Unfortunately, it's not just the low IQ GOP base who believe that slaves had no skills when they came to the Americas.
The book that I keep referencing in this thread uses notices of missing slaves to demonstrate that slavers knew of the cultural differences that existed among African peoples, and such cultural differences determined which skills someone was more or less likely to have if they came from a particular region of the continent. The value of enslaved Africans was also a function of their skills and their compatibility with the market in which they were traded. Rice plantations in the Carolinas wanted people from Senegambia because growing rice had been part of their culture.
And the blacksmith stuff is just
. Does he think the weaponry and jewelry used in Africa at that time fell from the sky?
DeSantis is an ignorant racist, and it's about time the people of Florida call out his bull****. But most importantly, we don't educate enough about the mechanisms of the economics of slavery, and this lack of knowledge makes it easy for clowns like him to introduce policies with very little pushback from the average person.