They Were Loving College. Then Ron DeSantis Got Involved.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis and his war on “woke” education took aim at the New College of Florida on Friday, Sam Sharf was surfing with friends an hour down the coast.
Which is to say the 22-year-old sophomore was blissfully unaware that the small public liberal arts school she attended was the latest target in what could be the governor’s hate-fueled march to a Republican presidential nomination.
That day, DeSantis announced the appointment of six new board members at the small Sarasota college, many of whom were ultra-conservative political players and academics. Sharf, a trans woman, said that she returned to shore—and her phone—to find it had blown up with messages from people telling her the news.
“I got really sad and then just, like, laid down,” she told The Daily Beast.
Among the appointees on Friday were Charles R. Kesler, a professor and editor for a publication of the far-right Claremont Institute; Mark Bauerlein, a Trump-allied Emory University professor; and Matthew Spalding, a professor at conservative Christian University Hillsdale College in Michigan.
“It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college… more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” DeSantis chief of staff James Uthmeier told the right-wing Daily Caller, laying out their plan.
But what immediately caught Sharf’s eye were tweets by incoming board member Christopher Rufo, who only days before had declared that “Gov. DeSantis is going to lay siege to university ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ programs.” In addition to being perhaps the key figure behind the bogus right-wing backlash to mostly nonexistent use of “critical race theory” in schools, Rufo has also been an avid opponent of what he calls “radical gender theory” in education. And among other appeals that form part of his admittedly ruthless political playbook, he has issued callouts on Twitter for “documents, PDFs, audio-video, and training materials related to gender, grooming, and trans ideology in schools.”
Grooming, is, of course, the stuff of obsession among right-wing parents and activists across the country, who seem to falsely believe that they alone are worried about sexual predators and children—and that LGBTQ acceptance invites criminality.
Now, several students interviewed by The Daily Beast who see New College as a safe space for learning are vowing to protect it amid fears that as the small college becomes a big target for a conservative culture war, it will attract racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ attacks and even a potential for violence.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-college-of-florida-students-call-out-ron-desantis-and-christopher-rufo-takeover?ref=home
DeSatan is going to ruin everything in the state.
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