Florida Traffic Sign Reads “Kill All Gays,” as State Completely Demolishes Queer Rights

A traffic sign in Florida was hacked to say “Kill All Gays,” the same day that Governor Ron DeSantis signed a raft of anti-LGBTQ measures into law.

Orlando police officers received reports about the sign Wednesday morning. They arrived just before 5:00 a.m. and found the sign in the city’s medical neighborhood.

Brandon Wolf, the press secretary for the rights group Equality Florida and a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, tweeted a photo of the sign. “This is what emboldened bigotry and extremism look like,” he said.

A city spokesperson told the local Fox channel that the original sign had been put out at the start of the week as part of preparations for an upcoming 5K race. It was removed Wednesday after it had been hacked to display the homophobic message. Orlando police are still trying to determine who is responsible.

In a cruel twist, Wednesday was the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. It was also the day that DeSantis signed multiple bills curbing LGBTQ rights into law. The new laws expand “Don’t Say Gay,” ban discussion of personal pronouns in schools, and prohibit transgender people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender on any public property (including schools).

One of the bills will let the state take trans children away from families if they are receiving gender-affirming care, and another could cancel all future Pride celebrations in the state from taking place.

DeSantis, who is expected to officially announce his presidential campaign next week, has made clamping down on LGBTQ rights a major part of his platform. He also recently signed a bill defunding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at all state universities.

“The homophobia and transphobia needs to stop,” tweeted Democratic state Representative Anna Eskamani, who represents the district Orlando is in. “The rhetoric is already bad, the policies dangerous—and all of it has and will translate into violence.”

All the hurt and the hate going on here (It needs to stop here)

We are rainbows, me and you

Every color, every hue

Let’s shine through (through)

Together, we can

Start livin’ in a rainbowland

These are the lyrics that have prompted a Wisconsin school district superintendent to recommend a first-grade teacher be fired.

On Monday, Heyer Elementary first-grade teacher Melissa Tempel says, she was notified that Waukesha School District Superintendent Dr. Jim Sebert is recommending her termination, in retaliation for her complaining about the district’s decision to ban her students from singing Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton’s “Rainbowland,” a chart-leading song about hope, positivity, and love.

The escalation follows an ongoing drama that has left thousands of people across the nation scratching their heads.

In March, first graders were barred from singing “Rainbowland” at their spring concert. Tempel had been working with other teachers to prepare for the concert, and they had decided that “Rainbowland” would be a good addition to the set list. But administrators, including the school principal, barred the song’s inclusion. The opponents cited a district-wide policy on items “that may be considered political, controversial, or divisive.”

After Tempel tweeted about the ban, bringing mass public attention toward it, she was placed on administrative leave, with few details made available to the public.

“I am deeply concerned that Ms. Tempel was removed from her classroom for standing up for them and what she knows is right,” a parent from Tempel’s class said at the time.

Even State Superintendent Dr. Jill Underly weighed in, sending a letter addressed directly to Waukesha Superintendent Sebert and the Waukesha School Board, saying she was “deeply troubled by the harm caused” by their actions, imploring them that “this damage is reversible. It is paramount that you change course now.”

Underly cited Waukesha’s own policies to argue what the administrators’ course of action should be. “The district can instead choose to foster inclusive environments where staff, students, and families are able to ‘identify important issues, explore fully and fairly all sides of an issue, weigh carefully the values and factors involved, and develop techniques for formulating and evaluating positions,’” she wrote, citing the very same policy that led to the song ban.

“You can choose to re-evaluate the decision to place a district employee on administrative leave and, instead, recognize that ‘acknowledging the rights of [the district’s] professional staff members as citizens in a democratic society is, in fact, in the best interests of the School District of Waukesha,’” Underly continued.

Yet it seems, instead of reflecting on whether they may have reacted too harshly, they decided to go even further and move to fire Tempel.

“I have missed my first graders every single day since I was removed from the classroom with no notice, no ability to provide plans and no ability to communicate with my first-grade families, Tempel said in a statement. “It will take me a long time to process how cruel the District’s actions were to those families and the chilling effect my termination will have on any other educators in the Waukesha community.”

The recommended firing follows a long-standing concern by parents and teachers about district administrators policing expression within the classroom. Waukesha’s Board Policy 2240, “Controversial Issues in the Classroom,” has set guidelines for when the district would “permit” a so-called “controversial issue” to be introduced in the classroom. Along with the innocent Cyrus and Parton song, the policy has also been applied to bar students, teachers, and even classroom walls from donning rainbow designs, because of their association with the LGBTQ community.

With regard to the song banning itself, Waukesha School Board President Dr. Kelly Piacsek and Superintendent Sebert previously insisted they did not “insert themselves into the song selection.” The pair has framed the decisions as ones made by Heyer Principal Mark Schneider and the school’s music teacher, insisting that they only reviewed and upheld decisions made by Heyer’s staff. Yet they interestingly took it upon themselves to explain the exact rationale of why the song was banned. They explained that the “subject matter addressed by the song’s lyrics” was not in line with the “the age and maturity level of the students.”

While Tempel has encouraged individuals not to call the district out of concern for taking time and resources away from students, she herself plans to pursue a First Amendment claim against the district. “I cannot allow others to be intimidated into silence. These are matters of public concern that the Waukesha Community has a right to know about and I stand by my decision to share the impact of Policy 2240 with the public. I will rest easy every night knowing that I did what was right for children.”

Louisiana Republican Representative Clay Higgins manhandled a protester on Wednesday, after the activist asked other GOP members questions about their personal lives.

In a video that has gone viral, Higgins can be seen grabbing a protester and shoving him away from a press conference, repeatedly saying, “You’re out, you’re out.” At one point, Higgins uses so much force that he lifts the young man off the ground. The protester continues to say, “Get off me!”

The protester has identified himself as a 25-year-old named Jake Burdett. He told Newsweek that he had been in D.C. for a Medicare for All rally hosted by Senator Bernie Sanders. When the event ended, Burdett saw that several Republicans, including Higgins, Lauren Boebert, and Paul Gosar, were holding a press conference, so he went over to ask questions.

In videos he posted on Twitter, Burdett asks Gosar about his apparent ties to neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and his own family opposing his politics. Burdett also asks Boebert about her divorce and a food poisoning outbreak at her former restaurant Shooters Grill.

In both videos, Higgins approaches Burdett to make him stop asking questions. It’s during the questions to Boebert that Higgins begins shoving Burdett away. Burdett said on Twitter that Capitol Police officers took him to the side and questioned him. A third video shows officers asking him what happened, and someone out of frame says, “He tried to attack a member of Congress,” which was quickly refuted by other protesters. Burdett said he did not see Capitol Police questioning Higgins.

There is widespread outrage online over Higgins’s actions, including a petition calling for him to be charged with assault and battery. Retired U.S. Army General Mark Hertling called Higgins’s actions “BS” and said the representative should be charged.

Higgins did not respond to a request from The New Republic for comment.

But Higgins has a history of taking things way too far. He joined the Opelousas City Police Department in 2004, and within three years, the police chief was prepared to take major disciplinary action against Higgins for using “unnecessary force on a subject” and then later giving false statements during the investigation. Higgins resigned before he could be disciplined.

A few years later, Higgins joined St. Landry Parish sheriff’s office, where he made videos for the local Crime Stoppers program. He repeatedly got into trouble for using aggressive language about suspects in the videos. Another video he made for the state police drew pushback from the ACLU.

The St. Landry Parish sheriff accused Higgins of using his badge and uniform for personal gain, by wearing them in an ad for a security firm and using them to sell personal merchandise. Salon magazine also reported that Higgins would negotiate large speaker’s fees for events, in cash, and one time asked that the fee also cover shopping money for his wife and fuel for a friend’s private plane.

Many politicians have gotten away with behaving slightly weird, if not totally unsettlingly, especially in recent years. Perhaps that’s helped by the former president being as absurdly unusual and villainously criminal as he is. But still, Ron DeSantis is finding a way to make sure his bizarre behavior not only cuts through the headlines but remains burned into our minds forever.

As the Florida governor gets closer to finally announcing his run for president, he has had more and more time in the public eye, which means more opportunities to show how normal and fun he is—in case his vicious agenda against queer people, migrants, women, students, and teachers didn’t already win you over.

Last week, as DeSantis was soft-campaigning in Iowa, he made some friendly banter and refocused people’s attention on his … jovial behavior.

The moment brought back memories of just weeks ago, when DeSantis had a warm back-and-forth with Piers Morgan, in which the Florida governor robotically laughed while denying reports of his eating chocolate pudding with three fingers.

There was also the time DeSantis short-circuited in Tokyo when he was asked about his falling poll numbers in the 2024 primary.

To be clear, DeSantis’s aesthetics are just incidental. Emotion and expression aren’t bad things for a politician to display, even if you laugh like a Chuck-e Cheese animatronic. What’s more important is how little emotion or sorrow DeSantis seems to genuinely express about the pains of our world. Mass shootings, climate disaster, the plight of migrants; the struggle for people to find out who they are and who they love—all things any good-willed politician might express some sort of something about; instead, DeSantis is the front-runner in exacerbating those pains.

So while he may not end up winning the presidency, DeSantis can take solace knowing his leadership in hurting millions of people, with a show-stopping personality to match.

Republicans have said they want to reduce government spending and increase U.S. revenue—but not if it inconveniences rich people, apparently.

When a reporter asked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy if he would consider raising taxes on wealthy Americans, he answered with a short “No” before the question was even finished. Republicans standing around him groaned and shook their heads. They then began laughing when McCarthy asked where the reporter was earlier.

McCarthy explained that wealth taxes weren’t necessary because the United States has a revenue of 20 percent of gross domestic product, as opposed to 17 percent in previous years. Instead, inflation was due to the Democrats spending $6 trillion after winning the presidential election in 2020.

McCarthy’s statement about revenue is technically true: The U.S. revenues in 2022 totaled 19.6 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office, compared to the annual average of 17.4 percent in the five decades prior. Most of that revenue comes from income taxes.

But raising taxes on the wealthy, even by a little bit, would produce huge amounts of revenue. In 2021, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders proposed charging billionaires a 3 percent wealth tax, and households and trusts worth between $50 million and $1 billion a tax of just 2 percent per year.

This would only apply to a tiny fraction of Americans, but it could produce about $3 trillion in revenue over the next decade, University of Berkeley economists predicted.

In his budget, President Joe Biden proposed increasing taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations and using the revenue to expand health care, childcare assistance, and housing aid. Not only have Republicans fought this plan, but their own budget proposes punishing lower-income Americans to benefit the wealthy.

Republicans’ solution to the debt ceiling crisis is focused on mere pennies in comparison to what a wealth tax would do. The bill calls for work requirements for Medicaid, food stamps, and cash assistance programs—which would barely make a dent in U.S. debt. Work requirements would save the government only about $1 billion per year, according to the CBO, nowhere near how much actually needs to be recouped. And that’s assuming, of course, that such requirements actually work.

The U.S. is just weeks away from defaulting on its debt, but Republicans and Democrats remain at a logjam over how to solve the problem. The GOP seems ready to take it out on the backs of people who can least afford it.