FL Education Commissioner: ‘Would Love to See’ Kamala Harris Debate New Curriculum With Scholars Who Wrote It, Will ‘Absolutely Not’ Bend to Dems’ Resignation Demands

Manny Diaz Jr., the Florida Commissioner of Education,  joined the Guy Benson Show to discuss the recent backlash directed towards Vice President Kamala Harris because of her blatant lies about Florida’s education curriculum.  Guy and Manny also discussed the DeSantis administration’s response to the allegations and accusations.

Listen to the full interview below:

Full transcript:

Guy Benson: Mandy Diaz Jr. He is the Commissioner of Education in the state of Florida and he’s in the middle of this firestorm when a lot of the attacks coming his way. And it’s good to have you here, sir. Thanks for your time.

Mandy Diaz Jr.: Thanks for having me on, Guy. It’s good to be with you. I’ll start off just by saying the the interesting thing that Kamala Harris says there is she she says that Dr. Will Allen, who is one of the scholars who’s out there talking about this and helped write this, that the these the benchmarks is in extremis. This is the great grandson of slaves, as he explained yesterday so eloquently on the Jesse Waters show. And he as he talked about the process of these 13 scholars putting together a very comprehensive African-American history benchmarks. In fact, there’s only about a dozen states that have them. And this is an expansion in Florida, where we’ve had them since 1994. But we actually have created standalone benchmarks that if anyone reads, you can see, go delve into the ugliest parts of our history without removing anything. And it’s just it’s unfortunate that you have the Vice President in this White House demagoguing this gaslighting and just flat out lying Guy.

Guy Benson: Yeah. I mean, it’s more than unfortunate in my book. It’s disgusting. And we will get to Dr. Allen and some of those sound bites here in a moment. But I just want to let you address the underlying claim here. You heard it from Kamala Harris that Florida is teaching students and you would think from this rhetoric, Florida is only teaching students that slaves actually benefited from slavery. And we saw on another network, MSNBC, someone said that this is basically akin to defending the Holocaust. That’s where this rhetoric is going. Manny Diaz, Jr, you are very familiar with this curriculum. It’s hundreds of pages long. As you pointed out, scholars, more than a dozen of them collaborated to put together this rigorous expansion of this curriculum. When you see it being characterized the way that it is. What is your substantive response to the way that it’s being framed by people like the Vice President and others?

Mandy Diaz Jr.: Let’s talk about the actual standard with, Guy, who seems you’re familiar with them as well. Hundreds of pages going into each individual instance in this period of time, both during slavery, pre-slavery, telling the story and the atrocities of the treatment of Africans that were enslaved and that passage over to the New world. Also the plantation life both in America and in the Caribbean, because there was a lot of transfer, all of the atrocities, all of the terrible things that happened, bluntly explained and covered in these standards, as well as post-Civil War reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, discrimination, beat downs, the civil rights movement, all of it very, very, very transparently covered without punishing anything. But included in that are the stories of individuals,  Guy, individual slaves, who, through their perseverance, their strength, their resiliency, figured out how to acquire skills despite the fact that these atrocities were being committed, despite the fact that they were in a system where human beings were being owned. And it is important that this story is also told because it’s a fact and it’s part of that history to talk about the individuals and where it occurred. Obviously, the general topic and all of the atrocities that occurred are covered in detail. But this is also that story of the individuals, their resiliency and how they continue to push through with their strength despite these atrocities and everything that’s going on.

Guy Benson: Am I correct to say just to jump in, am I correct? Because when I searched for this and for that word benefit and I know there’s some debate about whether that word should have been used benefit, but this point, which is historically accurate, I quoted an encyclopedia published by Columbia University, an Oxford University, yesterday that used that exact same word and making this exact same point. This is true history. This point is one sentence out of 216 pages. Is that correct?

Mandy Diaz Jr.: Not only that guy, it’s not even a benchmark. What they’re pointing to is a clarification that was written under the benchmark, talking about this this very situation where individuals persevered and were resilient to acquire the skills. So it’s not even a benchmark.

Guy Benson: It’s a sub point. It’s a sub point of one benchmark of dozens across hundreds of pages. And the way that they’re telling it is that Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, wrote these standards himself. And the number one thing being imparted to social studies students in the state of Florida is that actually slavery benefited the slaves. That is just an absolute inversion of the truth. It is a truly repugnant lie done for racial political reasons. I think there’s no getting around that. I’m very glad that you mentioned Dr. William Allen. He is one of these scholars, a very erudite man who went on with Jesse Waters, as you pointed out last night on Fox News Channel. And he was asked about this. And I just want to say, as I set up these sound bites, just consider the quick, cheap demagoguery. There’s this Drive-By stuff from Kamala Harris and the way that she’s sort of getting herself to tremble and seem like she’s all mad about this. Consider her honesty and her authenticity and the depth of her knowledge versus this man, this man who actually helped craft the standards in Florida. And as you pointed out, is the great, great grandson of slaves starting in 12. Listen to Dr. Allen.

Dr. Allen: These people are saying this is what’s being presented in Florida. It is an absolute falsehood. If anybody is presenting the positive good school of slavery, it’s the heirs of people like Calhoun and Tawney and Woodrow Wilson, who continue to propagate the false picture that the birth of the nation was nothing but slavery. I can point out quickly enough, Frederick Douglass and R.W. Wills in 1893 demonstrated in protesting the exclusion of blacks from the world fair of 1893 amidst thousands of lynchings that the accomplishments of black people post-slavery were the accomplished was not just to black Americans, but the accomplishments of American principles. And that is the truth that people seek to deny by erasing the stories of the people who lived through the histories.

Guy Benson: And this is part of what he said in that interview. And he’s been really active in saying this publicly in the face of all of this criticism. He’s saying the reason that we’re talking about the skills that ultimately helped benefit some of these slaves to escape to the north, build life for themselves, purchase their own freedom, is because those are the actual lived histories of the people. And listening to those voices in history firsthand accounts really matters. And he made it personal in Cut 13. Listen to this.

Dr. Allen: What is being done here is the attempt to create stories for our time and impose them on people who told their stories in their own time, thereby erasing their stories. And that means my story, by the way, because, after all, my great grandfather came to this country through fraudulent inducement, looking for opportunity only to find himself a slave. But he had the pluck to seek opportunity. And that pluck that he brought with him provided the skills, provided the initiative that allowed him post-slavery to establish his family securely. And this is the story of millions of people. Those stories must be told as the people who lived them experienced them, and no one should be allowed to erase those stories.

Guy Benson: And what you just heard from Dr. Allen, plus the actual publicly available 216 page long curriculum that is being boiled down and ludicrously simplified into Florida’s teaching middle schoolers that slavery was good for the slaves and benefited them. You know, Manny Diaz, Jr. I have to say, watching that interview with Jesse Waters, I would love to see a debate between the Vice President of the United States and Dr. William Allen on this point. I don’t think if it were a fair, evenhanded debate with a good moderator, I don’t think she could even come close to holding her own because she has one or two sizzling hot takes that she pounded the table about with no apparent caring about what the facts are versus the deep understanding and the studied history and the thoughtfulness of Dr. Allen. I would welcome that type of exchange, though. I assume you would, too.

Mandy Diaz Jr.: I would love to see that. I think Dr. Allen, not only, as you mentioned, as one of the authors of this very well read man, clearly a direct descendant who is affected by the topic. And on the other side, you have someone who has picked up some talking points bolstered by the teachers union and just trying to gaslight Americans into believing this. And I think that would be a great debate to illustrate the truth. We have to stand with the truth, and I think Dr. Allen illustrated what the truth is, what these benchmarks are really saying, and not what the gaslighting that the Vice President is trying to produce here.

Guy Benson: Since you mentioned the teachers union and their spouting off, I’ve seen some of their representatives in the media talking about how awful this is joining the pile on, fueling the dishonesty. I saw one of your spokespeople on social media was calling them out saying they had a seat at this table on the curriculum. Not only were they there, they praised the curriculum, I guess, until their fellow leftist tribe members instructed everyone in the the sort of the talking points one out, we’re mad about this, this is racist. And then they’ve they’ve flipped and they’re joining the chorus. But is it accurate that the teachers union was active in the formulation and the conversations around this curriculum in that they were laudatory towards it until they weren’t?

Mandy Diaz Jr.: Yeah, Guy. And the process was months of publicly available meetings where the public could go. The teachers union did participate. They did complement the work group of scholars that was putting this together as they were doing it. They they were at multiple meetings. And this is only until they decided to pile on with the other leftists that decided to take this message. And that direction is when you saw that that’s not what they were saying when they were attending these meetings.

Guy Benson: In retrospect, do you feel like you guys could have just taken the word “benefit” out and this would have all gone away? Or was just this a means to an end? It didn’t matter how it was presented.

Mandy Diaz Jr.: I don’t think it would have mattered. I think they would have taken this and spun it in the direction that they wanted. They obviously had an agenda. I think Dr. Allen gave a bit of an explanation illustration of what this benchmark is, that I, I cannot do it any better than he did. I think it’s pretty clear and and I believe that regardless of that there was going to be spin guy in one direction or another.

Guy Benson: I’ve seen public calls for your immediate resignation, sir, as the Commissioner of Education in the state of Florida. I think I saw the Miami-Dade Democratic Party joined that fray, calling on you to step down. Obviously, they’re they’re trying to turn this into a big problem for the Governor, but for the state, for his whole administration, they want you to be a fall guy. They want to collect your scalp. Will you be stepping down any time soon?

Mandy Diaz Jr.: Absolutely not. And again, that’s simply just political rhetoric taking a shot just like this. This White House is obsessed with Florida and taking shots at Governor DeSantis and telling lies. His opponents within the state are doing the same thing. And having gone through this thing, these politics for ten years in the legislature prior to being the commissioner, Guy, it’s very apparent that this is just a political cheap shot that they’re taking.

Guy Benson: Florida’s Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz Jr. Our guest on the Guy Benson Show. Sir, thank you very much for your time and some of the clarity. There’s a lot of noise out there and I’m glad you spent some time with us to try to cut through some of that noise.

Mandy Diaz Jr.: Well, I appreciate you, Guy, and thanks for having me on.