The Bloom Is Off The Seth Rose. What To Think About Corey DeAngelis?
What to expect when you're expecting scandal
We do fish porn around here, sure. We don't do the real kind, this is a family friendly publication. Yet this week the sector has a porn scandal. So here we are.
It turns out that self-described school choice evangelist Corey DeAngelis (who I know of professionally, obviously, but have never met) allegedly has a history in gay porn under the screen name "Seth Rose." Not going to link here and it's not safe for work (suffice it to say you can bet this is not the race theory Corey wanted to talk about), but you can look it up easily on social media. Pretty pedestrian porn name, but what do I know. He's a beloved figure on the right and a favorite of culture war politicians. Not so much on the left.
It was a far-right website that brought this to light, it should be noted.
My initial reaction to the claims was to figure they were some deep fake bullshit from the trench warfare corners of the internet where every day brings a stupid battle over something. Or look-alike and mistaken identity. How could this not have come to light sooner, I wondered? And given his combative style he was ripe for a hit. But Corey's profile was removed from the American Federation For Children's website where he has been a senior fellow. Also the Hoover Institution did the same. And the word on the edustreet is that there is something to this.
To me, something always felt a little off about Corey, this interview with Reason's Nick Gillespie is a good inadvertently revealing example of why. Public affairs is about performance at some level, but this always seemed like too much of one. His popular Twitter account just seemed like trolling. I could never quite put my finger on it, and certainly didn't guess this.
Anyhow, a few notes on the kind of scandal we don't often get in education:
It's not the the heat it's the hypocrisy. I don't care what consenting adults do. It does not change how I like my coffee and there is way too much 'live and let me tell you how to live' going around these days for my taste. The problem here is Corey has been a high-profile culture warrior, including on LGBT issues. Some of his positions don't rise to the level of hypocrisy - for instance plenty of gay people think the current obsession with drag by progressive parents of kindergartners is a little strange and performative. Plenty of gay and transgender people don't think schools should get in front of or supplant parents on gender transitions. But he traded in less defensible claims and a general context of 'they're coming for your kids' as well. That's going to be hard for his allies to defend in this context.
A little empathy. As is often the case with this sort of thing it seems like this is probably a deeply troubled person in one way or another. Corey may have been lacking a fully functional empathy or compassion gene, that doesn't mean you should. It's understandable to be frustrated by the apparent hypocrisy, angered by the climate he stoked, and still show a little grace.
This really isn't a school choice story. Corey used culture war issues as an argument for school choice (I'm for giving parents choices but that's an argument I disagree with). It will all get lumped together, of course, yet this really isn't about choice, it's a culture warrior story and a hypocrisy / human story. There might also be some lessons about celebrity culture in education.
Ed media is falling down again. I was in the mountains of Colorado last week and heard about this. It's been days and still crickets from mainline ed publications. A correspondent for the Texas Observer is following on Twitter. This may not be a story you want to touch, but it is a story. At this point enough for a brief mention this is happening even if not a full story. This is an influential person with a big platform. And, upstream, why did no one vet this guy, this could not have been totally unknown?