pamphlet in 1932 called Dare the School Build a New Social Order? in which he argued frankly that schools should be used to inculcate progressive beliefs. “Progressive education,” he wrote, should “become less frightened than it is today at the bogies of imposition and indoctrination.” He added, “Every Progressive school will use whatever power it may possess in opposing and checking the forces of social conservatism and reaction.”
Later that decade, a number of history textbooks written by Harold Rugg swept into popularity. The Rugg history scalded the Founders as aristocratic landowners using the Constitution to preserve their wealth from the masses. Critics denounced it as left-wing propaganda, while his supporters insisted that educators alone were qualified to choose the proper historical emphasis. “Judgment as to the merits of a textbook is the function of those most competent to form a judgment: the teachers concerned and professional scholars,” maintained the American Historical Association.
As the New Deal lost momentum in Washington, Rugg’s ideas, held aloft by the assumption that liberalism had entered a new permanent ascendancy, fell out of favor. Sales of his texts plunged from a peak of 289,000 in 1938 to just 21,000 half a dozen years later, and they soon dropped out of usage altogether. The heady liberal dream that schools could serve as a vanguard of a social revolution had met political reality.
After the Rugg conflict, American history and civics texts generally adopted a mushy, consensus-oriented tone that offended very few people. Among the aggrieved minority was William F. Buckley Jr., who shortly before the founding of National Review in 1955 helped establish a publication called the Educational Reviewer dedicated to demanding right-wing content in the schools. Buckley’s first book, God and Man at Yale, proposed that the left-leaning faculty be denied academic freedom, which, he charged, they were abusing to warp the minds of impressionable college students.
Buckley is generally credited as the founder of the modern American conservative movement, but his call to conscript schools into the cause of promoting right-wing thought, like many of Buckley’s ideas, failed to catch on at the time. As Jonathan Zimmerman recounts in Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (2002), the campaign to censor textbooks never made it far in the halls of power after World War II: “Even at the height of its frenzied search for subversion,” the McCarthy era, “Congress refused to extend the quest into textbooks.”
Eventually, the fights over indoctrination largely receded. “By the early 1980s, the shared sense across the political spectrum that public schools were sites worthy of intense contestation began to diminish,” writes education historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela in Classroom Wars (2015).
The return came very fast at a magnitude and with a vehemence unlike anything that has ever occurred in American history.
The Republican Party emerged from the Trump era deeply embittered. A large share of the party believed that Democrats had stolen their way back into power. But this sentiment took another form that was not as absurd or, at least, not as clearly disprovable. The theory was that Republicans were subverted by a vast institutional conspiracy. Left-wing beliefs had taken hold among elite institutions: the media, the bureaucracy, corporations, and, especially, schools.
This theory maintains that this invisible progressive network makes successful Republican government impossible. Because the enemy permanently controls the cultural high ground, Republicans lose even when they win. Their only recourse is to seize back these nonelected institutions.
“Left-wing radicals have spent the past 50 years on a ‘long march through the institutions,’” claims Manhattan Institute fellow and conservative activist Chris Rufo, who is perhaps the school movement’s chief ideologist. “We are going to reverse that process, starting now.”
Many institutions figure in Republicans’ plans. They are developing proposals to cleanse the federal workforce of politically subversive elements, to pressure corporations to resist demands by their “woke employees,” and to freeze out the mainstream media. But their attention has centered on the schools. “It is the schools — where our children spend much of their waking hours — that have disproportionate influence over American society, seeding every other institution that has succumbed to left-wing ideological capture,” writes conservative commentator Benjamin Weingarten.
Or, as Florida governor Ron DeSantishas said in his most revealing comments on the issue, “Our K–12 schools are public institutions that are funded by our taxpayers. And so that line of thinking is saying, even though they’re public institutions, the people that are elected to direct those institutions have no right to get involved. If the left is pursuing the agenda. So basically, we can win every election and we still lose on all these different things. That is totally untenable. So these are public institutions, and they have to reflect the mission that the state of Florida has in our case, not just K–12, but also higher education.”
A recent study by the Manhattan Institute illustrates why the right finds this cause so urgent. The paper surveys 18-to-20-year-olds about what it calls “critical social justice” concepts they learned in school, such as “America is a systemically racist country,” “white people have unconscious biases that negatively affect nonwhite people,” “America is built on stolen land,” or “America is a patriarchal society.” The survey proposes that adults exposed to these concepts develop liberal beliefs: “CSJ and school ideology appear to be having a major impact in converting young people to left-wing beliefs and Democratic partisanship.”
The report finds that these concepts are being taught in private, religious, and charter schools and spread through social media and entertainment. Therefore, the old conservative method of promoting choice between public and private schools stands little chance of holding back the progressive tide. The biggest shift among young people seems to have occurred among those whose parents were Republicans or independents.
Put aside for a moment whether this finding is correct. What it shows us is why Republicans are acting so urgently (or, to their bewildered critics, hysterically). They believe the schools have become factories for turning children into Democrats, that progressives are so powerful the children of Republican parents cannot resist them, and that their old remedy of exiting the public-school system is nearly useless. Working from these assumptions, Republicans’ determination to seize control of the indoctrination machinery makes perfect sense.
Even the most paranoid belief systems often contain elements of reality. It is true that American society has polarized, pushing its most conservative communities rightward and its liberal communities leftward. Schools, largely being run by people who have college educations, have likely undergone the same kind of socially progressive shift that has rippled through the rest of the knowledge economy.
In California, public schools are rolling out required ethnic studies and have pushed schools to decelerate adoption of algebra in order to advance equity goals. Thousands of classrooms have used the New York Times’ “The 1619 Project,” a provocative interpretation of American history that has drawn criticism from some respected historians, including one approached by the Times to fact-check it.
Some teachers and administrators see the role of the school, like Rugg and Counts did, as a vanguard institution driving social change. In 2021, the National Education Association approved a resolution for “increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic (Native people, Asian, Black, Latin[o/a/x], Middle Eastern, North African, and Pacific Islander) Studies curriculum in pre-K–12 and higher education.” The NEA can’t simply dictate classroom pedagogy, but its desires do reflect a popular sentiment within the profession that has left its mark on many classrooms. A national report by Bellwether, a nonprofit firm analyzing education, reported, “Much of the backlash to teachers’ efforts to teach about racism in the classroom or to DEI trainings comes from lessons and programs that are poorly designed and poorly implemented, often because of limited or nonexistent resources and support or politicized approaches.”
Many parents, understandably, don’t like this stuff. A poll last year by the American Federation of Teachers found that voters would be more likely to support a Republican candidate who endorsed propositions like “public schools should focus less on teaching students about race and racism, and more on core academic subjects,” giving parents more say over content, and other right-leaning criticisms of the pedagogy. The idea that some schools have gone farther left on social policy than the public as a whole shouldn’t come as a surprise. Progressive educators can implement change that’s far more radical in character than anything Democrats could pass in Congress.
It is possible for legislatures to restrict some of the pedagogical fads of recent years without preventing children from learning unvarnished historical truths about slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, and its aftermath. Reports have described bans on lessons that make students feel guilty, when they have merely restricted lessons that instruct them to feel guilty, a reasonable thing to ask. Commentators on the internet likewise depicted Florida as banning the teaching of African American history, when in fact the state merely objected to elements of the AP African American History curriculum, ultimately resulting in a revised version.
And aspects of the Republican legislation confines itself to these limited measures. But other bills attempt far more expansive levels of ideological control over the classroom, and they suffer from either sweeping vagueness or paralyzing specificity.
As an example of the former, a Montana bill currently tabled in committee would restrict science education to “scientific fact,” defined in the bill as “an indisputable and repeatable observation of a natural phenomenon,” which would present a serious challenge to teaching a field composed in large part of scientific theories. A South Carolina bill introduced in 2021 would have forbidden any lesson that “omits relevant and important context” and created a hotline to report violations of this hopelessly subjective criteria.
An example of the latter can be seen in an Oklahoma bill that tried to stamp out social-emotional learning, a strategy to help students manage their emotions that conservatives have bizarrely associated with indoctrination. (“The intention of SEL,” Rufo has claimed, “is to soften children at an emotional level, reinterpret their normative behavior as an expression of ‘repression,’ ‘whiteness,’ or ‘internalized racism,’ and then rewire their behavior according to the dictates of left-wing ideology.”) But how can a legislature ban an entire style of teaching? The solution settled upon by Oklahoma would have prohibited an array of concepts so vast it has to be beheld in its entirety:
Any evidence-based or non-evidence-based programming that promotes school or civic engagement or builds an equitable learning framework that creates or uses evidence-based benchmarks, standards, surveys, activities, learning indicators, programs, policies, processes, professional development, or assessments that address noncognitive social factors including but not limited to self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, responsible decision-making, and other attributes, dispositions, social skills, attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, feelings, emotions, mind-sets, metacognitive learning skills, motivation, grit, self-regulation, tenacity, perseverance, resilience, and intrapersonal resources.
Imagine attempting to teach a class for a year while keeping this entire list of forbidden ideas in your head at all times.
A broader problem with the wave of conservative legislation is that it is responding to a wildly hyperbolic version of reality. In a very large country with a fragmented education system, there are going to be plenty of examples of outrageous or radical teaching in the schools on a daily basis without necessarily indicating anything about the system’s overall character. As conservatives grew alarmed about left-wing teachers, their favorite media sources started curating examples of it to stoke their outrage.
Chaya Raichik’s account Libs of TikTok has amassed more than 2 million followers — DeSantis once invited her to stay at the governor’s mansion in Florida — partly by finding posts by left-wing teachers on social media. Her audience has come to see these cherry-picked examples as representing the normal experience in an American classroom. In response to a post by a teacher with brightly dyed hair and tattoos appearing to pledge allegiance to the Pride flag, National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry commented, “Don’t laugh — this pledge is probably coming soon to blue jurisdictions.” In apparent response to a viral but false Libs of TikTok post claiming a school was placing litter boxes in the bathroom for children who identify as cats, North Dakota’s House passed a bill that would, among other restrictions, forbid any “policy establishing or providing a place, facility, school program, or accommodation that caters to a student’s perception of being any animal species other than human.”
These sorts of lurid fantasies inspired Republicans in Florida, Iowa, and Mississippi to introduce bills to put microphones, cameras, or livestreams inside classrooms. An Indiana Republican bill proposed to require school officials to create parent-led curricular advisory committees. Louisiana attorney general Jeff Landry, who is running for governor, created a “Protecting Minors” tip line to field complaints about libraries and schools.
Inevitably, perhaps, conservative fears of sexual indoctrination have led them to seek out evidence of heresy in school libraries. Concerned parents have been pestering school boards to keep scary books away from little Susie’s innocent eyes since the school library was invented. But the movement to do so has taken on a wholly novel scale. PEN America, a literary-freedom organization, has tracked some 50 organizations dedicated to restricting library content — nearly three-quarters of which have formed since 2021. The most prominent, Moms for Liberty, presented DeSantis with a “liberty sword” when he spoke at its summit in July.
About two-fifths of the bans are tied to rules or political pressure from state officials or elected lawmakers, an “unprecedented shift,” according to PEN America, which notes that book bans have historically been initiated by locals in a community, not their governments. Seven states are considering bills to restrict books containing things like “profane language” or “depictions of gender identity.” Twelve states have introduced bills that could make school employees and librarians subject to being charged with violating obscenity laws.
In Florida, HB 1467 — a law requiring all books in schools to be “suited to student needs” — prompted school libraries across the state to frantically pull texts for fear they would violate the new regime. The Florida Freedom to Read Project reported that some 20 school districts in the state eliminated books to comply with this law or DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” and Stop WOKE acts. School officials in two counties covered up all the books in the library until the entire catalogue could be vetted for compliance. “There appears to be confusion over what books or materials could actually lead to a criminal charge,” conceded a report in National Review. Citing DeSantis’s HB 1557, what critics called the “Don’t Say Gay” law, the Lake County district removed And Tango Makes Three, which tells the true story of two male penguins who had built a nest together in the Central Park Zoo, then, when provided an egg by the zookeeper, raised the baby penguin. The book contains no sexual content, not even between consenting penguins.
One of DeSantis’s allies has introduced a bill requiring schools to “teach that the male and female reproductive roles are binary, stable, and unchangeable” and another to remove children from their parents if a court deems that they have been “subjected to” gender-affirming care, making a mockery of their professed concern for parental rights. DeSantis’s state-imposed ideology is being extended to student-run clubs: One high school shut down a meeting by its Queer and Ally Alliance, a student group, after Florida’s Department of Education reportedly sent the school administration a threatening message. <b>Both in theory and in practice, the Republican schools campaign has attacked even basic expressions of respect for gay and trans people.</b>
The difference between the old conservative approach to education and the new variant can be seen most starkly in the realm of higher education. American conservatives have never exactly adored universities, and the feeling is mutual. One study found that left-leaning faculty members outnumber conservatives by about six to one, and among administrators the ratio is twice as high. For many years, conservatives have deplored the left-wing tilt of academia and supported the complaint, along with many moderates and liberals, that the hothouse atmosphere on campus was suppressing dissent.
Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind and Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education expressed the conservative view of academia: It had become close-minded and abandoned its historic commitment to open inquiry. Conservatives joined groups like the National Association of Scholars to protect conservative professors — or a liberal one who happened to say something provocative — from being intimidated or fired.
In recent years, a rising class of conservative intellectuals has advanced a different critique. Rufo, in particular, has pressed the case that the far left has infiltrated schools and other institutions so thoroughly that conservatives must take drastic action. “We’re going to actually learn the left-wing playbook,” he vowed in one lecture, calling for a “counterrevolutionary strategy for recapturing the institutions.”
Like many radicals who studied the methods of their adversaries, Rufo seemed to come away not with horror but a strange respect. “One thing I almost admire about the political left is that they want to achieve dominance and nothing less than dominance,” he said. In other words, conservatives must discard their attachment to fusty principles of academic freedom and open debate. When laying siege to institutions, Rufo has said, “You have to be very aggressive. You have to fight on terms that you define. You have to create your own frame, your own language. And you have to be ruthless and brutal in pursuit of something good.”
Academic freedom is no longer the solution. It is now the problem.
The world of politics and activism has plenty of would-be Lenins, but few have a direct plan for conservatives to use their power of the state to shape the ideological character of schools. And the place demonstrating the feasibility of this method is Florida, which represents the most advanced proving ground of the right’s new campaign against education.
DeSantis has placed his stamp on K–12 schools with an array of creative methods. His law restricting gender education and another, the Stop WOKE Act, which bans the teaching of certain progressive racial theories, have both had a chilling effect on liberal teachers. He also held voluntary training sessions for civics teachers with the lure of a $700 stipend for those who attend and the chance to receive $3,000 if they complete an online course. <b>The sessions, reportedly developed in part by Hillsdale, had a distinctly conservative slant, according to several attendees. “It was very skewed,” one government teacher told the Miami Herald. “There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents.”</b>
State and local governments traditionally observe some limits on their control of subject matter. DeSantis’s K–12 agenda has at least pushed that line. When it comes to universities, DeSantis has obliterated the line completely.
He began with a takeover of New College, a public university in the state, stacking its board with right-wing ideologues, several of whom have praised him, including Rufo.
The pretext for tearing down the school leaned heavily on its alleged budgetary woes, but DeSantis immediately allocated $15 million in state spending and the board hired Corcoran as president with a base salary above that of presidents of other Florida universities that have nearly 100 times more students. DeSantis hoped to turn New College into “Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” his chief of staff told the Daily Caller. “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within,” exclaimed Rufo.
Having supplied proof of concept, DeSantis is now turning to the other, vastly larger components of the state’s higher-education system. His allies have introduced legislation that would impose rigid ideological control over every state university. The original text of the bill held that no core American-history course could teach a narrative except one “based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” and shunted teaching any “unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content” to electives. The current version bars any general-education courses from teaching “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, or economic inequities.”
To backstop these changes, DeSantis, who had already signed a law in 2022 scaling back tenure protections for faculty, is now considering all but doing away with them. DeSantis would additionally consolidate power over hiring and firing in the hands of university presidents, some of whom owe their appointments to DeSantis. Any professors wandering too close to his vague regulations on progressive thought could find their career at the mercy of political operatives.
Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker, recently called the DeSantis education program Soviet, which is a tad melodramatic, given that the Soviets arrested or murdered millions and millions of people. But there does happen to be a comparison at hand that is chilling in its own right: the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, whom DeSantis and the Republican Party have adopted as a model.
When he won his first election in 1998, Orbán identified the universities as the primary institutional source of opposition. Orbán placed most state universities under the control of close allies. He drove the prestigious Central European University, which had been founded by his enemy George Soros, out of the country — not by sending in troops to seize the school but through the blandly bureaucratic method of imposing new operating requirements.
At first, the scholar Kim Lane Scheppele noted at the time, his critics joked darkly that “since educated people don’t vote for Orbán, his long-term plan for staying in power in Hungary has been to create fewer educated people.” But Orbán’s vision turned out to be much more strategic than that. Universities cut back on academic departments with the most liberals and expanded funding for departments with conservative leanings. Orbán opened a lavishly funded new campus for conservative intellectuals. His supporters publicly invited students to submit the names of faculty who professed “unasked-for left-wing political opinions.”
Last September, Balázs Orbán, the political director for the Hungarian prime minister, visited Florida, where he praised DeSantis and likened his governing style to that of his own boss. Rufo just spent a month in Budapest as a fellow at the Danube Institute, a pro-Orbán group, where he gave speeches denouncing critical race theory and reportedly met with Orbán’s government. (Rufo declined to confirm whether they actually met.) The two men appear to be swapping notes.
DeSantis seems to have absorbed the notion that conservatives have an existential need to use their political power to seize the commanding heights of the culture, especially its schools. His new book argues against the old conservative notion of supporting academic freedom, warning that “elected officials who do nothing more than get out of the way are essentially greenlighting these institutions to continue their unimpeded march through society.”
Orbán’s example has shown the government’s power over the academy can be absolute. DeSantis is simply the first Republican to appreciate the potential of this once-unimaginable use of state power to win the culture wars. Even before DeSantis’s plan has passed, Republicans in North Carolina, Texas, and North Dakota rushed out bills to eliminate tenure for professors.
Trump, racing to catch up with DeSantis on the education issue, has vowed to eliminate federal funding for any school promoting critical race theory, “transgender insanity,” or “any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” He promises to fire existing college accreditors and appoint new ones who will implement his ideological dictates, and to back up this threat by imposing confiscatory taxes on the endowment of any university that resists.
Conservatives as a whole have fled from any pretense of respecting academic freedom. “To complain that the governor and the state legislature are interfering with” public universities “is, in effect, to complain that the governor and the state legislature are interfering with the government that they run,” editorialized National Review, neatly sweeping away any concern that a Republican state could ever go too far in dictating content to its universities.
With DeSantis and Trump now vying for supremacy with a boot on the neck of American education, the Republican Party appears to have quickly settled on this strategy. There is not any assurance that the campaign to control the ideology of the schools will remain confined to the public sphere. Representative Dan Bishop of North Carolina and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas have put forth a bill that would deny federal funding to public and private universities that promote CRT concepts.
And what has been revealed in these early days of the Republican plan to conquer the academy merely represents the powers of state governments. Should Republicans win control of the White House and Congress, they would have far more authority at their disposal. Federal research dollars and tuition subsidies give the federal government leverage over every institution of higher learning, public and private alike.
There is little sign Democrats have grasped the ultimate ambitions they are confronting. When DeSantis began pushing through yet another expansion of his restrictions on gender instruction — a bill that would, among other things, require “certain materials” facing objections by any parent to be removed before they were vetted — his opponents dismissed it as mere pandering. Democrats “see it as an attempt by DeSantis to excite the conservative base and, ultimately, win the GOP 2024 presidential nomination,” reported Politico.
<b>This pat assumption fails to appreciate that seizing political control of the schools is not a campaign slogan. It’s a plan to turn power into more power.</b>
When Republicans last had control of government, admiration of Orbán was confined to a marginal fringe of right-wing intellectuals, and the whole idea of imposing their will on schools had yet to be invented. It was well into his final year in office before Trump glommed onto the issue. Trump called the George Floyd demonstrations “the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.” That is when he brought Rufo in for a visit and began ranting on the campaign trail about the “wokes” in the classroom. In November 2020, to counter the narrative of “The 1619 Project,” Trump created a “1776 Commission,” which released its report on Trump’s penultimate day in office.
This futile departing gesture seemed at the time to signify the superficiality and ridiculousness of the Republican interest in the subject. But now members of the party elite have fully invested themselves in this objective. They have only just begun to explore their powers, and their statements on the matter recognize no theoretical limit as to how far they might go. In retrospect, Trump’s late embrace of the crusade to purify the schools was not a fleeting interest but a new turn, the first shots fired in what we now see is a full-scale war.
Mauricio Garcia was radicalized by far-right neo-Nazi ideology, and he probably expected he'd be praised as a true blood-and-soil martyr. Instead, the same far-right MAGA extremists Garcia died for are labeling him a false flag Antifa liberal.
Wow. The Allen, Texas mass shooter’s profile on a Russian social media site has been found. He posted a photo of Nazi tattoos and “reconnaissance” photos of the outlet mall weeks prior. He also posted the right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool. (per @AricToler) pic.twitter.com/BnebamBumi
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) May 8, 2023
The governor’s office also pointed to a “PBS Newshour” feature on parents’ support for various gender care treatments including puberty blockers, a gay character in “Work It Out Wombats” which airs on OETA, PBS Kids’ “Clifford the Big Red Dog” introducing LGBTQ characters “Oklahoma taxpayers are going, ‘Hey, hang on, time out for just a second. That’s not my values,’” Stitt said. “I’m just tired of using taxpayer dollars for some person’s agenda. I represent the taxpayers.”
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt bizarrely claimed PBS programming "overly sexualizes our kids." (via The ReidOut Blog) https://t.co/n7T4IQ0L7I
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, who was reelected yesterday, recently dedicated "every square inch" of the state to Jesus: "[With] the authority that I have as governor, and the spiritual authority and the physical authority that you give me, I claim Oklahoma for you." pic.twitter.com/JEdTsJuzAe
“Stop using taxpayer values to push an agenda!” the bigoted governor screeched, as he used taxpayer dollars to push his agenda on everyone in the state.
That’s the problem with being a minority which represents roughly 5% of the population (except in larger cities with large gay populations). Unless the majority of citizens stand with you, which they usually don’t, you’re on your own.
And that’s the bottom line. Not that they’re taxpayers but rather the fact that that evangelical governor doesn’t see them as citizens, taxpayers, or as a demographic worth even bothering with; by acknowledging who and what they are.
Thus, he’s worse than evil. He literally can’t see LGBT people as a thing. His religion has rotted his forebrain.
No, sweetie, you represent a very narrow, exceedingly bigoted minority of taxpayers hell-bent on forcing the rest of the country to kowtow to your twisted views of morality.
“the [white male] ones that are blamed for any social ills”
Feel free to look at the office holders for the Republican (and some D) party. Pretty much white male. Also old, rich and christian. So yes, it’s entirely fair to put all the crap at their feet. it’s their show in a large part of the USA.
Legislature declares victory after badly failing Floridians | Editorial
At the behest of lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis Floridia lost ground on abortion, guns, school vouchers, LGBTQ freedom, open government and more.
Phil Sears/AP House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast, and Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, chat at the rostrum after a joint session for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ State of the State speech Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at the Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla. (AP Photo/Phil Sears)
Senators and representatives packed up and headed home, where most can no longer do more damage to Florida citizens. But the misery will continue as Gov. Ron DeSantis gleefully signs into law the many harmful, hateful or wrongheaded decisions made by his fellow Republicans over the past nine weeks.
Floridians, their kids and grandchildren will feel the effects for a long time. The ramifications are grave. But such are the consequences in a state that no longer has a competitive two-party system at the state level, and where far too many lawmakers unquestioningly rubber stamp a far-right agenda fashioned mostly by an authoritarian, ambitious and secretive governor.
Less safe and less free
Floridians will be less safe. Women will be less free.
Legislators approved a near-total ban on abortion after six weeks, when many women don’t even know they are pregnant (SB 300).It’s now legal in Florida to carry a loaded and concealed gun with no permit or training (HB 543).
Lawmakers approved a universal taxpayer-funded school voucher program (HB 1) that will wreak havoc on a public school system that for too long has been chronically underfunded by both parties.
They made it easier to impose the death penalty than any state in the U.S. and allowed for the death penalty to be imposed on child rapists when the victim is under age 12 (HB 1297). The law won wide approval from members of both parties and will look good in a political mailer but is of dubious constitutionality. The 19 Democrats who voted no showed courage, because some will surely be vilified as “soft on crime” in the next election.
A lot less sunshine
This was a terrible session for weakening Florida’s “sunshine” laws, as legislators draped a dangerous and senselessly retroactive cloak of secrecy over official travel by the governor and other top state officials. They made claims of supposed threats against DeSantis that have not been substantiated. The governor goes everywhere closely surrounded by a half-dozen FDLE agents.
Lawmakers also handed the law-and-order governor an expanded Florida State Guard, a state militia under his personal control.
In a mean-spirited attack against public sector workers, they gutted union protections for teachers, 911 dispatchers and other front-line employees.
They did nothing to provide meaningful relief for property insurance policyholders and instead made it harder for them to sue companies that refuse to pay claims.
For the third year in a row, they attacked democracy by further weakening state election laws. They made it so financially risky for third-party organizations to register voters that many threaten to stop the practice — the Republicans’ objective all along.
They imposed new regulations on use of bathrooms and pronouns and imposed a ludicrous crackdown on drag shows — acts of oppression that stifle artistic expression, criminalize gender-affirming care and encourage more bullying and discrimination against already-marginalized groups.
What they got right
Did lawmakers do anything right over the past 60 days? Yes.
They passed a record-high $117 billion budget with nearly universal bipartisan harmony, which was unusual enough in itself in Tallahassee’s hyper-partisan bubble, but Democrats praised Republicans for even-handedness and the budget came together without the trench warfare that tarnished previous sessions.
The budget has 5% pay increases for rank-and-file state workers, salary hikes for assistant public defenders, assistant state attorneys and correctional officers, $1,000 bonuses for police officers, more money to acquire environmentally sensitive lands and other initiatives.
With so much money floating around, they could easily have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. But they refused, preserving Florida’s status as an outlier state that neglects the well-being of its residents. Only nine other states refuse to expand Medicaid.
Showing more bipartisan cooperation, they voted to expand eligibility under Florida KidCare and Healthy Kids, which will help more than 40,000 children obtain affordable coverage. More positives: a stronger law to combat human sex trafficking, in response to the Sun Sentinel series Innocence Sold, and later start times for Florida middle and high schools.
Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, took a welcome stand for public safety. After the House voted 69 to 36 to repeal a key provision of the post-Parkland gun law and allow immature and troubled 18-year-olds to buy rifles and long guns, Passidomo refused to consider it in the Senate, and it died. There’s nothing to celebrate here except the rarity of a Republican leader breaking with her own party for a change.
“I voted for the Parkland bill,” said Passidomo, who visited Marjory Stoneman Douglas days after the massacre five years ago. “It was a horrific day. I will not change my position.”
A changed Capitol, for the worse
Sun Sentinel opinion writers have watched every session for the past 35 years, and this must be said: Florida no longer has a traditional bipartisan Legislature where people of good intentions and different beliefs come together and work cooperatively to improve the state.
The political agenda and outcome is all preordained. Citizens who openly challenge the system risk being arrested, as 14 were this week in the Capitol.
In its current form, hopefully temporarily, it has evolved into a partisan political arm of DeSantis’ presidential campaign.
The vastly outnumbered Democrats, led by their caucus leaders, Sen. Lauren Book, D-Davie, and Rep. Fentrice Driskell, D-Tampa, fought valiantly most of the time against impossible odds. We implore Democrats to stick together and to hold Republicans more accountable.
People increasingly talk about leaving this state because of policies that show outright contempt for women, the LGBTQ community and others. The former Miami Heat basketball star Dwyane Wade, a Hall of Famer and one of the most popular pro athletes in South Florida history, who has a transgender daughter, disclosed that he moved his family to California because they no longer feel accepted in Florida.
As events drew to a close Friday, a celebratory House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast, called it “a session like no other.”
That’s true — but for all the wrong reasons.
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.
Notice how these bills are written as vague as possible to include anything the right doesn’t like. Remember, gender and sex includes more than trans or gay people, it also includes all the hetero straight people. They have gender and they have sexual relationships. But of course the people behind these bills don’t mean the straight hetero kind as it is “normal” right. They only mean that icky kind they don’t like. Who cares that gay and trans people exist, let’s make any mention of them illegal, just like Russia did. Remember when the president of Iran said they don’t have gays in Iran, as that is a western disease? They just force all gay men to become women and as for lesbians, well women have no rights so they are forced into relationships with me. That is what these bills in Florida and other red states comes down to, the forcing the end of LGBTQ+ people out of society and back into hiding again. The writers of these bills don’t care about the health or well-being of the gay or trans kids, it is about pushing their religious church doctrines of moral correctness on everyone else. Same with the attempts to ban everything their religion hates, it is about forcing every person in these red states to live by strict Christian church doctrines and standards. Fuck you if you have a different idea or way of living, you will live by our demands, by our church morals because we are the Christian Taliban. Hugs
Indiana’s governor on Thursday signed a bill that will require schools to notify a parent if a student requests a name or pronoun change at school, one of the final bills approved in a legislative session that had targeted LGBTQ+ people in the state, especially students. Critics worry the law could out transgender children to their families and erode trust between students and teachers.
It also prohibits, from prekindergarten through third grade, instruction on “human sexuality,” something that is not defined in the bill. Holcomb said in a statement Thursday,“I also just believe its commonsense that sex education should not be taught in prekindergarten through third grade.” GOP bill author Rep. Michelle Davis said the law will “ensure Hoosier parents are in the driver’s seat when it comes to introducing sensitive topics to their kids.”
The bill’s author, Rep. Michelle Davis [photo], has appeared on the Family Research Council’s daily podcast. Republicans hold supermajorities in both Indiana chambers.
Indiana’s governor signed a bill that will require schools to notify a parent if a student requests a name or pronoun change at school, one of the final bills approved in a legislative session that targeted LGBTQ+ people in the state, especially students. https://t.co/RxHIq56mtm
⚠️Governor Holcomb today signed HB 1608, the "Don't Say Gay" bill, into law. This law attempts to erase LGBTQ voices, histories, and lived experiences from schools.
Our attorneys are assessing the law, and we will do everything in our power to protect LGBTQ rights.
Because of its incredibly vague language censoring discussions on “human sexuality"—a term with no definition in state code—HB 1608 could be used to: ❌silence any mention of LGBTQ people ❌ban books with LGBTQ characters ❌fire LGBTQ teachers ❌bar Pride flags in classrooms
LGBTQ students and teachers deserve safe, inclusive schools—not censorship and discrimination based on who they are.
HB 1608 does nothing but harm. LGBTQ people have always existed in Indiana, and we won't allow their stories and identities to be erased. https://t.co/SVAedNVshi
“I also just believe its commonsense that sex education should not be taught in prekindergarten through third grade.”
First off, where in the hell was “sexuality” being taught in K-3, and secondly, does this now mean you can’t refer to your teacher as Mr., Miss, or Mrs. as they all explicitly imply gender, and Mrs. implies that there is a sexual relationship somewhere.
Oh that’s ok. When you talk about straight people you talk about good, normal people
When you talk about LBGT, you talk about straight people who have sodomy because they’re sick snd evil
I guess there will be mass arrests on the first day of kindergarten when the teacher shows the children where the (gasp!) boy’s and girl’s restrooms are.
They’re just working their way toward making us illegal in the literal sense – it’s only a matter of time before they try to get Lawrence v. Texas overturned.
And Santos thinks if gays and lesbians abandon trans people the MAGAts will leave us alone I don’t think he really thinks that. He’s just helping the fascists in their attempts to divide us up into as small groups as possible so that they can stamp on each in turn.
Sadly there are some that will agree with that message, thinking that they are the good upstanding ones, and those trans / drag queens / kinky people / whoever are ‘making us look bad‘.
(I’m also not sure why the message included TQIA+ as the ‘others’. What do they have against questioning people? Most of us were at some point. Asexual / Aromantic people are no threat to anyone. They can’t pretend that Intersex people are ‘making a bad choice’ like they try with the rest of us, since they were obviously biologically born that way! Just looks like a transparently lazy way to split the community.)
No surprise here. Indiana is a racist hater State that flies under the radar. Our politicians are pussies and are usually a year or two behind the others. Today, I am putting my Rainbow Flag out and keeping it there.
Our local GOP rep decided to not seek re-election because she was so disgusted with her fellow colleagues in that party She and her husband are now independents. She refused to endorse any GOP candidate for her seat.
Often overlooked in media discussions of this wave of anti-LGBT legislation is the fact that some kids will attempt — or succeed in — suicide on account of the hate directed to them.
The Republicans engaged in this campaign of hate are murderers, pure and simple.
Do we have any progressive straight allies paying attention to this wave of homophobic bullshit? Are there any wealthy or powerful gays in the fight or we still just in the “tsk tsk” stage of a fascist overthrow?
He kiddies if you want to be an ally, change your name. If you’re Susie, ask to be called Susan. If its Malik, ask to be called Mallie. If your name is Billy, asked to be called Mister Smith. There are plenty of name changes that are not gender related. While this puts a burden on the teachers, it will point out the ridiculousness of this law.
What happened to parent’s rights? Why can just one parent stop a field trip to see a play because they object to any children seeing an actor in a female role, yet a parent has no rights to help their child socially transition? The only parents who have rights are maga republican parents. This is the state that the king wannabe governor calls the “free state of Florida”? This is the enforcement of a Puritan religious belief and view of Christian morality. This is enforcing a dress code on the entire public to agree with church doctrine of how the bible says to dress. This is real child abuse to separate children from loving parents following the medical advice of doctors, following the approved accepted best practice from the major medical organizations including the AMA and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is the largest professional association of pediatricians in the US. But what do doctors know compared to religious conservatives who get their medical information from a book written 2,500 years ago before people even knew about germs. Think of what the republicans are doing and have managed to do in the last two years. They have set the country and civil rights back 100 years and have set child labor laws back 150 years. Every poll says what the republicans are doing is unpopular and unliked by the majority, the republicans don’t care. Why, because they want to rule the people, not serve the public. Hugs
The Florida legislature passed a bill Thursday that will let the state take transgender minors away from their families if they are receiving gender-affirming care.
The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 26–13, mainly along party lines, and the House shortly after by a vote of 83–28, again along party lines. The measure now goes to the desk of Governor Ron DeSantis, who has previously expressed support for it and will likely sign it into law.
If he signs it into law, the measure will allow the state to take custody of a child if they have been “subjected to or [are] threatened with being subjected to” gender-affirming care, which includes puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy.
“Parents have the right to raise their children as they see fit, and government intervention should be a last resort,” Senate President Kathleen Passidomo [photo] said in a prepared statement Friday.
“Unfortunately, all too often we are hearing about treatments for gender dysphoria being administered to children, often very young children. That’s just wrong, and we need to step in and make sure it isn’t happening in our state.”
The bill’s Senate sponsor, Sen. Clay Yarborough, appeared here in March for his bill banning minors from public drag shows.
He first appeared on JMG in 2010, when as a member of the Jacksonville City Council he declared that gays, Muslims, and atheists should not be permitted to hold public office, otherwise God will smite the fuck out of the country.
One of the many, many reasons I pleaded with the American public to care about family separation. It was just a matter of time before it came for all of us
The bill that would grant Florida the power to seize trans-identifying children receiving or likely to receive treatment for gender dysphoria is sponsored by Republican state senator Clay Yarborough, who is a follower of Christ. @Clay_Yarboroughhttps://t.co/rp83mxCzFNpic.twitter.com/7mWED7xNva
100% horseshit, its all made up to attack trans people. period. Its a start too, they’re not going to stop with trans kids. Next it will be taking children from gay couples and we need to know thats where its going.
Kids are being operated on. Approximately 1.5% of breast augmentation surgeries are preformed on girls under the age of 18. Thousands of cisgender girls receive “gender affirming” surgery every single year.
Funny how no Republicans are writing laws to take those girls away from their parents.
I’ve been tired of the Florida bashing but now I’m feeling the same way. Fuck this state. I want to get the fuck out of here ASAP. I just hope I can sell my home quickly. This place has become a quagmire of insanity. It’s horrible for all of the good LGBTQ+ people who choose to live here, including myself.
Parents, get your Trans kids out of the state now. I am sure they included provisions to detransition the children too. You know he’ll sign it. Anything to hurt someone.
You can bet Florida is going to eventually be setting up contracts with “ministries” to “counsel” the trans kids they steal from their parents to pray away the trans.
These people are mostly religiously driven, and they use fake or misleading information from debunked failed studies to push their hatred. They chose their name to confuse people who mistakenly think they are the highly-regarded American Academy of Pediatrics. They are behind a lot of the misinformation about abortion. One of their main targets right now is trans children. This includes pushing schools to adopt junk science painting transgender youth as carriers of a pathological disorder, one that’s capable of spontaneously causing others–à la the dancing plague–to adopt similar thoughts and behaviors. There is a lot more in the article. How ever since I reloaded my computers the classic editor is not working like it use to allowing me to color in the pages easily. I have to figure out if it is a setting on my security programs or if WordPress changed the editor. Hugs
A Google Drive left public on the American College of Pediatricians’ website exposed detailed financial records, sensitive member details, and more.
PHOTOGRAPH: ROHANEH/GETTY IMAGES
A DOCTORS’ ORGANIZATION at the center of the ongoing legal fight over the abortion drug mifepristone has suffered a significant data breach. A link to an unsecured Google Drive published on the group’s website pointed users last week to a large cache of sensitive documents, including financial and tax records, membership rolls, and email exchanges spanning over a decade. The more than 10,000 documents lay bare the outsize influence of a small conservative organization working to lend a veneer of medical science to evangelical beliefs on parenting, sex, procreation, and gender.
The leaked records, first reported by WIRED, offer an unprecedented look at the groups and personnel central to that campaign. They also describe an organization that has benefited greatly by exaggerating its own power, even as it has struggled quietly for two decades to grow in size and gain respect. The records show how the College, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes as a hate group, managed to introduce fringe beliefs into the mainstream simply by being, as the founder of Fox News once put it, “the loudest voice in the room.”
The Leak
A WIRED review of the exposed data found that the unsecured Google Drive stored nearly 10,000 files, some of which are compressed zip files containing additional documents. These records detail highly sensitive internal information about the College’s donors and taxes, social security numbers of board members, staff resignation letters, budgetary and fundraising concerns, and the usernames and passwords of more than 100 online accounts. The files include Powerpoint presentations, Quickbooks accounting documents, and at least 388 spreadsheets.
One spreadsheet appears to be an export of an internal database containing information on 1,200 past and current members. It contains intimate personal information about each member, including various contact details, as well as where they were educated, how they heard of the group, and when membership dues were paid. The records show past and current members are mostly male and, on average, over 50 years old. As of spring 2022, the College counted slightly more than 700 members, according to another document reviewed by WIRED.
Data visualization: DataWrapper
The breach exposes some material dating back to the group’s origin. It includes mailing lists gathered by the group of thousands of “conservative physicians” across the country. (One document outlining recruitment efforts states in bold, red letters: “TARGET CHRISTIAN MDs.”) The ongoing recruitment of doctors and medical school students seen as holding Christian views has long been its top priority. The leaked records indicate that more than 10,000 mailers were sent to physicians between 2013 and 2017 alone.
While the group’s membership rolls are not public, the leak has outed most if not all of its members. A cursory review of the member lists surfaced one name of note: a recent commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, who after joining in 2019 asked that his membership with the group remain a secret. (WIRED was unable to reach the official for comment in time for publication.)
The SPLC’s “hate group” designation, which the College forcefully disputes, haunted its fundraising efforts, records reveal. A barrage of emails in 2014 show that the label cost the group the chance to benefit from an Amazon program that would eventually distribute $450 million to charities across the globe. Amazon would deny the College’s application, stating that it relied on the SPLC to determine which charities fall into certain ineligible categories.
A strategy document would later refer to a “unified plan” among the College and its allies to “continue discrediting the SPLC,” which included a campaign aimed at lowering its rating at Charity Navigator, one of the web’s most influential nonprofit evaluators. One of the group’s admins noted that despite SPLC’s label, another charity monitor, GuideStar, listed the College as being in “good standing.”
The College’s GuideStar page no longer says this and appears to have been defaced. It now reads, “AMERICAN COLLEGE OF doodoo fartheads,” with a mission statement saying: “we are evil and hate gays :(((”
The Google Drive containing the documents was taken offline soon after WIRED contacted the American College of Pediatricians. The College did not respond to a request for comment.
The Talk
Leaked communications between members of the group and minutes taken at board meetings over the course of several years speak loudly about the challenges the group faced in pursuing its deeply unpopular agenda: returning America to a time when the laws and social mores around family squared neatly with evangelical Christian beliefs.
Many of the College’s most radical views target transgender people, and in particular, transgender youth. The leak, which had been indexed by Google, includes volumes of literature crafted specifically to influence relationships between practicing pediatricians, parents, and their children. It includes reams of marketing material the College aims to distribute widely among public school officials. This includes pushing schools to adopt junk science painting transgender youth as carriers of a pathological disorder, one that’s capable of spontaneously causing others–à la the dancing plague–to adopt similar thoughts and behaviors.
This is one of the group’s most dubious claims. While unsupported by medical science, it is routinely and incuriously propagated through literature targeted at schools and medical offices around the US. The primary source for this claim is a research paper drafted in 2017 by Lisa Littman, a Brown University scholar who, while a medical doctor, was not specialized in mental health. The goal of the paper was to introduce, conceptually, “rapid onset gender dysphoria”—a hypothetical disorder, as was later clarified by the journal that published it. Littman would also clarify personally that her research “does not validate the phenomenon” she’d hypothesized, since no clinicians, nor individuals identifying as trans, had participated in the study.
The paper explains that its subjects were instead all parents who had been recruited from a handful of websites known for opposing gender-affirmative care and “telling parents not to believe their child is transgender.” A review of one of the sites from the period shows parents congregating to foster paranoia about whether there’s a “conspiracy of silence” around “anime culture” brainwashing boys into behaving like girls; insights plucked in some cases straight from another, more insidious forum (widely known for reveling in the suicides of the people it has bullied).
A 2021 prospectus describing the group’s focus, ideology, and lobbying efforts encapsulates a wide range of “educational resources” destined for the inboxes of physicians and medical school students. The materials include links to a website instructing doctors on how to speak to children in a variety of scenarios about a multitude of topics surrounding sex, including in the absence of their parents. Practice scripts of conversations between doctors and patients advise, among other things, ways to elicit a child’s thoughts on sex with the help of an imaginative metaphor.
While the material is not expressly religious, it is clearly aimed at painting same-sex marriage as aberrant and immoral behavior. Physicians lobbied by the group are also told to urge patients to purchase Christian-based parenting guides, including one designed to help parents broach the topic of sex with their 11- and 12-year-old kids. The College suggests telling parents to plan a “special overnight trip,” a pretext for instilling in their children sexual norms in line with evangelical practice. The group suggests telling parents to buy a tool called a “getaway kit,” a series of workbooks that run around $54 online. The workbooks methodically walk the parents through the process of springing the topic, but only after a day-long charade of impromptu gift-giving and play.
These books are full of games and puzzles for the parent and child to cooperatively take on. Throughout the process, the child slowly digests a concept of “sexual purity,” lessons aided by oversimplified scripture and well-trodden Bible school parables.
Another document the group shared with its members contains a script for appointments with pregnant minors. Its purpose is made evidently clear: The advice is engineered specifically to reduce the odds of minors coming into contact with medical professionals not strictly opposed to abortion. A practice script recommends the doctor inform the minor that they “strongly recommend against” abortion, adding “the procedure not only kills the infant you carry, but is also a danger to you.” (Medically, the term “fetus” and “infant” are not interchangeable, the latter referring to a newborn baby less than one year old.)
The doctors are urged to recommend that the minor visit a website that, like others shared with patients, is not expressly religious but will only direct visitors to Catholic-run “crisis pregnancy centers,” which strictly reject abortion. The same site is widely promoted by anti-abortion groups such as National Right to Life, which last year held that it should be illegal to terminate the pregnancy of a 10-year-old rape victim.
The Professionals
The effort to ban mifepristone, which the Supreme Court paused last month pending further review, faces significant legal hurdles but could ultimately benefit from the appellate court’s disproportionately conservative makeup. Most of the legal power in the fight was supplied by a much older and better funded group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has established ties to some of the country’s most politically elite—former vice president Mike Pence and Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett among them.
A contract in the leaked documents dated April 2021 shows the ADF agreeing to legally represent the College free of charge. It stipulates that ADF’s ability to subsidize expenses incurred during lawsuits would be limited by ethical guidelines; however, it could still forgive any lingering costs simply by declaring the College “indigent.”
In contrast to the College’s some 700 members, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)–the organization from which the College’s founders split 20 years ago–has roughly 67,000. The rupture between the two groups was a direct result of a statement issued by the AAP in 2002. Modern research, the AAP said, had conclusively shown that the sexual orientation of parents had an imperceptible impact on the well-being of children, so long as they were raised in caring, supportive families.
Data visualization: DataWrapper
The College would gain notoriety early on by assailing the positions of the AAP. In 2005, a Boston Globe reporter noted how common it had become for the American College of Pediatricians “to be quoted as a counterpoint” to anything the AAP said. The institution had a rather “august-sounding name,” he wrote, for being run by a “single employee.”
Internal documents show that the group’s directors quickly encountered hurdles operating on the fringe of accepted science. Some claimed to be oppressed. Most of the College’s research had been “written by one person,” according to minutes from a 2006 meeting, which were included in the leak. The College was failing to make a splash. In the future, one director suggested, papers rejected by medical journals “should be published on the web.” The vote to do so was unanimous (though the board decided the term “not published” was nicer than “rejected”).
A second director put forth a motion to create a separate “scientific section” on the group’s website, strictly for linking to articles published in medical journals. The motion was quashed after it dawned on the board that they didn’t “have enough articles” to make the page “look professional.”
The College struggled to identify the root cause of its runtedness. “To get enough clout,” one director said, “it would take substantial numbers, maybe 10,000.” (The College’s recruitment efforts would yield fewer than 7 percent of this goal in the following 17 years.) Yet another said the marketing department advised that “the College needs to pick a fight with the AAP and get on Larry King Live.” Another board member, the notes say, felt the organization was too busy trying to “walk the fence” by neglecting to acknowledge that “we are conservative and religious.”
The discussion between Sam, Emma, and the crew as they break down what this woman is really saying here is the important part of the video. Notice the woman says she spent all her time on the floor praying but it seems she neglected to talk to the very doctors who could have given her daughter the help she really needed. Yes a book written 2,500 years ago has the updated medical knowledge to treat gender issues of teenagers today. This woman wanted a religious womanly future for her daughter, she did not care what the daughter felt or what was going on in the daughter’s body. The only things she was worried about was her god and her daughters continuing to be in her god’s good graces. As she says at one point, she wanted her daughter to have a shining womanly future. It seems the daughter was rejecting the woman’s religious views, and that couldn’t be allowed. Hugs
Montana Republican State Representative Kerri Seekins-Crowe made controversial remarks during a floor debate on a bill that would ban transgender youth from participating in school sports.
Seekins-Crowe said that she would rather her child died than be transgender. Seekins-Crowe’s remarks were met with widespread condemnation. Many people called her remarks hateful and transphobic. Some people also called for her to resign from her position.
Seekins-Crowe’s remarks are a reflection of the deep-seated transphobia that exists in Montana and across the country and that transgender people are still facing discrimination and violence. They are also a reminder that there is still much work to be done to achieve equality for all people, regardless of their gender identity.
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