A school privatization activist who frequently appears on Fox News and has been praised by former President Donald Trump for his activism has been placed on administrative leave by his conservative nonprofit employer after reports emerged that he appeared in a gay porn video.
Corey DeAngelis has served since 2021 as a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, a conservative education nonprofit founded by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. (DeVos’ website lists him as the group’s past president, and the group’s website does not state his current involvement.) Asked about DeAngelis and the adult film reports, group spokeswoman Rebecca Bidlack said the staff member “has been placed on administrative leave while we further investigate the matter.” Bidlack declined to comment further.
A person similar to DeAngelis, who goes by the name “Seth Rose,” has appeared in at least three gay adult films on the porn site GayHoopla since 2014. In the videos, “Seth Rose” does not engage in sexual contact with the other performers, but rather appears in scenes masturbating alone and with other men. The existence of the videos was first reported last week by Str8 Up Gay Porn, a blog that shares gay porn and sex-related articles.
DeAngelis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
DeAngelis, who has more than 160,000 followers on X, earned his doctorate from the University of Arkansas in 2018 and has worked for several conservative nonprofits. In recent years, he has been a vocal supporter of “school choice,” which subsidizes private schools with public funds. He has also been critical of discussing LGBTQ topics in schools. In 2021, Forbes named DeAngelis to its 30 Under 30 in the education sector.
DeAngelis has been a regular guest on Fox News in recent years, where he has criticized policies that support LGBTQ students.
Speaking on Fox News last year, DeAngelis criticized the Los Angeles Unified School District for hosting a “week of action” to honor prominent LGBTQ people, including former NFL player Carl Nassib.
“I find it really odd that the far left is so obsessed with bringing sex into elementary school,” DeAngelis said on the show. “Why not just focus on the basics and get math, reading, writing and arithmetic right?”
Appearing on Fox News in May, DeAngelis criticized and connected student-led protests against the Israel-Hamas war to discussions of LGBTQ issues in public schools.
“They don’t focus on the basics like math, reading and writing,” he said. “They focus more on ‘LGBT’ than ‘ABC’.”
A representative for Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this year, DeAngelis released a book called “Parent Revolution: Saving Our Kids from the Extremists Ruining Our Schools,” which the book’s description says “exposes the hypocritical elites who are content to lock up other countries’ children in poorly run public schools.” Trump praised the book on his social media site, Truth Social, in May.
“Corey DeAngelis is a fighter for parental rights,” Trump wrote. “His new book, ‘Parent Revolution,’ is a brilliant guide for moms and dads to take back control of their children’s education from the radical Marxists who are ruining our schools.”
Trump’s endorsement of the book was pinned at the top of DeAngelis’ Instagram account and is also quoted at the top of his X account.
In July, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance shared one of DeAngelis’ X posts, which included a video in which Vance vowed to fight for kids to have “a quality education, not brainwashing.”
A spokesman for the Trump Vance campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week, DeAngelis shared an X-post from Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana that supported transgender girls playing on school sports teams that match their gender identity and mocked “Drug Story Hour,” a children’s reading program.
“Schools are meant to be places of education, not indoctrination,” the post read.
DeAngelis has not posted to any of his social media accounts since Thursday, and his website for the American Federation for Children appears to have been taken down.
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