Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis scorched Vice President Kamala Harris with a scathing response after she repeated a popular but misleading narrative about the state’s curriculum on slavery.
Harris claimed that DeSantis had instituted new standards that taught slaves benefitted from slavery and promised to do what she could to oppose the policy.
On Friday, DeSantis fired back.
“I thought it was absolutely ridiculous, it’s totally outrageous,” said the governor in a media briefing.
“You guys can look on the website at the Florida department of education, they got a lot of scholars together to do a lot of standards, and a lot of different things, but these are the most robust standards in African-American history, probably anywhere in the country,” DeSantis continued.
“Anyone who reads that will see that it’s very thorough, factual, and for them to try to demagogue it, look, that may have worked in the past, nobody’s buying their nonsense anymore,” he concluded.
Charles C.W. Cooke bolstered DeSantis’ argument in the National Review by posting the voluminous standards applying to slavery to show how deceptive Harris’ characterization was.
This is a brazen lie. It’s an astonishing lie. It’s an evil lie. It is so untrue — so deliberately and cynically misleading — that, in a sensible political culture, Harris would be obligated to issue an apology. Instead, NBC confirms that she will repeat the lie today during a speech in Jacksonville.
“There is simply no way of perusing this course and concluding that it ‘gaslights’ people or whitewashes slavery,” Cooke concludes.
DeSantis also issued a statement on Twitter about the controversy:
“Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children. Florida stands in their way and we will continue to expose their agenda and their lies,” he tweeted.
Instead of addressing DeSantis’ argument, some on the left attacked him for having white people behind him at the media briefing.
DeSantis is running for president but has retooled his campaign after trailing frontrunner former President Donald Trump in the polls.
Here’s more from Gov. DeSantis:
DeSantis on Jason Aldean backlash: We need to restore sanitywww.youtube.com
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