A22 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022
beings, so I don’t understand the
purpose of withholding informa-
tion from them,” said Hough, 48, a
former Republican who recently
became a Democrat and decided
to run for the Brevard County
School Board. “If DeSantis gets
reelected in 2022, I really fear the
rules will be so stringent that local
school boards won’t even be able
to function at that point, and the
state will be the end-all-be-all of all
rules.”
DeSantis, however, continues
to highlight his “anti-woke” agen-
da at public events, suggesting he
believes it’s a political winner. At a
recent speech in Gainesville to
distribute funding for workforce
education programs, DeSantis
said the concept of critical race
theory is “denigrating our coun-
try.”
“We want to make sure people
can go to school without being
scapegoated or without being tar-
geted,” DeSantis said. “And I think
that’s where the vast, vast majority
of people want to be.”
But Patton, the GOP strategist,
said some of his clients in the
Florida legislature are privately
“exasperated” over having to con-
sider DeSantis’s bills, believing the
governor is trading short-term po-
litical support for the party’s long-
term image among “young voters
and college-educated voters.”
“How do you legislate someone
feeling discomfort?” Patton asked.
“To a lot of [GOP lawmakers], it
doesn’t make intellectual sense.”
For now, MacManus, the politi-
cal scientist, said DeSantis has
clearly tapped into the skepticism
many suburban White parents
who “vote their kids” feel around
these issues. Those voters tradi-
tionally turn out in higher num-
bers in a midterm election, she
said.
In recent weeks, however, Mac-
Manus has seen Black mothers —
who also tend to have robust turn-
out — become more galvanized in
opposition to DeSantis’s efforts.
What remains unclear, Mac-
Manus said, is how various seg-
ments of the state’s Latino com-
munity view the debate.
“[Critical race theory] means
different things, to different peo-
ple depending on their circum-
stances, their backgrounds and
their country of origin,” said Mac-
Manus, adding that the debate
over DeSantis’s proposal remains
largely anchored in “Black or
White” terms.
In Miami, some parents say
they are starting to pay closer
attention to how the proposals
could affect their children’s educa-
tion.
Liliana Vera, who has three chil-
dren in Miami-Dade schools, is a
first-generation American of Cu-
ban and Argentine descent.
In an interview, Vera, 34, re-
called a lesson her daughter re-
ceived on voting rights, which she
now worries will be prohibited if
the legislation is enacted.
“The teacher gave them each a
slip of paper and said they would
vote on whether the class got re-
cess. Then the teacher took away
the papers from all the girls, and
then from all the Black and Brown
students, and that left only the
White kids with the right to vote,”
Vera said.
“I absolutely agreed with that
lesson,” Vera said. “We don’t need
to shield kids from the facts. They
can handle the truth.”Te d Mellnik contributed to this report.servative voters will play a crucial
role in deciding the GOP nominee.
“What is happening is our gov-
ernor is competing with the gover-
nor of Texas over who will be the
heir apparent to Donald Trump,”
said Florida House Democratic
Whip Ramon Alexander, who is
Black. “It’s all about who can go to
the farthest extremes of the Re-
publican Party.”
Even some Florida Republicans
lament DeSantis’s approach,
which they describe as divisive
and a step back from how past
state GOP leaders have governed.
“Our party has become mean, and
driven by emotion on whom we
dislike,” said Alex Patton, a Gaines-
ville-based Republican consultant
and pollster. “But that is the driv-
ing force in American politics
right now.”
Florida legislators are debating
two versions of DeSantis’s Stop
Woke Act, known as SB148 in the
state Senate and HB7 in the
House. DeSantis uses “woke” as an
acronym he devised for “Wrongs
to Our Kids and Employees.”
Under the Senate bill, Florida
businesses could not mandate
that employees attend diversity
trainings that cause any individu-
al to “feel discomfort, guilt, an-
guish, or any form of psychologi-
cal distress.” Employees who are
distressed by a training could file a
lawsuit against their employers.
The Senate bill also sets new
standards for school curriculum,
requiring districts to teach “the
history and content” of the Decla-
ration of Independence and prop-
er forms of patriotism. Teachers
and lesson plans may not imply
that any “individual is inherently
racist, sexist, or oppressive,
whether consciously or uncon-
sciously.”
“An individual, by virtue of his
or her race or sex, does not bear
responsibility for actions commit-
ted in the past by other members
of the same race or sex,” the legisla-
tion states.
HB7 is even more expansive,
giving parents and state regula-
tors considerable authority to ban
books or teachings that cause dis-
comfort, including carefully re-
viewing lessons about “the Civil
War, the expansion of the United
States... the world wars, and the
civil rights movement.”
A separate bill in the Senate,
SB1300, would also appoint a
state-trained reviewer in each
school district to look over curric-
ulums and textbooks, and estab-
lish procedures for any parents or
resident to file objections to ma-
terial they find offensive. Law-
makers are also considering bills
that would bar teachers from dis-
cussing sexual orientation in pri-
mary school, giving parents the
right to sue school districts that
violate the policy.
Vonzell Agosto, a professor of
curriculum studies at the Univer-
sity of South Florida, said the Stop
Woke Act looks very similar to an
executive order signed by then-
President Donald Trump in 2020
that barred the use of “divisive
concepts,” including the idea that
the United States is “fundamental-
ly racist or sexist.”
If it becomes law in Florida, she
said, teachers will abandon les-anyone to object to any instruc-
tion in public school classrooms.
DeSantis wants to give people the
right to sue schools and teachers
over what they teach based on
student “discomfort.” The pro-
posed legislation is far-reaching
and could affect even corporate
human resources diversity train-
ing.
While the legislation mirrors
national efforts to ban critical race
theory in schools, the debate in
Florida has turned especially raw
and emotional, a testament to
how central multiculturalism is to
the state’s identity. Many parents
and teachers — who note that
critical race theory is not taught in
Florida’s public schools and is al-
ready banned under state law —
fear the legislation would force
teachers to whitewash history, lit-
erature and religion courses.
In recent days, advocates on
both sides of Florida’s ideological
divide have said they are girding
for a divisive political fight in a
state where more than 1 in 5 resi-
dents are foreign-born and nearly
half the population is Latino,
Black or Asian American.
Political analysts say the battle
could have wide-ranging impacts
that carry over into the 2022 mid-
terms and DeSantis’s reelection
campaign.
Florida voters have shifted to
the right in recent elections. But
many analysts remain skeptical
that residents want to upend how
cultural and ethnic histories are
shared in classrooms and work-
places, raising questions about
how far DeSantis can tug at the
seams of Florida’s demographic
makeup.
“A lot of people have been beg-
ging the Republican Party to be
more inclusive, and if you look at
the gains that were made in 2020,
it was with Latino Republicans,”
said Susan A. MacManus, a retired
political science professor at the
University of South Florida and a
widely respected state political
analyst. “But things change, and
with the debate over [critical race
theory]... we may see challenged
doctrines with regards to party
voting and ethnic voting, and the
old tried-and-true explanations
may no longer apply.”
In speeches, DeSantis has
sought to frame his “anti-woke”
agenda as pushback against “a
form of cultural Marxism” that
elevates some historical lessons
while downplaying others.
“The goal is to delegitimize the
founding of this country, the prin-
ciples that the founders relied on,
our institutions, our constitution,
to tear basically at the fabric of our
society,” DeSantis said in a recent
speech at the Common Sense Soci-
ety, an international research in-
stitute popular with conserva-
tives. “And they want to replace it
with effectively left-wing ideology
as the founding ethos of America.
That would be a disaster.”
Florida Democratic lawmakers,
who have been in the minority for
nearly a generation, argue that
DeSantis is polarizing the state
while positioning himself for a
possible presidential campaign,
where predominantly White, con-
FLORIDA FROM A1
GOP pushes ‘anti-woke’
bill in diverse Florida
BY DAN LAMOTHEDeclassified U.S. military anal-
yses of the calamitous exit from
Afghanistan detail repeated in-
stances of friction between Amer-
ican troops and diplomats before
and during the evacuation, con-
cluding that indecisiveness
among Biden administration offi-
cials in Washington and initial
reluctance to shutter the embassy
in Kabul sowed chaos and put the
overall mission at “increased
risk.”
Two “after action” reports were
prepared by officials assigned to
U.S. Central Command in Sep-
tember, about three weeks after
the final planeload of military
personnel departed Hamid
Karzai International Airport. The
assessments appear to affirm sep-
arate accounts of senior U.S. com-
manders frustrated by what they
characterized as sloppy, misguid-
ed management of the withdraw-
al.
As The Washington Post first
reported Tuesday, military lead-
ers who coordinated the evacua-
tion fault officials in the White
House and the State Department
whom, they say, failed to respect
the Taliban’s swift advance last
year and resisted pleas from the
military to prepare for an evacua-
tion weeks before Kabul’s fall.
The declassified after-action
analyses are contained within an
official report detailing the mili-
tary’s investigation of an Aug. 26
suicide bombing outside the air-
port’s Abbey Gate that killed an
estimated 170 Afghans and 13 U.S.
service members. The report, ob-
tained by The Washington Post
through a Freedom of Informa-
tion Act request, comprises doz-
ens of witness interviews, find-
ings of fact, and other official
government records. Spanning
2,000 pages, it presents the most
extensive, unvarnished account
to date of the United States’
1 7-day race to end its longest war.
The existence of the after-ac-
tion reports contradicts claims
made Friday by White House
press secretary Jen Psaki, who
has joined President Biden and
other administration officials in
seeking to downplay the signifi-
cance of U.S. commanders’ re-
marks.
“I think it’s important for peo-
ple to understand that there was
no after-action report,” Psaki told
reporters in the White House
briefing room.
A National Security Council
official, speaking on the condi-
tion of anonymity because the
matter remains highly sensitive,
said Saturday that Psaki’s state-
ment from the podium referred to
a forthcoming, more extensive
review of the war’s endgame.
“Many people have wrongly
conflated the Abbey Gate report
and documents released to The
Washington Post with the Penta-
gon’s after-action review of Af-
ghanistan — a broad report that
will examine the final months of
America’s longest war, beginning
in February 2020,” the official
said, referencing the month thatPresident Donald Trump made a
deal with the Taliban, setting the
stage for a withdrawal of all U.S.
troops.
The Biden administration has
pointed to that deal — in which
Trump agreed to pull all U.S.
troops by May 2021 — in explain-
ing part of its rationale for leaving
Afghanistan. After a months-long
review, the president delayed the
final exit until September but
followed through nonetheless,
saying that Americans had sacri-
ficed enough.
The official said the White
House stands by the findings of
the Abbey Gate investigation. It
concluded that the Aug. 26 attack
was carried out by a lone Islamic
State operative who had a bomb
rigged with ball bearings to cause
catastrophic carnage in a packed
outdoor corridor just outside the
airport. Senior military officials
briefed those conclusions at the
Pentagon on Feb. 4.
Biden administration officials
have offered shifting responses to
the critical firsthand accounts of
senior military commanders and
other U.S. troops involved in the
evacuation effort.
President Biden said in an in-
terview with NBC News on Thurs-
day that he was “rejecting” the
commanders’ accounts, though
White House officials said later
that he accepted the narrow, over-
all findings of the Abbey Gate
report. On Tuesday, State Depart-
ment spokeswoman Jalina Porter
described the comments of the
military officials as having been“cherry-picked” from the larger
report. A State Department offi-
cial said Saturday that he could
not comment on the Defense De-
partment’s after-action analyses.
The after-action reviews in-
cluded in the Abbey Gate report
were completed by U.S. Forces-
Afghanistan Forward, the mili-
tary headquarters that oversaw
the withdrawal, and Joint Task
Force-Crisis Response, a unit led
by the U.S. Marine Corps that also
was involved. Their findings
closely hew to observations made
by Rear Adm. Peter Vasely and
Brig. Gen. Farrell Sullivan, who
were responsible for coordinat-
ing the evacuation.
The after-action report by U.S.
Forces-Afghanistan Forward,
which Vasely oversaw, is dated
Sept. 24 and titled “Operation
Allies Refuge,” the name the
Biden administration assigned to
the evacuation mission. It deter-
mined that decisions to delay
reducing the size of the U.S. Em-
bassy’s staff in Kabul and declare
a formal evacuation of American
citizens and Afghan allies compli-
cated the military’s ability to exe-
cute its mission.
An Aug. 10 interagency table-
top exercise to rehearse the evac-
uation “identified the deteriorat-
ing situation which predicted the
full isolation of Kabul within the
next 30 days,” but no decision to
evacuate was made then, accord-
ing to the report. Instead, a day
later embassy staff informally re-
quested military support to grad-
ually downsize and shift opera-tions to the airport “over a 17 day
period,” the report said.
In their witness statements to
Army officials investigating the
airport bombing, Vasely and oth-
er officers described the delayed
evacuation as fateful.
U.S. troops would have been
“much better prepared to con-
duct a more orderly” evacuation,
Vasely told the investigators, “if
policymakers had paid attention
to the indicators of what was
happening on the ground.”
The evacuation order was de-
clared after the central govern-
ment in Kabul collapsed on Aug.
15 as the Taliban completed a
months-long rise, seizing numer-
ous provincial capitals and even-
tually encircling Kabul, where a
skeleton force of about 600 U.S.
troops remained to provide secu-
rity for the diplomats. The crisis
triggered the deployment of more
than 5,000 additional U.S. troops,
some of whom had been staged in
the region. Over the next two
weeks, more than 124,000 people
were flown to safety.
The after-action report pre-
pared by Vasely’s headquarters
says the decision to delay closing
the embassy left commanders
about 12 hours to empty out the
embassy with State Department
collaboration. It recommends
that future crisis planning
“should include a discussion on
building consensus” while ready-
ing an evacuation operation
“with triggers for action that
should be taken to avoid strategic
surprise.”The report also states that U.S.
troops struggled in the bombing’s
aftermath. There was a “severe
failure” in patient administration
and tracking, the report says,
including one instance when a set
of human remains and a patient
in critical care were misidenti-
fied, resulting in the wrong name
being reported to more senior
commanders.
“The discrepancy was discov-
ered prior to [family] notifica-
tion,” the report says.
The second after-action analy-
sis included in the Abbey Gate
report focuses heavily on the ac-
tions of U.S. Marines at the air-
port. It concludes that after Af-
ghanistan’s government col-
lapsed, there was “insufficient
airlift” in the region needed to
rapidly boost the number of U.S.
forces at the airport.
“While considered in the plan-
ning phase, the scope and scale of
the desperation population was
not fully appreciated,” the report
states, referring to the tens of
thousands of civilians who con-
verged on Kabul’s airport seeking
a way out of Afghanistan.
The State Department at times
sent messages to potential evacu-
ees that “conflicted with gate
conditions and real-time capabil-
ities” at the airfield, military offi-
cials wrote in the second after-ac-
tion report. It warns that the
Defense and State departments
must have personnel at all levels
“plan, cooperate and endeavor to
stick to the plan” to successfully
carry out future evacuations.Afghanistan reports back commanders who said Biden team was indecisive
race purposefully did it, and so
now that race is forever con-
demned, and another race is for-
ever exalted. That just doesn’t add
up. That’s just not right.”
Tina Descovich, a leader of
Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based
conservative group that advocates
for “parental rights,” said DeSan-
tis is merely responding to parents
who have been “opening up back-
packs” and finding history lessons
or class assignments that are “divi-
sive,” especially for students in
elementary school.
“To say there were slaves is one
thing, but to talk in detail about
how slaves were treated, and with
photos, is another,” said Des-
covich, 47.
Asked what age would be ap-
propriate for detailed lessons
about the treatment of enslaved
people, Descovich said it should
be up to parents to decide.
“Moms in each community
need to have a voice in that discus-
sion,” said Descovich, who has
been trying to position Moms for
Liberty as a nationwide political
force in the 2022 midterm elec-
tions.
Other Florida parents have
started organizing against Moms
for Liberty and their allies in the
Florida Legislature.
Lisa Schurr, an attorney who
lives in Sarasota, and three other
women recently founded Support
Our Schools, a statewide group
that advocates for what they de-
scribe as diverse, fact-based
school curriculums and text-
books.
“We are all appalled about what
is happening in Florida,” said
Schurr, 62. “They don’t want our
kids to be critical thinkers.... And
to say [a student] can’t feel dis-
comfort. What about the child of
color? What about the gay child?
You don’t think this legislation is
making them feel discomfort? You
don’t think they have felt discom-
fort for all of their lives?”
Kim Hough, a Melbourne
mother aligned with another new-
ly formed group, Families for Safe
Schools, said she is alarmed at
how quickly the conservative pa-
rental rights movement transi-
tioned into a major, statewide po-
litical force.
“We are all trying to raise social-
ly responsible human beings, in
addition to well-educated humanwrong with that,” said Payne, who
previously did human resources
work for cruise lines.
But the push to crack down on
what legislators view as critical
race theory, an intellectual move-
ment that examines how policies
and laws perpetuate systemic rac-
ism, has galvanized conservative
parents around the state.
For more than a year, angry
parents — who began by protest-
ing mask mandates — have been
crowding into school board meet-
ings objecting to lesson plans that
touch on race, gender or sexual
orientation.
In response to that pressure,
Polk County Public Schools re-
cently removed 16 books from the
library including “The Kite Run-
ner” by Khaled Hosseini and “Two
Boys Kissing” by David Levithan.
Rick Stevens, a pastor who is
co-founder and director of the
Florida Citizens Alliance, a con-
servative advocacy group, said
parents are “horrified” to learn
that some children are being
taught explicit or potentially
traumatic history lessons in class-
rooms. He is especially worried
that lessons about slavery could
make White children feel guilty
over the actions of their ances-
tors.
“What we don’t want teachers
to do is to take sides, and that’s the
objectivity that I believe the gover-
nor is trying to solve,” Stevens
said. “We want them to take sides
that slavery was wrong, but they
don’t need to take sides that onesons on issues ranging from the
history of civil rights to the Holo-
caust.
“Part of the way you teach the
Holocaust in the state of Florida is
associating it with prejudice and
racism,” Agosto said. “Once you
make teaching racism taboo,
you’ve made it very difficult to
teach about antisemitism.... I
don’t understand how you’d teach
the civil rights movement without
connecting it to economic injus-
tice and racism.”
Rywell, the Miami Beach teach-
er, said if the legislation passes he
suspects most teachers will be-
come even more cautious with
their words, denying students the
benefit of freewheeling classroom
discussions.
“Teaching is a constant set of
judgment calls,” Rywell said. “To
try to specify, ‘This is what you can
say, this is what you can’t say,’ is
very, very difficult. Every word can
be interpreted differently.”
Other flash points in the legisla-
tion are provisions that give em-
ployees the right to file legal chal-
lenges if they are subjected to
workplace diversity trainings that
make them uncomfortable. Rosa-
lie Ellis Payne, the interim dean of
Florida Memorial University’s
business school, said those provi-
sions could gut corporate train-
ings in the state’s highly diverse
tourism industry.
“You’ll have people in hiring
positions who will go back to just
dealing with folks who look like
them, and they will see nothingEVA MARIE UZCATEGUI/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Students arrive at a public school in Miami Lakes, Fla., in August. Some parents and teachers fear the
Stop Woke Act would force educators to whitewash how they teach history, literature and religion.REBECCA BLACKWELL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is up for reelection this year, could
be positioning himself for a 2024 presidential bid, Democrats say.