Ron DeSantis’s “Slavery Was a Good Thing” Curriculum Weirdly Unpopular Among GOP Hopefuls

A lot of crazy s–t has come out of Florida over the last number of years—see: every headline that starts with “Florida Man…”—but almost none of it compares to what the Sunshine State came up with earlier this month, when the Board of Education approved a new set of rules requiring teachers to tell students that there were upsides to being enslaved. Yes, really: The state literally requires instruction on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Obviously, this is completely nuts, as is the fact that Florida governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has repeatedly defended the new curriculum standards, saying its authors “did a good job” and that it would be totally reasonable to “show that some of the folks…eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” To be clear, “the folks” the governor is talking about here are enslaved people, and he’s suggesting that there were positive trade-offs to being human property.

Not surprisingly, a number of DeSantis’s rivals for the GOP nomination have seized on Florida’s batshit new rules as well as DeSantis’s decision to back them. On Sunday, appearing on NBC News’ Meet the Press, former GOP congressman Will Hurd said that “anybody that is implying that there was an upside to slavery is insane.” (He also noted the obvious, which is that “slavery is not a jobs program.”) Hurd added: “It’d be hard to make the case, if Ron DeSantis was the Republican nominee, that folks in Black and brown communities should support him.”

Also on Sunday, former UN ambassador and 2024 hopeful Nikki Haley told CBS News’ Face the Nation: “It’s the 21st century. And I think we can all agree that…there were no positives that came out of slavery,” adding that DeSantis should say as much. On CNN’s State of the Union, fellow 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said that “obviously, we should be teaching kids about the awful legacy of slavery.”

Days earlier, Representative Tim Scott—the sole Black Republican in the Senate—told reporters at a campaign stop: “As a country founded upon freedom, the greatest deprivation of freedom was slavery. There is no silver lining…in slavery…What slavery was really about [was] separating families, about mutilating humans, and even raping their wives. It was just devastating.”