Corey DeAngelis, a prominent right-wing school choice activist, was recently fired from the Betsy DeVos-backed American Federation for Children following the exposure of his past participation in gay-for-pay “adult” films. (He has since joined the American Culture Project as a senior fellow.) In a twist on the usual cancellation script, DeAngelis was initially targeted not by the far left but by the far right. Texas Freedom Coalition president Sarah Fields shared a suggestive old photo of DeAngelis on X, but the controversy only went viral when the right-wing Substack Current Revolt produced more sordid receipts, including videos. News outlet The 74 explains that DeAngelis, who is pro-school voucher, had run afoul of various anti-voucher MAGA entities, who believe he is enabling government takeover; school vouchers are government-funded, and allow parents to choose to send their kids to non-public schools. However, leftist media was also happy to gloat as the exposé went viral, given DeAngelis’s history of “anti-gay” rhetoric against sexualizing schoolchildren.
The ten-year-old videos capture a nude, college-age DeAngelis in a variety of raunchy scenarios, although none show him having intercourse with other men. In a long interview explaining how he was first “lured” into the industry, he claims that he got out before crossing that particular line. At first, he says he only wanted to be a fitness model, but he quickly discovered the fitness-to-porn pipeline. After spending most of his subsequent political career single, he recently married and became a father. While not proud of his past “mistakes,” he believes their exposure has only made him and his marriage stronger, and he offers his story as proof that “people can change.” Further, he tweeted that his experiences provided “the fuel that fires me to save young people” from hyper-sexualization.
Fellow mainstream conservatives and libertarians have rallied around DeAngelis, including Tiffany Justice, Chris Rufo, and Robby Soave, who wrote a spirited defense in Reason magazine. Soave rails against the “hypocrisy” of conservative institutions who claim to be against cancel culture but are now reluctant to retain ties with DeAngelis. He also rejects the idea that there is any tension between DeAngelis’s activism and his checkered past. In fact, Soave’s one point of agreement with the left is that said past isn’t intrinsically shameful. He argues there isn’t anything inherently “anti-gay” about saying that schools and families should have freedom of choice.
While Soave may be right that there is room for conservatives to show grace to DeAngelis, he’s wrong that there is no deeper tension (beyond professional embarrassment). Indeed, DeAngelis himself seems to acknowledge that tension, though he doesn’t apologize for having launched his career anyway. It could reasonably be argued that he did a disservice to his conservative colleagues by not informing them of his past; they had a right to know what was inevitably coming. However, he is at least addressing the scandal with commensurate chagrin and soberness now, recognizing that there is, in fact, shared DNA between the evil industry that exploited him and the evil forces insinuating themselves into public education.
Still, something is missing from this language of “mistakes,” or being “a victim of poor choices.” Here, as elsewhere in the landscape of areligious conservatarianism, one feels the lack of a vocabulary potent enough to capture the real stakes of the fight. In his interview, DeAngelis still tips his hat to the generic libertarian platitude of “supporting something for adults while vehemently opposing it for children.” The interviewer misses an opportunity to clarify: What exactly does DeAngelis mean by “supporting” pornography? Presumably DeAngelis believes it was objectively foolish and wrong to degrade himself for cash. He’s clearly very glad that he balked before degrading himself even further. Does he still want to argue that pornography should be a legally unregulated career path? Would he similarly argue that one can support prostitution for adults while vehemently opposing it for children?
DeAngelis says that he’s always been agnostic, but his wife is a Christian, and he has been motivated to “draw close to the church” through the scandal. This suggests that some part of him is uncomfortable with the absolution of his libertarian peers. The form of their absolution is, “You did nothing wrong.” Yet he knows this is false. So where else can he go? To whom can he turn?
Christless conservatism may sometimes function as an effective political battering ram, and it is often expedient to make common cause with it in a landscape where the devoutly religious will always be a strange and unfashionable minority. Yet the core of the movement is hollow. It lacks a full-orbed positive vision for the human person, and thus for the common good. At the end of the day, it has nothing truly substantive to offer the Corey DeAngelises of the world, beyond the obvious observation that the far left and the far right operate in bad faith. It has even less to offer those whose past sins run deeper and darker—the post-abortive woman, the parents who have subjected their children to “gender-affirming care.”
This election season, there is much grandiose talk about “rescuing the republic.” But all such rescue operations will run aground absent the recognition that our national crisis is first and foremost a spiritual crisis. For all Americans, whatever their politics, whatever their past and whatever their future, the remedy is the same.
Bethel McGrew is an essayist and social critic.
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Image by Gage Skidmore, provided via Flickr, through Creative Commons. Image cropped.
