The pundit panel on Fox News Sunday took on the subject of Florida's new standards for teaching black history in public schools. Juan Williams took the Democratic hot takes to a new level, that Florida was teaching something like "Jews picked up some skills in concentration camps" and "engineers learned a lot" from 9/11. He folded that subject, redistricting in Alabama, and leftist opposition to a Jason Aldean country song into a "problem for the Republican Party."
On "Fox News Sunday," Juan Williams not only distorts the Florida black-history standards into somehow finding positive angles in the Holocaust and 9/11, he not only drags Racism into the Jason Aldean country song, he thinks the song is a problem for the Republican Party! pic.twitter.com/llbF2FYRoV
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) July 23, 2023
WILLIAMS: That sounds like Booker T. Washington, if you go back in history, you know, uplift, self-help in the black community. It's a deep tradition. But what we're seeing here really is an attempt to distort reality. I mean that's like saying, oh, you know what, Jews picked up some skills in concentration camps. Or, you know what, engineers learned a lot when those planes crashed into the World Trade Center.
That's not the story. The story is slavery. And I don't think there's anybody in this world who's going to tell you, oh, yes, I'd go into slavery so I could pick up a few skills about chopping wood or whatever. It's - it's absurd.
And this week there have been so many racial controversies surrounding Republicans. The redistricting in Alabama. They refused to, despite Supreme Court order, create a majority black second district in Alabama. You have the situation that we have seen in Texas as well. And then you think about the Jason Aldean controversy with country music making a video in front of a courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, where lynchings occurred, near where the Ku Klux Klan was started and saying, "oh, it's not about race."
This is a problem for the Republican Party. DeSantis is playing culture wars with this in a damaging, divisive way.
Fox News radio host Guy Benson went first, and notice Williams didn't attempt to rebut what he said, including his blazing criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris:
BENSON: I think the vice president is being either willfully ignorant or willfully dishonest on this issue. She's demagoguing what the state of Florida has done. This is a group of scholars that put together this curriculum. Many of them black scholars. And there is a rigorous, massive amount of information that students in that state must be taught on these issues.
This one piece of it is a very small piece that, for example, this is an encyclopedia published by Oxford and Columbia Universities says exactly the same thing, a system of apprenticeship emerged that further developed the skills of enslaved people. In some cases, these skills created benefit for the slaves. They were able to purchase their freedom. They were able to go, escape to the north and earn a living.
Katie Pavlich also noted the Florida standards talk a lot about teaching the horrors of slavery. But Williams could only try to suggest Ron DeSantis & Co. were like whitewashers of 9/11 and the Holocaust.
