Busted on video: Corey DeAngelis, school choice evangelist, is in ...

Corey DeAngelis came to Little Rock in January of 2023 to promote school choice and help Arkansas Republicans pass their Arkansas LEARNS Act. Credit: Brian Chilson

Shout out to The Advocate, an outlet for LGBTQ news, for doing the work here.

Advocate reporter Christopher Wiggins delved into the did-he-or-didn’t-he controversy that’s been brewing since word started circulating last week that Corey DeAngelis, school choice evangelist, used to star in gay porn under the stage name “Seth Rose.”

This would be all well and good, except that DeAngelis has made a name for himself by attacking wokeness in public schools generally and targeting queer people specifically. DeAngelis has argued that public school teachers indoctrinate their students with progressive ideologies, and he champions vouchers as an off-ramp for families who want to avoid that sort of thing. Public schools are “focusing more on the LGBTs than the ABCs,” DeAngelis lamented recently on Fox News.

So, is the guy who wins it all in the “Jerk-Off Race” the same guy who wrote “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools”? The guy Arkansas Republicans brought to town in 2023 to shill for vouchers and lead a ballroom full of private and charter school children in a school choice cheer? The Advocate’s analysis indicates as much:

“The Advocate has not been able to independently confirm that DeAngelis is the person who appeared in the adult films, but The Advocate compared images and audio of DeAngelis with Rose. Our analysis of the clips suggests they are the same.”

The American Federation for Children, a school choice organization where DeAngelis was a senior fellow, scrubbed him from their website.

More telling, however, is the radio silence from DeAngelis himself, a prolific social media troll who hasn’t uttered a peep in nearly a week.

His fans in Arkansas have been quiet, too. Rep. Keith Brooks, a Pulaski County Republican who was the lead sponsor for Gov. Sarah Sanders’ LEARNS Act to establish a universal school voucher system, did not respond to an email seeking comment on DeAngelis’ exciting plot twist.

Brooks even deleted a social media post from the good old days of January 2023, before someone looked at the internet and realized Corey DeAngelis and Seth Rose are one and the same.

Arkansas Republicans were big fans of Corey DeAngelis. What happened? (This post has been deleted.)

DeAngelis earned his doctorate in education philosophy from the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, and Brooks’ affection for a fellow UA alum was mutual. Here’s a tweet from DeAngelis about his buddy Brooks.

Arkansas Representative KEITH BROOKS: "No longer will we leave parents in the dark. No longer will we do anything but break down every barrier that stands in the way for the kids of Arkansas to lead. Anything less than that is no longer acceptable." pic.twitter.com/gNF8InF6s8 — Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) February 28, 2023

And another.

Arkansas Representative KEITH BROOKS: "today we empower parents and fund students over systems." pic.twitter.com/fiLUC1zPa0 — Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) March 9, 2023

Oh, wow. DeAngelis really likes Brooks a lot.

Clearly, DeAngelis did some cheerleading to help push Arkansas LEARNS to the finish line.

And once it was done, Sanders sent out a press release that included DeAngelis’ praise for the new legislation:

Governor Sanders is based. She is an unapologetic education freedom fighter. Her proposal will unleash education freedom and make Arkansas a national leader on school choice. This is the only way to truly secure parental rights in education. The proposal by Governor Sanders will unlock education freedom for all Arkansas parents, allowing every single family to take their children’s education dollars to the education providers of their choosing. Every governor should follow the lead of Sarah Huckabee Sanders and empower families with educational opportunities.

Does his now-exposed hypocrisy call into question the ideological underpinnings of the school choice movement in Arkansas? I’d say so, but who knows what the governor thinks? Her office did not respond to a request for comment.

Sanders herself sends her children to a private school that declines to admit students from families that don’t subscribe to “the biblical definition of marriage, the attendant boundaries of sexuality and moral conduct, and the clear biblical teaching that gender is both sacred and established by God’s design.” Not certain where gay porn fits in here, but we’re betting it’s not sanctioned by the Little Rock Christian community.

But what does it mean that a carnival barker for school choice is exposed for not exactly practicing what he preaches?

Research increasingly shows academic outcomes for voucher students are not as great as the salesmen make them out to be, so it makes sense that some chicanery is required on the part of school choice shills. Now that we know that DeAngelis has acted (?) professionally before, it makes you wonder if his voucher rallies and Fox News appearances were all just an act, too.

The Republican Freak Week of the past seven days has been a lot to take in, with Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz accused of bringing a 17-year-old to a coke party and North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson revealed to be a self-proclaimed Black Nazi who called for Al Sharpton’s assassination and bragged online about doing wildly unsanitary things with his sister-in-law.

Some schadenfreude is impossible to resist. But Peter Greene, an educator-turned-writer, offered up a good way to think through the DeAngelis situation:

I don’t wish DeAngelis ill, even though he so often wished people ill straight to their faces. At the same time, I don’t wish him to be spared the karma that he has so richly and ambitiously earned; he used cultural panic over LGBTQ persons to help him sell vouchers and troll armies to try to silence anyone who dared to disagree with him. He had a choice to pursue his ambitions without being awful to other human beings, and he chose being awful. And you can’t spread toxins all around you without getting soaked in it yourself.

Greene was already on DeAngelis’ case back in July for more buttoned-up reasons, weeks before we ever heard of a gay porn actor named Seth Rose who looked awfully familiar.

Austin Gelder is the editor of the Arkansas Times and loves to write about government, politics and education. Send me your juiciest gossip, please. More by Austin Gelder