Florida Gubernatorial Candidate Ron DeSantis Wrote the Book On Why Slavery Wasn't So Bad

In what may be the most shocking political development of the year, a bombshell report found that Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis—seriously, are you sitting down?—wrote some insanely racist shit.

In 2011, DeSantis published the little-noticed book Dreams From Our Founding Fathers. Not only is the name a shoddy rip-off of President Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, it’s filled to the brim with ramblings that objectively clash with the stated ideals of a man who claims he’s only ever racist on “accident.” The Miami New Times reported on excerpts from the book excerpts on Tuesday after American Ledger—a publication of the liberal super PAC American Bridge—first resurfaced the book’s contents in a post on Monday.

What the two Bizarro World book reviews show is DeSantis’s commitment to railing against any pro-integration, anti-slavery arguments lobbed at the Supreme Court or the Founding Fathers. This starts with his rebuke of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s decision to criticize the collective of long-dead racists for baking white supremacy into American culture, with DeSantis writing that Marshall’s “failure overshadows the numerous and long-lasting political achievements embodied in the structural foundations of the government that have nothing to do with the institution of slavery.” DeSantis went on to write that Marshall was dead wrong in his criticisms because the “philosophical foundations of the Constitution are incompatible with slavery.”

The line fits with the general worldview promoted by DeSantis and his ilk. The Ledger and New Times both reported that DeSantis went on to claim the so-called “Three-Fifths Compromise” in the Constitution, which counted enslaved Americans as three-fifths of a person, actually “benefitted anti-slavery states.” Simply stated, Southerners wanted the compromise because it meant more bodies counted toward representation while continuing to summarily deny those same people their basic human rights. The only people the compromise benefitted were white citizens, and then mostly the literate landowners who could actually participate in the voting process.

You can go read the full manifesto yourself, but for the sake of the remaining brain cells that have survived the past two years, maybe just take my word for it that it very much is exactly what one would expect from a man (and potentially future governor!) who has done nothing but show his racist ass for the entirety of his campaign and political career.