Whenever Fox News replaces its 9 p.m. host, it feels a bit like Dick Cheney getting a new heart. It seems like a big deal at the time—and may even offer a faint glimmer of hope for a new, less-awful outlook on life—but the evil inevitably continues unabated.
In 2017, Bill O’Reilly groped his way out of the media spotlight and was replaced by Tucker Carlson, the face that launched a thousand dry heaves. And as much as we rejoiced at O’Reilly’s falafel-y defenestration, in the final analysis it was kind of like sending your undercooked steak back to the kitchen and getting a sawed-off moose head in its place. And now Fox has replaced Carlson with Jesse Watters, who’s doing his utmost to preserve the network’s toxic brand.
You’ve probably heard about the controversy surrounding Florida’s new Black history standards, which call for middle school students to be taught that Black people personally benefited from slavery. Well, Watters is peeved that the media are “twisting” this story in order to unduly trash Florida, which Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent the past four years turning into a his own personal Klaus Barbie Dreamhouse.
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Watters called out the haters Friday for saying … well, I’ll let you figure this one out for yourself:
Transcript!
WATTERS: “No one is arguing slaves benefited from slavery; no one is saying that. It’s not true. They’re teaching how Black people developed skills during slavery in some instances that could be applied for their own personal benefit.”
Got that? No one is saying the awful thing that liberals keep saying they’re saying, and nobody is saying what Jesse Watters says at the end of this very short statement—which was meticulously crafted to prove that absolutely no one is saying the very thing that Watters himself just said.
It could not be any clearer.
In fact, it’s so obvious, they apparently need to add weird, spacey graphics to the segment to hypnotize people into not instantly changing the channel to “Gunsmoke.”
People somehow noticed Watters’ Planck-length leap of illogic.
Ah, yes. Speaking of Madame Vice President Kamala Harris, she shared some thoughts of her own on this issue—and she was somehow able to avoid contradicting herself in the space of a few brief sentences.
After news of Florida’s new curriculum dropped, our fearless vice president decided to fly to Florida to personally call out DeSantis. And per usual, she didn’t disappoint.
Harris gave a fiery speech — without a teleprompter — that both called out the curriculum changes and knocked Florida’s Republican leaders. Among the targets, inevitably, was DeSantis — though Harris never mentioned him by name, referring to him and other top state Republicans as “extremists” and “people who walk around and want to be praised as leaders.”
“Come on — adults know what slavery really involved,” Harris said. “It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world. How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”
But some enslaved people became blacksmiths!
No, seriously. Someone actually said that. And that someone is running for president.
While campaigning in Utah on Friday, Gov. DeSantis attempted to defend his state’s new curriculum.
“I think that they’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed being a blacksmith into doing things later in life. But the reality is, all of that is rooted in whatever is factual,” DeSantis said, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. He also claimed that Florida now had “the most robust standards in African American history” in the U.S.
Mmm-hmm. Checks out. If you don’t think about it too much. Or at all, really.
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Of course, as Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson recently pointed out, this latest outrage is part and parcel of DeSantis and his bigot brigade’s strategy of relentlessly pandering to white people, many of whom actually did “benefit” from slavery—and still do.
The Florida Black history guidelines and their glaring offenses against the teaching of Black history are inherently a part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to gut teaching about anything that might possibly offend right-wing white parents. The standards specifically mention Ruby Bridges, but just months ago a Disney movie about Bridges was removed from schools in one Florida county. Florida law enacted under DeSantis has textbook publishers so scared of telling the truth about Black history that one removed mentions of race from the Rosa Parks story. DeSantis faced off against the College Board with demands to weaken the curriculum in an Advanced Placement African American Studies class. The Florida Board of Education has no standing to deny that any curriculum it approves will be watered down at best.
All of this is part of DeSantis’ effort to elevate himself as a presidential primary candidate in a party that has spent the last several years freaking out about the possibility that race, racism, and Black history might be taken seriously in schools.
At some point, you have to believe decent people will say “enough is enough” and meaningfully punish gaslighters like Watters and DeSantis. Unfortunately, decency is now a vanishingly rare commodity in one of our country’s two major political parties.
RELATED STORY: Florida tries to defend its revisionist history on slavery
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.
