Jessica Tarlov Battles Fired Up Co-Hosts Over Florida’s Black History Curriculum: ‘Just Let Me Finish’

Fox News’s top-rated show, The Five, kicked off its program on Monday with a heated discussion about Florida’s controversial new Black history curriculum, which includes teaching students that slaves learned useful skills.

The segment began with most of the co-hosts tearing into Vice President Kamala Harris for her condemnation of the curriculum in a speech last Thursday.

Co-host Jesse Watters raged against the vice president, concluding, “Kamala Harris is either dumb and didn’t read anything about it, or she knows the truth and has decided to lie to the American people about it.”

“I think it’s disgusting. And why doesn’t Kamala Harris want African Americans and White Americans to know that Black Americans did learn skills despite being enslaved? Why doesn’t she want them to learn that?” Watters concluded after defending teaching students that Blacks learned skills as slaves.

“Jessica, do you think that she read the whole thing and just decided to cherry-pick something?” asked Dana Perino.

“I do think that she read the whole thing, and I think that it’s an incredibly complex piece when you look at 191 passages. You have some good and frankly, I’m just fundamentally uncomfortable with this sentence that Blacks benefited at all from this,” replied Jessica Tarlov, offering a different take from her four co-hosts.

“And, you know, it made me think of, as someone, obviously, I’m not Black, but I’m Jewish. Would someone say about the Holocaust, for instance, that there were some benefits for Jews? While they were hanging out in concentration camps. You wanted a strong work ethic. Right. Maybe you learned a new skill,” Tarlov added.

Greg Gutfeld jumped in and added, “Did you ever read ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’? Vik Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility. Utility kept you alive.”

Tarlov replied, “We are also talking about middle schoolers here and there’s a lot of concern about what age people are prepared to understand complex issues. I’m not sure that 12 is the right age to start hearing things like and when you were enslaved here in America.”

Both Watters and Gutfeld quickly jumped in and shouted questions about “gender ideology” being taught to kids.

Tarlov, clearly expecting the interruption, didn’t take the bait and said, “Just let me finish.”

“Ron DeSantis knows that this is bad for him because his first response was, I didn’t do it,” she continued, adding:

I’m not involved in it. We do know that it’s a response to his 2022 act, the quote “Stop Woke Act.” And we also know that the type of people who are in charge of this overhaul, maybe not Dr. Allen, who you’re going to have on tonight, are someone like Kim Daniels, who’s on tape saying, “I thank God for slavery, because without it, I would be in Africa worshiping a tree.” She’s also an anti-Semite. She threw in that Jews own everything, which is a classic trope.

But the Florida Department of Education released a statement in response to Kamala Harris’s speech saying, you know, she’s got it totally off base. It includes, I think, 16 examples of the slaves that learned their skills while they were doing this. And Joshua Stratton from Georgetown pointed out that it’s riddled with inaccuracies.

Tarlov then ran through the inaccuracies as Watters continued to challenge her.

Watch the full clip above via Fox News.

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