Florida Decides Healthcare, a political committee and nonprofit that is fighting for expanded Medicaid eligibility in the Sunshine State, on Sunday sued the Florida secretary of state and other state officials, challenging a law Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed last week that makes it tougher for citizens to get constitutional amendments on the ballot. According to the lawsuit…
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Mike Hixenbaugh first knew things had changed when someone on a four-wheeler started ripping up his lawn after his wife placed a Black Lives Matter sign outside their home on the suburban outskirts of Houston.
Hixenbaugh is an award-winning investigative reporter for NBC News. He’s covered wrongdoing within the child welfare system, safety lapses inside hospitals, and deadly failures in the US Navy. But when his front yard was torn apart in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests, he saw a story about race and politics collide at his own front door. So like any investigative journalist, he started investigating, and his reporting about the growing divides in his neighborhood soon led him to the public schools.
As more than a dozen states sue the Trump administration over its policies aimed at ending public schools’ diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, More To The Story host Al Letson talks with Hixenbaugh about how America’s public schools have become “a microcosm” for the country’s political and cultural fights—“a way of zooming in deep into one community to try to tell the story of America.”
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Listen: The Culture War Goes to College (Reveal)
Read: At the Heritage Foundation, the Anti-DEI Crusade Is Part of a Bigger War (Mother Jones)
Read: They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms, by Mike Hixenbaugh
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Listen: Southlake/Grapevine podcasts (NBC News)
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For almost a decade now, Florida has served as a laboratory for hardline immigration policies that are later exported to other state legislatures across the country. The recent arrest of Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a U.S.-born citizen who was mistakenly detained under an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hold in Leon County, shows the threat that these persecutory laws pose for the civil…
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Florida Atlantic University’s police department has a pending agreement with the federal government that would allow campus officers to question and detain people they suspect are in the country without authorization. The public university in Boca Raton could be the first to enter such an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which lists the campus police department as one…
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Republican lawmakers in Florida are advancing a bill that would rescind protections for teenage workers, a move that critics say will allow employers to exploit children. The legislation was crafted to address worker shortages, which have come about due to Florida’s harsh laws targeting immigrant workers. In part because of those laws, there are currently only 53 workers available for every…
Now that Trump has ‘Muskrat’ using his chainsaw on this and then that within the federal government, beware MAGA seniors. This writer sat in a coffee shop right before the election, next to seven elderly MAGA men. How did I know? Easy, by the Trump 2024 baseball caps they all wore. I’m a baby boomer and these old guys (I refuse to say Fools in hopes of reaching them and their fellow MAGAs) were definitely near or above 80 years old. Before they ended their morning breakfast with hand holding prayers ( with one guy doing the Speaking in tongues bit) their consensus was for Trump to Deport those drug carrying lazy illegals on DAY ONE. My better half was outraged at this rhetoric, and came close to confronting these guys. She didn’t and thank goodness they were finished with their little circus and left.
I would have liked to give those old MAGA lemmings the story of my late parents, when they were ready for assisted living, followed by a nursing home. We had to get them to apply for Medicaid by spending down their money (which was very meager). Thank goodness they then were able to be placed in a nursing home nearby. This was 25 years ago, when Uncle Sam subsidized Florida Medicaid BDS (Before DeSantis). I wanted to go into the parking lot of that coffee shop and shake a few of those old baseball cap wearing men. Most of them looked like how my parents looked in 2000, going by their attire. These guys had to be retired working stiffs. “What’s going to happen to you when you get frail and need to go into a nursing home dude? Do you have the $10k to $20k a month to stay there? Trump and his ‘Muskrat’, along with Captain Ron DeSantis want to cut federal aid for Medicaid, and your lovely Red States are going to cut it down locally. Keep praying guys.”
The post You’re Next, MAGA Seniors!! first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has picked state Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) to become the state’s next senator, replacing outgoing Sen. Marco Rubio (R). Rubio is vacating his seat due to being nominated by president-elect Donald Trump to serve as secretary of state in the next administration. It’s believed that Rubio will likely be confirmed by the Senate to fill that role.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration has revoked the driver’s license of a transgender content creator who publicly shared how they updated the gender marker on their license. Last year, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) issued a letter stating that transgender residents would no longer be allowed to change the gender marker on their driver’s licenses.
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“The hostility has always been there,” Paul told me. “But I feel like it truly began to ramp up like 2020.” A 16-year-old student at a large public high school in a large Texas city, Paul (a pseudonym to protect his safety) is a varsity athlete with aspirations to join the FBI. But in 2020 he was still in middle school. Texas wouldn’t pass its first anti-trans bill — a sports ban on trans…
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An abortion rights group in Florida is suing state officials for suppressing free speech, alleging in their lawsuit that the state unconstitutionally threatened television stations that were airing its ads in favor of a ballot initiative that would overturn Florida’s extreme abortion ban. Florida currently restricts all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, granting only nominal exceptions…
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New guidance from the Florida Department of Health includes disinformation directed at people who are considering getting vaccinated with the new COVID-19 boosters, wrongly describing the vaccinations as untested and dangerous. In reality, the vaccinations have been tested and provide updated protection from new coronavirus variants. They have been approved for use by both the Food and Drug…
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In the summer of 2023, Reveal host Al Letson felt compelled to return home to Jacksonville, Florida. His best friend had recently passed away following a long battle with cancer, and he wanted to be close to the place where they became men together.
But when he arrived, he found a city and state he barely recognized.
In recent years, the Republican-dominated legislature has passed a slate of laws targeting minority groups. Educators could now face criminal penalties over the material they teach regarding gender and sexuality. Schools across the state have banned books about queer families, transgender youth, and Black history.
Many of these legislative changes were part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called “war on woke,” launched ahead of his failed bid for the presidency. This week on Reveal, Letson examines Black life in Florida, following a rare travel advisory by the NAACP stating that “Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals.”
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in January 2024.
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Florida voters who signed a petition to place a pro-choice abortion referendum on the ballot this November say they have been visited by police who are investigating claims of fraud at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, the Tampa Bay Times reported Saturday. Last year, DeSantis, a Republican, signed into a law a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. In response…
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Several transgender youth and adults are being told their care will be terminated following a ruling from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals by a majority-Trump appointed panel. The court ruled that a 2023 law, which restricts transgender care at any age, can go back into effect after being permanently blocked in June 2024. The ruling, released late Monday, stated that transgender people are…
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On Tuesday, several anti-queer and anti-transgender candidates backed by Governor Ron DeSantis lost their school board races in Florida. The defeats included suburban districts like Sarasota, an early focal point of DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ+ culture wars, and Pinellas County, a swing district that supported Donald Trump in 2016. Many of these candidates were associated with Moms For Liberty and…
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Thousands of Florida residents have died due to coronavirus over the past year, according to new data from the state’s Department of Health website — a figure that is significantly lower than was seen during the worst parts of the pandemic, but worryingly higher than has been recently observed. According to those figures, 3,162 Floridians died from COVID-19 over the past 12 months.
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On Tuesday night, several of Donald Trump’s former rivals endorsed the Trump ticket, including former Ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Vivek Ramaswamy. Much of the evening focused on the Republican Party’s hard-line border and immigration policies. The 2024 Republican platform backs Trump’s pledge to carry out the “largest deportation operation in…
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A recent white paper by Isaac Kamola, director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, details the ongoing culture-war backlash against higher education in America, largely in response to the grassroots activism of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and increasing LGBTQ+ visibility. More than 150 bills seeking to undermine academic freedom and intervene in university governance were introduced…
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A recent white paper by Isaac Kamola, director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, details the ongoing culture-war backlash against higher education in America, largely in response to the grassroots activism of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and increasing LGBTQ+ visibility. More than 150 bills seeking to undermine academic freedom and intervene in university governance were introduced…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A federal judge has ruled that Florida’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender children is unconstitutional, invalidating a state law and various other boards of health rules restricting access to such treatments. A law passed by Florida’s Republican-controlled state legislature and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last year banned all health providers in the state from providing gender…
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The academic year that just ended left America’s college campuses in quite a state: with snipers on the rooftops and checkpoints at the gates; quads overrun by riot squads, state troopers, and federal agents; and even the scent of gunpowder in the air. In short, in the spring semester of 2024, many of our campuses came to resemble armed camps. What’s more, alongside such brute displays of force…
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Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation on Wednesday that will weaken climate regulations and expand fossil fuel use in the state, even as Floridians experience the increasingly devastating effects of global warming. Although Florida Republicans passed several regulations in 2008 to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, they have since dismantled those regulations piece by…
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Some of the dozens of migrants who were tricked by a scheme orchestrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office into boarding an airplane in Florida and flying to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022 have been granted temporary visas due to the fact that they may have been victims of a crime. DeSantis’s office coordinated two planes to fly the migrants (most of whom had come to the U.S. from Venezuela) from San…
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The Florida Supreme Court released two opinions on Monday that will affect abortion access in the state, including one in which a ballot initiative on reproductive rights will move forward for voters to decide on this fall. Between then and now, however, abortion access will be severely limited within the state. In a 6-1 decision, the state’s highest court overturned decades of previously…
School districts across Florida will soon receive written notice from the state that discussions of LGBTQ+ identities are not banned in classrooms. This acknowledgement comes two years after the Parental Rights in Education Act, nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, banned the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten to third grade — and almost a year after the law was…
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Just over one week after diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and positions were eliminated at the University of Florida (UF), the NAACP is calling for student-athletes of color who are considering their college and university options to avoid the state entirely, if they’re able to do so. UF’s decision stems from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signing into law last year legislation that…
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At 2:27 p.m. on Friday, March 8, the Florida Legislature adjourned sine die. With this adjournment, 21 of 22 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were effectively killed, leaving an anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in education bill as the lone piece of legislation to pass this session. This session featured some of the most severe bills ever proposed against transgender individuals, all of these bills…
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Florida is budgeting nearly $558,000 to surveil patients who are still navigating the immigration system when they visit the doctor. Republican lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis are allocating the funding to enforce a harsh new anti-immigrant law that is spreading fear and confusion and pushing people to forgo medical treatment — including an alarming number of pregnant women.
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A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — including two Donald Trump appointees — voted Monday to block a key portion of Florida’s controversial 2022 “Stop WOKE Act” from going into effect. In doing so, the panel upheld a previous lower court ruling that prevented the law from going into effect in 2022. “By limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive…
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When Afshan Jafar arrived at Ohio Wesleyan University as an undergraduate in 1995, she enthusiastically enrolled in a variety of classes, including classics, dance, economics, philosophy and sociology. As an international student from Pakistan, she found the array fascinating, but it was an 8:30 am class called “Intro to Sociology” that most intrigued her. “The class helped ease my transition from…
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