First, the governor is accused of erasing ethnicity, now a Ron DeSantis plan to require Asian studies is “controversial” because everything is stupid.

If you needed any further evidence that anything Ron DeSantis says or proposes is automatically attacked by certain factions, this latest contrived controversy essentially sums it up. Recently a new law was signed by Florida’s governor to require Asian-American and Pacific Islander history to be taught in schools, and he is facing a backlash from those with sensitivities towards marginalized groups. This argument is as ridiculous as it is a lazy complaint.

Remarkably, NBC News wants us to believe the pushback is emerging from those with that very background, as they claim to be outraged on behalf of other minorities. This is such an ill-conceived gripe that you have to just sit back and laugh at the indolence on display.

Asian American academics and civil rights organizations are speaking out after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill last week, requiring that Asian American and Pacific Islander history to be included in the K-12 curriculum. Gregg Orton, national director of National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, a coalition of dozens of AAPI organizations, said the history law is far from a “win” for the Asian American community, adding that “racial justice can’t be a zero-sum game for communities of color.”

The Asian Pacific director also invoked “efforts to invisiblize or erase Black history.” This means, most obviously, this is all rooted in ignorance, and it would appear to be of the willful variety. The only way a leader of an ethnic organization would take issue with his ethnicity benefitting like this is if they were purely operating from the starting point of political opposition.  

This is not some kind of PR bandaid DeSantis cooked up to deflect from criticisms, this was a lengthy lobbying effort by another AAPI group to have these curriculums placed into schools. The organization Make Us Visible has worked for two years to get this law passed. But after giving that group perfunctory coverage, NBC News had to find others complaining.

Pawan Dhingra, president of the Association for Asian American Studies, said that the effort from activists to implement Asian American studies in schools is admirable. However, the greater context around race education in the state can’t be ignored.

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Moreover, Asian American history is intertwined and inextricably tied to others’ experiences, challenges and struggles, Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, said. Omitting those aspects of education would create an untruthful representation, he said. 

We will call this a misguided sentiment fueled by the false narratives in the media – otherwise, it is outright deception taking place by these academics. Florida has not omitted anything regarding black history, it has seen fit to prevent a perversion of history through courses and class studies that were newly proposed. The narrative that Florida’s Department of Education has been eliminating black history and slavery from classrooms is an abject lie.

The second form of press prevarication is the lie of omission. In order to sell this fable of Florida erasing black studies they have to ignore a key disqualifying fact: It is a law in Florida that the DOE includes black history and the teaching of slavery in K-12 classrooms. They cannot even say that Ron DeSantis is attempting to skirt this legislation or repeal it through new proposals – he was the man who signed it into law three years ago. 

Along with currently mandated teachings of the Holocaust and those victimized by communism, now he wants to add the AAPI history course to this curriculum, and some want to scorch him over this. There is another dose of education taking place for others to take in. This is a great lesson in media manipulation and the crafting of false narratives in the press.