A shamefully bogus story promoted by Vice President Kamala Harris has taken an amusing turn. You might call it a “self-own.”
First, a little backstory.
In January, the Florida Department of Education rejected the Advanced Placement standards for African American history produced by College Board. The department cited a lack of educational value and historical inaccuracy as the reason.
To cut to the chase, it was ideological indoctrination masquerading as “history.”
The Left went bonkers and tried to portray the move as evidence that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is a “racist” who doesn’t want Florida schoolchildren to learn about black history.
The Left couldn’t really make the accusation stick, DeSantis remained popular, and Florida moved on with creating its own alternative curriculum. But the Left just couldn’t let it go, especially now that DeSantis is running for president.
In a July 20 speech in Jacksonville, Florida, Vice President Kamala Harris said that middle school students in Florida are “to be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”
Whoa, what? Florida says slavery is good? DeSantis is really Jefferson Davis 2.0?
No.
Charles Cooke at National Review did an excellent job at shredding the vice president’s slavery line.
“This is a brazen lie. It’s an astonishing lie. It’s an evil lie,” Cooke said of Harris’ accusation. “It is so untrue—so deliberately and cynically misleading—that, in a sensible political culture, Harris would be obligated to issue an apology.”
Cooke listed every mention of slavery—more than 190 of them—in the Florida curriculum, and it’s hard to see anything there that could even be slightly construed as saying that slavery was “beneficial.” Apparently, there is a single line that notes how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Has Harris never heard of Frederick Douglass?
“They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us,” Harris said following her line about Florida teaching that slavery was good. I’m not sure if she blinked, winked, or otherwise gave a signal to the reporters covering the speech, but the legacy media quickly picked up that line and took it as marching orders.
Not only has Harris not issued an apology, the liberal media followed up by continuing to gin up as much hysteria as possible. No surprise there.
They really are just going to repeat this lie repeatedly until it sticks.
Here’s the kicker, though.
There’s been an amusing follow-up to this story. On Wednesday, DeSantis’ press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, posted part of the AP African American studies curriculum—you know, the curriculum students had to receive in Florida to get real, not racist, history—on Twitter.
This was labeled “essential knowledge.”
In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free, [African] Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.
There you have it. Not only was the whole “pro-slavery” thing based on pure nonsense, but the original rejected AP African American studies curriculum that Harris and the Left threw a tantrum over says essentially the same thing.
Amazing. I guess that line is now both racist and anti-racist. There’s a glitch in the Matrix.
So, what are we to make of this whole brouhaha?
The debate over history is really a sideshow. Democrats and the legacy media (I know, I repeat myself) are desperate to portray conservatives as wild-eyed fanatics.
That DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have been effective in thwarting their ideological control of schools and nearly everything else in the state is a cause for panic on the Left. What if every red and purple state began copying that model? For the Left, that would be an existential threat.
In response, they are going into full hysteria mode. They know that the Democratic base is already likely to see a racist around every corner. Portraying any remotely successful conservative-leaning group as proto-fascist is an easy way to get them fired up.
Just look at how they have smeared Moms for Liberty as pro-Nazi. Does truth or reality matter? Nah. If a successful conservative group can be labeled beyond the pale, that’s all that matters. And often that’s all they need to get “mainstream” organizations to cancel and blackball those conservatives.
More importantly, Democrats and their media allies want to create a frenzy, a deluge of hit pieces about the Florida curriculum to get independents and moderate Republicans to think there’s maybe some truth to the charge that neo-Confederates got ahold of Florida’s government.
Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be working.
Americans are flocking to the Sunshine State in record numbers while the media keeps frantically trying to portray it as a totalitarian nightmare.
Not only is Florida doing great, but people of differing political persuasions seem to find the state’s current course as altogether reasonable.
If anything has been revealed here, it’s not that Florida is racist and pro-slavery; it’s how Democrats have become completely reliant on bogus media narratives to get their way. They don’t even care if they are contradicting their prior narrative from a moment ago.
What remains to be seen is how much mileage Democrats can continue to get from running the same rancid play over and over again.
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