Once again PolitiFact is defending the undefendable to fulfill their role as propagandists for the Democratic Party.
In an article that required three bylines, PolitiFact’s Sofia Bliss-Carrascosa, Louis Jacobson, and Amy Sherman rate VP Kamala Harris’ “mostly false” claim that “Florida decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” as “mostly true.”
While speaking at the Ritz Theater and Museum in Jacksonville, Florida, Harris slammed recent curriculum updates for middle schoolers from the Florida State Board of Education, and added to the growing list of hysterical myths about Florida politics.
Harris began rattling off a handful of debunked talking points; “So when I think about what is happening, then, here in Florida, I am deeply concerned. Because let’s be clear: I do believe this is not only about the state of Florida; there is a national agenda afoot. And what is happening here in Florida? Extremist so-called leaders for months have dared to ban books. Book bans in this year of our Lord 2023,” Harris said. There is, of course, not a single “banned book” Harris could name that can’t be purchased with a simple web search or visit to a local bookstore.
She continued with another lie; “Extremists here in Florida passed a law, ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ trying to instill fear in our teachers that they should not live their full life and love who they love.” Contrary to liberal popular belief, it’s still legal to say gay in Florida.
After repeating those two lies that PolitiFact completely ignores, we get to the part of Harris’ speech where she utters yet another lie, and this one that PolitiFact saw fit to defend. “And now, on top of all of that, they want to replace history with lies. Middle school students in Florida to be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” Harris said.
The purpose of Harris’ statements is to give the impression that Florida is trying to sanitize slavery to the extent that they’re pushing it as something beneficial, and PolitiFact is intent on pretending that’s the case too.
In defending Harris, the PolitiFact trio argues:
Although the new standards include many conventional lesson points about the history of slavery, they also include a sentence that enslaved people developed skills that "could be applied for their personal benefit" — and this has drawn heated rebuttals from historians, who consider it factually misleading and offensive for seeming to find a silver lining in slavery.
The part of Florida’s new standards that Harris was citing is for grades six through eight. It says: "Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation)."
The controversial part is in this "benchmark clarification" about slave labor: "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."
Already the bias is apparent, with PolitiFact finding it appropriate to brand the curriculum “offensive” in a fact check about whether or not Harris is accurately representing its contents.
In the 216-pages of new standards, the mention of “benefits” of slavery accounts for fewer than 40 words of the 50,000+ word document (appearing only on pages 6 and 71). They hardly represent some ominous undertone to the entire curriculum.
So unobjectionable are the new standards that out of all of them, the only thing Harris’ team could find to argue was something they misrepresented.
As Charles Cooke noted, the likes of PolitiFact were short on specifics when it came to the rest of the curriculum, as it would’ve imploded their case that Florida is trying to downplay the horrors of slavery:
The program establishes “the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations (e.g., undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free)”; highlights “the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease)”; notes the “overwhelming death rates” that were caused by the practice; records that there were many ways in which “Africans resisted slavery”; and reports that Florida, like the entire “South[,] tried to prevent slaves from escaping.” There is not a person in America who, when trying to convince children that a given practice was good, lists “harsh conditions,” “undernourishment,” “mortality,” “poor nutrition,” “disease,” or “overwhelming death rates” as its consequences. The idea is absurd.
Further proving how PolitiFact never cared about the truth in the first place, two of the men who helped craft this curriculum also explained this in plain English to PolitiFact, who then proceeded to ignore everything they say.
The two men, retired political science professor William Allen, and Frances Presley Rice, the chair of the National Black Republican Association clearly explained to them that no, they were not arguing slavery benefited slaves, but that they believed some slaves were able to make something out of the terrible situation they were in. Again quoting PolitiFact:
The intent of the “personal benefit” benchmark, they wrote, was “to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefited” and listed the names of blacksmiths, shoe makers, shipping and industry workers, tailors and teachers.
“Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resilience during a difficult time in American history,” they said. But the Tampa Bay Times found that some of the people listed by the working group were not enslaved when they developed these skills or were freed at a young age. For example, Booker T. Washington, who was enslaved until he was 9, worked in mines and as a houseboy before entering school and later becoming a teacher.
Oddly, PolitiFact doesn’t register that this point about Booker T. Washington contradicts their own narrative. They continue:
In an interview with PolitiFact, Allen argued the examples apply even if they developed skills after slavery. He noted that the title of Washington’s autobiography was “Up From Slavery." "They benefited from the skills, not the slavery,” Allen told PolitiFact.
Allen, a descendent of slaves, further explained to Jesse Watters: “This curriculum is dedicated to telling the truth, while VP Harris is telling a lie. Now it may have only been a falsehood the first time she stated it, but when you repeat it it becomes a lie.” When asked to explain the portion of the slavery course Harris referenced, Allen replied “Permit me to have Frederick Douglass tell her. He wrote an autobiography in which he described how the mistress of his slave owner began to teach him to read. She pulled back the curtain through which a glimmer of life shed before the master forced her to close it. But that glimmer of light was enough for Frederick Douglass to create a bright flame that he exploited to his benefit and his country’s benefit thereafter. Such examples are numerous, and they are retelling the stories of people who suffered the indignity of slavery, time and again. And permit me to say, what this curriculum is about is having the people who lived this history tell their stories.”
And because fact-checking is rigged, Harris’ claim was amazingly rated “mostly true” by PolitiFact.
One of the challenges of political fact checking is that the implication behind a certain claim is relevant in determining the truth behind it. For example, a claim such as “women earn 80 cents for every dollar a man earns on average” may literally be true, but if one were repeating this statistic to push the narrative that it’s due to sexism in the workforce and not lifestyle choices, the same statement would become false.
In this case, the implication behind Harris’ claim is clearly that Republicans in Florida are trying to downplay the cruelty of slavery to the extent where they’re cartoonish villains trying to teach that slavery was for the slaves’ own good.
And since that’s obviously not the case, PolitiFact has to deploy on a motte-and-bailey fallacy to rule in her favor; conflating the reality that Florida’s curriculum mentions there were rare cases where slaves happened to develop skills while enslaved that ended up helping them later on, with the false claim that “Middle school students in Florida will be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery.” While these two statements may share similarities, they are entirely different, and PolitiFact had to rely on people not realizing that to rate her claim true.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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