Black pregnant Americans are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white pregnant Americans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. And according to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, Black infants are nearly four times as likely as white infants to die during birth. “I had no idea how much this problem was hiding in plain sight,” the co-writer and director of the film, Monique Matthews, told the American Independent Foundation. “Prior to coming on board, I had a cousin that I reconnected with and I asked him about his little sister, who was my younger cousin. And he told me that she passed away and she was like, 28, and I was like, ‘How did she pass away in the hospital?’ And he was like, ‘She gave birth. And then, you know, I was excited and I called back and I got a call that my sister passed away.’ And I was devastated.”Matthews said many of the women she spoke with at screenings of the film told her their heartbreaking pregnancy and delivery stories.
“I had no idea how much this problem was hiding in plain sight,” the co-writer and director of the film, Monique Matthews, told the American Independent Foundation. “Prior to coming on board, I had a cousin that I reconnected with and I asked him about his little sister, who was my younger cousin. And he told me that she passed away and she was like, 28, and I was like, ‘How did she pass away in the hospital?’ And he was like, ‘She gave birth. And then, you know, I was excited and I called back and I got a call that my sister passed away.’ And I was devastated.”
Matthews said many of the women she spoke with at screenings of the film told her their heartbreaking pregnancy and delivery stories.
A review of Peter d’Errico’s Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, an indictment of a legal system with the unflinching goal of stealing as much land as possible.
Despite its confusion and contradictions, federal Indian law — in d’Errico’s terms, “anti-Indian law” — has long had an unchanging purpose. By destroying Native individuals and communities, it has helped the rich and powerful scoop up vast lands and resources. This landgrab is accomplished in part because what’s typically called federal Indian law is hardly a systematic set of statutes. Instead, according to d’Errico, it’s what mid-20th-century U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter called “a vast hodge-podge” and covers all areas of Indigenous life and activity with a massive array of U.S. court decisions, laws, executive orders and agency regulations that have piled up over the years in a disorderly and improvised fashion.
Kent McNeil, a professor emeritus at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, calls d’Errico’s Federal Anti-Indian Law “a frontal attack on the whole field of American law pertaining to Indigenous peoples.” He lauds it as a “must-read” for those wanting to understand what motivates any claims that the dispossession of Indigenous people has been legally sound. Similarly, Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution and a Mashpee Wampanoag tribal citizen, hails the book as “important and enlightening for all people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.”
Throughout the chaos, the application of U.S. law to Indigenous people has had an unflinching goal: theft.
Police killings are of course not the only fuel for the mass protests. Beyond the deaths of Americans such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor lie countless other large and small indignities—the massive stop-and-frisk program practiced by the NYPD until a court order declared it unconstitutional, the needlessly aggressive execution of warrants—that also fall most heavily on people of color and the poor.But many of the most egregious police abuses are avoidable, and the anger over them has created an opportunity for real police reform. The nation must jettison paramilitary approaches to policing. That means moving beyond shallow critiques of “police militarization,” most of which focus narrowly on federal programs allowing the transfer of military equipment to police, and looking at subtler and more entrenched aspects of police culture as well.Wesley Lowery: The breaking pointTo be sure, federal military-surplus transfers like those through the Defense Department’s 1033 Program do little good, and much harm: Police departments obtaining used Army filing cabinets at cost isn’t cause for concern, but there’s no earthly reason for small-town cops to wear military fatigues, ride around in mine-resistant Humvees, or carry bayonets. Studies suggest that police departments that receive such equipment see no measurable improvement in officer safety or crime rates, but greater quantities do seem to correlate with higher rates of officer-involved shootings and reduced public trust.Federal programs that allow the provision of military equipment to domestic police departments are only part of the problem, however. Although tightening the restrictions on such programs would be a good first step, the training that police recruits go through must also be reformed.We’re living in a dark moment: President Donald Trump’s threat to send in active-duty federal troops to quell protests further blurred the line between policing and the military. But some hopeful signs have emerged.For one, some progressive police leaders are questioning the value of paramilitary academies. In Washington State, for instance, former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr, now the head of the state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission, has pioneered an academy-training approach centered on a vision of police as guardians, not warriors. Rahr calls her training method “LEED,” for “Listen and Explain with Equity and Dignity.” Instead of an emphasis on yelling and standing at attention, her recruits are trained to engage others in courteous conversation, and are evaluated during role-play exercises on their ability to listen, show empathy, explain their actions, de-escalate tense situations, and leave everyone they encounter “with their dignity intact.”
An account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness
The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.
A recommended read on the history of how the medical field responded to the civil rights/Black power movements by diagnosing Black men as schizophrenic.
Ron DeSantis wants to break the unions and make a temporary advantage permanent.
” . . . In Florida, all of the most important macro-issues of American politics are screaming out as we speak. The proud fascism that DeSantis embodies must be met with radicalism. Clinton-esque Democratic attempts to triangulate their way out of the problem are doomed to fail, and will only serve to drive home the untrue impression that Florida is a red state. You can’t equivocate with DeSantis. He puts Black people in jail at gunpoint for voting; he bans books and outlaws Black history teaching with a bluntness that would make George Orwell blush; he demonizes trans kids, perfectly happy to drive a few young people to suicide if it helps him solidify his own position. This guy is not some sophisticated mastermind — he’s an asshole. He is the embodiment of the worst 30% of Floridians, the ones who make the state a national punchline. And those who roll over for him, like the dozens of college presidents who publicly kowtow to his backwards “vision,” are cowards who will find themselves on the wrong side of history when the uncensored textbooks eventually get written.
That is one thing Florida proves: The absolute need for the Democrats to stop being weak and afraid of their own convictions. The second thing it proves is the absolute centrality of organized labor as a path out of the political quandary that afflicts America. Inequality has killed public faith in institutions, and modern media has entrenched national partisanship to a degree that some perceive as hopeless. Unions can roll back inequality. Unions can bring people of different political persuasions together in common cause in the workplace. Unions can show people an actual functioning democracy. Unions can lead regular people to political activism based on principles they learn by fighting for fair treatment for themselves. Unions can be strong enough to serve as a wall that stops the predations of opportunistic, hateful politicians like Ron DeSantis.
But all of that can only happen if many people are in unions. In Florida, as in the rest of the South, they’re mostly not. Unions need to spend much more money to organize new workers. Unions need to spend much more money organizing in the South. The Democratic Party needs to prioritize and enable this to a much larger degree — out of self-interest, if nothing else. Unions can change people, and they can change Florida, and they can change the country. But only if they rouse themselves out of their stupor and organize millions of people.
All of these things are connected. Working people and environmentalists together can unquestionably be a strong enough coalition to control the state of Florida, far stronger than the petty racists and boat-owning car dealers that make up the DeSantis base. Pulling this together requires a strong labor movement, and it requires the Democratic Party helping to build that movement. There is nothing impossible about any of this. The threat here is bigger than one teachers union, or one state. Ron DeSantis intends to make Florida a stepping stone that he will use to walk into the White House and prove that America is still a racist, oppressive nation at heart. Stop him before he gets there. As a native Floridian, I politely call on the Florida Democrats, unions, teachers, and people of all stripes who don’t prefer life in a dystopia: Get your shit together, before it’s too late. . . “
The Florida governor’s long-ignored 2011 work, Dreams From Our Founding Fathers, reveals a distinct vision of American history and how it should influence the present.
DeSantis of 2011 praises the Tea Party movement and the backlash it inspired, which cost Democrats the House in 2010. He thinks the movement was absolutely right to identify itself with the American Revolution, fighting against un-American tyrannies of the Obama Democrats. But he argued it should go deeper than symbolic acts like dressing up in 18th-century garb or brandishing rifles at rallies. The book is intended firstly as a wholesale indictment and a game plan, pointing out the ways Republicans should attack “progressives” for the “transformational change” they are attempting—by which DeSantis meant federally mandated health care, corporate and mortgage bailouts, and increased regulation.
DeSantis of 2011 praises the Tea Party movement and the backlash it inspired, which cost Democrats the House in 2010. He thinks the movement was absolutely right to identify itself with the American Revolution, fighting against un-American tyrannies of the Obama Democrats. But he argued it should go deeper than symbolic acts like dressing up in 18th-century garb or brandishing rifles at rallies. The book is intended firstly as a wholesale indictment and a game plan, pointing out the ways Republicans should attack “progressives” for the “transformational change” they are attempting—by which DeSantis meant federally mandated health care, corporate and mortgage bailouts, and increased regulation.
A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline
For generations, members of the Beers family of Canton, Ohio, have used Christian faith to sell health coverage to more than a hundred thousand people like Martin. Instead they delivered pain, debt and financial ruin, according to an investigation by ProPublica based on leaked internal documents, land records, court files and interviews. They have done this not once but twice and have faced few consequences.
Another foundation of the disinformation crisis was the deregulation of broadcast by the Reagan administration, which eliminated the fairness doctrine in 1987. That simple change insured the pollution of the radio airwaves by Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, creating the first echo chamber.Of course, the internet allowed these waves of lies to reach warp speed, more destructive than anything humanity has experienced. In the understated description of this volume, “the conservative media ecosystem was augmented by … Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, where the tendency to find like-minded partisans and the freedom from fact-checkers took disinformation to new depths.”These venues have given “far-right lies unprecedented access to significant numbers of Americans” and allowed “ordinary Americans to spread lies to one another”, instantly. “As a result, misinformation and disinformation have infused our debates about almost every pertinent political problem.”The vastness of the problem is underscored by the fact that Fox News Digital ended 2022 as “the top-performing news brand” with more than 18bn multi-platform views and an average of 82.7m monthly multi-platform unique visitors. Not to mention 3.4bn Fox News views on YouTube. It was the first time Fox had surpassed CNN in these categories since 2019.The essays in Myth America attack rightwing myths about everything from immigration to Reagan. The authors were chosen in part because they are already “actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media”.In one of the very best chapters, Ari Kelman, a professor at the University of California Davis, tackles the foundational American myth: “Vanishing Indians.” He begins with the former Republican senator Rick Santorum’s assertion in 2021 that colonists arrived with a “blank slate” because there was “nothing here”. (Santorum said he had been misunderstood but was booted off CNN nonetheless.)
Kelman documents how such remarks can be traced back to myths started by the New England colonists, who “systematically erased evidence of long-standing Indigenous cultures … as a way of legitimating Euro-American land claims”. Portraying native Americans as hopelessly primitive, they “turned imperial violence into innocent virtue”.The alliance of some native tribes with the British during the War of 1812 made it even easier to marginalize them. “That Indigenous peoples might disappear” began to “look like just deserts”.
A counter-narrative began in the 1880s, when Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, which described “robbery” and “cruelty … done under the cloak” of 100 years “of treaty-making and treaty breaking”. Hunt described the culpability of white settlers in what we now realize was genocide: “This history of the United States government’s repeated violations of faith with the Indians … convicts us, as a nation” of “having outraged the principles of justice, which are the basis of international law.”Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the 1970 book by Dee Brown which sold millions, did more than any other modern work to explain how the conquering of the west was only possible because Americans assumed “treaties could be shredded” and the slaughter of Native Americans was just part of the natural order of things.The book described a vanished Native American culture, at a moment when Native Americans had experienced enough of a resurgence to become “the nation’s fastest growing minority”. As a result, “a book written to debunk one pernicious myth unwittingly reifies another, hammering home the message that by the start of the 20th century, Indians had vanished”.Another compelling chapter, The Southern Strategy, dismantles the assertion of the conservative political scientist Carol Swain “that this story of the two parties switching identities is a myth … fabricated by left-leaning academic elites and journalists”.Karl Mundt, right, sits next to Roy Cohn, special counsel to the McCarthy Senate investigations subcommittee, during a hearing in Washington in 1954. Photograph: Henry Burroughs/APWritten by Kruse, the chapter traces the Republican party’s decision to embrace racism to a cross-country tour in 1951 by a South Dakota senator, Karl Mundt, who was the first to propose a merger of Republicans and southern “Dixiecrat” Democrats committed to segregation. In 1952, the Republican platform endorsed every state’s right “to order and control its own domestic institutions”.The election of the Republican John Tower to fill Lyndon Johnson’s Senate seat in 1961 made him the first Republican to enter the Senate from the south since the end of Reconstruction – and showed “the segregationist vote was up for grabs”.Republican strategy shifted so quickly that by the time the party gathered in 1964 to nominate Barry Goldwater for president, for the first time in 50 years there were no Black delegates in any southern delegation. One of the few Black delegates who did attend “had his suit set on fire”. The B . . .
Karl Mundt, right, sits next to Roy Cohn, special counsel to the McCarthy Senate investigations subcommittee, during a hearing in Washington in 1954. Photograph: Henry Burroughs/AP
And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media – the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality. While fairness guides everything we do, we know there is a right and a wrong position in the fight against racism and for reproductive justice. When we report on issues like the climate crisis, we’re not afraid to name who is responsible. And as a global news organization, we’re able to provide a fresh, outsider perspective on US politics – one so often missing from the insular American media bubble.
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Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.
Judge Donna Scott Davenport oversees a juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, with a staggering history of jailing children. She said kids must face consequences, which rarely seem to apply to her or the other adults in charge.
by Meribah Knight, Nashville Public Radio, and Ken Armstrong, ProPublicaOct. 8, 2021, 5 a.m. EDT
Friday, April 15, 2016: Hobgood Elementary School, Murfreesboro, Tennessee
Three police officers were crowded into the assistant principal’s office at Hobgood Elementary School, and Tammy Garrett, the school’s principal, had no idea what to do. One officer, wearing a tactical vest, was telling her: Go get the kids. A second officer was telling her: Don’t go get the kids. The third officer wasn’t saying anything.
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Garrett knew the police had been sent to arrest some children, although exactly which children, it would turn out, was unclear to everyone, even to these officers. The names police had given the principal included four girls, now sitting in classrooms throughout the school. All four girls were Black. There was a sixth grader, two fourth graders and a third grader. The youngest was 8. On this sunny Friday afternoon in spring, she wore her hair in pigtails.
A few weeks before, a video had appeared on YouTube. It showed two small boys, 5 and 6 years old, throwing feeble punches at a larger boy as he walked away, while other kids tagged along, some yelling. The scuffle took place off school grounds, after a game of pickup basketball. One kid insulted another kid’s mother, is what started it all.
Screenshots from a heavily filtered video, originally posted to YouTube, showing a scuffle among small children that took place off school grounds. Credit:Screenshots by ProPublica
The police were at Hobgood because of that video. But they hadn’t come for the boys who threw punches. They were here for the children who looked on. The police in Murfreesboro, a fast-growing city about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, had secured juvenile petitions for 10 children in all who were accused of failing to stop the fight. Officers were now rounding up kids, even though the department couldn’t identify a single one in the video, which was posted with a filter that made faces fuzzy. What was clear were the voices, including that of one girl trying to break up the fight, saying: “Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay.” She was a fourth grader at Hobgood. Her initials were E.J.
The confusion at Hobgood — one officer saying this, another saying that — could be traced in part to absence. A police officer regularly assigned to Hobgood, who knew the students and staff, had bailed that morning after learning about the planned arrests. The thought of arresting these children caused him such stress that he feared he might cry in front of them. Or have a heart attack. He wanted nothing to do with it, so he complained of chest pains and went home, with no warning to his fill-in about what was in store.
Also absent was the police officer who had investigated the video and instigated these arrests, Chrystal Templeton. She had assured the principal she would be there. She had also told Garrett there would be no handcuffs, that police would be discreet. But Templeton was a no-show. Garrett even texted her — “How’s timing?” — but got no answer.
Instead of going to Hobgood, Templeton had spent the afternoon gathering the petitions, then heading to the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center, a two-tiered jail for children with dozens of surveillance cameras, 48 cells and 64 beds. There, she waited for the kids to be brought to her.
In Rutherford County, a juvenile court judge had been directing police on what she called “our process” for arresting children, and she appointed the jailer, who employed a “filter system” to determine which children to hold.
The judge was proud of what she had helped build, despite some alarming numbers buried in state reports.
Among cases referred to juvenile court, the statewide average for how often children were locked up was 5%.
In Rutherford County, it was 48%.
Rutherford County Locked Up Kids in Almost Half of Cases
Tennessee used to publish statistical reports on juvenile courts statewide. For the last year available, 2014, we compiled reports for all 98 courts. Rutherford County locked up kids in 48% of its cases, eclipsing every other jurisdiction. (The graphic below shows the top 50 courts.) The state stopped publishing this data even as it figured prominently in a lawsuit against Rutherford County.
In one case, we obtained through public records requests 38 hours of audiotaped interviews conducted by Murfreesboro police as part of their investigation. That investigation included interviews with the school’s principal, Tammy Garrett, and 13 police officers, including Chrystal Templeton (who was interviewed twice for a total of seven hours), Chris Williams, Albert Miles III, Jeff Carroll and five higher-ups. Other materials we drew upon included videotape of the kids’ scuffle; the final report of the Murfreesboro Police Department’s internal review; the Metro Nashville Police Department’s external review; juvenile petitions; settlement agreements; and an email that Miles wrote to an investigator describing his conversation with a parent.
For this story we interviewed dozens of people, including children arrested in the April 2016 case and their parents. We interviewed, for the first time, the kids (now adults) whose cases launched class-action lawsuits against the county over its illegal detention practices and use of solitary confinement. We obtained thousands of pages of documents through 56 records requests to city, county and state agencies. We obtained more than a dozen personnel files and reviewed court records in seven federal lawsuits.
Donna Scott Davenport declined to be interviewed. But we listened to or transcribed more than 60 hours of her on the radio. We obtained her deposition and hearing testimony from a class-action lawsuit. Other records we relied on included disciplinary records from the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct; two personnel files; memos and emails; videotaped appearances before the Rutherford County Commission and a canvass of appellate opinions in cases she had handled in juvenile court. We also listened to the oral arguments from some appellate cases.
Lynn Duke declined to be interviewed. But she often appears before the county’s Public Safety Committee, and we watched and reviewed 137 of those meetings spanning 2009 to 2021. We obtained three depositions in which she was questioned. We reviewed her personnel file and drew upon her court testimony, memos and emails, as well as the detention center’s written operating procedures.
We reached out to each of the police officers named in our story. They each declined to be interviewed or didn’t respond. The sergeant who supervised Templeton also declined to be interviewed.
Michael Wrather, a Rutherford County commissioner, declined to be interviewed other than to say he stands behind his public comments praising Davenport.
We relied on reports and sometimes data from the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, the Tennessee Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury. We used Prison Rape Elimination Act audits and the 2004 consultant’s report from Pulitzer/Bogard & Associates. We also drew upon reporting from fellow news organizations, including Murfreesboro’s Daily News Journal, The Tennessean, the Murfreesboro Post and the Tennessee Lookout.
We’re planning to continue reporting on the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County and elsewhere in Tennessee. If you have any stories that you’d like to share, please get in touch. Meribah Knight’s email address is mknight@wpln.org, and Ken Armstrong’s is ken.armstrong@propublica.org.
Editing by Emily Siner of WPLN News and Sarah Blustain and Susan Carroll of ProPublica. Alex Mierjeski contributed reporting.
When the four girls were arrested at Hobgood Elementary School in 2016, media covered the community’s reaction and the immediate fallout. But left unknown was all that led up to the arrests; what the children, police and school officials, experienced, in their voices; and what the case revealed about the county’s failed juvenile justice system as a whole.
To reconstruct the Hobgood Elementary case, we obtained through public records requests 38 hours of audiotaped interviews conducted by Murfreesboro police as part of their investigation. That investigation included interviews with the school’s principal, Tammy Garrett, and 13 police officers, including Chrystal Templeton (who was interviewed twice for a total of seven hours), Chris Williams, Albert Miles III, Jeff Carroll and five higher-ups. Other materials we drew upon included videotape of the kids’ scuffle; the final report of the Murfreesboro Police Department’s internal review; the Metro Nashville Police Department’s external review; juvenile petitions; settlement agreements; and an email that Miles wrote to an investigator describing his conversation with a parent.
For this story we interviewed dozens of people, including children arrested in the April 2016 case and their parents. We interviewed, for the first time, the kids (now adults) whose cases launched class-action lawsuits against the county over its illegal detention practices and use of solitary confinement. We obtained thousands of pages of documents through 56 records requests to city, county and state agencies. We obtained more than a dozen personnel files and reviewed court records in seven federal lawsuits.
Donna Scott Davenport declined to be interviewed. But we listened to or transcribed more than 60 hours of her on the radio. We obtained her deposition and hearing testimony from a class-action lawsuit. Other records we relied on included disciplinary records from the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct; two personnel files; memos and emails; videotaped appearances before the Rutherford County Commission and a canvass of appellate opinions in cases she had handled in juvenile court. We also listened to the oral arguments from some appellate cases.
Lynn Duke declined to be interviewed. But she often appears before the county’s Public Safety Committee, and we watched and reviewed 137 of those meetings spanning 2009 to 2021. We obtained three depositions in which she was questioned. We reviewed her personnel file and drew upon her court testimony, memos and emails, as well as the detention center’s written operating procedures.
We reached out to each of the police officers named in our story. They each declined to be interviewed or didn’t respond. The sergeant who supervised Templeton also declined to be interviewed.
Michael Wrather, a Rutherford County commissioner, declined to be interviewed other than to say he stands behind his public comments praising Davenport.
We relied on reports and sometimes data from the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, the Tennessee Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury. We used Prison Rape Elimination Act audits and the 2004 consultant’s report from Pulitzer/Bogard & Associates. We also drew upon reporting from fellow news organizations, including Murfreesboro’s Daily News Journal, The Tennessean, the Murfreesboro Post and the Tennessee Lookout.
We’re planning to continue reporting on the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County and elsewhere in Tennessee. If you have any stories that you’d like to share, please get in touch. Meribah Knight’s email address is mknight@wpln.org, and Ken Armstrong’s is ken.armstrong@propublica.org.
Editing by Emily Siner of WPLN News and Sarah Blustain and Susan Carroll of ProPublica. Alex Mierjeski contributed reporting.
Republican politicians and right-wing activists are transforming one of the Sunshine State’s liberal arts schools into the “Hillsdale of the South,” a strategy that could be replicated across the country. As one New College alum tells Vanity Fair, “I weep for our nation if DeSantis wins a presidential bid.”
ILLUSTRATION BY KHOA TRAN. IMAGES FROM GETTY IMAGES.
It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of students, faculty, and parents who’d come to defend her record—and the hundreds more outside who weren’t admitted—saying she was sorry to disappoint them, but she couldn’t represent the mandate New College was being given through this “hostile takeover.” And she refused to support the claims of right-wing critics that the school had been indoctrinating its students.
In the audience, supporters hugged one another and students left in tears. The trustees moved on, voting to replace Okker with interim president Richard Corcoran, Florida’s recently departed education commissioner who, in a 2021 speech at Michigan’s right-wing Hillsdale College, came close to calling for the collapse of the public school system through student attrition and said the political war “will be won in education.” The trustees replaced the board chair too, made plans to replace the general counsel, and instructed administrators to start preparing to dismantle the college’s diversity offices.
It was hard to imagine a starker change in leadership for New College, the small, nontraditional honors college of the Florida public university system, known for its lack of grades, individualized majors, and leftist student body, but which has also been eyed skeptically for years by Florida’s conservative-dominated legislature for its low enrollment and graduation rates. But that was exactly the transformation intended when Governor Ron DeSantis last month appointed six new trustees to the school’s 13-member board, in hopes they would remake New College into a right-leaning “classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south,” as his education commissioner Manny Diaz put it.
After the Republican-controlled Board of Governors appointed a seventh trustee, the new majority represented a team uniquely qualified to carry out DeSantis’s scorched-earth, right-wing education wars. There was Manhattan Institute fellow and anti-critical race theory hype man Christopher Rufo, who has most recently turned his efforts to laying “siege” to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; one of Hillsdale’s graduate school deans, Matthew Spalding, who also helped lead Donald Trump’s short-lived 1776 Commission; Charles Kesler of the right-wing Claremont Institute, which spent the Trump years retconning an intellectual platform for the MAGA movement; a senior editor at a religious right magazine; the Catholic author of a book accused of “fram[ing] LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness”; and a private Christian school cofounder with a penchant for Covid disinformation.
Following his appointment, Rufo immediately began speaking in martial terms: that conservatives were “recapturing higher education,” mounting a “landing team” to survey the school as well as a “hostage rescue operation” to “liberate” it from “cultural hostage takers.” Another new trustee, the private Christian academy cofounder Jason“Eddie” Speir, started a Substack to chronicle the transformation, sparking further panic in late January with a post proposing the board declare a financial emergency, firing the entire staff and rehiring only those professors aligned with the school’s new business model. (Speir also used his newsletter to propose banningUSA Today affiliates from covering campus events over a reader comment suggesting people throw dog poop on the new trustees; to request the entire board be given his essay, “‘Florida, Where Woke Goes to Die’ What Does It Mean?” as “supporting material”; and to ask if any readers had a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order he could borrow.)
Students, faculty, and alumni from New College and far beyond decried the takeover as an attack on academic freedom with national implications. Multiple scholarly organizations, including the American Anthropological Association and the American Historical Association, denounced it as “an orchestrated attack on academic integrity.” The University of Florida graduate assistants’ union tweeted a message of “Solidarity with New College students, faculty, and staff as DeSantis appoints a card-carrying fascist to the presidency.” At a campus rally preceding last Tuesday’s meeting, former Democratic state representative Carlos Guillermo Smith warned, “New College is their first test, their first trial run.” Repeating a Twitter hashtag protesting students had used, Smith added, “your campus is next.”
As though to prove them right, on February 1, Florida Republican state representative Spencer Roach—who cosponsored a recent Florida law mandating ideological surveys of public university campuses to “stem the tide of Marxist indoctrination”—tweeted that Okker’s termination should be replicated “at every university of the state.” In a January essay published in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Rufo touted the opportunities for emulation as well, writing that “If we are successful” in carrying out the mission of “institutional recapture,” what happens at New College “can serve as a model for other states.”
One horrified alum, Cayenne Linke, who attended New College in the 1990s, compared the takeover to a violent assault. “I feel like I’m standing at the precipice of the Fourth Reich, and I’m mostly powerless to fight back,” Linke said. “I weep for our nation if DeSantis wins a presidential bid and inevitably installs Rufo as education secretary.”
But that sort of lament has largely left the new trustees unmoved. When a current LGBTQ+ student told reporters about her grief, Rufo quoted her comments on Twitter, adding a laughing-crying emoji.
The invocation of Hillsdale College, a 1,500-student private Christian school in rural Michigan, might seem a surprising model for overhauling a public Florida institution, but it shouldn’t. The college, sometimes called “the citadel of conservatism,” has long had an outsized political influence in movement conservatism. Right-wing politicians and advocates vie for slots in its speaking program, the speeches of which are then distributed to a claimed audience of 6 million through a monthly Hillsdale publication. Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist who soughtto overturn the 2020 election, and who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,facilitated the launch of Hillsdale’s Capitol Hill campus in Washington. This magazine called Hillsdale a “feeder school” for the Trump administration.
Hillsdale has also spent the last 12 years proselytizing its Western civilization-focused model of “classical education” through a nationwide charter school-planting network, a bundle of freely-licensed right-wing K–12 curricula (including its ahistorical post-Trump “1776 Curriculum”), and its extensive connections with conservative state leaders. It’s largely thanks to Hillsdale that the idea of “classical education”—despite its varied forms and perspectives—has become right-wing shorthand for anti-“woke” American exceptionalism and an antidote to critical race theory. Last year, Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee announced plans to open 50 Hillsdale charters across the state; the year before, Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, who is also the former president of the Claremont Institute, claimed that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem offered to build him an entire campus. (Noem’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
But in Florida, Hillsdale’s footprint is uniquely large. The state boasts the highest number of Hillsdale-affiliated K–12 publicly-funded charter schools, several launched or directed by spouses of prominent state Republicans, including Corcoran and Republican congressman Byron Donalds. Hillsdale was instrumental in helping DeSantis overhaul the state’s K–12 civics standards along more “patriotic” lines. Last year the state hired a Hillsdale duo—one staffer, one undergraduate—to assess whether math textbooks Florida teachers submitted for approval contained prohibited concepts like critical race theory. And a number of prominent Florida officials, including Corcoran and DeSantis himself, have addressed gatherings hosted by the college, where Arnn praised both men as among the most important people in America today.
Rufo has addressed Hillsdale audiences too: once in early 2021, where he laid out what quickly became Republican talking points about critical race theory, and again last spring, in a speech entitled “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” which he recently described as his “theory of action.” In the latter address, delivered while Rufo was teaching a journalism course for the college, he called on state legislators to use their budgetary power to reshape public institutions, including higher education.
“We have to get out of this idea that somehow a public university system is a totally independent entity that practices academic freedom—a total fraud, that’s just a false statement, fundamentally false—and that you can’t touch it or else you’re impinging on the rights of the gender studies department to follow their dreams,” he said. Instead, conservatives must have the guts to say, “‘What the public giveth, the public can taketh away.’ And so we get in there, we defund things we don’t like, we fund things we do like.”
In terms of the former, he elaborated, states should defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and find creative ways to undermine university departments perceived as too liberal, like changing state teacher accreditation laws as a means of rendering teachers colleges irrelevant. Both suggestions have become common conservative talking points over the last year. As The Chronicle of Higher Educationreported this week, South Carolina legislators have requested information from its state’s 33 public colleges and universities regarding training around race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, following similar moves in Florida and Oklahoma.
In terms of what the right does like, Rufo advised state legislators to fund the creation of new, independently-governed “conservative centers” within flagship public universities to attract conservative professors, create new academic tracks, and serve as a “separate patronage system” for the right.
“Some people don’t like thinking about it that way,” Rufo said. “But guess what? The public universities, the DEI departments, the public school bureaucracies are, at the end of the day, patronage systems for left-wing activists. And as long as there’s going to be a patronage system, wouldn’t it be good to have some people who are representing the public within them?”
In many ways, that’s an old idea. Big-money donors on the right like the Olin and Koch foundations have been establishing “beachhead” academic centers in universities across the country since the 1970s, as a means of shoring up academic arguments for right-wing policies, creating a pipeline of conservative talent, and endowing professorships for right-wing scholars—some of whom, more moderate academics suggest, are unemployable on their own merits. (Of possible note here: Corcoran’s appointment to New College follows his failed bid to become Florida State University’s president in 2021, when he was passed over, apparently, in part for lack of qualifications.)
But these days, the model has been adapted, so that funds for such programs and institutes are increasingly coming from state legislatures directly, as numerous red states have passed bills establishing new “classical” and “civics” institutes with barely-disguised agendas. In Arizona, the legislature effectively replaced private donations from the Koch foundations with taxpayer funds in order to create a new School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State, to address a claimed lack of ideological diversity. In Texas, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has sought to establish a free-market think tank at University of Texas Austin, partly as a response to critical race theory. In Tennessee, Governor Lee paired his proposal to create dozens of Hillsdale charters with a call to build a $6 million, Hillsdale-inspired civics institute at University of Tennessee Knoxville to combat “anti-American thought.”
Florida already has several, including a politics institute at Florida State; the Adam Smith Center for the Study of Economic Freedom at Florida International University; and the University of Florida’s freshly-approved Hamilton Center for Classical and Civics Education, dedicated to “the ideas, traditions, and texts that form the foundations of western and American civilization,” and tasked with helping create anti-communist content for Florida’s new K–12 civics curricula.
Last spring, this track record prompted another Florida school, St. Augustine’s private Flagler College, to worry that it was being, well, groomed to become “the Hillsdale of the South.” The legislature was considering a multimillion dollar grant for the school to establish its own “Institute for Classical Education”—money that was certainly needed and might also be used to shore up existing programs, but which faculty feared would come with intolerable strings. Professors there brought a resolution to the faculty council, declaring that, if the funding came through, faculty would retain control over how it was used for hiring and curriculum creation. In Flagler’s case, the administration readily agreed.
But that sort of assurance—long considered a bedrock of academic freedom—is not a privilege shared at Florida’s public universities. And at New College, DeSantis’s new trustees made no effort to hide the fact that ideological transformation would bring rich financial rewards.
Several hours before last week’s New College board meeting, DeSantis affirmed as much, in a press conference announcing a suite of plans to reform higher education, including defunding all diversity programs at public universities and requiring them to instead teach a core curriculum focused on Western civilization, further eroding the protections of faculty tenure, bolstering University of Florida’s conservative institutes with even more funding and autonomy from university administrators, and transferring hiring authority from faculty committees to college presidents and the trustees who appoint them. In the same speech, DeSantis pledged an initial $15 million dollars to New College for immediate faculty recruitment and student scholarships, and an additional $10 million annually—money he suggested would not just attract the right sort of professors and students, but also new private donors.
“I can tell you this: you have people who are interested in donating money now, they want to endow professorships and all this stuff,” DeSantis said. “So it just shows you, if the mission is sound, people really respond to it.”
To New College’s distressed community, and academics more broadly, it suggested that the strategy for transforming the school was, effectively, cash. “A strategy that has worked, that it seems DeSantis may employ at New College, is to take a lot of money from very conservative outside donors, and flood the school with money for things that it’s hard to turn down,” like scholarships or restoring crumbling infrastructure, said Lauren O’Neill-Butler, a writer and New College alum who now teaches at New York’s Hunter College. “It often starts with a new center ‘to fund more classical education.’”
Indeed, last summer, after the Florida legislature approved the creation of University of Florida’s Hamilton Center, it received an additional, unsolicited $3 million donation from a previously unknown nonprofit, the Council on Public University Reform, which had no website or listed phone number and whose only contact was the director of a conservative Catholic legal institute currently pursuing a master’s degree at Hillsdale.
At Flagler College, civil rights history professor Michael Butler, who led the group of faculty skeptical about the implications of their own proposed classical institute last year, said that in recent days, every colleague he’s seen has stopped to share their fear and outrage over what’s happening at New College. For now, in the grim environment of Florida higher education, being a private school seems like an “oasis of intellectual freedom.” But it would be naive, he continued, to think that either private schools, or the rest of the country, will remain “immune from the ideological hysteria” consuming their state.
“It’s easy to ridicule Florida, or cite ‘Florida Man.’ But the Florida of today is the America of tomorrow,” Butler said, referencing a maxim from filmmaker Billy Corben. “If you put these culture wars into context, there’s always a bigger issue at play. This time, it’s 2024, and Florida is being used as a laboratory for policies and practices concerning higher education that will be unveiled at the national level.”
Indeed, over the weekend, an essay published on Revolver—a site launched by former Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, who was fired by the White House in 2018 for appearing on a panel alongside the founder of the white nationalist website VDare— compared the takeover of New College to Napoleon’s swift defeat of the Austrian army in 1805, writing that DeSantis and Rufo were “putting on a masterclass” of the principle that “speed, surprise, and decisiveness matter far more than mere strength” in any battle.
“DeSantis’s conquest is clearly a test run, with lower stakes, executed against a small and obscure school with little institutional power to resist,” it read, with the author urging Republicans around the country to seize the momentum. “Every state in America is holding a legislative session this spring. Now presents a golden opportunity to grab as much territory on education as possible, while Florida leads the way … concerned citizens nationwide must quickly learn how to adapt the New College plan to other publicly-controlled universities across the country.” (The article did not include a byline, but was presumably written by Beattie.)
Education might traditionally be a winning Democratic issue, the author continued, “yet there is a very real sense that they are caught off-guard and being overtaken by the sheer speed of events,” as well as the confounding array of attacks on public education happening at once. The New College overthrow, after all, has happened simultaneously with the Florida Department of Education banning a new Advanced Placement high school African American studies course, with the seeming result that the College Board, which oversees AP curricula, immediately caved, stripping the course of content related to contemporary issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and police violence, as well as numerous Black authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and bell hooks. (This week, a letter from Florida’s Department of Education made clear that DeSantis’ administration had been in frequent contact with the College Board as it was creating the course last year, as the DOE requested that subjects like intersectionality and systemic marginalization be removed.)
“Universal vouchers, weakening tenure, core curricula, CRT bans, and more,” declared the Revolver piece, “it’s all hitting, all at once.” On Twitter, Rufo thanked Beattie for understanding the strategy at work, writing, “This is the best analysis of the New College takeover, by far.”
OCG 