In the misguided pursuit of parochial political benefits, Will Hurd and Chris Christie are taking a sledgehammer to a valuable initiative.
Florida government officials and Sunshine State governor Ron DeSantis are “digging in and defending the state’s new standards for teaching Black History amid continued widespread criticism,” Politico reported. Their job has been made marginally more difficult by virtue of the opportunism displayed by some of the GOP’s long-shot presidential aspirants, who seem to be laboring under the delusion that their candles will shine brighter if DeSantis’s is snuffed out.
During an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, former congressman Will Hurd was confronted with the monolith view of the state’s amendments to the public-school curriculum that prevails in the press. The state has allegedly committed itself to a pedagogy that maintains chattel slavery in the antebellum South had some redeeming features. Rather than reject the premise and educate CNN’s viewers on what the curriculum actually entails, perhaps winning the respect of Republican primary voters in the process, Hurd took the gift-wrapped opportunity to tee off on DeSantis:
“Here is the reality. If you’re going to talk about how African Americans, despite being treated, like property, despite having zero freedoms, or zero rights, that they still had a tremendous impact on our country, if you want to talk about that? That’s great. But to imply that there was an upside? It is unacceptable.”
“Ron DeSantis showed his lack of leadership by acting like it was somebody else’s fault and not something that was done on his watch,” Hurd added. “Slavery was not a jobs program.”
Hurd joined a pile-on into which former New Jersey governor Chris Christie had already bellyflopped. In a Sunday interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the onetime Garden State governor laid the blame for the controversy that has consumed the press at DeSantis’s feet.
“DeSantis started this fire with the bill that he signed, and now he doesn’t want to take responsibility for whatever is done in the aftermath of it,” Christie said. “And from listening and watching his comments, he’s obviously uncomfortable.”
“‘I didn’t do it’ and ‘I’m not involved in it’ are not the words of leadership,” he added of the Florida governor’s “politically manipulative” conduct. “If this was such a big issue for Gov. DeSantis, he had four years to do this. He only started to focus on this when he decided he wanted to run for president and try to get to the right of Donald Trump.”
What’s “politically manipulative” here has been the conduct of the mainstream press, which has uncritically accepted the cartoonishly vile caricature of DeSantis’s educational reforms Democratic operatives are retailing.
Charles C. W. Cooke has done yeoman’s work explaining why the media’s focus on one out of 191 items in Florida’s curriculum discussing American slavery’s wholly odious effects on the people and institutions it tainted is an exercise in misdirection. He has also demonstrated why the commentary around the one line that has so obsessed the Fourth Estate substitutes scholarly precision with soap-box agitation. National Review’s editorial on this subject posits that the effort in which media is engaged is an effort not to broaden the parameters of a public-school education but narrow them, with the singular and transparent aim being the diminution of DeSantis’s political prospects.
It’s not hard to see why the GOP’s also-rans might convince themselves that they can benefit from DeSantis’s woes, but this line of attack won’t endear their campaigns to Republican voters. It will, however, undermine the mission in which the Florida governor is engaged. His state’s efforts to retool the curriculum is not an exercise in historical revisionism in isolation; it is a response to the historical revisionism around race in American political life to which the Left committed itself in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
In the misguided pursuit of parochial political benefits, Hurd and Christie are taking a sledgehammer to a valuable initiative. They’re being led by the nose — willingly, apparently — into doing their opponents’ work for them. It’s hard to see how either candidate will benefit from this exercise in obeisance, but it’s easier to see why Democrats would thank them for their efforts.