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      ‘There won’t be libraries left’: how a Florida county became the book ban heartland of the US

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      “Why do you need to know how to masturbate when you still got skid marks in your underwear?” asks Tia Bess, the newly appointed national director of outreach for the conservative advocacy group Moms for Liberty.Inside a squat Pentecostal church on a country road in Clay Hill, Florida, Bess flips through a large illustrated handbook titled It’s Perfectly Normal, marketed to kids ages 10 and up, intended as a primer about the onset of puberty.“This is not something you want your children to see if they are not developmentally ready,” she says, pointing at a rudimentary sketch of young adults masturbating. Bess sports a bright blue T-shirt with a Moms for Liberty logo plastered on the front, touting an organization which she refers to as an army of “joyful warriors” advocating for parental rights, and which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a rightwing extremist group.Advancing the analogy, Bess pulls a copy of Hustler magazine from her bag, along with a copy of Gender Queer, the graphic novel by Maia Kobabe that PEN America ranks as the most banned book in the country.“Show me the difference,” she says, holding the two illustrated pages side by side.Both pages depict oral sex. Though, in the case of Gender Queer, it’s fairly obvious that the message is one of confusion and insecurity about sexuality, which contrasts with the superficially erotic scene in Hustler.Bess thinks these distinctions are too subtle for teenagers to understand. She wants to see Gender Queer and many other titles removed from shelves of public school libraries in her home district of Clay county, a rural, predominantly conservative swath of north-east Florida. And she’s had tremendous success.Clay county has become a flashpoint in the state of Florida on the topic of book challenges. According to recent tallies, more than 175 books have been permanently removed from its public school libraries – a number which ranks among the highest of any county in the US – and hundreds more remain unavailable to students due to a policy unique to the county, requiring that books are pulled from shelves as soon as a challenge form is filed with the school district. Conservative activists from two organizations have seized on that policy, often filing multiple challenge forms at a time, which inundates the systems and committees that process the claims.“The biggest issue facing Clay county right now is the backlog of challenges and the huge political divide that’s driving it. No other county is dealing with a similar problem,” says Jen Cousins, co-founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project (FFTRP) and a mother of four. “They’re creating fake outrage over what’s available in libraries.”Last year, Bess moved her family from Jacksonville to Clay county due to a “less restrictive” political and cultural climate. She’s since embedded herself locally in the fight for book removal, filing challenge forms, holding forth in school board meetings on the dangers of books like Gender Queer (which has since been removed from public school collections) by drawing salacious parallels with flatly pornographic material, and recording hammy YouTube videos reading selections from books that she deems inappropriate for middle- and high-school students.In her official capacity at Moms for Liberty, she advises other parents in Clay county on how to do the same. She is also a key player in advancing the mandate on a national level – going city to city, state to state, speaking at chapter meetings and conventions, recruiting new members and encouraging members to run for school board seats.“Empower and educate parents – that’s what we want to do,” says Bess. “And holding elected officials accountable for the decisions they’re making.”Bess first rose to prominence as a volunteer at Moms for Liberty in the spring of 2021, when she successfully sued Jacksonville’s school district for defying Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-masking mandate on behalf of her then three-year-old son, who has autism and sensory issues. As a Black woman from downtown Jacksonville, who spent a portion of her teenage years homeless, she complicates the stereotype of Moms for Liberty members as a tidy bloc of predominantly white suburban housewives.“A lot of people in the Black community are afraid to speak up,” she says. “And I just didn’t care about that. It wasn’t about me or my feelings.”Despite the express mission of parental empowerment, it’s rare that book challenge forms are filed by individual parents. Instead, nearly all of the challenges in Clay county have been filed by activists affiliated with the same two organizations: Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Bess also chalks this up to fear over repercussions and a lack of knowledge about school board politics and procedures.“Parents are afraid. Even my own mother still has the mentality of a Black woman born in the 40s. There’s still that fear and intimidation,” she says. “The average person doesn’t know these books are out there. But if they knew how to challenge them, they would. And that’s my job.”Founded in central Florida in 2021, Moms for Liberty began as a critical mass of parents troubled by their school district’s Covid-19 mask mandates. With the help of well-organized campaigns of outrage (both in person and online) it has since spread rapidly, growing to 285 chapters in 45 states, with roughly 120,000 members, in two years.The group’s national profile has been built on combating what it deems the ills of society: gender ideology, critical race theory and the “sexualization” of children. For those critical of the group, these interpretations often translate to homophobia, racism and delusions of rampant pedophilia.Moms for Liberty purports to be a grassroots organization, but has attracted donations from political action committees such as Conservatives for Good Government. It also has longstanding connections to the Republican party. The founding mothers are Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, both former school board members from central Florida. The third founder is Bridget Ziegler. (She has since stepped back from her leadership role in the group, but continues to serve as chair of the Sarasota county school board.) She is married to Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida Republican party. The pair are close friends with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who recently appointed Bridget Ziegler to the board overseeing Disney World’s district after stripping the corporation of its power to self-govern.Ziegler’s advocacy for the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” laid the groundwork for last year’s Parental Rights in Education Act, better known by the “don’t say gay” moniker. She appeared behind DeSantis at the bill’s signing last year.Among its most controversial sections, the bill prohibits classroom discussions of gender identity or sexual orientation from kindergarten to third grade. An update to that legislation, HB 1069, was passed in the spring of this year, and went into effect on 1 July and extends those same prohibitions from third to 12th grade.Additionally, the new law emboldens book challenges by forcing all districts in Florida to adopt policies that were already in effect in Clay county, such as removing books from shelves five days after a challenge form has been filed, allowing parents to appeal a school district’s decision to return books to shelves, or refile the same challenge form repeatedly, and providing parents a path to limit their children’s access to public school libraries.“It’s effectively a ban when you pull books out of circulation,” says Gargi Chipalkatti, a mother of two children in Clay county public schools. “I want my kids to have access to any book they want to read. I didn’t like the fact that somebody else was trying to dictate that.”Chipalkatti served as a volunteer on Clay county’s book review committee last school year, which rules on whether or not challenged books should be returned to shelves. “It boggles my mind that you had a couple of organizations flooding the system and holding everybody hostage.”All of this is particularly troubling for media specialists, who oversee library collections in public schools, and bear the full weight of the issue.Julie Miller, who serves as chair of the Clay county education association media specialist committee, is in charge of selecting and purchasing books for a high school library in Clay county. Her husband, Joel Miller, is likewise a career educator, and teaches media studies at a rival high school.“Prior to 2021, we’d gone over 20 years without a single challenge,” Julie Miller says. Midway through this summer, 706 books have been officially challenged, according to data provided by FFTRP. Many of the titles currently receiving negative attention have been in libraries for decades. Such is the case for Push by Sapphire, and Lucky by Alice Sebold, both of which contain granular depictions of rape. A handful of outliers, like those furnished by Tia Bess, have questionable illustrations and advice, which the Millers make no concessions for.“It all comes down to community standards,” Joel Miller says. “Portland, Oregon, may feel differently, but there’s probably no place for books like that in Orange Park, Florida.”The Millers note that a large percentage of challenges are for books that have LGBTQ+ themes, such as All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson. And yet more are challenged on the grounds of being critical race theory-adjacent and teaching “alternative history”, including canonical novels such as Native Son, Beloved and the anodyne children’s book Before She Was Harriet (which has since been returned to library shelves).“There are a few inappropriate books on that challenge list,” says Chipalkatti. “But 99.9% of those are really good books.”As is the case across the country, judging these books as roundly unsuitable for students and demanding their removal is a minority opinion. And Julie Miller feels that librarians are being unfairly maligned.“They’re calling her a groomer, a pornography peddler,” Joel Miller says.She has become the target of one conservative activist’s ire in particular – a former resident of New York named Bruce Friedman. Like Tia Bess, Friedman moved to Clay county in 2021 for political reasons. He now serves as the Florida chapter president of No Left Turn in Education, a rightwing advocacy group allied with Moms for Liberty.Last year, Friedman made headlines for having his microphone cut off at a school board meeting while attempting to read a rape scene from Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky. At a Florida department of education meeting several months later, Friedman said he’d made a list of books in Clay county public school libraries that had “concerning content”, including “porn, critical race theory, social-emotional learning [and] fluid gender”.He has since become one of the most prolific book challengers in the country. A spreadsheet on his website compiles 4,623 titles that he labeled as problematic and intends to challenge. (Friedman declined to comment for this story.)In dozens of challenge forms provided by FFTRP, Friedman mentions Julie Miller by name – along with comments that the books will “DAMAGE SOULS”, declaring his need to “PROTECT CHILDREN”. In a school board meeting earlier this year, Friedman shared an anecdote about a friend of his son’s reading a library book aloud in his high school cafeteria that contained “steamy, erotic” scenes. Friedman said the experience “stole his son’s innocence”, but failed to provide the title of the book.Dubious, Julie Miller immediately requested an investigation. “I wanted to know if there was a book like that in my library so I could deal with it. If not, I wanted my name to be cleared,” she says.She found no record of any book that had been recently checked out matching Friedman’s description.The term “pornography” is the most bandied by Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Bess warns that these books violate statutes. “There’s a clear definition,” she says, citing Florida statute 847.012. “All materials must be free of pornography, the depiction of erotic behavior or pictures intended to cause excitement.”The caveat is statute 847.001, which clarifies that material can only be deemed pornographic if, “Taken as a whole, [it] is without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors,” making the question of age-appropriateness difficult to parse. If the state holds to the most conservative possible reading of that statute, then texts like the Bible, Shakespeare and countless others would have to be taken off shelves as well. (Since then, Shakespeare has actually come under scrutiny.)“You have to consider context. And if you don’t do that there are not going to be libraries left,” says Chipalkatti.Bess says that the chair of Clay county’s Moms for Liberty chapter introduced the idea of a rubric, like the one recently proposed in Texas, to determine at what age certain themes and language are permissible. “But there hasn’t been much feedback on it yet,” Bess says. “That’s something that I’m really going to push for. Where’s the parental advisory label for books?”Another proposed solution was introduced last school year, when the district advertised a new “individualized school library access plan”, which allows parents to limit what books their kids can borrow or ban library access outright. “What more could you want? It blows my mind as to why that’s not sufficient for [the activists],” Joel Miller says.However, out of 38,265 students enrolled in Clay county schools, only four parents signed up to limit or oversee their children’s library access. In nearby Citrus county, the school district introduced an “opt-in” access plan, where students are defaulted to having no library access until the form has been turned in to school officials by a parent. There were roughly 4,000 students who couldn’t use their school library last school year due to “parent error or lack of engagement”, according to FFTRP. Citrus county has yet to amend this policy.The future of public school libraries in Florida seems to be imperiled in the debate over book challenges. Last year, Julie Miller purchased chairs instead of new books. And she has not been cleared to make any acquisitions for the approaching school year either. DeSantis’s new law does away with earmark percentages of school district funding for specific departments, allowing school boards to curtail or redirect library funds to different categories if they so choose.All of this suggests it might be easier to defund libraries and winnow collections rather than venture the social and political risks associated with fighting a culture war with a governor who’s currently using the state legislature as his personal armory.In a Clay county school board workshop meeting from last month, the chief academic officer Roger Dailey seemed to cast aspersions on the very utility of libraries, referring to them as glorified copy rooms, and admitting that his own teenage children have never checked a book out of their high school library because they “consume their literature in different formats, most of it digitally on their devices”, he says.“I don’t even know if my own sons know where the library is in their school.” More

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      How Many of Trump’s Trials Will Happen Before the Election?

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      Donald J. Trump is the target of four separate criminal indictments, but the prosecutions could drag on for months or even years.Three different prosecutors want to put Donald J. Trump on trial in four different cities next year, all before Memorial Day and in the midst of his presidential campaign.It will be nearly impossible to pull off.A morass of delays, court backlogs and legal skirmishes awaits, interviews with nearly two dozen current and former prosecutors, judges, legal experts and people involved in the Trump cases show. Some experts predicted that only one or two trials will take place next year; one speculated that none of the four Trump cases will start before the election.It would be virtually unheard of for any defendant to play a game of courthouse Twister like this, let alone one who is also the leading contender for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And between the extensive legal arguments that must take place before a trial can begin — not to mention that the trials themselves could last weeks or months — there are simply not enough boxes on the calendar to squeeze in all the former president’s trials.“This is something that is not normal,” said Jeffrey Bellin, a former federal prosecutor in Washington who now teaches criminal procedure at William & Mary Law School and believes that Mr. Trump might only be on trial once next year. “While each of the cases seems at this point to be strong, there’s only so much you can ask a defendant to do at one time.”Any delay would represent a victory for Mr. Trump, who denies all wrongdoing and who could exploit the timeline to undermine the cases against him. Less time sitting in a courtroom equals more time hitting the campaign trail, and his advisers have not tried to hide that Mr. Trump hopes to overcome his legal troubles by winning the presidency.If his lawyers manage to drag out the trials into 2025 or beyond — potentially during a second Trump administration — Mr. Trump could seek to pardon himself or order his Justice Department to shut down the federal cases. And although he could not control the state prosecutions in Georgia or Manhattan, the Justice Department has long held that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, which very likely applies to state cases as well.Ultimately, the judges overseeing the four cases might have to coordinate so that Mr. Trump’s lawyers can adequately prepare his defense without needlessly delaying the trials. Judges are permitted under ethics rules to confer with one another to efficiently administer the business of their courts, experts said, and they periodically do so.“The four indictments can appear to resemble four cars converging on an intersection that has no lights or stop signs — but that won’t happen,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Well before the intersection, the judges will figure it out.”For now, Mr. Trump’s court schedule looks to be nearly as crowded as his campaign calendar, with potential trials overlapping with key dates in the Republican primary season. Claiming he is a victim of a weaponized justice system that is seeking to bar him from office, Mr. Trump may end up bringing his campaign to the courthouse steps.A federal special counsel, Jack Smith, has proposed Jan. 2 of next year (two weeks before the Iowa caucuses) as a date for Mr. Trump to stand trial in Washington on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. In a Thursday night court filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers countered with a proposed date of April 2026.Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney who this week announced racketeering charges against Mr. Trump, accusing him of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Georgia’s election results, wants that trial to begin on March 4 (the day before Super Tuesday).It is possible that the election interference case brought against Mr. Trump by special counsel Jack Smith may be given scheduling priority, the experts said.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Smith’s recent case in Washington, and Ms. Willis’s in Georgia, were filed after Mr. Trump was already scheduled for two additional criminal trials next spring: in New York, on March 25, on state charges related to a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels; and in Florida, on May 20, on federal charges brought by Mr. Smith accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling classified material after leaving office.Although the New York and Florida indictments were unveiled earlier, affording them first crack at the calendar, some experts now argue that they should take a back seat to the election-related cases, in Georgia and Washington, in which the charges strike at the core of American democracy. Trial scheduling is not always a first-come, first-served operation, and deference could be given to the most serious charges.In a radio interview last month, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said that having been the first to indict did not necessarily mean he would insist on being the first to put the former president on trial. However, he said, the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, ultimately controls the calendar.“We will follow the court’s lead,” Mr. Bragg said.There has not yet been any direct communication among judges or prosecutors about moving the Manhattan case, according to people with knowledge of the matter.Still, Mr. Bragg’s comments suggest that he would not oppose moving the Manhattan case, which carries a lesser potential punishment than the three others, backward in line.“My own belief is Alvin Bragg will be true to his word and remain flexible in the interests of justice,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and believes that prosecutors might be able to squeeze in three Trump trials next year.And Mr. Eisen, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that voters deserve to know whether Mr. Trump was convicted of subverting the will of the people in the previous election before they vote in the next one.“There could not be a more important question confronting the country than whether a candidate for the office of the presidency is innocent or guilty of previously abusing that office in an attempted coup,” he said.The most likely candidate to take over Mr. Bragg’s March trial date would be Mr. Smith and his election interference case. Recently, nearly a dozen Republican-appointed former judges and high-ranking federal officials submitted a brief to the judge overseeing that case, arguing that the trial should take place in January as Mr. Smith has proposed and citing a “national necessity” for a “fair and expeditious trial.”But this is the case in which Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for a 2026 trial date, citing the voluminous amount of material turned over by the government — 11.5 million pages of documents, for example — that the defense must now review. Mr. Trump’s lawyers estimated that to finish by the prosecution’s proposed January trial date would mean reading the equivalent of “Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”In that case, Mr. Smith brought a narrow set of charges against Mr. Trump in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election, totaling four felony counts, and with no co-defendants.In contrast, Ms. Willis’s election case is a sweeping 98-page indictment of not only Mr. Trump, who faces 13 criminal counts, but also 18 co-defendants, including Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. Already, Mr. Meadows has petitioned for his case to be moved from state to federal court, and other defendants are likely to follow suit. That process could take months and could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, probably making Ms. Willis’s proposed trial date of March 4 something of a long shot.In contrast to the relatively narrow election interference case brought by Mr. Smith in federal court, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, has charged Mr. Trump and his associates with a multitude of felonies related to the 2020 presidential election.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe sheer size of Mr. Trump’s Georgia case, and the fact it was the last of the four cases to be brought, suggests any Georgia trial of Mr. Trump could be delayed even beyond next year.It is exceedingly rare for a criminal defendant to face so many trials in such a concentrated period of time. The once high-flying lawyer Michael Avenatti seemed to be heading for three federal trials after he was charged in Manhattan in 2019 in a scheme to extort the apparel giant Nike; and, separately, with stealing money from Ms. Daniels, a former client; and in California, with embezzling money from other clients. (He was eventually convicted in the New York trials and pleaded guilty in the California case.)E. Danya Perry, a lawyer who represented Mr. Avenatti in the Nike case, the first to go to trial, said the challenge was “sequencing the cases in a way that would be most advantageous” to her client. And because there was some overlap in the evidence, she said, the defense had to be careful not to open the door for prosecutors to introduce evidence against Mr. Avenatti from another of the cases.“You’re not just trying the case in front of that particular judge,” Ms. Perry said. “Evidence from one case could bleed into other cases.”Before any trial, Mr. Trump’s cases are also likely to become bogged down as his lawyers review and potentially argue over large amounts of documents and other case material turned over by the government. Certain judicial rulings could also lead to drawn-out pretrial appeals.In the Florida documents case, disputes over the use of classified information could delay the proceeding as well. And in the federal court in Washington, which is already contending with lengthy backlogs amid prosecutions of hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have suggested they plan to litigate complex constitutional issues, including whether some of Mr. Trump’s false claims about the election were protected by the First Amendment.Even the jury selection process could drag on for weeks or months, as courts summon huge pools of prospective jurors for questioning over whether they harbor bias in favor of or against the polarizing former president.Michael B. Mukasey, a former U.S. attorney general and longtime Manhattan federal judge, said because of the complex issues raised in all four of Mr. Trump’s cases, “I think the odds are slim to none that any of them gets to trial before the election.”And Mr. Trump’s criminal cases are not the only courtroom battles he’s waging.In October, he faces trial in a civil suit filed by Attorney General Letitia James of New York, accusing him, his company and three of his children of a “staggering” fraud in overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars. In January, Mr. Trump faces two civil trials arising from private lawsuits: one a defamation claim by the writer E. Jean Carroll and the other accusing him of enticing people into a sham business opportunity.“We fully expect both cases to go to trial in January 2024,” said Roberta A. Kaplan, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the two private suits.Although Mr. Trump need not be in court for the civil cases, he almost certainly will have to attend the criminal trials, said Daniel C. Richman, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor and now a professor at Columbia Law School.“If you asked all the prosecutors in each case, they’d firmly and sincerely say that they want these trials to happen in the first half of 2024,” Mr. Richman said. “But wishing does not make it so.”Maggie Haberman More

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      DeSantis’s Security and Travel Costs Rose by Nearly 70 Percent in a Year

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      The Florida Department of Law Enforcement spent about $8 million to protect and transport the governor as he sought to expand his national profile to run for president.The LatestWhile Gov. Ron DeSantis was laying the groundwork for his presidential campaign, an endeavor that frequently involved out-of-state trips with his Florida taxpayer-funded protective detail in tow, his security and travel expenses rose by nearly 70 percent in the past year.In a report released on Tuesday, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement indicated that it had spent about $8 million on protecting the governor and associated transportation costs from July 2022 through the end of June. The previous year’s total was about $4.8 million.In all, the agency reported that it had spent $9.4 million on security and travel for Mr. DeSantis and his family and for the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. The previous year’s total was $5.9 million. (The figure did not include Florida Capitol Police hours related to mansion security.)Ron DeSantis has faced criticism from government watchdog groups as well as his main rival, former President Donald J. Trump, who say that the Florida governor has not been transparent about how much taxpayer money he was spending on travel.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesWhy It Matters: DeSantis’s travel has been in the spotlight.Even before entering the presidential race in May, Mr. DeSantis had encountered intense scrutiny over the ancillary costs of his many political excursions out of state and who was paying for them.A Republican in his second term, he has also faced criticism from government watchdog groups as well as his main rival, former President Donald J. Trump, who say that Mr. DeSantis has not been transparent about how much taxpayer money he was spending on travel.Jeremy Redfern, the press secretary for Mr. DeSantis, said in an email on Wednesday that Florida law required the state’s law enforcement agency to provide protection for the governor and his family.“His record as the most effective conservative governor in American history has also earned him an elevated threat profile, and F.D.L.E. has increased the number of protective agents to ensure the governor and his family remain safe,” he said.The governor’s office did not say whether it had been reimbursed for any of those expenses by Mr. DeSantis’s campaign or Never Back Down, the main pro-DeSantis super PAC. Neither immediately commented on Wednesday.Background: DeSantis and his allies have shielded his travel records.In a state known for its sunshine laws, Mr. DeSantis signed a law in May to shield records of his travel from the public, including out-of-state political trips.The measure, which Republicans and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement argued was needed for security reasons, placed a veil of secrecy over who is paying for Mr. DeSantis’s travel and how he is dividing his time as both governor and presidential candidate.Mr. DeSantis has also frequently traveled on private jets, with political donors picking up the tab.What’s Next: A long Republican primary campaignIf the breakneck pace of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign is any indication, especially in states with early nominating contests, Florida taxpayers should probably not expect a sharp reversal in rising security costs anytime soon.In Iowa, Mr. DeSantis has set out to visit all 99 of the state’s counties by the fall, having visited about a third of them so far, often with a large entourage that includes his wife, Casey, three children and a phalanx of Florida law enforcement officers.He has also been confronted on the trail by hecklers, a mix of liberals protesting his policies as governor and loyalists to Mr. Trump taunting him for his challenge to the former president. More

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      Florida’s attacks on academic freedom just got even worse | Moira Donegan

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      Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is flailing: the Florida governor, once considered a formidable contestant for the Republican nomination, is polling at a pathetic 14.8% among the Republican contenders. His camp is struggling to raise money, and the candidate’s public appearances have revealed him to be interpersonally unpleasant – coming off stiff, judgmental and creepy.At the Iowa state fair last week, DeSantis was caught on video telling a little girl, who was clutching a fairground treat, “that’s probably a lot of sugar”. The governor, a man so joyless that he scolded a child for eating candy, was later the subject of a taunting banner flown over one of his events: “Be Likable, Ron!”But just because DeSantis will not become president doesn’t mean that his constituents in Florida will be relieved of the policies he put in place there while trying to draw national attention to himself. In a years-long campaign that now seems destined to end with a third-place finish in Iowa, DeSantis reshaped Florida in his image, pursuing culture-war fights that he hoped would grab media attention and convince Republican primary voters that he was hurting their most hated enemies.Among these was the seizure and restructuring of New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college in Sarasota that was long known in the state for its curious students, eclectic faculty and countercultural bent. DeSantis overhauled the college’s board of trustees, appointing his own loyalists. The man newly in charge of New College is Christopher Rufo, a rightwing influencer known for whipping up moral panics. He’s been given a mandate to make the school conservative, bringing the curriculum in line with the governor’s ideological preferences, and reshaping it in the image of Hillsdale College, a private conservative Christian school in Michigan.Now Rufo has escalated his attacks on New College, transforming a board of trustees meeting into an ideologically driven attack on academic freedom – and eliminating the school’s gender studies department.Last Thursday’s trustees meeting was supposed to be mostly about the college’s quest to hire a new president: three far-right candidates were interviewed earlier that day. The meetings were already tense. New College’s students and faculty, along with staff, alumni and many ordinary Floridians, are appalled at what is being done to the school. The candidate interviews were livestreamed, but they had to be conducted in a secure separate building, cordoned off by police tape. When the board met in public in front of an audience, the proceedings became so contentious that four different onlookers were removed by police.For his part, Rufo seems to be courting this controversy. Like DeSantis, his is a politics of contempt, made up largely of sneering attempts to elicit an outraged reaction from his victims. At the board meeting, he brought up the proposal to eliminate gender studies abruptly, without advance notice to the full board, and without allowing any time for public comment. When student and faculty trustees – including Grace Keenan, the student body president, and Amy Reid, the director of the gender studies program – pointed out that the proposal violated procedures required by Florida state law, Rufo, who appeared at the meeting on Zoom, bulldozed through anyway. When Reid spoke movingly in defense of her program and its importance to students, Rufo could be seen in mute on the projector screen above her, laughing.Rufo’s own plans for the school are vague. Earlier in the meeting, he and his fellow DeSantis appointees had voted to overhaul the college’s course load, so as to require students to take courses in fields he designated using the Greek words “logos” and “technos”. It’s unclear what these terms are supposed to signify, or how exactly Rufo is translating them: “logos” is often interpreted as “word” but “technos” can mean either “technology”, “art” or “skill”. But perhaps the old-timeyness of the ancient Greek is all that Rufo is really going for: like much of the modern right, and indeed like DeSantis himself, he is solemn only in his style, and merely peevishly cruel in his substance.More to the point might be the fact that the end of New College’s gender studies department mirrors the broader project of Rufo’s boss, the terminally unlikable Ron. DeSantis has long been modeling his governorship of Florida on the rule of the autocratic Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, a darling of the American right who hosted 2023’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” ban on LGBTQ+ content in instruction for K-12 students was an imitation of an Orban-backed law banning “gay propaganda” anywhere minors might see it; the destruction of the gender studies program at New College follows Orban’s ban on gender studies programs in 2018.But DeSantis’s attacks on education go beyond the strictly defined gender studies field. Florida’s 2023 high school social studies curriculum advances the insultingly reductive lie that “slaves developed skills” that could be used “for personal benefit”. The attempt is to twist historical fact to legitimize a brutal and unjust racial hierarchy, and the same could be said of DeSantis’s attack on gender studies: to render natural and right what is in fact unnatural, constructed and violent.For his part, Rufo framed the attack on gender studies at New College in flippant, even blase terms: “The best universities, when they have programs that do not fit in with the mission … make hard calls to discontinue those programs.”Thanks to Rufo, New College is no longer among Florida’s best universities. And the “mission” Rufo was assigned to pursue there had less to do with scholarly integrity than with DeSantis’s culture-war fight-picking and presidential aspirations. It is a mission that is doomed to fail. Students and faculty at New College, however, are the ones who will suffer the consequences.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Trump praises ‘terrific’ white supremacist conspiracy theorist

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      In an online video, Donald Trump praised the white nationalist conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer as “terrific” and “very special” and said: “You are a very opinionated lady, I have to tell you. And in my opinion, I like that.”Loomer, 30, is a Florida activist and failed political candidate who once described herself as a “proud Islamophobe”, earning bans from major social media platforms.Among proliferating controversies, Loomer has called Muslims “savages” and Islam a “cancer”. She has spread conspiracy theories about mass shootings, including the Parkland school shooting in Florida.Trump endorsed Loomer in 2020, when she won a Republican US House primary in Florida. Heavily beaten in the general election, she switched districts in 2022, narrowly losing another primary.Loomer has been closely linked to Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist who, with the rapper Ye, controversially dined with Trump last year.In April, the New York Times reported that the former president wanted to give Loomer a campaign role. It did not come to pass but she remains a vocal supporter. In the video posted online on Sunday, she said she was making her first visit to Bedminster, Trump’s golf club in New Jersey.Sitting with the man she called “the greatest president ever”, she said Trump was “killing it right now” in the Republican presidential primary, adding: “You’re crushing it. You’re up over 50 points.”Trump, 77, said: “It’s great to have you and you are very special and you work hard … I appreciate your support and everybody appreciates your support.”Loomer said: “Thank you so much for inviting me to sit with you today. It’s a pleasure. You’re the best. I love you.”The ex-president is indeed dominating the Republican primary, despite facing 78 criminal charges contained in three separate indictments – for hush-money payments, retention of classified information and election subversion – and the prospect of more, over election subversion, in Georgia this week.On Monday, the fivethirtyeight.com polling average put Trump at 53.7% and his nearest challenger, Ron DeSantis, at 14.3% – a lead of 39.4 points.Aides to the Florida governor are reportedly bullish about his chances in Iowa, the first state to vote next year. But Trump leads there by robust margins too.Despite Trump’s unprecedented legal jeopardy, some party insiders fear that if he is not picked to face the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden, Republican turnout will drop.“There’s concern that if Trump’s not the nominee, his coalition will take their ball and go home,” Matt Dole, an Ohio strategist, told the Hill.Another strategist, Brian Darling, said: “If somehow he’s not the nominee, it will hurt turnout. He’s got a unique coalition. He brings a lot of non-traditional voters to the Republican party.”Trump’s “non-traditional voters” include those on the extreme right. But in April, when Trump reportedly sought to give Loomer a campaign role, another ardent supporter, the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, was angry.“Laura Loomer is mentally unstable and a documented liar,” wrote Greene, who has also spread conspiracy theories, including claiming the Parkland shooting was a “false flag” operation.“Never hire or do business with a liar. Liars are toxic and poisonous to everything they touch.”According to the Washington Post, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims in his four years in office. More

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      Florida wants to let a rightwing group teach history to children. This is appalling | Nancy Jo Sales

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      In July, the Florida department of education announced that it had approved the use of content by PragerU Kids for the coming school year. PragerU Kids was recently described by Time magazine as “a resource for schools”. But it is only a “resource” because the state of Florida has deemed it so. PragerU is not an actual university. It has no accreditation. It is a conservative media company whose goal since its founding in 2009 has been to spread rightwing ideology to adults and children.And it has been incredibly successful at doing that. PragerU’s latest annual report says that the company’s self-described “edutainment” videos racked up more than 1.2bn views in 2022, with more than 7bn since its founding. Its content has been mostly available online, particularly on Facebook and YouTube, but now it is making its way into US classrooms with the promise of fighting the so-called “woke agenda”.PragerU makes no secret of its agenda. Its co-founder, Dennis Prager – a conservative radio talkshow host and writer who has been attacking progressive causes since the 1980s – was recently glib in responding to claims that PragerU “indoctrinates kids”. “Which is true,” Prager said in a speech to the conservative “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty. “We bring doctrines to children. That is a very fair statement. I said, ‘But what is the bad of our indoctrination?’”PragerU Kids’ cartoon videos for children as young as kindergarten age not only soft-pedal the history of slavery, racism, colonialism and police brutality – they show sympathy for them. In one video, Leo and Layla Meet Christopher Columbus, Columbus tells young Leo and Layla: “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world … Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?”Another PragerU Kids video describes George Floyd, who was murdered by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020, as a “Black man who resisted arrest”. Another features a cartoon version of the Black American educator and author Booker T Washington comforting white children by saying, “Future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.” To which his young listener responds: “OK, I’ll keep doing my best to treat everyone well and won’t feel guilty about historical stuff.”Another video says that British colonialism transformed India “in many positive ways”.PragerU Kids’ videos for teens often focus on sexuality and gender, promoting traditional gender roles in ways that could be considered anti-feminist. In one, How to Embrace Your Femininity, a young blond woman with perfect hair and makeup tells viewers: “Most gender stereotypes exist because they reflect the way that men and women are naturally different. And those differences aren’t bad … So don’t let anyone tell you it’s bad to fit stereotypes. Those people are just trying too hard to be cool.”And climate change denial? A PragerU video for kids compares pushing back against the science of the climate crisis to Jews in the Warsaw ghetto uprising who fought the Nazis. As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the initial funding for PragerU came from the Wilks brothers, petroleum industry billionaires.It wouldn’t be a stretch to call this content rightwing propaganda, which the state of Florida has now all but legitimized as suitable learning materials for kids. This isn’t surprising in a state with a governor, Ron DeSantis, who has staked his political career on fighting “wokeness”. Alarmingly, however, Florida may be just the first of other states to follow in adopting PragerU’s anti-progressive materials. The company is now reportedly going through the process of being approved as an education “resource” in other states. Which is next? Texas? Oklahoma? And how many more after that?American education has never been perfect. I can remember, as a teenage girl growing up in Florida in the 1970s, being frustrated by the fact that my public high school curriculum included almost nothing on the history of women in the US – which hasn’t changed so very much since then. It was also appalling how little time we spent on the history of slavery, the history of Native people or the contributions of people of color to our society, which schools still fail to teach.But the adoption of PragerU Kids content by a state’s department of education is something on another level. This is admittedly indoctrination, propaganda full of lies and half-truths specifically designed to manipulate and mold young minds to serve a rightwing political agenda. You could argue that this has always been the problem – a problem that critical race theory and its proponents have been trying to combat and change.The reaction against this has been swift and severe, and the embrace of PragerU Kids could be just be one of the many unseemly moves we’ll be seeing in the continued fight to finally teach the truth in American schools.
      Nancy Jo Sales is the author, most recently, of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno More

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      Prosecutor suspended by DeSantis says he’s a ‘weak dictator’ seeking attention

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      Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, suspended the top prosecutor in Orlando on Wednesday, claiming “dereliction of duty” on crime. In return, the prosecutor said DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was a “weak dictator” acting undemocratically and for political reasons.Monique Worrell, the ninth judicial circuit state attorney, is the second Democratic prosecutor DeSantis has removed.Last year, the governor suspended Andrew Warren of Tampa over his supposedly “woke” agenda, including pledging not to enforce a 15-week abortion ban and supporting gender transition for minors. A legal battle over that decision continues.Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Worrell said: “Elected officials are being taken out of office solely for political purposes … Under this tyranny, elected officials can be removed simply for political purposes and by a whim of the governor and no matter how you feel about me, you should not be OK with that.“This is simply a smoke screen for Ron DeSantis’ failing and disastrous presidential campaign. He needed to get back in the media in some positive way. That would be red meat for his base. And he will have accomplished that today.”Trailing Donald Trump in the Republican primary, and having recently replaced his campaign manager amid reports of a campaign in free-fall, DeSantis made his announcement about Worrell on a break from the presidential trail.“Worrell’s practices and policies have too often allowed violent criminals to escape the full consequences of their criminal conduct, thereby endangering the innocent civilians of Orange and Osceola counties,” DeSantis’s office said in a statement.In an executive order, DeSantis accused the second African American elected state attorney of “neglecting her duty to faithfully prosecute crime in her jurisdiction”.The 15-page order accused Worrell of allowing practices and policies that “systematically permitted violent offenders, drug traffickers, serious-juvenile offenders, and pedophiles to evade incarceration”.It alleged such practices and policies included “non-filing or dropping meritorious charges or declining to allege otherwise provable facts to avoid triggering applicable lengthy sentences, minimum mandatory sentences, or other sentencing enhancements, especially for offenders under 25 years old”.Worrell was also accused of overseeing low prison admission rates “for crimes involving lewd and lascivious behavior, which includes possession of child pornography and other sex crimes against children”.In his own news conference, DeSantis said that while prosecutors “do have a certain amount of discretion about which cases to bring and which not”, Worrell “abused that discretion”.DeSantis said he was nominating a former judge, Andrew Bain, to serve during Worrell’s suspension.Worrell told reporters: “If we are mourning anything this morning, it is the loss of democracy. I am your duly-elected state attorney for the ninth judicial circuit. Nothing done by a weak dictator can change that.“I am a fighter and I intend to fight. I will not be quiet. I will not sit down … I will continue to stand for democracy. I will continue to protect the rights of the disenfranchised. I am proud to tell you that this will not stop me from running for re-election. My re-election will continue.”Earlier this year, DeSantis and Worrell exchanged barbs over the case of Keith Moses, a 19-year-old believed responsible for the killings of three people, including a journalist and a nine-year old girl, in shootings in Orange county in March.According to reports, Moses’s criminal history includes eight felonies and 11 misdemeanor cases, all bar one having occurred while he was a juvenile. His only crime as an adult was possession of drug paraphernalia and cannabis, in 2021. Worrell’s office did not prosecute, due to the amount found.Following the shootings, DeSantis said Worrell’s office, which announced in May that it would seek the death penalty against Moses, “may have permitted this dangerous individual to remain on the street”.“You have to hold people accountable,” DeSantis said, adding: “[The] state attorney in Orlando thinks that you don’t prosecute people and that’s the way that you somehow have better communities. That does not work.”Worrell fired back, saying: “For this tragedy to be politicized, it’s shameful and we should all feel that way about it.“Painting a narrative that there’s something that prosecutors could have done to keep this individual off the streets is just not true.” More

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      Florida schools plan to use only excerpts from Shakespeare to avoid ‘raunchiness’

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      Teachers in a Florida county are preparing to use only excerpts of works by William Shakespeare, rather than whole plays, as part of an attempt to conform to hardline rightwing legislation on teaching about sex .“There’s some raunchiness in Shakespeare,” Joseph Cool, a reading teacher at Gaither high school in Hillsborough county, told the Tampa Bay Times. “Because that’s what sold tickets during his time.”But, the newspaper said: “In staying with excerpts, the schools can teach about Shakespeare while avoiding anything racy or sexual.”The legislation at issue is the Parental Rights in Education Act, commonly known as the “don’t say gay” law for its clampdown on teaching about LGBTQ+ and gender issues.The act was signed in March 2022 by Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Republican governor who is now running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and expanded in April this year.The law has fueled widely reported culture-war clashes, including parental pushes for book bans in public school libraries and a legal battle between DeSantis and Disney, a major state employer which opposes the law.According to the Tampa Bay Times, the Hillsborough county school district has also switched to using excerpts as a way to help students meet state Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, teachers aiming to give pupils a broad range of knowledge based on one whole novel and excerpts from five to seven novels or plays.But the Parental Rights in Education Act also says material that is sexual in nature should not be used in classes not concerning sexual health or reproduction.Prudishness towards Shakespeare’s discussion of sex or use of sexual slang is not new. As the Royal Shakespeare Company notes, “Early editions of Shakespeare’s plays sometimes ignored or censored slang and sexual language.“But the First Folio [published in 1623] reveals a text full of innuendo and rudeness.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSuggesting that some sexual references may yet creep unwittingly into Florida classrooms, the RSC gives extensive examples of “slang or sexual language which were clearly understood by Shakespeare’s original audiences but may be less obvious to audiences today”.In Florida, rightwing groups such as Moms For Liberty also offer reading lists, selections more likely to include fellow travelers of the far-right John Birch Society than the works of Shakespeare.Cool, the Hillsborough county high-school reading teacher, told the Tampa Bay Times: “I think the rest of the nation – no, the world, is laughing us. Taking Shakespeare in its entirety out because the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is somehow exploiting minors is just absurd.” More