Judd Legum of Popular Information tells the sad story of what happened to sex education in Florida. Responding to Ron DeSantis, the legislature passed a bill declaring what must be taught and what cannot be taught, in accord with the ideology of rightwing Republicans, not science. The law requires districts to have their sex Ed curriculum approved by the state. Large numbers of students are getting no sex education at all. That may be what DeSanths wants.
Legum writes:
In May 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed Florida House Bill 1069, a law that requires sex education classes in the state to conform to right-wing ideology. Specifically, the law requires all sex education classes to teach students that sex is binary, “either male or female,” even though that is inaccurate. It also mandates that students are instructed that sex is defined exclusively by “internal and external genitalia present at birth,” and these sex roles are “binary, stable, and unchangeable.” This requirement erases the existence of trans and nonbinary people. Schools also must “teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for all school-age students” and “the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage.”
To enforce these new rules and other aspects of the DeSantis administration’s political agenda, HB 1069 also requires “all materials used to teach reproductive health” to be approved in advance by the Florida Department of Education (FDE) or use textbooks pre-approved by the state. Previously, sex education curricula were approved by district school boards. Florida parents can opt-out of sex education lessons on behalf of their children.
The FDE instructed school districts to submit their materials for sex education by September 30, 2023. The school districts met the deadline, but the FDE never responded. Florida counties were placed in a no-win situation as not teaching sex education, a mandatory course, at all is a violation of state law.
Several Florida school districts — including Hillsborough, Orange and Polk Counties, three of Florida’s largest — decided not to teach sex education at all during the 2023-24 school year, the Orlando Sentinel reported. Other counties, including Broward and Seminole Counties, taught sex education classes without getting the legally required approval.
Legum reviewed a copy of the training materials for reviewers of district plans. Among other things, it requires these “experts” to watch for the following criteria:
The “experts” are directed to evaluate all materials on 11 separate criteria, some inscrutable. For example, all materials must be evaluated on the criteria of “Male and Female Reproductive Roles,” “Principles of Individual Freedom,” “Critical Race Theory,” and “Social Justice.”
Please open the link to learn more about how the Florida Department of Education trains reviewers of district plans.
John Thompson, historian and former teacher, describes in this post the latest trampling of the rights of students and teachers by Ryan Walters, the state’s Secretary of Education. Secretary Walters wants to eject “indoctrination” from the schools but replace it with his own brand of introdoctrination. True MAGA!
Thompson:
Somethings Happening Here; What Is, Never Is Clear.
In July, State Superintendent Ryan Walters announced that an executive committee would overhaul Oklahoma’s standards in order to eliminate DEI and “indoctrination,” and highlight “American exceptionalism.” It would feature prominent conservatives, including Dennis Prager of PragerU, David Barton of the Christian Nationalist organization, Wallbuilders, and the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts.”
In an interview with NBC News, Walters then threatened, “Oklahoma educators who refuse to teach students about the Bible could lose their teaching license.”
And Roberts, a sponsor of Project 2025, has further explained, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Roberts also told the New York Times that “he views Heritage’s role today as ‘institutionalizing Trumpism.’”
According to FOX 25, in early September, the entire Social Studies Standards Committee met “to discuss what they thought would be a final review.” Instead, an undisclosed draft of their standards, was presented by the executive committee. Moreover FOX News was told that committee members “had to sign non-disclosure agreements not to share what was being discussed and were reminded of the NDAs at the end of the session.”
FOX’s sources also said, “what happened Tuesday left them ‘disheartened.’” One source said, “I want to throw up.”
Moreover, State Rep. Forrest Bennett described the meeting as, “essentially getting them into a room today and saying ‘Thanks for all your work. We don’t care. We’re deleting, copy-pasting … [and imposing] right-wing, out-of-state, out-of-touch, standards.'”
In 2023, “an administrative law judge found [that] the Education Department failed to prove that Boismier’s conduct justified revocation of her teaching certificate.” But in August of 2024, Board of Education issued their revocation order without revealing what it said. We now know that Boismier was accused of “’circumventing’ HB 1775, but not of teaching any of its banned concepts.”
And now Boismier’s attorney says, “It should be an easy call for the courts to overturn it, since Walters chose to throw out the actual facts and law in the case to get the results he wanted and campaigned on.”
In other cases during that week, Edmond teacher, Regan Killackey, is fighting in court against Walters’ effort to revoke his teaching license for “goofing around with his son and daughter in a party supply store in September 2019, snapping photos. His daughter put on a mask of Donald Trump. His son held up a silver plastic sword, and Killackey grimaced.”
That the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency (LOFT) would begin an investigation into spending concerns regarding the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE). This investigation, approved by Speaker Charles McCall, R-Atoka, and spearheaded by Wallace in his capacity as Chairman of LOFT, will focus on issues raised by both legislators and private citizens regarding alleged OSDE funding disbursement issues.
Moreover, all relevant information will be shared “with Attorney General Gentner Drummond regarding any potential violations of the Open Records or Open Meeting Acts by OSDE.”
So, what’s happening here in Oklahoma “ain’t exactly clear,” but we know that more Republican legislators are resisting Walters and it seems unlikely that Walters’ overreach will hold up in court. What I hear from legislators is that the effort to impose Project 2025 on history standards has prompted a serious tumult behind closed doors. It’s also clear that Walters and the Heritage Foundation will continue their assaults on public education. But, I’m confident that Walters, at least, his heading for a fall.
Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced math, is a close observer of the public school privatization movement. In this post, he reviews the situation in Delaware, where the big money for privatization is coming from the DuPont family. The school board of the Christina district recently fired its superintendent, who was named superintendent of the year only two years ago. The reason, Tultican writes, was his opposition to charter schools.
He begins:
July 10th the Christina school board voted, at 2:45 AM, to remove popular Superintendent Dan Shelton. The seven member board split 4 to 3. It seems that Shelton’s opposition to allowing charter schools to take over the district motivated the vote. The Christina school district serves the small Delaware cities of Wilmington, Newark and their outskirts. It is a modest sized district with about 14,000 students. The unseen force behind the ouster was the DuPont family.
The attack by billionaires on schools in Delaware is similar to harm visiting public education throughout the nation. The local rich guy sets up tax exempt “charities” and uses them to undermine local schools. The “charities” hire young ambitious and talented people to lead the effort. Looking behind the scenes in Delaware illuminates the undermining of public schools nationwide.
Board President Donald Patton was joined by Vice President Alethea Smith-Tucker, Y.F. Lou, and Dr. Naveed Baqir in voting to oust the Superintendent two months before the new school year begins. It is alleged that they are the compromised four. In a local pod cast, Highland Bunker, board member Doug Manley reported that Matt Clifford, who dropped out of the recent school board election, was offered support if he agreed to vote with Board President Patton. Manley also speculated that Y. F. Lou received the same offer.
Trustee Manley stated that in his view the only reason Shelton was removed from office was because of his opposition to letting charter schools parcel out the district. It is notable that in 2022, Shelton was named Delaware State Superintendent of the Year.
Longwood Foundation
The Longwood Foundation is not called the DuPont Foundation because it was originally established in 1937 by Pierre DuPont to support Longwood Gardens. A tax reform act in 1969 caused a change and Longwood Gardens Inc. was formed to finance the gardens. The Longwood Foundation remained in existence to “principally support charitable organizations” and push forward the DuPont agenda.
Over the last decade, the foundation has spent $1,812,200 to support Reading Assist Inc. whose web page says:
“Reading Assist provides high-dosage tutoring for students in grades K-3 in the lowest 25% for reading proficiency, with a focus on serving in schools where there is the highest need.
“We recruit, train, and embed AmeriCorps members – known as Reading Assist Fellows – willing to commit a school year of service to provide our accredited, one-on-one intervention program to struggling readers.”
Reading Assist is a science of reading (SoR) advocate whose founder has ties to the dyslexia community. AmeriCorps has helped provide Teach for America (TFA) training and recruits. In other words, these organizations come with privatization blemishes. Many researchers believe SoR is bad science promoted by wealthy people and publishing companies while TFA is their army.
Longwood is still a DuPont family run organization. According to the 2022 tax form 990PF (TIN: 51-0066734), John DuPont is the current president and Margaret DuPont is Vice President. The tax records also show that in the last decade they have provided the fake education graduate school, Relay Graduate School, $1,300,000.
The Foundation concentrates its spending into the Wilmington area and does very little spending nationally. So their spending of more than $15,000,000 on charter schools in the last decade has made a huge impact locally. Margaret and one other DuPont family member also sit on the board of the smaller Chelsea Foundation (TIN: 51-6015638) which also provides grants to charter schools. It is this drive to privatize the Christina School District that seems to have led to firing a respected and popular administrator.
In 2017, Indiana scholars Jim Scheurich, Gayle Cosby, and Nathanial Williams posted an article on Diane Ravitch’s blog that outlined the model used by billionaires to gain control of local schools. Point five of their rich guy privatization model is, “Development of a network of local organizations or affiliates that all collaborate closely on the same local agenda.”
Please open the link to finish the article.
One other interesting point in Ultican’s post. Remember Julia Keleher? She was appointed to be the Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico when the island was in dire financial straits. She pushed charters and vouchers and was widely opposed by teachers, parents, and students. She ended her time on the island with a jail sentence:
On December 28, 2016, Keleher was appointed Puerto Rico Secretary of Education by Governor-elect Ricardo Rosselló who became so hated he was driven from office in 2019. The appointment was just a few months before hurricane Maria hit. Keleher also became disliked as was demonstrated by San Juan protesters loudly chanting, “Julia go home!”
Things went sideways for Keleher. December 17, 2021, a federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced her with six months prison, 12 months house arrest and a $21,000 fine. She plead guilty in June to two felony counts involving conspiracies to commit fraud. Almost as soon as she finished her prison term, she was hired by First State Educate. Now she is the executive director.
General Stanley McChrystal, a much-decorated leader of the U.S. military, endorsed Kamala Harris for President. General McChrystal is retired. His endorsement appeared in The New York Times.
He wrote:
Some deeply consequential decisions are starkly simple. That is how I view our upcoming presidential election. And that is why I have already cast my ballot for character — and voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.
As a citizen, veteran and voter, I was not comfortable with many of the policy recommendations that Democrats offered at their convention in Chicago or those Republicans articulated in Milwaukee. My views tend more toward the center of the political spectrum. And although I have opinions on high-profile issues, like abortion, gun safety and immigration, that’s not why I made my decision.
Political narratives and policies matter, but they didn’t govern my choice. I find it easy to be attracted to, or repelled by, proposals on taxes, education and countless other issues. But I believe that events and geopolitical and economic forces will, like strong tides, move policymakers where they ultimately must go. In practice, few administrations travel the course they campaigned on. Circumstances change. Our president, therefore, must be more than a policymaker or a malleable reflection of the public’s passions. She or he must lead — and that takes character.
Character is the ultimate measure of leadership for those who seek the highest office in our land. The American revolutionary Thomas Paine is said to have written, “Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.” Regardless of what a person says, character is ultimately laid bare in his or her actions. So I pay attention to what a leader does.
History has shown us that the office of the presidency unfailingly reveals the occupant’s character. Moments of disappointment and crisis — like Jimmy Carter’s acceptance of responsibility for the failed 1980 Iran hostage rescue mission, John F. Kennedy’s navigation of the terrifying 13-day confrontation over Soviet missiles in Cuba and Abraham Lincoln’s courageous issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation — said little about policy but much about character.
And we’ve seen both sides of the coin: Failures of character, such as those of Richard Nixon and his vice president Spiro Agnew, dishonor and potentially threaten our republic. Character will dictate whether we stand by our NATO allies and against Vladimir Putin’s continued aggression. Character will dictate whether we have a commander in chief who honors and respects the men and women who serve in uniform.
Fortunately, neither candidate in this pivotal election is unknown to us. We’ve had years to watch both closely.
Each of us must seriously contemplate our choice and apply the values we hope to find in our president, our nation and ourselves. Uncritically accepting the thinking of others or being swayed by the roar of social media crowds is a mistake. To turn a blind eye toward or make excuses for weak character from someone we propose to confer awesome power and responsibility on is to abrogate our role as citizens. We will get — and deserve — what we elect.
I’ve thought deeply about my choice and considered what I’ve seen and heard and what I owe my three granddaughters. I’ve concluded that it isn’t political slogans or cultural tribalism; it is the best president my vote might help select. So I have cast my vote for character, and that vote is for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Ms. Harris has the strength, the temperament and, importantly, the values to serve as commander in chief. When she sits down with world leaders like President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, representing the United States on the global stage, I have no doubt that she is working in our national interest, not her own.
I would urge others to vote as I have. But whatever decision you make, let it be thoughtfully considered, carefully reached and yours alone. We’ll all have to live with it.
On September 9, Lisa Dye of Public Notice wrote about why Brazilian authorities banished Twitter (or, as its proprietor calls it, X). She wrote that he sticks up for his rightwing buddies, not free speech. In 2022, Brazil’s strongman leader Bolsonaro bestowed a prestigious national award on Musk.
She writes:
As of this writing Brazil’s 215 million citizens cannot access X (or “twitter” as we’ll call it). And yet, they are still living in the dumbest timeline.
Elon Musk, the world’s foremost “free speech absolutist,” has picked a fight with the Brazilian government over its demand that he censor rightwing misinformation. It’s a classic situation of “why can’t they both lose?” But right now, the only ones losing are the Brazilian people.
The saga began with former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a rightwing conservative who lost his bid for reelection in 2022 to leftwing politician Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On January 8 of last year, Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed Congress and the Supreme Court in a failed attempt to keep him in power.
The reaction of the Brazilian government to January 8 stands in stark contrast to official reaction to January 6 in the US. In Brazil, hundreds of people were immediately arrested, including some senior government officials. Bolsonaro was barred from running for office again. And Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes led an operation that was both investigatory and preventative. In short, they wanted to figure out why their government had been attacked, and they wanted to make damn sure that it never happened again.
To that end, Judge de Moraes sought to banish rightwing incitement, the so-called “digital militias,” from social media. In sealed rulings, he ordered Meta, Instagram, and Telegram to remove posts and users who flogged misinformation about the attack on government and advocated for Bolonsaro’s return.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro fled to Florida, where he launched a second act as hero of the American right. The Brazilian leader spews the same jingoistic populism, fueled by hatred of minorities and LGBTQ+ people, that animates Trumpism. He even consulted Steve Bannon on his 2018 campaign. And perhaps most importantly, he reinforces their bedrock belief that election fraud is rampant.
As former congressman and current Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes told CNN, “The way his narrative is built, to a large extent, as a copy or a mirror image of the narrative that they have in the US is very useful in the sense of showing people this is happening in other places, too. This proves the whole idea that there is a global conspiracy, a global leftwing conspiracy to keep us, the people who represent the real people, out of power.”
However, Musk has 20 million Twitter subscribers in Brazil, and they were drifting to other platforms, like Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads. Worse, the Brazilian Supreme Court took $2 million from Musk’s Starlink to satisfy its claims against Musk’s X. What did Musk do when threatened with fines and the loss of market share?
After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk’s social network, X, has capitulated. In a court filing on Friday night, the company’s lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site.
The decision was a surprise move by Mr. Musk, who owns and controls X, after he said he had refused to obey what he called illegal orders to censor voices on his social network. Mr. Musk had dismissed local employees and refused to pay fines. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil last month.
Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy. X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.
Brazil’s Supreme Court confirmed X’s moves in a filing on Saturday, but said the company had not filed the proper paperwork. It gave X five days to send further documentation.
The abrupt about-face from Mr. Musk in Brazil appeared to be a defeat for the outspoken businessman and his self-designed image as a warrior for free speech. Mr. Musk and his company had loudly and harshly criticized Brazil’s Supreme Court for months, even publicly releasing some of its sealed orders, but neither had publicly mentioned their reversal by Saturday morning.
The moment showed how, in the yearslong power struggle between tech giants and nation-states, governments have been able to keep the upper hand.
Mr. Musk has had to come to terms with that reality in other countries, including India and Turkey, where his social network complied with orders to censor certain posts. But in Brazil and Australia, he complained about government orders he disagreed with and accused local officials of censorship. His company’s responses to governments have often been in line with his personal politics.
In the U.S., where Musk will never be censored, he has restored accounts of neo-Nazis, election deniers, and COVID science deniers. His own Twitter feed is an advertising platform for Trump. He frequently highlights outrageous pro-Trump, anti-Harris messages.
It’s sad to think that this hateful, bigoted man “owns” the world’s town square, where no one ever fact-checks him or moderates his Tweets.
Just proves, as if proof were needed, that money is power.
Laura Loomer is a Trump fan who craves fame. She seems to have struck gold. She now travels with Trump on his private jet. She has insulted everyone who doesn’t worship Trump, and she has smeared every group that offends her. Charlie Sykes, a prominent Never Trumper, describes his view of Laura Loomer.
He writes:
“It is extraordinary. Laura Loomer is not just a bigot, she is a freak. She is at the far edges of the fever swamp. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene described her as racist and offensive. And yet Donald Trump is associating with her; these are the kinds of people who have his ear right now. So, at this moment of the campaign — I mean think about this we’re less than two months away from the election — Donald Trump is associating with some of the craziest, weirdest figures on the right.” — Me on “Morning Joe,” September 12, 2024
Apparently, I triggered Loomer when I called her a freak…
…which is odd, when you think about it.
By now — you’d think — she’d be used to being called an antisemitic-Islamophobic-racist-grotesquerie, as well as a conspiracist nutjob, and an overall vile human being. (Details below.)
After all, Trump’s favorite worm-tongue is not your standard-issue deplorable; she’s more like a leak from a laboratory of deplorability: a mutation of all the toxic insanity, bigotry, and demented inhumanity that has poisoned our politics.
So, you might imagine that she would have developed a thickish hide.
But no.
On Thursday (which was quite a busy day for her), she spent a good chunk of her morning lashing out at Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lindsey Graham… and me.
Personally, I thought “oxygen thief” was an underwhelming way to end this rant. But she was pretty jazzed by her efforts.
I am, of course, deeply flattered, honored, and not at all humbled by the fact that this loathsome mutant dislikes me. I may frame it.
Why is Donald Trump hanging out with Loomer?
Why did he want her to be hired by his campaign? Why did she fly with him to the debate this week? Why would he take this 9/11 Truther to this week’s solemn remembrance? Why is he so enamored of her presence?
Was Nick Fuentes unavailable? Were Alex Jones, David Duke, and the Tiki-torch dudes otherwise engaged? Or does she have other charms for the former president? I couldn’t possibly say.
But it seems clear that she is providing Trump the sort of safe space he so desperately craves — a space where his darkest and ugliest instincts are stroked and validated. Perhaps most important: she hates the people he hates. As Joe Perticone and Marc Caputo note, “Loomer has called Kamala Harris ‘a drug using prostitute.’ As for why Harris doesn’t have biological children, she once said: “I’m willing to bet she’s had so many abortions that she damaged her uterus.’”
Most people would promptly respond to the question that is the title of this post: NO! the First Amendment was written to protect the people against government over-reach. The very question is absurd on its face. Yet Republican Attorneys General have argued that the First Amendment protects their right to ban books. No, no, no, a million times NO!
Book banners in Llano County and Florida’s attorney general will try to convince a federal appeals court Tuesday that the First Amendment grants elected officials the unlimited right to remove books from public libraries.
Conservatives will turn freedom of speech on its head by arguing that politicians are expressing themselves when they ban books, and therefore, the Constitution protects book bans. In a perverse twist, they will make this argument during Banned Books Week, the time of year when writers defend the right to share ideas.
The Little v. Llano case will undoubtedly go to the U.S. Supreme Court. Seventeen Republican state attorneys general have joined Ken Paxton in defending the Llano County Commissioners Court’s order to remove 17 books from the public library. Not the school library, mind you, but the library system for all residents.
Historically, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment severely limits the power of government to control speech and other forms of expression. Governments are not allowed to ban books based solely on their viewpoint; there must be a public safety issue.
Llano County residents sued in federal court last year to have the books returned. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman found that Llano officials only banned the books because they disagreed with the content and determined the commissioners had no compelling government interest to remove them. He ordered all the books restored to library shelves.
The 18 Republican attorneys general who have joined the case want the judges to accept a new interpretation of the First Amendment, one first pushed in Florida. They argue government officials have free speech rights, and the court must protect them as much as a librarian’s, a writer’s or a reader’s civil liberties.
“The county’s decisions over which books to offer its patrons in its public libraries, at its own expense, are its own speech,” the states argued in a court filing last month. “The government does not violate anyone’s free speech rights merely by speaking — no matter what it chooses to say or not to say.”
If Little v. Llano makes it to the Supreme Court, and the justices agree with this argument, they will hobble the foundation of our democracy: the free exchange of ideas. The flip side of the freedom to write is the freedom to read. One is useless without the other.
Libraries play a crucial role in a free society. They are repositories not only of history and entertainment but of accumulated knowledge and new ideas. Books are expensive, and libraries make them available to the entire community.
Public libraries are, by definition, government entities financed with taxpayer dollars. In a free society, they must be nonpartisan and contain a wide range of content absent political litmus tests. A conservative victory for Llano would turn politicians into thought police.
Krause was among the state lawmakers who limited how teachers can discuss slavery and discrimination against African Americans because it might make descendants of slaveholders uncomfortable. Possessing “The 1619 Project” is now a firing offense at Texas public schools.
Where does it end if politicians have a free speech right to ban books? We know politicians try to outdo each other with ideological purity tests. Activists on the left and right will draft lists of authorized and prohibited books, and libraries will have to restock their shelves after every election.
As for those who argue libraries are full of pornography, I say poppycock. The American Library Association and professional librarians follow well-considered procedures in choosing what titles to carry, and one person’s taste should not determine what a library buys.
If politicians do end up determining what we can find at the library, you’ll have fellow Texans to thank.
Having spent years covering charter scandals and seeking accountability for charters, the Network for Public Education realized that it could not compete with the high-powered corporate public relations firms representing the charter school industry. So, we decided, the only way to get accountability is to do it ourselves.
So NPE established the National Center on Charter School Accountability, which will produce reviews of charter school performance.
When I first heard about the sex scandal swirling around Corey DeAngelis, I didn’t believe it. As I did more digging through links on the Internet, my disbelief turned to amazement. I never met Corey, but he used to harass me on Twitter until I blocked him.
How could someone who had inveighed against “the woke agenda” and urged the adoption of vouchers to escape that agenda have done what the rumors said? I didn’t think I would touch it with a ten-foot pole. I don’t care what others do in their private lives. I believe in Tim Walz’s credo: “Mind your own damn business.” But I was troubled by the hypocrisy.
Corey worked for Betsy DeVos and was her leading salesman for vouchers. DeVos and her family are rabidly anti-LGBT. For years, they have funded anti-LGBT organizations like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Alliance Defending Freedom. Yet the rumor was that Corey had performed in gay porn, and there were many videos online to prove it.
One of the alleged virtues of vouchers was that they enable students to escape pedophile teachers and to attend schools that ban LGBT students. I couldn’t make sense of these two lives.
Peter Greene wrote about Corey’s apparent double life.
Peter began:
I’m old enough to remember when you could have a reasonably civilized conversation with Corey DeAngelis on social media, and everyone is old enough to remember when his main social media function was to lead a small army of trolls against anyone who dared to oppose the right wing school privatizing culture panic crowd (we can all remember that because it was as recent as about a week ago).
Those days are gone, of course, now that DeAngelis has become the sixty-gazzilionth person to discover that the internet is not a private place, as he’s been outed as a featured performer in a bunch of gay porn under the name Seth Rose. Since the story was broken (in a far right website of all places), DeAngelis has been erased from several websites of the many thinky tanks and advocacy groups that employed this chief evangelist for choice.
The pro-public school crowd has been largely quiet about the news, and big time education media hasn’t picked it up yet. Andy Rotherham has a piece about it, which is appropriate– Rotherham and Bellwether have been unique in the right-tilted reformster edusphere in not jumping on the culture panic bandwagon.
There is no reason for any of us to care what an adult human person does. Lord knows we could have some more useful conversations right now if folks weren’t wasting so much time panicking over other peoples’ business.
And yet this parade of personal scandal– the Zieglers, Mark Robinson, Seth Rose–matters for several reasons….
I don’t wish DeAngelis ill, even though he so often wished people ill straight to their faces. At the same time, I don’t wish him to be spared the karma that he has so richly and ambitiously earned; he used cultural panic over LGBTQ persons to help him sell vouchers and troll armies to try to silence anyone who dared to disagree with him. He had a choice to pursue his ambitions without being awful to other human beings, and he chose being awful. And you can’t spread toxins all around you without getting soaked in it yourself.
You should open the post and read Peter’s measured views.
Kavitha Surana of ProPublica wrote the story of what happened to Amber Nicole Thurman. She died because it was illegal in Georgia to give her the care she needed when she needed it. She didn’t have to die. The anti-abortion Republican legislators in her state killed her. The “pro-life” movement killed her. The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court killed her. Governor Brian Kemp killed her. Shameful!
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.
Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.
Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.
There are almost certainly others.
Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.
Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans.
Doctors warned state legislators women would die if medical procedures sometimes needed to save lives became illegal.
Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.
The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.
“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.
Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.
The availability of D&Cs for both abortions and routine miscarriage care helped save lives after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, studies show, reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal.
Such stories have been at the center of the upcoming presidential election, during which the right to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states.
But Republican legislators have rejected small efforts to expand and clarify health exceptions — even in Georgia, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal mortality and where Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.
When its law went into effect in July 2022, Gov. Brian Kemp said he was “overjoyed” and believed the state had found an approach that would keep women “safe, healthy and informed.”
After advocates tried to block the ban in court, arguing the law put women in danger, attorneys for the state of Georgia accused them of “hyperbolic fear mongering.”
Two weeks later, Thurman was dead.
Thurman and her son in a photo she posted on social media the year before her death Credit: via Facebook
Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.
But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica. Thurman and her son had recently moved out of her family’s home and into a gated apartment complex with a pool, and she was planning to enroll in nursing school.
The timing could not have been worse. On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica.
Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.
On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect. Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.
Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said.
At the clinic, Thurman sat through a counseling session in which she was told how to safely take the pills and instructed to go to the emergency room if complications developed. She signed a release saying she understood. She took the first pill there and insisted on driving home before any symptoms started, Baker said. She took the second pill the next day, as directed.
Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare. Out of nearly 6 million women who’ve taken mifepristone in the U.S. since 2000, 32 deaths were reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role. Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis. Most of the remaining cases involved intentional and accidental drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and ruptured ectopic pregnancies.
Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.
On the evening of Aug. 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home, according to 911 call logs. Her boyfriend called for an ambulance. Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge at 6:51 p.m.
ProPublica obtained the summary narrative of Thurman’s hospital stay provided to the maternal mortality review committee, as well as the group’s findings. The narrative is based on Thurman’s medical records, with identifying information removed. The committee does not interview doctors involved with the case or ask hospitals to respond to its findings. ProPublica also consulted with medical experts, including members of the committee, about the timeline of events.
Within Thurman’s first hours at the hospital, which says it is staffed at all hours with an OB who specializes in hospital care, it should have been clear that she was in danger, medical experts told ProPublica.
Her lower abdomen was tender, according to the summary. Her white blood cell count was critically high and her blood pressure perilously low — at one point, as Thurman got up to go to the bathroom, she fainted again and hit her head. Doctors noted a foul odor during a pelvic exam, and an ultrasound showed possible tissue in her uterus.
The standard treatment of sepsis is to start antibiotics and immediately seek and remove the source of the infection. For a septic abortion, that would include removing any remaining tissue from the uterus. One of the hospital network’s own practices describes a D&C as a “fairly common, minor surgical procedure” to be used after a miscarriage to remove fetal tissue.
After assessing her at 9:38 p.m., doctors started Thurman on antibiotics and an IV drip, the summary said. The OB-GYN noted the possibility of doing a D&C the next day.
But that didn’t happen the following morning, even when an OB diagnosed “acute severe sepsis.” By 5:14 a.m., Thurman was breathing rapidly and at risk of bleeding out, according to her vital signs. Even five liters of IV fluid had not moved her blood pressure out of the danger zone. Doctors escalated the antibiotics.
Instead of performing the newly criminalized procedure, they continued to gather information and dispense medicine, the summary shows.
Doctors had Thurman tested for sexually transmitted diseases and pneumonia.
They placed her on Levophed, a powerful blood pressure support that could do nothing to treat the infection and posed a new threat: The medication can constrict blood flow so much that patients could need an amputation once stabilized.
At 6:45 a.m., Thurman’s blood pressure continued to dip, and she was taken to the intensive care unit.
At 7:14 a.m., doctors discussed initiating a D&C. But it still didn’t happen. Two hours later, lab work indicated her organs were failing, according to experts who read her vital signs.
At 12:05 p.m., more than 17 hours after Thurman had arrived, a doctor who specializes in intensive care notified the OB-GYN that her condition was deteriorating.
Thurman was finally taken to an operating room at 2 p.m.
By then, the situation was so dire that doctors started with open abdominal surgery. They found that her bowel needed to be removed, but it was too risky to operate because not enough blood was flowing to the area — a possible complication from the blood pressure medication, an expert explained to ProPublica. The OB performed the D&C but immediately continued with a hysterectomy.
During surgery, Thurman’s heart stopped.
Her mother was praying in the waiting room when one of the doctors approached. “Come walk with me,” she said.
Until she got the call from the hospital, her mother had no idea Thurman had been pregnant. She recalled her daughter’s last words before she was wheeled into surgery — they had made no sense coming from a vibrant young woman who seemed to have her whole life ahead of her:
“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”
Thurman and her son in a selfie she posted online in 2020, two years before her death Credit: via Facebook
Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her.
But when the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditions, even those known to present lethal risks later in pregnancy.
At 41, Miller had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire. So she avoided doctors and navigated an abortion on her own — a path many health experts feared would increase risks when women in America lost the constitutional right to obtain legal, medically supervised abortions.
Miller ordered abortion pills online, but she did not expel all the fetal tissue and would need a dilation and curettage procedure to clear it from her uterus and stave off sepsis, a grave and painful infection. In many states, this care, known as a D&C, is routine for both abortions and miscarriages. In Georgia, performing it had recently been made a felony, with few exceptions.
Due to Georgia’s harsh abortion law, she did not get the routine care that would have saved her life. She was killed by the law.
Candi Miller with her husband and her two children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 