NATIONAL REVIEW: IF YOU'RE EXPLAINING, YOU'RE TOTALLY WINNING

National Review's Natan Ehrenreich has a genius strategy for Ron DeSantis's campaign reboot:

Kamala Harris has gifted DeSantis a golden opportunity to begin that reset by recentering his cultural message on issues that Republicans care about.... [H]e should start by attacking the narrative pushed in recent days by the Vice President that Florida’s history curriculum is teaching that slavery was good for slaves.

Charlie [Charles C.W.] Cooke has convincingly demonstrated that Harris’ brazen abuse of what he calls “Ctrl+F politics” is dishonest to the core. If National Review can make these points, so can DeSantis. And by recentering his “anti-woke” message on quality education for Florida’s children rather than obscure examples of “woke capitalism” (I’m still slightly unsure what ESG is, exactly), DeSantis can retain a focus on the cultural battles that made him famous without falling prey to the “terminally online” aura that has defined parts of his campaign. He should start right now.

Cooke says we're practicing "Ctrl+F politics," by which he means this:

A few years ago, I started writing about a political phenomenon that I termed “Ctrl+F politics.” The rise of the internet, I observed, had led to the rise of actors and institutions whose explicit role in our civic life was to scour the debates that it generates in search of words or phrases that can be stripped of their mitigating context and weaponized against the unsuspecting.

Harris has criticized a line in Florida's 2023 social studies standards:

Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.

Ehrenreich and Cooke insist that this one sentence from a lengthy curriculum shouldn't be read in isolation. I think I know what it might refer to. I was in Charleston not long ago and learned that some enslaved people in cities were hired out as part-time laborers, using skills they learned as part of their forced labor. In Charleston, they were required to wear metal neck tags.

For more than a century, slaves in Charleston were required to give all the money they earned this way to their owners. But there were some arrangements that permitted slaves to put away some money, and a small number of slaves were able to purchase their own freedom (after which, however, they were required to pay a tax on themselves, as members of a race that was otherwise seen as property).

Is "benefit" the right word for this? It seems to me like a small mitigating factor in an otherwise brutally cruel and inhuman system. But if you're defensive about slavery, maybe this is the word you want to use.

I hope DeSantis takes Ehrenreich's advice. When you're explaining, you're losing. Go ahead, Ron, and explain.

And while we're on the subjecty of "Ctrl+F," maybe DeSantis shouldn't have fired Nate Hochman, the staffer who made the video in which DeSantis's face was superimposed on a Sonnenrad, a symbol embraced by Nazis and neo-Nazis.

Hey, it's on the screen only for a split second, at 1:01. Aren't we just stripping this Nazi symbol of its mitigating context?