At a time when a possible Category 5 hurricane is bearing down on Florida, you would think that Americans would be doing all they could to support the state and its governor at his time.
We’ve already seen pettiness from Joe Biden who seemed to have an issue with personally calling Gov. Ron DeSantis, although FEMA was activated and involved, which was important. DeSantis had the perfect response, concentrating on his job and what he was supposed to do for his citizens. Biden broke down after being pressed by the media and criticized, and finally called DeSantis.
But apparently, the president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten was so obsessed with trying to attack DeSantis, she didn’t seem to care about that when she tweeted an attack about DeSantis’ understanding of history. On top of that, what she said about our American history was so wrong, it’s hard to believe that she’s supposed to be the head of a teachers’ union. If anyone wonders about why our schools are in trouble, this may be one reason. A video of DeSantis earlier in the month before the hurricane talking about how the Founders questioned slavery was being shared on Twitter and Weingarten’s response was something else.
“The American Revolution was about leaving Britain,” Weingarten claimed. “If America’s founders questioned slavery there would not have been the heinous “3/5 compromise ” in the US Constitution, which was drafted and enacted AFTER the American Revolution. This is basic history…”
Oh, my. Weingarten was inundated by people quote-tweeting how wrong she was about this “basic history.” They had to quote-tweet her because she chickened out and limited her replies to the tweet.
The purpose of the Three-Fifths Compromise was an effort to limit the influence of slavery and the slave-holding states, as Dr. Carol Swain explains here in a great Prager U video.
But the fact that Weingarten doesn’t seem to understand that is stunning given her influence on education in this country. Not only that but for the brief period that she did teach, one of the things she taught was U.S. History and Government. She also was one of the coaches for students from her school for a “We the People” civics competition. So is she calling limiting slavery’s influence “heinous”? Or is she just propagating the usual misinformation that the left often spews out there about the Compromise? And we wonder why students often seem woefully ignorant about history and civics when this erroneous history is what is being taught to them.
Yes, the American Revolution was about “leaving Britain” — DeSantis didn’t say it wasn’t.
DeSantis, note, does not say that the American Revolution was fought over slavery. He says that the American Revolution “caused people to question slavery.” It did. As John Ferling notes in Whirlwind, the rhetoric of the Revolution mattered so much that, “within thirty years of Lexington and Concord, every northern state had acted to end slavery, either immediately or gradually.” Or, as DeSantis put it: once we had “decided as Americans that we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights,” it became much more difficult to say “but not them.” The language of revolution, which had been in the air since 1774, helped along the language of abolition; and, in turn, the language of abolition helped along the language of revolution. The Anti-slavery Society was founded in Philadelphia in 1775. Vermont banned slavery in its Constitution in 1777. Pennsylvania banned slavery legislatively in 1780. And so on.
It was those thoughts on freedom that were inculcated by the American Revolution and in the Constitution that were then taken up and influenced the world. Yes, would we have wished it to move faster? Indeed. But the failure to recognize the special nature of what the Revolution and the Constitution wrought is a failure to recognize the unique experiment that is this nation. What a shame that the head of the teachers’ union fails to grasp that.
Yep, she was.