(July 23) Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a slash-and-burn Republican candidate for president, made an absolute mess Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation of arguments against the prevalence of “social issues” in current conservative discourse.
Never one to pass up a chance to smear a Republican rival, Christie took patently unfair shots at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on one “social” issue while completely misstating the facts on another. Christie should be ashamed, except that he has never been one to show appropriate shame for much of anything.
Christie’s general thesis is that DeSantis and other conservatives are the ones emphasizing social-issue “culture wars” related to race and gender only to “create conflict” in order to score political points. This is hogwash.
As my colleague Tim Carney and others repeatedly have shown, it isn’t conservatives trying to use politics to force change against existing standards, but leftists who are using strong-arm tactics to force sudden changes in millennia of human practices. The Left then accuses conservatives of “politicizing” the issues when conservatives are merely trying to defend against the new assault and protect what had been the status quo.
When CBS’ Margaret Brennan unfairly presented Florida’s education standards pertaining to race and slavery by taking one sentence completely out of context, Christie accepted her premise rather than pushing back. He used the premise as occasion to trash DeSantis.
“Gov. DeSantis started this fire with the bill that he signed,” Christie said.
Not even close.
After leftists began teaching extreme race- and gender-based theories in schools, DeSantis responded, rather than instigated, a tremendously thoughtful push-back that actually requires teaching “the history of African peoples,” including “the passage to America,” “the enslavement experience,” and “how the individual freedoms of persons have been infringed by slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination.” Also, they explain that “an enslaved person” was treated as “property with no rights,” and that slavery violated “founding principles of liberty, justice and equality.”…. [The full column is at this link.]
