How do you know a Democrat is scrambling to recover from a blunder? Or that a Republican threatens to win an election Democrats thought safe? Or that the guy on the left has run out of arguments?
You know, because that’s when the Democrat calls his Republican opponent a racist. The vile accusation has become an all-purpose slur that left-wingers hurl at conservatives to end debate because they can’t defend their own views.
Terry McAuliffe has reached this point in his race to become governor of Virginia. Asked about his opponent’s criticism of schools teaching children anti-white racism, the one-time Clintonian henchman replied that Republican Glenn Youngkin “talks about critical race theory. … It really bothers me because it is a racist dog whistle.”
Ah, the trusty, old dog whistle Democrats pretend they can hear Republicans blowing. McAuliffe’s disingenuous disquiet is like Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas’s “profound” “horror” last month at the sight of mounted border agents trying to stem an illegal influx of Haitian migrants into Texas. Both men were simply trying to burnish their anti-racism credentials by averring squeamishness about someone else’s supposed racial insensitivity. It’s bunk — calculated, pretentious, moral grandstanding deserving nothing but scorn.
Parents in Virginia, like parents across America, are enraged by propaganda being spoon-fed to their children by the left-wing teaching establishment. Democrats deny it. For example, they say critical race theory is not taught in grade school. But district boards have paid tens of thousands of dollars for copies of How to Be an Antiracist, the CRT bestseller by Ibram Kendi, and Fairfax County, Virginia, paid him an additional $20,000 for a one-hour speech.
McAuliffe’s blunder was to say in a televised debate with Youngkin, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” It was immediately recognized as that damaging category of gaffe — when a politician accidentally tells the truth — and Youngkin has used it in campaign advertisements ever since.
No issue is more likely to change minds in well-heeled northern Virginia than the suggestion that children’s development is for government, not parents. It was suburban mothers and fathers who turned Virginia deep Democrat blue, but they didn’t buy expensive houses in high-ranking school districts just to sit idly by while ideologues undermine little Johnny’s and Mary’s education.
The Left’s purpose, openly declared by some of them, is to reduce parental control over children and undermine the traditional family. This sometimes takes the form of propagandizing children about race, but it is also about many other outrages in the extensive catalog of today’s cultural revolution, such as exposing children early to pornography, and helping them transition to the opposite gender without their parents being informed.
Families hinder the accumulation of power by central government, and Democrats tell parents to remove themselves from decision-making about the education of their sons and daughters. It’s time for parents to refuse, and to show arrogant politicians who is in charge. They should start in Virginia and deny McAuliffe a second term.
