DeSantis Disney appointee taught seminar falsely claiming white people were also slaves

As part of his escalating fight with Disney after they criticized his anti-LGBTQ school legislation, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies in the state legislature passed a law that let him step in and take over the special taxing district that provides public services to the Walt Disney World resort complex, a move designed to limit the powers of the company as retaliation for criticizing him. One of the steps of that involved hand-picking a new oversight board to manage the district.

According to CNN's KFILE investigative feature, one of the members DeSantis appointed to that board has promoted racist historical myths about slavery.

"The comments were made by Ron Peri, one of five people DeSantis appointed earlier this year to oversee the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District to replace the old board after the company spoke out against what critics dubbed the 'Don’t Say Gay' law in Florida," reported Andrew Kaczynski, Em Steck and Steve Contorno. "Peri, an Orlando-based pastor and CEO of a Christian ministry group called The Gathering, made the comments in an hourlong class for his group posted on YouTube about critical race theory called 'Cunningly Devised Fables,'" purporting to debunk the idea of systemic racism in America.

Among his remarks, Peri claimed that white people were also enslaved, and that specifically there was an "Irish slave trade" in which Irish people were forcibly interbred with Black Africans. This myth has been repeatedly debunked. There were some indentured white servants in early America, in which people were made to work unpaid labor to pay off a debt — but it was not very widespread, and indentured servants had far more rights than chattel slaves, who were hereditarily treated as property, essentially with no more rights than horses or pigs.

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Peri also claimed that it was commonplace for Black people to own slaves as well, another common myth of slavery apologists. There was at least one documented case of a Black slaveowner in the mid-17th century, but for most of the Antebellum period, slave-permitting states had laws that essentially made it impossible for Black people, including the handful who were free, to become extensive property owners, let alone slaveowners, themselves.

According to CNN, Peri has since scrubbed this seminar from the internet and told KFILE, "Slavery is a moral wrong wherever it exists or existed and is one of America’s great historical wrongs ... Even one person in slavery is egregious and morally reprehensible, regardless of race."

But the board Peri is already making some decisions that touch on racial matters. This week, the board announced it will be scrapping all of its diversity programs.

All of this comes as the DeSantis administration comes under fire after a task force he set up to rewrite state educational standards, dominated by a pair of right-wing activists, created guidelines that state Black people learned valuable skills from slavery, as well as teaching children that civil disobedience of the type Martin Luther King practiced is "irresponsible citizenship."