Two weeks ago, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, was in trouble. He was running against one of the true heavyweights of the Democratic Party—former advisor to President Bill Clinton and a former governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe.
Youngkin was running a good campaign but was lagging in the polls. Then, he got an unexpected gift from his opponent.
Terry McAuliffe wanted to shore up his support among the powerful teachers’ unions. The teachers and their allies on school boards have had a pretty rough go of it recently. Concerned parents had been showing up at school board meetings to complain about the curriculum their kids are being taught.
The arrogant school board members sought to silence the parents, basically telling them to sit down and shut up. The president of the national school board association had sent a letter to the president asking the federal government to treat the threats from some parents as “domestic terrorism.”
And then McAuliffe stuck his foot in it. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” he said during a debate with Youngkin.
That remark opened the floodgates of passionate opposition by parents and gave a power boost to Youngkin’s campaign.
Virtually overnight, Youngkin flipped the board on McAuliffe. After losing by double digits to the Democrat among independents in most polls. Youngkin now has a double-digit lead among indies. And Youngkin has drawn nearly even with McAuliffe among female voters after trailing badly.
And what’s driving Youngkin’s campaign is parental activism over what is being taught in schools. They reject critical race theory, rules on gender, and the deification of Black Lives Matter.
“We all know education starts with curriculum,” Youngkin told his supporters at a rally on Saturday. “We will teach all history, the good and the bad.”
“America has fabulous chapters and it’s the greatest country in the world, but we also have some important chapters in our history, we must teach them,” Youngkin added, saying that under his administration, children will not be taught “to view everything through a lens of race.”
“We know in our hearts it’s wrong,” Youngkin said. “Dr. Martin Luther King implored us to judge one another based on the content of our character and not the color of our skin. Therefore, on day one, I will ban critical race theory in our schools.”
Education is now the second-most important issue in Virginia, according to the most recent polls. Only the economy and jobs are considered more important to voters. Controversies over masks and mandates are now secondary to the great debate over who will feed and nurture America’s young minds—the parents who raise them or the teachers seeking to indoctrinate them?
Related: They’re at It Again: The Left Is Using Its California Playbook in Virginia
The left has pretty much had its way of teaching children what they want and how they want. They were able to get away with this because parents were either misled or misinformed and, in many cases, simply lied to by teachers and administrators.
But across the country, parents are standing up to protest what they see as the propagandizing of their children. As Youngkin made clear, the kids must be taught everything: the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly.
It appears at this point that Youngkin will ride these issues all the way to the governor’s mansion.
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