Ron DeSantis says Nikki Haley is serving up ‘word salad’ on slavery

Ron DeSantis is reacting to Nikki Haley’s comments about the causes of the Civil War, blasting his 2024 Republican presidential race rival for not acknowledging slavery as a cause of it.

“Haley has had some problems with some basic American history. She’s asked a very simple question and responded with just really incomprehensible word salad about this and that, and she asked the voter, what do you want her to say about this or that? And then now is taking different positions on this. And so I just think that this shows this is not a candidate that’s ready for prime time,” DeSantis said in Ankeny, Iowa on Thursday.

DeSantis added that in his view it was “not that difficult to identify and acknowledge the role slavery played in the Civil War, and yet that seemed to be something that was really difficult. And I don’t even know what she was saying.”

Haley has been doing damage control on her comments the night before, in which she said the Civil War was simply about “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” and turned the question around on an attendee at her event, asking, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

“Yesterday I was asked, last night I was asked about the Civil War. And what I think of the Civil War, what was the cause of the Civil War. Of course, the Civil War was about slavery. We know that. That’s unquestioned, always the case. We know the Civil War was about slavery. But it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government. For 80 years, America had the decision and the moral question of whether slavery was a good thing and whether government, economically, culturally, any other reasons, had a role to play in that. By the grace of God, we did the right thing and slavery is no more,” she said Thursday in New Hampshire.

The clean-up attempt didn’t mollify the Governor.

“I know she’s trying to clean it up. I know she’s tried to blame a Democrat plant…I mean, you’re gonna get asked a lot of tough questions — that’s just the nature of this business. And I think that she showed time and time again that when the lights get hot that she will wilt under pressure, and that was a good example last night,” DeSantis added.

DeSantis has dealt with his own issues regarding the framing of slavery in the wake of Florida’s new Black History standards, a 216-page set of guidelines for K-12 slavery education that include the controversial contention that slavery benefits the enslaved.

This summer in Utah, DeSantis contended that the Florida Board of Education “got a lot of scholars together to do a lot of standards and a lot of different things,” creating what he called “the most robust standards in African American history probably anywhere in the country.”

Describing the standards as “very thorough, very factual,” DeSantis even defended the inclusion of curriculum that claimed enslaved people benefited from slavery at one point, saying former slaves “eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life” and “developed skills in spite of slavery, not because of slavery … showing resourcefulness and then using those skills once slavery ended.”

Prior to that, Florida banned a pilot African American Studies course from the College Board’s Advanced Placement program.

“This course, on Black History, what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory! Now who would say that an important part of Black History is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids, and so when you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons, that’s a political agenda. And so, that’s the wrong side of the line for Florida standards,” DeSantis said.