FLORIDA: Gillum Misleads Voters, Claims DeSantis Justified Slavery
Luke Rohlfing
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The race for Governor in Florida has gone to mudslinging depths possibly never before seen in politics, with Democrat Andrew Gillum leading the charge. In his latest unfounded attack, Gillum claims his challenger, Republican Ron DeSantis “authored a book justifying slavery.”
His claim was made on the Late Show with Trevor Noah, in an interview inside a Miami-area restaurant.
It is based on misleading stories published by a myriad of left-wing “news” websites, which originated from a group called American Bridge, which is run by left-wing propagandist David Brock, and funded by billionaire mega-donor George Soros. Soros has also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Gillum’s campaign.
The book in question is a 2011 title published by DeSantis called “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers,” in which he talks about the principles the Founding Fathers relied on when they created the Constitution. It uses direct primary sources like debates from the Constitutional Convention and The Federalist Papers.
There is no part of the book that justifies slavery. The very brief portion of the book that discusses slavery is being misrepresented to claim DeSantis was justifying slavery.
In reality, DeSantis was simply laying out why many Founding Fathers didn’t abolish slavery at the initial Constitutional Convention. The belief in the minds of many Founders, like Benjamin Franklin, who was opposed to slavery, is that both abolishing slavery and ratifying the Constitution was impossible.
They instead chose to ratify the Constitution in the belief that it would ultimately doom the institution of slavery, as it did.
This is the main portion used to claim DeSantis is justifying slavery:
This is why there was no real chance that the Convention would abolish the peculiar institution of slavery. Some of the notorious compromises that demonstrated a toleration of slavery, such as the “federal ratio,” which allowed the slave-holding states to count 5 slaves as the equivalent of 3 free citizens (the free states did not want slaves counted at all because they did not want the political power of slave states to be enhanced), were even thought to be necessary to ensure ratification. Hamilton, a counselor to the New York Manumission Society, later lamented that without such a compromise “no union could possibly have been formed.” Similarly, Benjamin Franklin, who served as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, declined to read a letter to the Convention delegates from the Society that denounced slavery on religious and republican grounds. Franklin did not want to derail the Convention by further inflaming the delegates over the issue of slavery, and believed that the United States could not last without a new federal government, for, as he wrote in his final Convention speech, “our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.” For anti-slavery delegates like Hamilton and Franklin, abolition of slavery would be a moot point if a failure to erect a functioning government snuffed out the ideals of the American Revolution in their infancy; then, the future of all Americans, the free as well as the slave, would eventually be as serfs to a despotic government.
As any reasonable person can see, this is not a justification of slavery. And this portion is very minor, so minor that none of the reviews on Amazon even mention slavery, besides a handful placed in the past few weeks in response to the news coverage claiming it supports slavery.
In his interview with Noah, Gillum also misleads viewers by claiming that DeSantis told voters not to “monkey the state up.” His attempt at race-baiting is based on a statement made by DeSantis in which he praises the economic progress across the country under President Trump, and then urges voters not to “monkey this up” by embracing a socialist agenda. Race was only interjected later as a way to slander DeSantis.
What is really happening is the left is utilizing the illusion of truth effect. “If you repeat a lie often enough it becomes truth,” is a quote often unattributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, which outlines exactly what the left is doing in this case.
They are using anything possible, from mundane statements using common figures of speech, to misleading interpretations of his writings to call him racist. In reality, it is a propaganda tactic used to create a non-existent track-record of racism that they can then repeat over and over to try to make it true.
It is exactly what the left tried to do to then-candidate for President Donald Trump, and see how that turned out for them. Voters will be the deciding factor in the end, and they will decide if these tactics work on Tuesday, November 6th.
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