The DeSantis campaign is denouncing GOP presidential rival Nikki Haley for failing to cite slavery as a cause of the Civil War, but critics were quick to recall Gov. Ron DeSantis’ own controversy from the summer on the history of American slavery.
“Maybe you should sit this one out,” wrote Carlos Guillermo Smith, a former Democratic state representative from Orlando and current state Senate candidate, addressing the DeSantis campaign’s comments.
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, the first state to secede from the union in 1860, said in response to a questioner in New Hampshire on Wednesday that the cause of the war “was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”
“We need to have capitalism, we need to have economic freedom, we need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties, so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way,” she continued.
“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you’d answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery,’” the questioner said, to which Haley responded, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”
Her answer drew widespread criticism, including from President Joe Biden. “It was about slavery,” he wrote on X, the former Twitter.
The DeSantis War Room account also jumped in, posting a video of her “disastrous town hall” and writing, “Haley inexplicably does not mention slavery in her response.”
“It’s been 12 hours and Nikki Haley still hasn’t offered an explanation for her comments,” the War Room account wrote on Thursday morning. “What’s the hold up?”
Haley did backtrack later on Thursday, saying, “Of course the civil war was about slavery. We know that. That is unquestioned, always the case.”
But, she added, “it was also more than that. It was about the…
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