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A discussion between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sen. Mitt Romney over the weekend included what one critic called an “incredible mask-off moment,” with the two officials speaking openly about the U.S. government’s long-term attempts to provide public relations work for Israel in defense of its policies in the occupied Palestinian territories — and its push to ban TikTok in order to shut down Americans’ access to unfiltered news about the Israeli assault on Gaza.
At the Sedona Forum in Sedona, Arizona on Friday, the Utah Republican asked Blinken at the McCain Institute event’s keynote conversation why Israel’s “PR been so awful” as it’s bombarded Gaza since October in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, killing at least 34,735 Palestinians — the majority women and children — and pushing parts of the enclave into a famine that is expected to spread due to Israel’s blockade.
“The world is screaming about Israel, why aren’t they screaming about Hamas?” asked Romney. “‘Accept a cease-fire, bring home the hostages.’ Instead it’s the other way around, I mean, typically the Israelis are good at PR. What’s happened here? How have they, and we, been so ineffective at communicating the realities there?”
Blinken replied that Americans, two-thirds of whom want the Biden administration to push for a permanent cease-fire and 57% of whom disapprove of President Joe Biden’s approach to the war, are “on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond.”
“And of course the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative,” said the secretary of state. “We can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

Romney suggested that banning TikTok would quiet the growing outrage over Israeli atrocities in the United States.“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” said Romney. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”
Incredible mask-off moment: Romney and Blinken say that the ban of TikTok was directly because “the emotion, the impact of images has a very challenging effect on the narrative”, the narrative being “Israel’s PR”.pic.twitter.com/WkIGTAXG2X— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) May 6, 2024
The interview took place amid a growing anti-war movement on college campuses across the U.S. and around the world, with American police forces responding aggressively to protests at which students have demanded higher education institutions divest from companies that contract with Israel and that the U.S. stop funding the Israel Defense Forces.
Right-wing lawmakers and commentators have suggested students have been indoctrinated by content shared on social media platforms including TikTok and Instagram, and wouldn’t be protesting otherwise.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who co-sponsored a recent bill to ban TikTok — included in a foreign aid package that Biden signed late last month — said last week that “there has been a coordinated effort off these college campuses, and that you have outside paid agitators and activists.”
“It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the U.S.,” said Lawler.
Social media has provided the public with an unvarnished look at the scale of Israel’s attack, with users learning the stories of Gaza residents including six-year-old Hind Rajab, 10-year-old Yazan Kafarneh, and victims who have been found in mass graves and seeing the destruction of hospitals, universities, and other civilian infrastructure.
U.S. college students, however, are far from the only people who have expressed strong opposition to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians and large-scale destruction of Gaza as it claims to be targeting Hamas.
Human rights groups across the globe have demanded an end to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s military and called on the U.S. president to use his leverage to end the war. Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, in February lambasted Biden and other Western leaders for claiming concern about the safety of Palestinians while continuing to arm Israel, and leaders in Spain and Ireland have led calls for an arms embargo on the country. The United Nations’ top expert on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories said in March that there are “reasonable grounds” to conclude Israel has committed genocidal acts, two months after the International Court of Justice made a similar statement in an interim ruling.
Romney and Blinken didn’t mention in their talk whether they believe social media and bad “PR” have pushed international leaders and experts to make similar demands to those of college students.
The conversation, said Intercept journalist Ryan Grim, was an “incredible historical document” showing how the U.S. government views its role in the Middle East—as a government that should “mediate” between Israel and the public to keep people from having “a direct look at what’s happening.”
“Romney’s comments betray a general bipartisan disinterest in engaging Israel’s conduct in Gaza on its own terms, preferring instead to complain about protesters, interrogate university presidents, and, apparently, muse about social media’s role in boosting pro-Palestinian activism,” wrote Ben Metzner at The New Republic. “As Israel moves closer to a catastrophic invasion of Rafah, having already banned Al Jazeera in the country, Romney and Blinken would be wise to consider whether TikTok is the real problem.”
Enterpreneur James Rosen-Birch added that “Mitt Romney flat-out asking Antony Blinken, in public, why the United States is not doing a better job manufacturing consent, is wild.”

The World Food Programme is warning northern Gaza has reached a “full-blown” famine that is spreading south. This comes after the Israeli military has spent months blocking the entry of vital aid into Gaza, attacking humanitarian aid convoys and opening fire on Palestinian civilians waiting to receive lifesaving aid. We get an update on conditions among the besieged and starving population of Gaza — including of children now suffering from the psychological effects of intense and prolonged trauma — from Walid Masoud, a vascular surgeon and a board member of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund who is just back from heading a medical mission to Gaza.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We continue to look at the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza as the head of the World Food Programme warns northern Gaza is experiencing a “full-blown famine,” with severe starvation quickly spreading to the south, due to Israel’s war and total blockade of Gaza. World Food Programme Executive Director Cindy McCain, the widow of the late Senator John McCain, spoke Sunday on NBC News’ Meet the Press.

CINDY McCAIN: There is famine, full-blown famine, in the north, and it’s moving its way south. And so, with — what we’re asking for and what we’ve continually asked for is a ceasefire and the ability to have unfettered access to get in — safe and unfettered access to get into the — into Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Human rights groups accuse Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war, a war crime. The Israeli military has repeatedly blocked the entry of vital aid into Gaza, attacked humanitarian aid convoys and killed Palestinian civilians waiting to receive food and other aid. A Palestinian mother in Gaza City described the dire situation.

ASMAA AL-BELBASI: [translated] We need food to survive. We need to feed our children. We want to get to this area but can’t get there with cars, because the roads are blocked by rubble from the strikes. The sun hits us as we walk. And you find a long queue there from the morning. And you’re exhausted by the time you return, all for some bread.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Amman, Jordan, where we’re joined by Dr. Walid Masoud, a vascular surgeon, board member of Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. He headed PCRF’s medical mission to Gaza earlier this month.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Doctor. If you can start off by describing what we’re seeing, I mean, to have Cindy McCain, the head of the World Food Programme, saying the north is in “full-blown famine”? Describe the effects and what this means for the people who are surviving in Palestine, Gaza.
DR. WALID MASOUD: Good morning, first of all. Good morning, America.
First of all, let me say about PCRF that our mission is to provide medical and humanitarian relief for the children throughout the Levant, regardless their nationalities or religion. We headed to Gaza under the umbrella of PCRF and the umbrella of WHO. OK? We had one lecture in the WHO in Cairo telling us about the safety measures, what we are going to meet in Rafah.
Once we entered there, the moment we entered there, we could see the children around us begging for food, begging for money, begging for anything. OK? The starvation, you could see it in everywhere in the hospital. We were based in the European Hospital. And in the buildings of the hospitals, it was full of refugees. More than 50,000 refugees came from the north to this hospital, because they feel it is safe. It’s not only in the territory around the hospital, but inside the hospital, inside the corridors, in the stairs, every room, they had refugees.
While we were walking in the corridors, you could see the children around, and you could see by their eyes how they underfed and they have malnutrition and they are starving. You could see how they lost the muscle mass. You could see the skin. You could see how they fatigue. You could see how they are depressed, actually. When you talk to them, they are slow, slow motion in talking. OK? You can see the loss of the weight on these children. In the theaters, when we operate upon children, we could see how their body mass index is low, and we could see they are not oriented, actually, most of the patients upon which we operated. This reflects this decreased immunity of the children and increased rate of the infection, because there is not enough proteins in their body to initiate or to make the immunity system in the right way.
We had to operate immediately as emergency on many injured patients, not only children but also adults. Starvation does not only with the children. It was everyone in the population. Imagine you have 1.8 million in Rafah, and there is not enough food for these. If there is food, you cannot even reach it, because transportations is dangerous. You could see how is the World Kitchen being bombed and killed there. What about the locals? If the foreigners died from bombarding their cars, what about the locals?
You can imagine how 1.8 million, they don’t have enough hospitals. Only three proper hospitals is working in Rafah. We operated in Rafah only, but some of our surgeons went to Al-Kuwaiti Hospital, because they could not transfer the kids to the European Hospital. One of our surgeons, pediatric surgeons, went to the Al-Kuwaiti Hospital and performed 16 surgeries. Totally, we operated around 250 or 275 and more. The situation was very bad in the theater.
The staff, if we talk about the staff, the staff are exhausted, the staff depressed, the staff disoriented. All the staff in the theaters and in the wards in the hospital, they are volunteers, actually. They don’t receive salaries. Do you know what they receive? They are volunteers working, no money, but they receive only the lunch. And this lunch, they eat a little bit. Maybe they eat 10% of their lunch, in order to take the lunch to the tents to their families, because they don’t have money to buy anything. And if they have money, there is not enough food in the market.
We operated upon children who’ve been injured around five, six months ago. We had a patient, 13-years-old patient. I sent you his video. He had shrapnels behind the knee, and he developed a fistula between the artery and the vein. So, because of that, his foot and leg became ischemic, not enough blood, and it began a gangrene in his toes. So, we did such an operation. This patient had a referral letter to go to Egypt for treatment, but he could not, because there is a queue. Maybe it will take him 10 months just to his chance to go to Egypt. We did the operation. We disconnected the fistula. And he is OK. But you could tell how his muscles are weak and there is a loss of muscle bulk with him. His wounds — we followed him a few days after that. His wounds is not healing well because of the lack of proteins in his body, lack of minerals, lack of vitamins in his body. There is not enough food even in the hospital to give them IV fluids or IV nutrients.
Many patients died from infection because they don’t have enough immunity. They don’t have enough antibiotics or proper antibiotics, because sometimes they have the basics of the antibiotics. We managed to bring many medications, many antibiotics, other things, but it’s not that enough. When a mission comes, they bring some, but it’s not enough for 1.8 million people there. And there is, as you said earlier, above 78,000 injured patients.
Our mission was depressing to us from inside, but we were happy to give what we can do to them. There were many things which disturbed us. We could work in an environment which is unsuitable. OK? Example, these drones all the time have noisy, noise, voices, like zzzzz. They called it zanana. First three days, in our team, they could not sleep because of these drones and zanana and these noises. And it is 24 hours there. The staff is exhausted and depressed. When we came, we were seven surgeons from Jordan and one nurse also from Jordan. We had two from Ireland. We have one from Germany and one from United States. All of them, we gathered them. We could not eat full food, because we feel we are guilty once we are eating. And outside, there is a lot of children begging for food, and families, maybe they don’t eat at all or they eat one time a day.
Many surgeries were done, major surgeries, which means that this patient should have well feeding, IV or something, in order his wounds to heal. We managed to help patients, but in some situations it is out of our hands to continue. OK, I managed, for example, to reoperate the lab cath — the cath lab, so we can do some surgeries with intervention, interventional radiology. This cath lab was out of work for more than seven months. We managed to start working on this. We did many surgeries and, the patients, discharged them home.
This is another point. When we did surgery, patient went to discharge. The patient said, “Where I am going? I don’t have any home. I don’t have even tent to go.” So, many patients stay in the hospital so they can have a home, shelter. They can have food also.
We managed — also they have dialysis machines, which is out of work for the last seven, eight months in the European Hospital. We managed, with the help of one of the biomedical engineers who came from Jordan, Dr. Samadi, we managed to fix up these two machines, and we reopened the dialysis unit there. We tried to bring some medicine, some instruments, some tools, equipment to be used for the patients there, but that was not enough.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Masoud, I’m going to interrupt here —
DR. WALID MASOUD: Not enough for this.
AMY GOODMAN: — because we have to break.
DR. WALID MASOUD: Our mission not only was medical.
AMY GOODMAN: But I know that there is a delay.
DR. WALID MASOUD: We tried to support with —
AMY GOODMAN: Doctor — Dr. Masoud, there’s a delay, but I just wanted to end by saying that we are seeing nonstop breaking news on Twitter now. For example, The New Yorker contributor Mosab Abu Toha says the Israeli army is starting to blow up complete neighborhoods in East Rafah, just four hours after ordering families to evacuate the area. And I wanted to end — we just have 30 seconds — because you work with Palestine Children’s Relief, with your observation that increasingly children are expressing suicidal thoughts. We have 30 seconds.
DR. WALID MASOUD: Unfortunately, I had two patients — one patient and his sister — they were around 8 and 7 years. They were questioning me when I was in the round, “Why I am still alive while my wife — my mother and father and brothers died?” The children there, they started to think about suicidal attempts. And we have another patient who lost their legs and lost all the family, and she’s bedridden. And she tried to attempt suicide.
Children, I cannot imagine how they will grow, these children, in the future, while they were thinking about suicidal attempt because their family has died. Unfortunately, many children thinking about this. I cannot imagine in the future how they will act and how they will look to the world and to the peace. Imagine what’s happening. Each family has lost many of their main supporter as father or mother. This creates a psychiatric situation with these children.
I think as they need surgeons to be there, they need psychiatrists in order to treat these patients. There’s a need, definitely a need, because the increase of the, let us say, not suicide, because I did not see any suicidal attempts, but I heard from many children they are thinking about suicide. Unfortunately, the help now is going through vascular surgeon, orthopedic surgeon, etc. I think we need to send more doctors there. Unfortunately, the borders now is closed.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Walid Masoud, we’re going to have to leave it there as we go to the students who are protesting across the United States. I want to thank you so much for joining us from Amman, Jordan, just back from Gaza, vascular surgeon and board member of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
Coming up, the protests at University of Michigan graduation, at State University of New York, New Paltz, and more. Back in 20 seconds.

Austin, Texas—Although Travis County Attorney Delia Garza initially dropped criminal trespass charges against the first 57 people arrested while protesting in solidarity with Palestine on the University of Texas (UT) at Austin campus on April 24, her office is approaching a second batch of charges stemming from an attempt to reestablish an impromptu encampment on April 29 differently: Garza has yet to say whether she will pursue a second tranche of trespass charges.
Law enforcement provided more detailed documentation of probable cause this time around and, as Austin Chronicle’s Austin Sanders notes, another mass dismissal of charges could spark right-wing actors to launch the same kind of petition to remove her from office that the progressive district attorney, José Garza (no relation), is facing.
After the April 29 arrests, the university released an internal communication alleging that, of the 79 people arrested on campus that day, 45 had no affiliation with UT Austin. “These numbers validate our concern that much of the disruption on campus over the past week has been orchestrated by people from outside the university,” internal communications staffers wrote. The notice goes on to allege that police confiscated knives, bricks, and other weapons from the local organizers, but this reporter didn’t witness any such weapons present during the protest as police plucked demonstrators from their encampment last week.
Protesters at the University of Texas at Austin encampment launched in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and student encampments across the country.Candice Bernd
Rather, local organizers and students who had hoped to hold space at UT’s South Lawn on April 29 with a makeshift barricade of chained-together tables and chairs around a handful of tents argue that not only are police the true “outside agitators”; they also allege that detaining officers may have purposefully let some UT students go that Monday in order to falsely generate an “outside agitator” narrative. More than 100 people were initially detained, as this reporter and multiple participants witnessed, but only 79 were ultimately charged.

NOW: @UTAustin students have reestablished an encampment on the campus’s South Lawn, renamed the Liberated Zone. Students have barricaded themselves and five or so tents in with tables and chairs. About a dozen campus police are present. pic.twitter.com/bnGpllPmm2— Candice Bernd (@CandiceBernd) April 29, 2024

Sam Law, a Jewish American doctoral cultural anthropology student who was arrested Monday, told Truthout he was moved as a person of conscience to do what he can to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza by calling on the university to divest its Israel-related holdings.

After UT campus police pulled him from the encircled encampment, he told Truthout that he and other arrestees were given numbers, and that, at one point, he witnessed someone with the number 102. Moreover, he says arrestees were widely commenting on the historic number of people being arrested, with many remarking about the number being over 100. He also says that officers asked him whether he was a student at the time of his arrest, indicating that officers were tracking that data.
Truthout could not independently verify protest participants’ allegations, however, and other possibilities for the numerical discrepancy remain likely explanations, including the possibility of several arrestee escapes and/or crowd-led de-arrests of individuals.
Still, the “outside agitator” approach follows a common script often trotted out by local representatives and police looking to shut down or delegitimize authentic, localized opposition to repressive policing and other area policies.
Department of Public Safety state troopers form a perimeter on the north side of UT’s main lawn on April 29 just before moving in to encircle student and area organizers’ impromptu encampment.Candice Bernd
As Truthout recently reported, Dallas Mayor Pro Tem Tennell Atkins attempted to use the same playbook to downplay the efforts of North Texans who knocked doors to stop a $50 million bond proposition that will now fund a new police training center at the University of North Texas Dallas campus by accusing them of not being residents of his district. Those organizers are calling the new training center “Cop City Dallas” to link their fight to the ongoing struggle against what would be the country’s largest police training and militarization facility in Atlanta. There, too, local organizers have alleged that police have intentionally released local residents in order to falsely generate an “outside agitator” narrative.
“[UT Austin President] Jay Hartzell called the police to violently crack down on a peaceful protest using an incredibly excessive amount of force and after the fact is trying to generate political cover for this decision, and he’s trying to do it by fabricating lies and crafting the narrative. This can be anything from disseminating false information, like ‘the crowds were throwing rocks … or ‘had guns,’ — both of those are obviously not true,’” Law says. “But [he’s] also trying to fabricate this ‘outside agitator’ narrative, potentially by manipulating the number of students who were finally charged.”
“Jay Hartzell called the police to violently crack down on a peaceful protest using an incredibly excessive amount of force and after the fact is trying to generate political cover for this decision, and he’s trying to do it by fabricating lies and crafting the narrative.”
A local jail support organizer who requested anonymity told Truthout they initially tracked somewhere between 98 and 105 arrests, but that list was eventually whittled down to 83 after organizers were able to confirm certain individuals hadn’t been booked into jail. The revised list, the organizer notes, doesn’t account for the reason why certain individuals made it home safely that day. The organizer said there were at least three cases in which people were initially taken to the jail, and, rather than being booked, were instead taken to the hospital. Jail support organizers documented between 6 and 10 cases of serious injuries, including a torn rotator cuff, sprained ankles and asthmatics who had been pepper sprayed.
“All I know is that those people weren’t in jail. I don’t know what happened to them. I don’t know why they ended up on our list, like did someone just call because they couldn’t find their friend and so they ended up on our list, or were they arrested and then released?” the organizer said.
In terms of the administration’s “outside agitator” narrative, the jail support organizer pointed out that recent police brutalization of students and young people on campus has presented a PR crisis for the university. “It’s very important for them to make sure that people believe that this was some violent unaffiliated group of people who have nothing but ill intent for their student body because it helps them … avoid the truth, which is that UT administrators, staff, the militarized [Department of Public Safety] went in and beat the shit out of a bunch of 19-year-olds.”
UT Austin Vice President for Legal Affairs and General Counsel Amanda Cochran-McCall did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment.
Nationally, university administration officials responding to campus encampments and occupations have likewise employed the narrative to cast doubt on the historic student-led movement to end the genocide in Gaza. New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York City police officials have falsely claimed protests at Columbia have been “co-opted” by outside agitators — including at least one retired elementary school teacher who wasn’t even present on campus.
Department of Public Safety state troopers encircled an impromptu encampment on UT’s main lawn on April 29 before campus police moved in to begin arresting students and local organizers.Candice Bernd
Graduate student Law points out that the outside agitator narrative was first developed to discredit student activists who wanted to stand up to segregation during the Freedom Rides in the 1960s, and its inherent racism is being echoed today when applied to young people standing up against genocide of Palestinians.
“Solidarity means that everyone everywhere is able to participate in struggles for justice. I reject, totally, the idea that people of conscience and community members who are concerned about students being attacked by police, who are appalled by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, wouldn’t be able to participate in a protest on campus,” Law tells Truthout. “I think that this narrative of outside agitators is just ridiculous. I would say in this particular case, it’s also deeply, deeply condescending. It implies that students themselves are not capable, or don’t have the initiative to take leadership on their own campus, and what we saw on Monday totally disproved this.”
“Solidarity means that everyone everywhere is able to participate in struggles for justice. I reject, totally, the idea that people of conscience and community members who are concerned about students being attacked by police, who are appalled by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, wouldn’t be able to participate in a protest on campus.”
Additionally, he says that, despite officers filing more detailed affidavits this time around, he remains doubtful his charges could possibly stick because he was never once notified that he was criminally trespassing on his own campus, nor did he hear police give a dispersal order. He says other students received a criminal trespass notice for the South Lawn from UT on their phones, but that he did not have his phone on him at the time of his arrest, and that other participants’ phones had died.
“I as a student believe I have the right to free speech on my campus, and I was under that impression until they arrested me,” he says. “It wasn’t until I was in the jail, and people were like, ‘What did you get charged with?’ … that I heard about criminal trespass.”
The organizers behind the April 29 impromptu encampment included students and local area organizers and veterans affiliated with local chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace, the Palestinian Youth Movement and Veterans for Peace. In solidarity with the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which organized the first walkout and occupation event on campus on April 24, they are likewise calling for the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and other funders tied to Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and for the resignation of Hartzell over his handling of recent student protests. A small group of allies and supporters showed up to Hartzell’s residence a day after the arrests, chanting “Hartzell, Hartzell, you’re a clown, we demand that you step down!”
But student organizers say they don’t want the issue of the genocide in Gaza itself to get lost as the local and national story about campus encampments becomes one mostly centered around police repression. They continue to highlight how the oil-rich UT system’s $55 billion endowment is second only to Harvard’s. According to a report from Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, the company managing the endowment held about $52.5 million in debt and equity securities in weapons manufacturers tied to Israel, such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in 2020.
In addition to divestment and an official, university-sponsored call for a ceasefire, they want to dissolve the campus’s U.S. Army-partnered robotics laboratory that designs and tests weapons used by Israel to perpetrate genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
“It is a moral imperative for us to do whatever we can to end that genocide and divestment is such an important piece to that. It’s been a demand from the student movement for many decades now, as it really is so salient in the moment that we’re in.”
“It is a moral imperative for us to do whatever we can to end that genocide and divestment is such an important piece to that. It’s been a demand from the student movement for many decades now, as it really is so salient in the moment that we’re in,” Lenna Nasr of the Palestinian Youth Movement Central Texas told Truthout prior to the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) Rafah evacuation order. “Obviously a ground invasion of Rafah would be horrific. But I think what’s also important to say is that Israel is executing massacres in other places as well. And so I think it’s even more necessary to put economic pressure to end genocide.”
Moreover she points out that the UT administration has failed its Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students by refusing to take action against three men, one of whom claimed to be an IDF soldier, who disrupted a Palestine Solidarity Committee event in October. One of the men called the students “fucking terrorists” and boasted about killing Arabs. UT also invited a Zionist to give a speech titled “Israel’s Moral War” in January of this year, Nasr points out.
Palestinian student and youth demands are being supported by campus faculty and staff, 620 of whom signed a letter indicating they have no confidence in Hartzell over his handling of the students protests and over his firing of the “UT 60” diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program staffers in the aftermath of the state legislature’s passage of Senate Bill 17, which banned DEI trainings and programs at public universities.
Outside the UT’s main building that Monday just before the impromptu encampment arrests, at least 30 faculty members, dressed in academic caps and gowns, held a vigil highlighting Israel’s “scholasticide” in Gaza — the state’s systematic destruction of students, professors and all of the occupied territory’s educational institutions. Roger Reeves, an associate professor of poetry and creative writing in the English Department and a double alum of UT, was among the faculty organizers and told Truthout the vigil was also organized in solidarity with fired DEI faculty as well as students who police violently brutalized the prior week.
Thirty University of Texas faculty members held up signs with the names of slain educators and students in Gaza in recognition of Israel’s systematic “scholasticide” outside the campus’s main building on April 29.Candice Bernd
“UT acted within a credible amount of vigor in response to [SB 17] by firing 60 people that they told us in meetings before that they weren’t going to fire, they were going to reassign. So it feels like a betrayal of their word and a betrayal of sort of the university itself and the ethos of the university, which is a diverse educational environment,” Reeves told Truthout outside the main building. He made it clear that he and other faculty members are demanding more than just Hartzell’s resignation. “We’re asking for our administration to be beholden to the ideas of free discourse, intellectual rigor and telling the truth,” Reeves said.
Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe gives a speech during an April 29 rally sponsored by the Texas State Employees Union opposing the UT system’s firing of 60 staffers previously affiliated with diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Candice Bernd
The faculty were joined by union organizers with the Texas State Employees Union, the Texas NAACP and local city council representatives who organized a simultaneous rally on the west side of the main building that also opposed the firing of the UT 60 and police-perpetrated brutalization of students.
“All of us should know that what happened last week would not have happened if we had a DEI program that was accepted and respected. If we had a program that they would listen to, where there was a dialogue between the students, the faculty and the staff and an understanding, we would have understood that [what] occurred last week was a reasonable, peaceful protest,” Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe told the crowd.

A coalition of abortion rights advocates in Missouri moved one step closer to putting abortion rights on the ballot despite legal challenges, delays and a grassroots “decline to sign” campaign waged by anti-abortion groups.
The coalition, Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, submitted over 380,000 signatures on Friday for a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee a right to abortion and other reproductive health care in deep-red Missouri, the first state to ban nearly all abortions after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
The path to this moment has been marked by disagreements among abortion rights advocates, as well as lengthy court battles with Republican officials trying to block them from starting to gather signatures. More legal challenges loom, as Republican state lawmakers look to weaken the state’s long-standing tradition of giving the voters the power to directly amend their state constitution, and anti-abortion groups spin up new efforts to defeat the measure.
Missouri’s abortion ban, which threatens doctors with felony charges, has no exceptions for rape or incest. The proposed Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment would enshrine a constitutional right to abortion to the point of fetal viability, which is determined by physicians but is usually around 22 to 25 weeks of pregnancy, and requires the state to use the “least restrictive means” in regulating abortion. The amendment would also guarantee a right to other reproductive health care, including pre and post-natal care, contraception and miscarriage management.
“Missourians are excited for the opportunity to end our state’s cruel abortion ban and put health care decisions back in the hands of patients and doctors,” Tori Schafer, deputy director of policy and campaigns at the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, which is backing the measure, said in a statement.

That effort has garnered vigorous resistance from anti-abortion groups and top officials in Missouri’s Republican-controlled state government.
Abortion opponents in Missouri argue the proposed amendment would go too far in allowing abortions later in pregnancy and could overturn the dozens of abortion restrictions passed by the state legislature. Anti-abortion groups including Missouri Right to Life and Missouri Stands With Women, a political action committee incorporated in January, led “decline to sign” campaigns discouraging voters from signing petitions to get the abortion measure on the ballot.
Some of the fiercest opposition has come from Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, whose office waged a months-long legal fight with abortion rights advocates over the amendment’s summary language, delaying the start of signature gathering. Ashcroft, a candidate for governor, also suggested he’d refuse to do his job if voters passed the amendment.
Ashcroft ultimately lost in the state Supreme Court, but the coalition submitted more than double the signatures required in anticipation of his office possibly challenging their validity.
There’s also a chance state lawmakers could pass a bill that would ask voters in the November election or a special election to pass a constitutional amendment that would make it harder for citizen-led initiatives to get on the ballot and pass. An analysis from the news outlet The Missouri Independent found that under the proposal, as few as 1 in 5 voters in the state could reject a ballot measure. Its sponsor, Republican state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, has backed other anti-abortion bills.
Ohio voters resoundingly rejected a similar measure that Republican officials put on the ballot as they attempted to thwart the passage of an abortion rights constitutional amendment in 2023.
Kelly Hall, executive director of The Fairness Project, said Missouri is “a poster child for what can be achieved through direct democracy” with proper investment. The Fairness Project supports progressive ballot measure campaigns around the country, including current efforts to put abortion on the ballot in Missouri, Arizona, Florida and Montana in 2024.
Over the past decade, organizers in Missouri have led successful ballot measure campaigns to expand Medicaid, raise the state’s minimum wage, and legalize medical and recreational marijuana — all policies with little to no chance in the Republican-dominated state legislature.
Hall said Missouri organizers’ wealth of experience allowed them to raise significant funds and kickstart signature gathering despite months of delays. Missourians for Constitutional Freedom raised nearly $5 million in the first quarter of 2024, filings show. Over 1,800 volunteers collected signatures in all of Missouri’s 114 counties and knocked on over 40,000 doors, the coalition said Friday.
“As grateful as I am for the initiative petition, it’s a really unfortunate way to make law because it just means that we don’t have a representative legislature,” said Bridgette Dunlap, a St. Louis-based attorney and writer. Dunlap, who has a background in abortion rights litigation, assisted with an amicus brief the League of Women Voters of Missouri filed in the lawsuit over the initiative’s summary language.
“The only way things with bipartisan support get through in Missouri is through this arduous, expensive process,” she said.
Republicans are heavily favored to win the presidential, U.S. Senate and governor’s races in Missouri, which backed former President Donald Trump by 15 points in 2020. The abortion amendment could be among the most competitive contests on the November ballot.
A survey conducted by St. Louis University and YouGov in February found a plurality of Missourians, 44 percent, supported returning abortion rights to the standard under Roe v. Wade while 37 percent were opposed. The measure’s potential success lies with the 19 percent who said they were undecided.
Republicans backing the proposal to change the state’s citizen-led initiative process argue it would limit out-of-state influence in ballot measures and give rural voters a greater voice, making the outcomes of ballot measures more representative. But abortion rights advocates see it as a clear gambit to block citizens from directly voting on abortion.
“I just hope that they look at Ohio and see that that would be a huge waste of time and money,” said Dunlap. “And it just trains people to go out to vote.”
In the meantime, elected officials like Coleman and anti-abortion groups are deploying other tactics, some of which are relatively novel, to oppose the amendment.
In the summer of 2023, Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Coleman and another state lawmaker unsuccessfully disputed State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick’s assessment that the measure would have little to no cost to the state, arguing that legalizing abortion would cost the state billions of dollars in lost tax revenue from citizens who would have otherwise been born. Research has consistently found a strong correlation between abortion bans and negative economic outcomes at the state level.
Another effort picked up their line of argument, aiming to block organizers from getting the signatures they needed to get the measure on the ballot. Missouri Right to Life’s “decline to sign” flyers, which also argued that legalized abortion would cost the state tax revenue, encouraged people to call a hotline and report where volunteers are gathering signatures for the abortion amendment.
Jess Piper, a progressive advocate and writer who serves as the executive director of Blue Missouri, reported that Coleman, the Republican state senator who is also a candidate for secretary of state, has personally attempted to discourage people from signing petitions.
In a post on her Substack blog, The View from Rural Missouri, Piper shared photographs and witness accounts from an April 20 signature-gathering event at a public library in Coleman’s district that Coleman attended to dissuade voters present from signing petitions. Coleman’s campaign did not return a request for comment about the event.
Missouri Stands With Women, an organization led by men with close ties to the anti-abortion movement, has raised over $84,000 and spent nearly $67,000 since January, in part to back the decline-to-sign effort, campaign finance filings show.
The leading image on the group’s website, depicting a group of smiling women in white T-shirts, is a stock photo also seen on a modeling agency website and in an Amazon listing for friendship bracelets. Samuel Lee, the group’s president, is a longtime anti-abortion activist and lobbyist in the state who proclaimed that the fight over abortion was “not over” after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
The organization has close ties to Republican officials who have tried to block the ballot measure. The organization’s treasurer, attorney Edward Greim, donated $2,825, the maximum allowed, to Ashcroft’s campaign in June. Shortly after, Ashcroft hired the law firm where Greim practices as a partner to represent his office in a lawsuit. In January, Ashcroft told state lawmakers he intended to pay the firm, Graves Garrett Greim, $1.2 million in taxpayer funds for legal services in the case. Greim also represented Missouri Senate Majority Leader Cindy O’Laughlin, who filed an amicus brief defending Ashcroft’s proposed ballot summary language for the abortion measure.
The organization has released a “decline to sign” flyer and several videos featuring Republican elected officials urging Missourians not to sign petitions. They’ve also reportedly sent text messages to voters claiming, without evidence, that a voter signing an initiative petition is vulnerable to having their identity stolen, an argument Coleman has also echoed.
On Tuesday, Piper tweeted out a screenshot of a text message she said some Missouri residents received that urged them to “decline to sign” to “protect yourself from fraud & theft.”
“Out of town strangers are trying to collect your sensitive personal data for extremist groups,” claimed the text message, which did not mention abortion or the ballot initiative.
A disclosure seen at the bottom of a graphic included in the message says it was paid for by Missouri Stands With Women. A representative for the group did not respond to a request for comment about the text message.
Voters signing initiative petitions provide information like their name and address necessary to verify their eligibility to vote, but not sensitive information like their Social Security number. Registered voters’ names, addresses, dates of birth, and contact information are publicly available information. Campaigns and PACs regularly use them in their voter outreach and targeting efforts.
“Anti-abortion extremists continue to lie and spread disinformation because they know Missourians are fired up and ready to turn out to support our campaign,” Schafer said.
Dunlap, the Missouri lawyer and writer, has been volunteering to collect signatures for the ballot measure in St. Louis and Columbia. She said that while decline-to-sign efforts could have an impact of generally “stigmatizing” the abortion ballot measure, she saw no evidence of them actually being effective.
To Hall, the success of the signature-gathering effort in Missouri highlights the importance of long-term investment in direct democracy where it exists.
“We can’t only think about these middle-of-the-country states when there happens to be a shiny object like abortion on the ballot,” Hall said. “It really pays off to do cycle-over-cycle, year-round work to make sure that this infrastructure exists — and it’s being put to exceptional use by the abortion measure coalition right now in Missouri.”

In November, a study revealed how easily foreign governments could use companies known as data brokers to purchase personal information about U.S. military personnel. In some cases researchers paid less than a quarter per record for information that included home addresses, cell phone numbers and sensitive health data.
Congress reacted quickly; the House passed legislation this year that seeks to restrict the sale of “personally identifiable sensitive data” of American residents to North Korea, China, Russia or Iran or any businesses or individuals in any of those countries. The Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024 is now with the Senate’s committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
Data brokers are analytics companies that compile dossiers about all of us, combing thousands of sources, including DMVs, licensing agencies and social media. They then sell it to law enforcement, immigration authorities and insurance companies. (If you’ve ever been contacted about a class-action lawsuit, your information could have been provided by a data broker.)
For many people who work at abortion providers or in the reproductive health space, the problem isn’t foreign governments buying their information. It’s fellow Americans who oppose abortion who want to target them, often to directly threaten them. And national legislation to protect digital privacy has stalled for years.
Threats of harm or death directed toward abortion providers increased 20 percent from 2021 to 2022, according to the most recent data gathered by the National Abortion Federation. Stalking incidents more than doubled, from 28 to 92.

One of the most insidious forms of violence to emerge over the past decade is doxxing, or the public release of personal contact information to facilitate harassment. Part of the reason doxxing is so common is because of the ease of access to this information granted by data brokers, which often charge only a small fee.
Jessica Ensley first became aware of data brokers in 2017, when she joined Reproaction, an organization focused on increasing access to abortion and advancing reproductive justice. During her training she was advised to search herself online and remove as much information as possible.
“The first time that I did it, I was absolutely horrified at how easy it was to find all of the addresses where I had lived. You could create a very clear trail of where I was, who my family is, where I’ve been, where I went to school, where I live now,” Ensley said. “I found it very disturbing.”
Now Ensley is the senior vice president of outreach at Reproaction, and part of her duties involve leading staff security. She keeps tabs on possible threats, leads frequent privacy trainings and is always seeking outside expertise on the best ways to keep workers safe.
“I think everybody should be worried generally about their digital information, digital security and their digital footprint. But it is very much so repro workers that are targets of a lot of harassment and doxxing threats,” Ensley said.
The 19th spoke with several workers in reproductive health and justice, but some declined to speak on the record due to concerns about becoming a target of doxxing or worsening ongoing abuse.
The Post-Dobbs Reality
When Sarah Philips started organizing around abortion access in college in Texas eight years ago, an older mentor at an abortion fund told her to start paying attention to her personal information online. The mentor paid for Philips to have access to DeleteMe, a subscription service that monitors data brokers for personal information and automatically requests takedowns.
“If she hadn’t said that, I would have had no idea that this is even a thing,” Philips said. That experience helped lead her to work at Fight for The Future, a nonprofit focused on protecting digital privacy and freedom of expression.
Especially in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that ended a federal right to abortion, reproductive health and justice advocates are more visible online, Philips said. “You’re fundraising online, you’re doing fund-a-thons online, you’re educating people about Supreme Court cases, you’re talking to the media. We have to do all those things because of the state of reproductive and abortion access right now.”
That digital presence is necessary to raise awareness about services and current legislation, but it can come at a cost. After Eugenia Schauerman, admin and accounting manager at Northwest Abortion Access Fund (NWAAF), was interviewed for a state newspaper, a clinic received mailed threats meant for her.
When Schauerman first started working with abortion funds, she used her home address for business filings. Now she’s much more careful. She maintains a separate phone number to catch people who call to harass her.
Sometimes people silence themselves, avoiding media appearances, out of fear of harassment or violence.
“What’s so hard is that sometimes for our clients, their story could make a difference in the world, right? Their story could be really persuasive, but it’s so unsafe for them to have that story shared publicly, and that is really hard to see,” said Sara Ainsworth, senior legal and policy director at If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, which offers legal services through the Repro Legal Helpline.
Some of the clients represented by the organization have been doxxed or swatted, which is when someone calls in a false threat to someone’s home that results in a raid by a SWAT team. Ainsworth noted that this kind of harassment is extremely dangerous for people of color and people who have already been targeted by the criminal legal system.
Ainsworth said she has observed “an uptick in boldness” from people seeking to harass their clients, and “more certainty from those who would target them that they have state power behind them.”
The anti-abortion movement has gotten much more aggressive, said Melissa Ryan, CEO of CARD Strategies, a consulting firm that helps nonprofit organizations deal with targeted harassment, extremism and disinformation. “When you have someone’s personal information released online, they’re immediately under threat from a movement that is known to be violent and dangerous,” she said. Perpetrators also know there will not be strong consequences.
Removing Information Costs Time and Money
The most common way to prevent doxxing is to periodically remove your information from individual data broker sites. Organizations like the Digital Defense Fund, which provides cybersecurity training and grants for the abortion rights movement and was cited by many people interviewed for this article, compile guides on how to submit removal requests.
One resource shared by DDF recommends 24 data brokers to audit for your personal information. Another lists 220. More than double that number were registered in California in 2023. In Vermont, triple.
One of the most daunting aspects is that data brokers constantly are scanning for public information. Ensley said her coworkers find it shocking that they need to repeat the information removal process over and over. She recommends reviewing data brokers for personal information each quarter. But the process isn’t easy and is often intentionally difficult to complete.
“There is no set standard among data brokers’ sites as to how to get your information removed,” Ensley said. “It’s often very tricky to find.”
Ensley said she has even seen some data brokers require someone to watch ads as part of the process of trying to request information removal.
The convoluted, time-intensive process has an alternative: paying for a service to do it. One of the most popular is DeleteMe, which costs $129 per person for a year-long subscription. Since new data brokers are always popping up and more established ones recompile personal information, someone concerned about doxxing needs to subscribe indefinitely.
The expense can be difficult for both individuals and their employers. Some organizations do pay for personal information deletion services, but even then, if an employee leaves, the protection doesn’t follow them.
Lower-level workers can be more vulnerable to harassment. “Folks who are higher up in an organization are going to naturally have more protection most of the time, because organizations are built to protect people with power, versus someone who was an associate level staffer or an intern,” Ryan said.
The threats against Schauerman marked a turning point for the employees at NWAAF, who increased pressure on the board of directors to provide stronger safety protections for workers, said Jade Pfaefflin Bounds, the former volunteer and training coordinator. The staff sent a list of demands about pay equity and safety concerns to the board in 2022, less than a month after the Dobbs decision.
When the abortion fund decided to pay for a personal information removal service for employees, it felt like a blanket solution to a complex problem. Pfaefflin Bounds had a lot of questions about how the service worked and what sorts of information needed to be scrubbed. He was unsure how it would cover him as a trans person who changed his name. Did he also need to purchase a subscription for his husband, in case the two of them could be linked?
This confusion about data brokers is common. The general public has never heard of most data brokers, and neither have many lawmakers, said Sarah Lamdan, a professor at CUNY Law School and author of “Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information,” even as there’s more data about us than ever before.
Signing away the right to data privacy is a common condition of many apps such as Grindr and DoorDash, and companies like Meta track people who don’t even have registered accounts.
“There are all sorts of places where we don’t have much choice about submitting data. It’s not like the choice to stay on or off social media or to have a public-facing web page for your business,” Lamdan said. Cell phones, identification cards and marriage licenses are all potential sources of intimate information that are unavoidable in today’s world.
Attempts to regulate data brokers have been met with intense lobbying. Law enforcement is a large user of data brokers, Lamdan said, and the industry uses that connection to leverage pushback to highlight their importance to national security.
California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont have all passed laws that require data brokers to register with the state. In Oregon, Texas and Vermont, the companies need to say whether they allow people to opt out of having their data collected and explain the process as part of the public registry.
The 2018 law passed in California told data brokers that they needed to allow residents to opt-out of collection. An amendment was passed last year requiring a central portal for Californians to delete their information from all data brokers, to be released by January 1, 2026.
The DELETE Act, introduced to the House for the second time this Congress, would set up a central repository for Americans to delete their information from data brokers. Fight for The Future, where Philips and Pfaefflin Bounds work as organizers, released a public petition urging the creation of a centralized opt-out system last month.
Earlier this month, senators shared a draft of the American Privacy Rights Act of 2024, the first bipartisan federal data privacy law to gain traction in years. However, its current form lacks the central opt-out authority envisioned by the DELETE Act.
More comprehensive privacy legislation could help prevent information being collected in the first place, but digital security advocates say that permanent data broker opt-outs, like those proposed in the DELETE Act, have the highest potential for impact.
Philips is vocal on multiple issues that make her a target for doxxing, like Palestinian liberation and human rights abuses in India. After posting on those topics or publishing an op-ed about abortion, she usually gets a flurry of harassment and people trying to intimidate her by sharing personal information.
If she could, Philips would pay for deletion services for members of her family too because she doesn’t want them to be targeted because of her career. But it would cost hundreds of dollars a year to cover only her immediate family.
“It makes me feel really guilty about the work that I do, because it could expand risk onto other people,” Philips said.

It doesn’t take much searching to spot the fallout from the newest Florida law seeking to erase DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, from public campuses.
Several weeks ago, for example, staff offices at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Inclusion, Diversity Education and Advocacy in Boca Raton were vacant, with name plates blank and abandoned desks, plus LGBTQ+ flags, posters and pamphlets left behind.
Elsewhere on the palm-tree-framed campus, a sign for the “Women and Gender Equity Resource Center” remained, but a laminated paper on the door offered a new identity, “Women’s Resource and Community Connection Division of Student Affairs.”
In Florida, which, along with Texas, has the most extreme anti-DEI laws in the country, virtually all DEI staff have been fired or reassigned and offices shuttered — but that’s not the only story. There is also mounting resistance to the laws.
Students have devised workarounds, like camouflaging FAU’s annual homecoming drag show as “Owl Manor,” nodding to the school mascot. Mary Rasura, a senior, launched an LGBTQ+ newspaper, “Out FAU,” saying, “It just seemed like a no-brainer. You know, we are still a community. Like, we’re still here.”

And while some wary faculty members have recast their lectures, others have boldly not done so. Prof. Robert Cassanello at the University of Central Florida in Orlando — one of the nation’s largest campuses with 70,000 students — warned in red ink on the syllabus for his graduate seminar on the Civil Rights Movement (as for all courses he teaches) that he “will expose you to content that does not comply with and will violate” anti-DEI laws.
Cassanello feels compelled to object. “My area of research is Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. Being told not to discuss institutional, structural racism, “that’s like, what would be the point of me teaching? You know, I might as well just go home.”
The anti-DEI pressure in higher education has caught on — the Chronicle of Higher Education’s DEI tracker identifies 85 anti-DEI bills introduced in 28 states since last year, with 13 becoming law — but it is hardly something that colleges and universities came to on their own. Rather, it is a campaign led by the conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo and other far-right influencers seeking to make “DEI” as scary and repulsive a term as “CRT” (Critical Race Theory). Rufo has said as much.
And while Rufo frames DEI as an affront to colorblind meritocracy, Brendan Cantwell, a professor at Michigan State University who studies politics and policy in higher education, argues that there is nothing ideological in how DEI offices operate.
“The DEI movement as it manifests in colleges and universities is not radical,” he said. “It’s very bureaucratic and institutional.”
Cantwell said DEI shows up in tasks such as student advising or ensuring that databases accommodate gender identities and meet federal regulations — efforts that have arisen over the past decade as a direct response to campuses growing more diverse, racially and in other ways. DEI also covers veterans, first-generation students, international students, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities and people of different faiths. The aim has been to institute policies and practices that allow all students to feel accepted.
But now anti-DEI laws are reaching beyond attacking such functions and seeking to control what may be taught in college courses.
“We are fighting over whether or not political parties that are in control of state government, in control of Congress, can control higher education,” Cantwell said. This is not about regulating funding or financial aid, but “what people learn” and “how colleges and universities can serve their students and staff.”
That was apparent in January when the Board of Governors for Florida’s state university system, in approving regulations for the new anti-DEI law, also removed sociology from the list of courses that meet general education requirements. (On the social platform X, Education Commissioner Manny Diaz berated sociology as “woke ideology.”)
For Prof. Michael Armato, the sociology undergraduate director at UCF, the elimination of general education credit for his discipline was upsetting enough; introductory sociology enrolls 700 to 800 students per semester. But more disturbing, he said, “was the absolute silence on behalf of our administrators” who failed to defend the field or challenge state “meddling” in campus curriculum.
“What’s next?” he said, noting that fields like literature, anthropology and psychology also grapple with issues of race, gender and sexuality. “There is this sort of fear hovering over us,” said Armato, raising concerns “for what we can teach, for what we can advise students about.” As a result, his department now allows faculty who are assigned to teach potentially hot subjects like race and ethnicity to bow out. “It is their neck on the line,” he said.
Yet he is not backing down himself. He is preparing to teach a graduate course that includes Critical Race Theory.* “I refuse to kowtow to attempts to have me not teach what is the accepted and documented evidence within my field,” he said. Last semester, he taught a course, “Beyond the Binary.” Still, Armato wonders, “Is this going to blow up on me?”
Certainly, it’s easy to spot worry on campuses. At UCF, the student government counts on staff members to run an annual diversity training. The staffer responsible for it said he was unsure if it could happen — “we are waiting on guidance” — then ignored all follow-up emails. Across the state, more than a dozen campus leaders, including administrators, faculty representatives, staffers and student leaders who were contacted, declined to be interviewed about DEI or even to answer questions via email. Some apologized, as one did after initially agreeing to an interview, that “this is a very sensitive subject for state employees.” Some spoke only on background.
In teaching, Cassanello has a latitude that others don’t, because he has tenure. “If I were a lecturer, and I see what’s going on in Tallahassee,” he said, “I would say, ‘Maybe I don’t teach that concept.’”
Marissa Bellenger, one of Cassanello’s graduate students, was warned by a visiting professor teaching a lecture course on American history for which she is a teaching assistant. “He said, ‘You know, be careful of students asking you questions to get a rise out of you, to get you to say something that will get you in trouble,’” she said when we met outdoors in a shaded spot on campus. “I mean, if he’s worried about you, that says a lot.”
Bellenger, from Tampa, is studying for her Ph.D. at UCF, and has weighed leaving the state but would want to “come back and teach here. But then, it’s like, what is there to teach? You know, I’m going to be censoring myself.”
Such calculations are shaping Grace Castelin’s plans. Castelin, a senior and the president of the UCF chapter of the NAACP, sees professors avoiding certain discussions; they offer comments like, “Oh guys, you know, so the law, I can’t really say too much on this,” she said, or, as another did, add a disclaimer about “not trying to impose any beliefs on you guys.”
“It’s frustrating. It’s like we’re not getting the full course content,” Castelin said. She plans to go out of state to attend graduate school in public policy. “I applied to seven schools. None of them are in Florida,” she said. “If I stay here, I’m not going to learn the content that I need to know without it being censored.”
It is this kind of worry that spurred Michael H. Gavin, the president of Delta College in Michigan, a two-year institution, to start Education for All a year ago. The group gathers some 175 higher education leaders, many of them community college presidents, to monitor attacks on DEI and coordinate support through an online discussion list and regular meetings.
Gavin, who wrote a book on white nationalism and politics in higher education, said it is critical for leaders in states not facing anti-DEI laws to speak up for those who cannot. “Let’s not get tricked into this notion that we have to somehow be quiet about things that are right in our domain,” like restricting curriculum topics and banning books, he said.
He added that anti-DEI attacks are particularly damaging to students in community colleges, many of whom are from marginalized groups, “because the rhetoric is about their very identity.”
Conservative activists cast the anti-DEI movement as a sober pursuit, but opponents say it appears bent on chasing certain people from view or halting efforts to acknowledge and serve them. This, despite the fact that high-quality research shows the value of “belonging” to student success.
But even as home pages for DEI offices are redirected or show error messages, services may still exist. For example, the University of North Florida in Jacksonville dissolved DEI-related offices, but OneJax, which had run UNF’s Interfaith Center for 11 years, became an independent nonprofit. Elizabeth Andersen, the executive director, said the group hired the same leader who is “continuing to serve youth in an interfaith capacity on campus.”
Severing campus ties left them without office space or supports, like HR and IT, however. “It’s been a difficult nine months,” she said.
Andersen finds the anti-DEI landscape absurd. “The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion have been co-opted to be bad words is bizarre to me,” she said.
A sense of outrage fuels Carlos Guillermo Smith, a policy adviser for Equality Florida and a former state representative now running for the state senate. Smith, a UCF graduate, helped lead a large protest on campus last spring. Smith is campaigning to support abortion rights, affordable housing and college affordability — and to hold DeSantis’s administration “accountable.”
Despite the clampdown in Florida, Smith said he sees no choice but to speak up and push back. “Resistance, public pressure and litigation are the only paths” to counter “the far-right’s extreme agenda of censorship and control,” he said.” I am committed to that fight for as long as it takes.”
This story about the anti-DEI movement was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.