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Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential marketing campaign could also be floundering as he struggles to win over Republican voters along with his deadpan robotic demeanor, and he could also be shuffling marketing campaign workers like he’s taking a mulligan, however the harm he did to Florida to get himself to this second remains to be rippling by means of the state.
Final month, the Florida Division of Schooling introduced that grade-school academics may use movies produced by Dennis Prager’s PragerU Children of their lecture rooms.
PragerU is not any extra a college than Trump College was. In nice kind on the backside of its webpage, it admits that “PragerU isn’t an accredited college, nor can we declare to be. We don’t supply levels, however we do present academic, entertaining, pro-American movies for each age.”
In actuality, PragerU is little greater than a propaganda media web site. The Southern Poverty Regulation Heart takes a good dimmer view of its credentials, saying, “PragerU appears to be one more node on the web connecting conservative media shoppers to the darkish corners of the intense proper.”
As for Prager himself, it is a man who stated on his radio present in 2020, “It’s idiotic that you simply can’t say the N-word.” And final yr he falsely claimed that “when you see a noose on a school dorm of a Black scholar, the chances are overwhelming that the noose was put there by a Black scholar.”
“In the event you see the N-word on a dormitory constructing,” he continued, “the chances are overwhelming {that a} Black scholar truly did that. We’re crammed with race hoaxes.”
In brief, Prager is poison on the racial query, and something springing from his efforts ought to, by definition, be thought of tainted, notably with regards to race.
DeSantis’s destruction of Florida’s colleges is awash on this taint. Quickly, college students may very well be watching movies like one produced by PragerU that options two youngsters, Leo and Layla, who look like white, touring again in time to speak to Christopher Columbus. In it, a cartoon Columbus says that the primary Indigenous folks he met when he landed within the Bahamas, the Taino, a subgroup of the Arawak, have been “peaceable, curious and actually useful.” Later, he says, “I ordered my males to deal with them nicely.”
Howard Zinn’s “A Folks’s Historical past of the USA” tells a special story, detailing how Columbus described the Arawak in his log on the time. “They might make nice servants,” Columbus wrote. “With 50 males, we may subjugate all of them and make them do no matter we would like.”
Visions of enslavement danced in his eyes from the start. And so, he acted.
As Columbus put it in considered one of his letters, “As quickly as I arrived within the Indies, on the primary island which I discovered, I took among the natives by drive.”
Within the video, the cartoon Columbus rationalizes slavery, saying: “Being taken as a slave is best than being killed, no? I don’t see the issue.”
Nicely, I see an enormous drawback. Within the video, being enslaved or killed are introduced as the one choices for the Indigenous, which is blasphemous. Slavery was a brutal, inhumane establishment, but it surely wasn’t at all times lethal. Beneath Columbus, although, demise was a distinguished function of the establishment.
In line with Zinn’s historical past, on Columbus’s second journey, he arrange headquarters in what would grow to be Haiti, “taking girls and youngsters as slaves for intercourse and labor,” and in 1495 he and his crew went on an excellent slave raid, rounding up 1,500 males, girls and youngsters. They loaded 500 on ships again to Spain, however 200 died en route.
When the Arawaks tried to struggle again, they have been overwhelmed by the Spaniards’ weapons. These captured have been hanged or burned. That’s when the mass suicides of the Arawaks started. As Zinn writes: “Infants have been killed to save lots of them from the Spaniards. In two years, by means of homicide, mutilation or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti have been useless.”
In one other video, the 2 youngsters journey again in time to speak to Frederick Douglass. One of many first issues that the woman says to him is, “You’ve got actually cool hair.” Severely?
The cartoon Douglass says within the video:
“Our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and flawed, they usually knew that it might do horrible hurt to the nation. They wished it to finish, however their first precedence was getting all 13 colonies to unite as one nation.”
Nowhere within the video does it point out that a lot of the distinguished founders, together with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, have been themselves enslavers.
Then, maybe most outrageously, the cartoon Douglass says, “I’m actually not OK with slavery, however the founding fathers made a compromise to realize one thing nice: the making of the USA.”
Frederick Douglass would by no means! He despised the compromises that maintained and extended slavery.
Within the video, the cartoon Douglass says that the yr is 1852. However simply two years earlier than, the Compromise of 1850, which included a beefed-up fugitive slave legislation that even punished individuals who participated within the Underground Railroad, was handed. Douglass detested this “compromise.”
In an 1853 speech, Douglass blasted the compromise as one which “reveals with nice clearness the extent to which slavery has shot its leprous distillment by means of the lifeblood of the Nation.”
Eight years later, in 1861, after Abraham Lincoln defended the Fugitive Slave Act as an try to assuage Southern slavers, Douglass known as him an “wonderful slave hound” and the “most harmful advocate of slave-hunting and slave-catching within the land.”
To David Blight, the definitive biographer of Douglass, PragerU’s video is appalling and a joke, however in an interview with me, he acknowledged the hazard that it may very well be compelling to a younger scholar.
Is anybody, finally, served by this selling of logical fallacy and bastardizing of historical past? As Blight defined it, the video “actually does enchantment to that model and imaginative and prescient of historical past that so many People nonetheless need. They need to be left feeling good on the finish of the day. They don’t need to be threatened. They need to sleep at night time. They need to know that the best of Black leaders actually have been on their facet.”
Utilizing Douglass in any approach to soften slavery is a desecration. And, that’s DeSantis’s academic legacy within the state.
DeSantis has stated, “Within the state of Florida, we’re proud to face for training, not indoctrination, in our colleges.” However this summer time, at a Mothers for Liberty summit in Philadelphia, Prager admitted to his indoctrination efforts. Talking about criticism he acquired, he stated: “All I heard was, ‘You indoctrinate youngsters,’ which is true. We deliver doctrines to youngsters. That’s a very reasonable assertion. I stated, ‘However what’s the dangerous of our indoctrination?’”
Within the true hypocritical type of many conservatives, their subject isn’t with indoctrination itself however with whether or not they get to manage the shape and performance of that indoctrination.
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