McAuliffe: Parents Shouldn’t Pick Textbooks, ‘We Have Experts Who Actually Do That’

(AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

Among the many things riding on the gubernatorial race in Virginia is the question of whether American parents will be able to regain control of their children’s education, or whether that education will continue to be directed by a coterie of elitists with values that differ ever more sharply from those of the people whose children they are indoctrinating.

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Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe has already made it abundantly clear that he does not believe parents should have any say in how their children are educated; on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, he dug in even deeper than he already has.

Chuck Todd asked McAuliffe to comment on a video from an earlier debate in which McAuliffe complained that “parents had the right to veto books, not to be knowledgeable about it, also take them off the shelves,” and declared: “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision. So yeah, stopped a bill that I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they teach.”

Noting that McAuliffe had claimed that criticism he received for this had stemmed from his words being taken out of context, Todd followed up: “Governor, what about that makes you feel as if you were taken out of context? Do you feel as if anything you said there should reassure parents that they have some say in their kid’s schooling?”

To that, McAuliffe dug the hole he was already in even deeper: “Listen, that was about a bill I vetoed which people were very happy that I vetoed the bill, that literally parents could take books out of the curriculum. I love Billy and Jack McAuliffe, my parents, but they should not have been picking my math or science book. We have experts who actually do that. He is closing his campaign on banning books. It’s created controversy all over the book. He wants to ban Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved. He’s going after someone who won a Nobel Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom. He wants her books banned. In all the hundreds of books, you could look at, why the one black female author? Why did you do it? He’s ending the campaign on a racist dog whistle.”

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McAuliffe, resorting to a tried-and-true Leftist strategy, was trying to make the issue all about racism while ignoring the genuine, and quite serious, issues that were actually involved. A volume of gay pornography, Gender Queer, which is a graphic novel in both senses of the word “graphic,” has been available in Virginia school libraries.

While McAuliffe prattles about Toni Morrison, he is covering for the fact that many of the “experts” to which he would entrust the education of Virginia’s schoolchildren are ready and even eager to do everything they can to ensure that those children reject the values their parents have tried to instill in them, and become uncritical adherents of the establishment ideology of sexual libertinism, privileged victimhood, race and class hatred, socialism, and dependence upon the state.

Related: Youngkin Hits Back at McAuliffe’s ‘Out of Context’ Claim in Virginia Governor’s Race

Signs appeared all over Virginia recently: “Keep Parents Out of Classrooms, Vote McAuliffe, Keep Virginia Blue.” Both campaigns have said that they had nothing to do with the signs, and many people have assumed that Youngkin supporters produced them in order to satirize McAuliffe’s elitist stance. But given how open McAuliffe is about opposing the idea of parents being involved in the education of their children, it would be no surprise if his own supporters produced the signs.

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It has been a hallmark of totalitarian socialist regimes that they work to break the family unit, destroy family loyalty, and assert that the state has the primary right and responsibility to educate children. It takes a village, as Hillary Clinton put it in a masterful example of an appealing propaganda phrase masking a sinister reality.

This is necessary, of course, precisely because one’s family constitutes a call to one’s loyalty and allegiance that may end up in conflict with the loyalty and allegiance one owes to the state, or that the state believes one owes to it. The totalitarian state brooks no competition for the total involvement and obedience of each individual.

Terry McAuliffe is just one of the many incipient totalitarians in American politics today. If he and his allies succeed in imposing their agenda upon Virginia and the nation, the free republic Americans once lived in will be definitively a thing of the past. If the state wants to raise your child to be a drag queen and gay lap dancer, that’s entirely the state’s prerogative. It is not for you to question the wisdom of the state. It is your job solely to love Big Brother and do his bidding.

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