"Renowned” PBS filmmaker Ken Burns appeared on Tuesday’s CNN This Morning to rain fire on Gov. Ron DeSantis over a bill in the Florida legislature to mandate some boundaries on how taxpayer-funded universities teach American history. In the fevered brain of this PBS star, DeSantis is somehow comparable to both the Nazis and the Soviets. CNN loved this, and didn’t blink at this blatant misinformation from a "treasured chronicler."
CNN host Don Lemon touted Burns as “renowned” and read one of his tweets on the subject:
By trying to dictate what teachers can and cannot teach, Florida House Bill 999 is an assault on the very liberties articulated by the Founders and something that all Americans should speak out against. (3/3)
Burns told CNN “All of these bills that DeSantis and others are doing limit our ability to understand who we are and they are not inclusive, they are exclusive. They are narrowing the focus of what is and isn’t American history. It’s terrifying. It feels like a Soviet system or the way the Nazis would build a Potemkin village,” Burns said.
He threw in Fox News to please his CNN hosts. “Tucker Carlson’s doing the same thing with the footage from 1/6. It’s just a kind of rewriting of history at the most dangerous level. It’s a huge threat to our Republic.”
CNN host Kaitlan Collins made no objection, she just gushed “You are such a treasured chronicler of history and of our times.” He added, "I think part of what we're seeing in DeSantis and others is a kind of reaction to anything that makes it nothing but a kind of neat, tidy, white picket fence, morning in America kind of view of things."
Please point and laugh at Kenny when he lectures about “Potemkin villages.” Burns should be best known for his kiss-ass Ted Kennedy tribute film made for the 2008 Democrat convention. PBS has no problem with Burns doing glossy campaign ads for Ted Kennedy that leave out death at Chappaquiddick and many other sordid Kennedy scandals. Burns has endless chutzpah to think he can lecture us about "narrowing the focus" of history.
Later, they plugged his coffee-table book of photographs, and he gushed over a positive review in the liberal New Republic. “They said this is an anti-fascist book. Right? So what we see is this narrowing, saying only you can treat -- is right out of the authoritarian playbook. If a company, Disney, disagrees with me, I change their tax status. If somebody, you know, a state employee disagrees with me I fire them. This is not a democracy. That’s an authoritarian.”
Later, he ranted again: “There is no communication in this world except among equals, and the kind of hierarchies that a Tucker Carlson and a Ron DeSantis are trying to superimpose over us are extraordinarily dangerous to this experiment."
Don Lemon had to bring it back to racism: “You called it a narrowing. We have to run. But it's racism, right?" Burns replied: "I think it's -- right now it's just white supremacy. There is a kind of fear of the other and so what you are seeing, we saw it in our film on the Holocaust, you know, it's easy to make a person other. "
So conservatives are like genocidal Nazis and Soviets....and we shouldn’t create an “other.” Does that make any sense?
Ken Burns attacking DeSantis as a tyrant was brought to you by....an ad promoting travel to Key West! And by GoDaddy.
