It's always a puzzle which scandal will or won't derail the career of the latest loose cannons who have taken up a career in the depressingly lucrative world of MAGA politics. North Carolina's Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson kept full GOP support for his gubernatorial campaign even as he raved against women's suffrage and declared "some folks need killing." But when he was outed for calling himself a "black NAZI" on an adult internet forum, that was, for some reason, when the party started to pull support away and his staff began to quit. As the GOP rallies behind Donald Trump for president, despite his 34 felony convictions, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to what Republicans consider a bridge too far.
As of now, it's unclear what the future holds for Corey DeAngelis, a far-right activist who focuses on undermining public education. Working with right-wing organizations like Moms for Liberty and Hillsdale College, DeAngelis pumped out a steady stream of disinformation to paint public schools as a "woke mind virus" set out to destroy children. He especially tried to scare parents into thinking public schools are deliberately turning kids gay or trans, to convince parents to pull their kids from school entirely.
DeAngelis also has a history as a gay adult film actor. He was recently outed by a group of Texas Republicans who are mad at Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Tex., for going along with DeAngelis' plan to use "school vouchers" to drain public school systems of resources until they collapse. Advocates for the DeAngelis/Abbott view argue that public schools can simply be replaced with home schools or private religious schools. But many Republicans in Texas balk at the privatization push, fearful that rural areas will be left with no schools at all if that happens. I suspect it's also that small-town Texas is not interested in losing high school football, which is close to a religion in the state.
DeAngelis' conservative opponents have been trying to make his sexual past an issue for months now, to little avail. Republican activist Sarah Fields shares the anti-LGBTQ views of Abbott and DeAngelis, but also opposes school vouchers. In July, she attempted to out DeAngelis, but it didn't get any traction.
🚨🚨 Special Report 🚨🚨
— Sarah Fields (@SarahisCensored) July 21, 2024
Corey A. DeAngelis is the director of school choice at the Reason Foundation.
All of his associations with the UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) have been scrubbed.
UNESCO’s Vision for School Choice is to… pic.twitter.com/VlOGir65pj
When another far-right site, which has openly peddled Nazi propaganda, posted clips and stills from a video that allegedly shows DeAngelis, performing under the name "Seth Rose," that seemed to have finally generated a reaction. Clearly, there are no good guys in this story. But what is unclear is whether DeAngelis will suffer long-term consequences to his MAGA career. He hasn't tweeted in days and has had his name removed from a couple of right-wing websites. But he's also still on the schedule for this weekend's upcoming "Rescue the Republic" MAGA event, alongside names like RFK Jr., Russell Brand, and Jordan Peterson. (The latter two of whom are not American citizens.) Still, with a party leader who has been found liable for sexual assault by a jury, many other Republicans have found it possible to weather scandals like this, so don't count DeAngelis out.
DeAngelis is one of the many contributors to Project 2025, which was developed to replace the traditional policy arm for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Much of the playbook for a second Trump term is centered around a radical agenda to gut public education, including ending the Department of Education. Despite his false claims of distance from Project 2025, Trump has continued to campaign on decimating the Department of Education.
As wild and weird as the details are in this intra-MAGA fight, in a sense, it's not surprising. Project 2025 and other far-right groups attract cranks, grifters, and other deeply unpleasant people. We were all subject to another unpleasant reminder this week when the Guardian reported that Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025, reportedly bragged to multiple people about beating his neighbor's dog to death with a shovel. Roberts denied the report but didn't explain how it came to be that multiple independent sources verified it. Nor did he have an answer when the Guardian found the neighbor, who indeed had a dog go missing at this time.
What Roberts is accused of doing is wrong. The same cannot be said of DeAngelis reportedly doing nude modeling or sex work. DeAngelis' actual transgression against decency is knowingly exploiting homophobia and transphobia to get attention, money, and support. The word "hypocrisy" is being thrown around a lot, but really, this is an illustration of a much uglier issue on the right: cynical operators who use moralizing language to advance their agenda and make money without believing a word of their own nonsense.
If DeAngelis had been outed by progressive activists, he'd probably be fine. As Thomas Edsall detailed this week in the New York Times, the MAGA movement has no limits in what it will excuse, so long as the alleged transgressor is on Team Redhat. That's why there's no number of felony convictions, diatribes against democracy or sexual assault victims that will rattle the faith of Trump supporters. It's all reframed as attacks from "the left" and disregarded as illegitimate.
Sadly for DeAngelis, however, his angriest and loudest critics are other right-wingers. If anything, the fact that the site that outed him also trafficks in Hitler memes has made it worse for him. In the topsy-turvy world of the radicalized right, a willingness to publish Hitler memes has a legitimizing power. Whatever else you may say about them, you can't say they're of the left. So DeAngelis and any of his allies are deprived of the ability to hide behind Trumpian claims of victimization at the hands of "communists."
As gross as this all is, there is a silver lining: It's a reminder that MAGA is prone to infighting because it's composed of self-serving jerks with strong antisocial tendencies. It's a lot like the recent story of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accusing Trump's traveling companion, white nationalist Laura Loomer, of being "racist." It's doubtful Greene has developed any sincere objections to racism, so much as she's angry and jealous about being displaced as a close advisor to the boss. Still, this animosity is destabilizing to the MAGA movement, like any group infighting, and can be exploited to undermine their organizing. And that is why, as squicky as it can feel at times, amplifying these internecine MAGA battles is a smart move for the left.
