Even in an era when the political right seems to come up with shocking new ways almost weekly to trash facts and norms, this is surreal: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is defending and doubling down upon new state teaching standards that claim American slavery had a silver lining in that it taught enslaved people useful skills.

What's next? Suggesting that the Nazis' horrendous wartime experiments on Jews weren't entirely evil, because they yielded medical data?

Like Nazi genocide, American slavery was entirely evil. It was an inhuman institution devoid of any redeeming characteristics. That this even has to be said in 2023 is a testament to the depth of the racial rabbit hole down which Republican politics has plunged lately.

DeSantis' remarks last week were in defense of new Florida teaching standards that go into effect this week. The written standards have drawn sharp criticism for including instruction on "how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."

The state's Board of Education created the new standards to bring curriculum in line with DeSantis' vow to eliminate "woke ideology" from the classrooms. In that sense, it's best understood as another front in the GOP's culture-war crusade against "critical race theory" and other efforts to purge discussion of race from schools.

Pressed last week about the new standards, DeSantis noted he wasn't personally involved in creating them. But he defended them, speculating they were "probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life."

Wow.

As U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas — who is Black and who, like DeSantis, is seeking the GOP presidential nomination — aptly responded via tweet: "Slavery wasn't a jobs program that taught beneficial skills. It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms."

Again: How is it possible this even has to be said today?

The new guidelines also seek to gaslight students regarding the post-Civil War terror campaign of murder and violence against newly freed slaves and other Black citizens at the hands of white racists. The guidelines refer to that period as being characterized by "acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans."

As if the overwhelming pattern of the violence wasn't white-on-Black. And as if it was random instead of systemic. This is, literally, historical disinformation being mandated for students as history curriculum.

DeSantis is struggling to revive what many see as a floundering presidential campaign. As with the rest of his anti-woke crusade, his defense of the indefensible notion that slavery had a good side is clearly a dog whistle to right-wing racists in hopes of peeling them away from the presidential campaign of former President Donald Trump.

But DeSantis also has inadvertently performed a useful service for the nation's political discourse: He has demonstrated the logical if ultimately absurd outcome of the GOP's efforts to whitewash the nation's fraught racial history and obfuscate its impact on the present. It's a more valuable lesson than the ones Florida has in store for its students.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Photo credit: Alexander Grey at Unsplash