Surprise, surprise. Fox "news" channel actually let someone get a word in edgewise with some push back to their attacks on VP Kamala Harris and their defense of Florida's godawful new Black History curriculum. Normally these guys would just scream over The Five cohost Jessica Tarlov and make sure she didn't manage to get an entire sentence out.
While discussing Kamala Harris rightfully going after Florida for wanting to whitewash Black history, and Watters doubling down on statements he's made on his own show this week, Fox regular Jessica Tarlov actually did a decent job pushing back against Watters, not that it will make one iota of difference to their regular audience:
Co-host Jesse Watters raged against the vice president, concluding, “Kamala Harris is either dumb and didn’t read anything about it, or she knows the truth and has decided to lie to the American people about it.”
“I think it’s disgusting. And why doesn’t Kamala Harris want African Americans and White Americans to know that Black Americans did learn skills despite being enslaved? Why doesn’t she want them to learn that?” Watters concluded after defending teaching students that Blacks learned skills as slaves.
“Jessica, do you think that she read the whole thing and just decided to cherry-pick something?” asked Dana Perino.
“I do think that she read the whole thing, and I think that it’s an incredibly complex piece when you look at 191 passages. You have some good and frankly, I’m just fundamentally uncomfortable with this sentence that Blacks benefited at all from this,” replied Jessica Tarlov, offering a different take from her four co-hosts.
“And, you know, it made me think of, as someone, obviously, I’m not Black, but I’m Jewish. Would someone say about the Holocaust, for instance, that there were some benefits for Jews? While they were hanging out in concentration camps. You wanted a strong work ethic. Right. Maybe you learned a new skill,” Tarlov added.
After Gutfeld made a lame attempt to pretend the anti-Semitic comparison wasn't valid, Tarlov also did a decent job of laying out a bunch of the inaccuracies in the curriculum. Gutfeld's only defense was to try to pretend liberals don't care if there's slavery in other parts of the world, one of their usual attacks when going after liberals for daring to want American history to be taught accurately in public schools across America.
Here's more from the Tennessee Democrat on what's actually in the curriculum that has people upset:
On Thursday, Alex Lanfranconi, spokesperson for Diaz, tweeted out a response from members of the Board of Education.
"The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted," wrote officials William Allen and Frances Presley Rice. "This is factual and well documented." The release included a list of 16 such enslaved people who became blacksmiths, fishers, shoemakers, tailors, teachers and shipping industry workers.
However, historians pointed out that nearly half of those examples were never actually enslaved and many of the rest gained the skills for their later professions after gaining their freedom. The Tampa Bay Times pointed out multiple examples, including Booker T. Washington (listed as a teacher) who was actually illiterate until he taught himself to read after he was freed at age 9.
"They just threw out a bunch of names to make it seem like something good came of (slavery)," FEA president Andrew Spar told the Times. "The reality of it is, the facts don’t back up what they are saying.
”Backlash to this addition was fierce. The NAACP issued a release pointing out the skills lesson and calling the new standards a "sanitized and dishonest telling of the history of slavery in America."
Don't expect reality to get in the way of Republicans' and Fox's spin on this issue any time soon.
UPDATE: The Auschwitz Museum enters the chat:
