(Official Washington Examiner editorial, Aug. 5) We already knew Vice President Kamala Harris is a cheap-shot artist. Now we also know she’s a coward.
She is a coward because she refuses to debate an issue that she herself, quite dishonestly, turned into a national line of attack.
It was Harris more than anyone else who catalyzed the most recent national media frenzy against Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), alleging that educational standards he implemented in Florida taught that “enslaved people benefited from slavery.” We have shown multiple times in these pages that the claim is a malicious lie. Harris and her mendacious chorus took a single sentence completely out of context.
The sentence not only doesn’t say what they claim it does, but it is remarkably similar to sentences used in documents from sources of which the Left itself approves, such as the Library of Congress, the National Park Service, the National Humanities Center — and, we now know, the very Advanced Placement standards for African American history that the Left has spent months insisting should be used in Florida.
In context, there is no way anyone could honestly claim that the Florida standards are in any way meant to suggest that slavery had an even mildly sunny side. Instead, the standards repeatedly emphasize the awful legacy of “slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, and racial discrimination.” That is as to be expected, considering that the parts of the standards at issue were adopted by a panel led by black scholars about whom it makes zero sense to make the accusation that they somehow believe slavery was beneficial.
And when black scholars write standards for black history and explain exactly why they chose the language they did, with both the language itself and their explanation directly rejecting the false interpretation Harris assigned to them, it takes outrageous gall for Harris to insist they meant the very opposite of what they said.
Either way, if Harris really believes the claptrap she continues to spew about the standards created by DeSantis’s committee, she should have the decency and gumption to make her case when challenged on it…. Instead, she slunk away…. [The full column is at this link.]
