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Corey DeAngelis, a right-wing advocate against LGBTQ+ rights and public schools who was recently alleged to have performed in several gay adult films, also contributed to the Heritage Foundation’s infamous “Project 2025” policy blueprint, as The Advocate first reported this week.
DeAngelis’ name appears on page 27 of the full Project 2025 document, which lays out a plan to dramatically reshape the U.S. government around a far-right agenda in the event of a second Donald Trump presidency. He is listed as a “contributor” to the plan in his capacity as a senior fellow for the American Federation for Children (AFC), a conservative advocacy group for private and charter schools (and against teachers’ unions) founded and chaired by Betsy DeVos until she was named Trump’s Secretary of Education in 2016. DeAngelis is also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank best known for its fight to privatize Social Security.
DeAngelis has called for the Department of Education to be abolished, one of Project 2025’s main goals, and previously spoke at Heritage Foundation events as an AFC mouthpiece. “The kids have a union of their own now, they’re called parents, and they can beat the [teachers’] unions at their own game,” DeAngelis told a Heritage audience in June. He is also steadfastly anti-LGBTQ+, telling Fox News in May this year that public schools are “focusing more on the ‘LGBTs’ than the ‘ABCs’” and derisively posting online about the “woke mind virus” — an anti-LGBTQ+ dog whistle made popular on the right by leaders like Jordan Peterson, whom DeAngelis has promoted, and Elon Musk. DeAngelis has built a career railing against “left-wing indoctrination” in “government schools,” the subject of his 2024 book The Parent Revolution, which claims to teach parents how to “rescue” their children from “the radicals ruining our schools.”
But DeAngelis is also the most recent conservative ideologue to seemingly be caught literally with his pants down. DeAngelis is alleged to have performed in adult films under the name “Seth Rose” in 2014 for the porn studio GayHoopla. As nonprofit education news site The 74 noted, DeAngelis was actually felled by his fellow conservatives: The revelations were first posted on X (formerly Twitter) in July by podcaster Sarah Fields, then picked up last week by “Current Revolt,” a far-right Substack blogger who found details of “Seth Rose’s” filmography. (We suppose he never imagined the leopards would eat his face.) The allegations were then spread even further by activist, podcaster, and content creator Matt Bernstein.
Shortly after his alleged adult film history was exposed, AFC confirmed that DeAngelis had been put on leave. DeAngelis himself has been silent, and did not respond to multiple requests for comment, according to The Advocate; he has also not posted to social media since September 19, leading American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten — a frequent target for DeAngelis’ ire — to wonder wryly, “Has anyone heard from Corey DeAngelis in the last few days? He normally tweets at me incessantly - he’s been very silent. Hope he’s ok.”
As with so many other instances of conservative queer hypocrisy, DeAngelis shouldn’t be ashamed of allegedly having done gay porn in the past; rather, he should be ashamed of making money from gay porn, then helping enact political agendas like Project 2025, which also contains a plan to ban pornography as a whole.
“DeAngelis’ fraud on school districts across the country should be seen for what it is: an anti-LGBTQ attack, underwritten by the most extreme anti-LGBTQ groups,” said GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis in a statement to The Advocate earlier this week. “DeAngelis and Heritage have no business anywhere near America’s schools, students, and families.”
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