Much like Georgia’s voting law, Florida’s anti-critical race theory rule seems to have really triggered some people who don’t seem to fully understand it beyond what they read in headlines. As early as March, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said his state’s curriculum would “expressly exclude” critical race theory, which a lot of people have said would preclude discussions of such things as slavery.
Timothy Snyder has a piece in the New York Times magazine called “The War on History Is a War on Democracy,” and he goes to great lengths to compare Stalinism to Florida’s law. “We have no trouble seeing that famine, gulag and terror were something other than administrative excesses, and can’t easily overlook an alliance with Hitler,” he writes. “By the same token, anyone looking at the United States from the outside immediately sees that our new memory laws protect the legacy of racism. We are only fooling ourselves.”
National Review’s Rich Lowry isn’t making the connection.
It’s hard to exaggerate how shoddy this New York Times magazine piece by @TimothyDSnyder comparing anti-CRT rules to Russia’s “memory laws” ishttps://t.co/r1n9FFu02w
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
He either didn’t take time to understand these rules or deliberately is distorting the truth.
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
No way.
Consider Florida. @TimothyDSnyder says the state is attempting “to forbid education about racism” and the subject of Jim Crow “would seem to be banned in Florida schools”
This is a blatant falsehood
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
As evidence for his charge, @TimothyDSnyder quotes the new rule from Florida’s board of education that forbids the teaching of CRT,
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
which is defined as “the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.”
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
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He interprets this prohibition on teaching a controversial theory about contemporary American society as a prohibition on lessons about the history of racism in this country
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
He must know that this nonsense if he looked at the rule that actually passed
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
Here is the rule https://t.co/2cgTAWdMzL
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
The sentence preceding the one quoted by @TimothyDSnyder says “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, ….
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions or women, African American and Hispanic people to our country.”
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
Again, that’s the immediate prior sentence!
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
And the sentence right *after* says, “Instruction must include the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments.” That obviously includes the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
How could @TimothyDSnyder miss this or leave it out when it is directly relevant to—and gives the lie—to a key accusation in his piece? Indeed, if a state like Florida isn’t banning instruction about racism and Jim Crow, his entire argument falls apart
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
It gets worse. As @TimothyDSnyder would understand if he took just a little time to try to understand it, the board of education rule is a merely a supplement to the statue setting out what students in Florida should learn
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
Here is the statute. https://t.co/9uRNjivpJO
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
It describes exactly what Florida students need to be learning and what instructors should be teaching “efficiently and faithfully, using the books and materials required that meet the highest standards for professionalism and historical accuracy”
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
And thus, the 1619 Project is excluded from the curriculum.
And it includes this among the required subjects: “The history of African Americans, including the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery, the passage to America, …
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
the enslavement experience, abolition, and the contributions of African Americans to society. Instructional materials shall include the contributions of African Americans to American society.”
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
This is *the law* in Florida. Nothing changed it, and in fact the new board of education rule is obviously written to accord with it, hence the references to slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
The question now is whether @TimothyDSnyder or the @NYTmag will correct his falsehood, which is provably wrong and would have been revealed as such with any competent fact-checking or just a little bit of curiosity
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
If @TimothyDSnyder doesn’t correct his blatant distortion it would show, sadly, like the authoritarians he rightly excoriates, he considers a convenient political narrative more important than the truth
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 1, 2021
They won’t correct anything because it’s an opinion piece, and that’s just like his opinion, man. We’ll note that the Washington Post already published its anti-DeSantis piece, written by a 17-year-old. NBC News and MSNBC are also doing a full-court press against anti-CRT rules and the parents who support them.
Related:
‘Every word of this is bulls**t’: Washington Post finds 17-year-old who opposes Gov. Ron DeSantis’s critical race theory ban https://t.co/mJ5lcEaaV5
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 22, 2021
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