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Fed-up Florida teachers unload on MAGA culture warriors: 'No one is teaching your kids to be gay!'
June 01, 2023
Hernando County, Florida, a Gulf Coast area just north of Tampa Bay, is not known for being a liberal place, as it hasn't backed a Democrat for president in over two decades, and Gov. Ron DeSantis carried the county by over 40 points last year.
But parents and teachers there have had enough of the far-right culture war against LGBTQ people — and they demanded an end to the campaign of intimidation in their local schools at a contentious board meeting this week, wrote columnists Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman for The Washington Post.
"A raucous school board meeting in Hernando County, Fla., on Tuesday night captured what’s striking about this new phenomenon. The scene featured teachers pointedly declaring that right-wing attacks are driving them to quit, even as parents and students forcefully stood up on their behalf, demanding a halt to the hysteria," they wrote.
The writers also quoted local social studies school teacher Victoria Hunt, who told the meeting that "'I have never seen such fear from my colleagues as I have seen in the last two months."
READ MORE: Infighting Trump lawyers plotted 'murder-suicide pact': report
This school system is where a local teacher, Jenna Barbee, became a focus of a campaign of threats and intimidation, and an investigation by the Florida Department of Education, after she showed her students "Strange World," a recent Disney film about generational family tension and environmentalism that also happened to feature a prominent gay character.
Local teacher Daniel Scott, citing the recent culture-war campaigns being launched against his profession, said that "I don’t feel that I can adequately provide a safe environment for my students anymore,' Scott said, before going on to denounce the "draconian working conditions that are causing many such as myself to abandon this honored career."
And Alyssa Marano, a former local math teacher who recently resigned, shredded MAGA activists for accusing her of "indoctrinating" children into LGBTQ lifestyles.
"No one is teaching your kids to be gay!" she told them. "Sometimes, they just are gay. I have math to teach. I literally don’t have time to teach your kids to be gay."
All told, some 50 teachers in the county school system are making plans to resign. But the teachers weren't the only ones pushing back at the meeting: parents and students stepped up to condemn the right-wing activists as well.
“War on woke? More like war on your children’s future,” said one student at the meeting.
This comes as similar pushback from parents against far-right attacks is happening in schools all over the country, and as "nine Democratic governors representing nearly 9 million students have sent a letter to leading textbook companies decrying 'the negative impact that censorship and book-banning has on this nation’s students,'" Sargent and Waldman noted.
DeSantis is currently trying to leverage his war on classrooms into a campaign for president — although as of now, polling shows him distantly behind former President Donald Trump among Republican voters.
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Donald Trump's defense lawyers reportedly engaged in a "murder-suicide pact" to protect themselves, much as top Justice Department officials allegedly had as he attempted to overturn his 2020 election loss.
The former president's legal team in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case have been embroiled in interpersonal conflict for months, and the bitterness and mistrust toward co-counsel and Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn curdled so badly that some lawyers agreed to a pact where if one attorney was fired, the rest would quit in solidarity, reported The Guardian.
One top lawyer, Tim Parlatore, abruptly resigned last month over his disagreements with Epshteyn, whom he accused of attempting to interfere with the legal team's efforts to locate classified documents at Trump properties and lying to both other attorneys and the former president.
Epshteyn was recently questioned by special counsel Jack Smith, and Parlatore and Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran have testified before a grand jury in the classified documents case.
The legal team feels confident that Parlatore won't turn on Trump, according to The Guardian, after a transcript showed he told a grand jury the ex-president had allowed him to search freely for any remaining documents last year at his properties.
But six sources familiar with the situation told the newspaper that efforts to remove Epshteyn from the case had failed after months of worsening relations, and he remains on the team while Parlatore had resigned.
Last year, former acting deputy attorney general Bill Donoghue told the Jan. 6 committee that top Justice Department officials, along with then- White House counsel Pat Cipollone, had agreed to resign en masse if Trump made Jeffrey Clarke, an environmental lawyer with the department, the acting attorney general and allowed him to send a letter to states about election fraud.
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Nearly 40 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus broke with the majority of their House Democratic colleagues late Wednesday to vote against the debt ceiling agreement negotiated by President Joe Biden and Republican leaders.
The legislation, which would lift the debt ceiling until January 2025 and enact painful caps on non-military federal spending, passed the GOP-controlled House by a vote of 314 to 117, with 165 Democrats joining 149 Republicans in supporting the measure.
The bill's passage came after weeks of talks between the White House—which repeatedly said it would not negotiate over the debt ceiling—and Republicans who manufactured the standoff to pursue austerity for low-income Americans, gifts for rich tax cheats, and handouts to the fossil fuel industry.
While Republicans didn't get anything close to what they called for in legislation they passed in late April, progressives who voted against the bill on Wednesday said the final agreement will harm vulnerable people and the planet by imposing new work requirements on aid recipients and approving the Mountain Valley Pipeline—a top priority of fossil fuel industry ally Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
Progressives also raised alarm over a provision that would codify the end of the student loan payment pause, setting the stage for a disaster if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Biden administration's debt cancellation plan.
"I cannot vote for a bill that guts key environmental protections and greenlights dirty fossil fuel projects for corporate polluters who are poisoning our communities, pushes our residents deeper into poverty by implementing cruel and ineffective work requirements for our low-income neighbors who rely on SNAP and TANF for food and housing, terminates the student loan payment pause, and slashes IRS funding to make it easier for the rich to cheat on their taxes," Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said in a statement.
"We cannot continue to capitulate to a far-right Republican Party and their extreme demands while they inflict policy violence on working-class people, gut our bedrock environmental protections, and decimate our planet," Tlaib added, referring to the bill's work requirements for food aid.
In total, 36 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) voted against the legislation:
Reps. Tlaib, Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Summer Lee (D-Pa.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Chuy García (D-(Ill.), Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), Val Hoyle (D-Ore.), Juan Vargas (D-Calif.), Nikema Williams (D-Ga.), Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), Mark DeSaulnier (D-Calif.), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Judy Chu (D-Calif.), and Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.).
But the CPC members who joined Republicans in voting yes on the bill, including prominent progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), outnumbered those who opposed it.
Jayapal, the CPC chair, said Wednesday that she could not in good conscience be part of the Republican Party's "extortion scheme" by voting for legislation that "rips food assistance away from poor people and disproportionately Black and brown women, pushes forward pro-corporate permitting policies and a pipeline in direct violation of the community's input, and claws back nearly 25% of the funding Democrats allocated for the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats."
Bush, who represents St. Louis, added that "this agreement, whose worst elements are undoubtedly the fault of MAGA Republicans who shamefully took our economy hostage, pairs raising the debt limit with many policies that will harm our most vulnerable communities."
"I am disgusted with the chief hostage taker Kevin McCarthy and his MAGA insurrectionist conference for threatening economic catastrophe," said the Missouri Democrat. "For the good of our country, and to prevent the GOP from politicizing the debt ceiling to harm our communities moving forward, I believe we must eliminate the debt ceiling altogether."
The bill now heads to the Senate, where lawmakers are expected to act before the June 5 debt-limit deadline set by the Treasury Department.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the lone Senate member of the CPC, announced ahead of Wednesday's House vote that he will oppose the legislation, calling it "a bill that takes vital nutrition assistance away from women, infants, children, and seniors while refusing to ask billionaires who have never had it so good to pay a penny more in taxes."
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the measure's new work requirements for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients would put nearly 750,000 low-income adults between the ages of 50 and 54 at risk of losing food aid.
"The fact of the matter is that this bill is totally unnecessary," Sanders said. "The president has the authority and the ability to eliminate the debt ceiling today by invoking the 14th Amendment. I look forward to the day when he exercises this authority and puts an end, once and for all, to the outrageous actions of the extreme right-wing to hold our entire economy hostage in order to get what they want."
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