Florida's New School Curriculum, and The Blind Side gets Blindsided

Good Morning,

Last week, I put this newsletter out to the world in a bigger way than I had ever done previously, and I am excited to see all the new people who decided to subscribe.

To the new faces reading this, here’s the quick rundown of what this newsletter is, and what it isn’t.

It’s not a pure journalistic endeavor. I am not an insider. But I do feel that I have a firm pulse on what’s going on, and the writing know-how to put it into words.

Unfolding all around us are stories both large and world shaping, to small, local, and maybe even trivial. The purpose of this newsletter is highlight these stories, usually two to three each week, ranging from political discourse you may have missed, to underreported on topics, to even a handful of in-depth personal essays. As a forewarning, my political and social biases will be on full display, but my hope is to inform you on why I’ve come to the conclusions I have. We ultimately may disagree on things, but hey, that’s life!

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Lets get to it.

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Florida’s Educational Upheaval

I distinctly remember a meme floating around in college where you would google “Florida Man” alongside your birthday. Whatever news story pops up associated with that date is now your own personal Florida man. For example, when I google “Florida man” and my birthday, my top result is “Naked Florida man, high on meth, bites K-9 dog, assaults officer”, followed closely by “Florida burglars call 911 to get help moving stuff”.

The state of Florida has long held a mixed reputation. On one hand, its a beautiful retirement destination and our third largest state by population. On the other hand, its a location rife with crazy stories that feed into its celebrity.

In recent years, Florida has been one of the highest moved to states in the country, especially by Republican voters, and specifically very pro-Trump supporters. In a sense, its become the MAGA movements own backyard, which has made it the perfect pilot site for Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign; his own personal billboard to advertise his populist policy and rhetoric to one of the GOP’s most engaged voter bases in the country.

So if we want a sense of the political messaging and policy that some GOP leadership hope to spread and install across the country, we don’t have to look much further than the Sunshine State.

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For many year’s the dismantling of our government run education system has been a primary objective and policy point of the GOP. DeSantis is even on the record saying he’d like to completely scrap the Department of Education if elected. Trump’s previous Secretary of Education Betsy Devos attempted this dismantling by driving greater investment into private school choice for families. However, DeSantis is attempting to change education not by dismantling it, but by completely altering the state curriculum through some rather extreme government measures.

In what must be one of the nuttiest attempts at a rebrand ever, the state of Florida is actually going to teach children that slavery had “real benefits” to the enslaved, and they are using an unaccredited political advocacy group called PragerU to do so.

PragerU, to those unfamiliar, is a conservative advocacy and media organization who specializes in creating digital content to “advance Judeo-Christian values." Florida, under DeSantis’s leadership, has partnered with PragerU to provide supplemental educational content for classrooms. They recently published a series of these cartoon videos aimed at kids that have circulated widely.

One video in particular depicts a cartoon of Frederick Douglass, a prominent leader of the Abolitionist movement after he escaped slavery in Maryland. The video includes a segment where Douglass teaches two cartoon children that slavery was a “compromise” between northern and southern colonies to build our nation. And even goes on to say that "There was no real movement anywhere in the world to abolish slavery before the American founding. Slavery was part of life all over the world. It was America that began the conversation to end it." This is despite the fact that slavery was outlawed in many parts of Europe in 1860 already.

So these videos are aimed at both elevating the role America had in ending slavery, while also diminishing the part America played in maintaining the practice for longer than much of the western world.

It is not a stretch to state that slavery is one of our society’s greatest sins, but I don’t think most people know how truly horrifying this practice actually was. The deep South’s brand of slavery in particular took the practice to another barbaric level. At its peak, the South was importing so many slaves, that it was in fact cheaper for slave owners (lords, really) to work slaves to death and buy replacements than it was to provide slaves with any level of “care”.

To attempt to put any positive spin on what the reality of slavery actually was, or suggest indirectly that it was in any way “beneficial” to the enslaved is at best, deeply negligent, and at worst, malicious. Stories of former slaves who were able to build normal or successful lives following emancipation are stories of triumph and perseverance in the face of the worst humanity has to offer, not stories of “well, at least slaves learned a few neat tricks during a lifetime of brutality and neglect.” To educate anyone, especially children, without the full context of how terrible slavery and the slave societies of the South were is an injustice to those who endured it.

Attempts at softening the horrors of slavery need to be resoundingly rejected and ridiculed. Its a part of our history we cannot afford to forget or misinterpret. But what’s in it for Florida? What’s in it for DeSantis? For Meatball Ron (Trump’s nickname, not mine) this drastic curriculum change falls right in line with his slogan for Florida: “Where Woke Goes to Die”.

As a reminder, “woke” is a completely nonsensical word that DeSantis has made central in his campaign messaging. It’s a word he uses to describe policies and political beliefs he disagrees with, so its definition in the public sphere ebbs and flows. But he once was forced to define it in court, and according to DeSantis’s attorney, Woke is defined as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."

So the DeSantis administration is fighting the “belief we need to address systemic injustice” in education by partnering with an unaccredited organization with a very specific set of biases. In other words, they are combatting what they claim is the brainwashing of children by… brainwashing children?

I wrote last week that I believe criticizing and calling attention to issues plaguing our country is its own form of patriotism. But what’s happening in Florida appears to be the exact opposite. The leadership of this state has selected the “head-in-sand” approach to teaching history to placate MAGA voters and prop up the DeSantis campaign.

Luckily, its not exactly working. As of writing this, the DeSantis campaign is in a complete tailspin. Since announcing his presidential run, DeSantis’s poll numbers have dropped to their lowest levels all year, and he’s fired 40% of his original staff. At this point, the best bet for the folks running the DeSantis campaign might be to just fire DeSantis himself.

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The Blind Side of The Blind Side

Do you remember that heartwarming 2009 Sandra Bullock movie The Blind Side? The one based on the true story of the a Tuohy family who adopted a semi-homeless high schooler named Michael Oher off the streets, who later become an NFL player?

Well, that cutesy heartwarming story just got a crazy 2023 epilogue.

This past Monday, the real life Michael Oher filed a civil suit against the Tuohy family who took him in, alleging that they actually never adopted him, and instead used him as a money pit to finance their mini empire of fast food franchises.

The lawsuit alleges a bunch of crazy things including:

• That Michael “had been tricked into signing an agreement to make the couple his conservators, giving them authority to make his business decisions and allowing the family to profit from his life story with "The Blind Side."

• And that “Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy negotiated a movie deal that gave them and their two biological children $225,000 each and 2.5% of the film’s net proceeds.” But Michael’s own contract with 20th Century Fox “gave away his story rights without any payment whatsoever," the petition alleges.

The irony to this whole story is that a central part of the plot of The Blind Side involves an NCAA Investigator who is looking into the family because the NCAA believes the adoption of Michael Oher may have been financially motivated. To us as the audience, this investigation is depicted as sham. We’re shown that the Touhy’s are a loving family who adopted Michael out of the goodness of their hearts, and definitely not because at 17 he was built like a top college and NFL prospect.

Now, everything alleged in the lawsuit could wind up being untrue, and its also possible we never find out the whole truth. However its interesting to note this lawsuit didn’t exactly come out of nowhere.

Michael Oher actually published a memoir in 2011 about his life and upbringing. In it he called out a handful of issues he took with the movie The Blind Side, chief among them that he “felt like (the film) portrayed me as dumb instead of as a kid who had never had consistent academic instruction and ended up thriving once he got it.”

So it would seem the cinematic depiction of Michael’s life didn’t exactly sit well with him from the get-go.

One of the premises of this newsletter is my belief that a strong and effective story can change peoples perception, beliefs, and drive action. In the case of The Blind Side story, while it resonated well with general audiences, it would seem this 2009 Oscar winning film provided a new lens for which Michael viewed and reflected on his own life and upbringing. And for better or worse, it would appear that perception has changed.