On Monday, the popular Fox News program “The Five” discussed the new Black History curriculum adopted by the state of Florida.
The discussion started with most of the panel criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for her comments on the matter in a speech last week.
Host Jesse Watters argued that Harris was either ignorant about it or deliberately lying to the American people while Dana Perino asked liberal co-host Jessica Tarlov to weigh in on whether she read and cherry-picked from the 191 passages of the curriculum.
Here’s the exchange:
“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 continued.
Co-host Dana Perino then asked liberal co-host Jessica Tarlov: “Jessica, do you think that she read the whole thing and just decided to cherry-pick something?”
“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,” Tarlov replied.
“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,” she added.
Co-host Greg Gutfeld jumped in, saying, “Did you ever read ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’?Vik Frankel talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility. Utility kept you alive.”
“We are also talking about middle schoolers here, and there’s a lot of concern about what age people are prepared to understand complex issues. I’m not sure that 12 is the right age to start hearing things like and when you were enslaved here in America,” Tarlov.
At that, both Watters and Gutfeld noted that liberal educators have no problem feeding “gender ideology” to children who are that young and even younger.
“Just let me finish!” Tarlov exclaimed.
Later on his own Prime Time program, Watters played a couple of clips of Harris making false accusations about the curriculum, which were then refuted by a Black academic who helped write it for Florida’s schools.
Dr. Allen from Florida’s African American History Workgroup takes @VP to task on @JesseBWatters for her dishonesty about the state’s new curriculum, saying “Kamala Harris has retailed a lie.”
Watch: pic.twitter.com/9oPtxpQLRc
— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) July 25, 2023
Other left-wing commentators and media personalities also parroted the same false claims made by Harris, including some women on ABC’s “The View.”
Both Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin claimed that whites today are still “reaping” benefits from black slavery.
“I feel like they didn’t talk to any African Americans because we could have told them about the history, and nor have any — anyone seemingly gone to the Smithsonian to find out anything. You know, there are all of these former slaves who have given their testimony. You can go to the Smithsonian and hear them, but they must think it’s a lie,” Goldberg noted, though several of the academics on Florida’s development panel were black.
“You know, when you talk about enslaved people and the — just the horrible things that happened to slavery, what we often forget is that slavery continued. Right?” Hostin said, bizarrely.
“So you sort of erase then Jim Crow and you erase reconstruction, and you erase the sundown laws, and you just start erasing the wealth gap and the inequality, and you erase the fact that while black people, maybe he taught his son how to be a blacksmith, this country was built on the backs of black labor for free,” she claimed.
Erica Carlin is an independent journalist, opinion writer and contributor to several news and opinion sources. She is based in Georgia.
