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Kamala Harris pounds the demogoguery table with lies about Florida's educational curriculum

Kamala Harris, who does little more than Instagrams of herself as vice president, has suddenly roused herself to go to Florida to attack the local educational establishment with mendacious speeches loaded with demogoguery.

According to Charlie Cooke, writing at National Review:

NBC reports that Kamala Harris intends to visit Florida today to criticize its new school curriculum:

In remarks Thursday, Harris blasted efforts in some states to ban books and “push forward revisionist history.”

“Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” she said at a convention for the traditionally Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta Inc. “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”

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.

Cooke picked through the entire curriculum and found nothing but harsh realism about the conditions endured by slaves in the U.S. during the time of slavery. He even included a list so long it can't be reproduced here.

The single passage that Harris is screaming about as racist, raacist, raaacist, as well as calling 'gaslighting' and spewing other lies about is that enslaved people sometimes learned skills which they were later able to use to benefit themselves after liberation and in some instances, before.

Cooke noted this.

If you are able to read it and conclude that the single reference to slaves developing skills (which I’ve bolded) is indicative of the narrative direction of the course, rather than a tiny (and correct) part of it, then you are beyond saving and you deserve to live your life as an ignoramus. There is simply no way of perusing this course and concluding that it “gaslights” people or whitewashes slavery. Among many, many other things, it includes sections on “the conditions for Africans during their passage to America”; “the living conditions of slaves in British North American colonies, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, including infant mortality rates”; “the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations (e.g., undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free)”; “the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease)”; “how the South tried to prevent slaves from escaping and their efforts to end the Underground Railroad”; the “overwhelming death rates” caused by the practice; the many ways in which “Africans resisted slavery”; “the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms”; and “the struggles faced by African American women in the 19th century as it relates to issues of suffrage, business and access to education.”

That passage that Harris is yelling about has the sound of truth to it -- as some enslaved people had been used as blacksmiths, tanners, or or performed other labor requiring some kind of training and then when they were freed, were in better shape than other enslaved people, as well as the poor white "trash" in the area, to work for income as free people. 

Did this boob really think that slave-owning plantation owners would pay tradesmen in town for their blacksmithing needs? They didn't pay for any labor, why would they pay for high-priced skilled labor?

Is she trying to tell us that the enslaved people who worked as blacksmiths somehow "forgot" their blacksmithing skills once they were freed in 1863, or by 1865?

Let;s just say this proud product of public schools, as she says, is an idiot.

Having skills may not have even been ideal for the enslaved peoples -- maybe the trained blacksmith really wanted to become an artist or teacher, but had to forge iron and shoe horses to feed his family, because it was reality in an oppressive era. There is no racism in learning such realities.

This is what we call intellectual inquiry and discussion, to examine all the subtle issues found in a historic era in order to understand it.

Nothing was whitewashed here, the harshness was more than cursorily noted.

Harris however, wants to paint a world with all rage and no shades of gray and dark gray, a world of Black Lives Matter attacks and fanaticism where no intellectual inquiry of any kind can happen. 

This is why we can't have nice things in academica -- and why liberal arts departments in most universities are smoking ruins of wokedom.

It's pretty important that this kind of demogoguery for political points be countered in Florida with more than soft dismissals such as we are seeing. The curriculum is actually very good, very truthful, very nuanced and careful with facts and children of all colors will benefit.

Harris, on the other hand, the descendant of actual slave trading profiteers from Jamaica, promotes none of those things. She's out to whip up political advantage and raise campaign cash as well as shape a "narrative" to get it repeated over, and over, and over again, until it becomes "truth" so that Democrats can make America into a vast blue state of permanent power.

What a disgusting picture.

Image: Screen shot from News4JAX video, via YouTube

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