If MAGA-lite candidate Glenn Youngkin wins the Virginia gubernatorial race, or even if he loses the bluish state respectably, Republicans will rightly conclude that they’ve hit on a boffo new formula for marketing ignorance. Just listen to this Virginia voter who was caught on camera yesterday expounding on what he considered to be the most important issue in the campaign:
“Getting back to the basics of teaching children. Not teaching them critical race theory.”
Then he was asked, “What is critical race theory?”
John Q. Citizen’s priceless response: “I’m not going to get into the specifics of it because I don’t understand it that much. But it’s something that I don’t – little bit that I know I don’t care for. I’m not gonna, you know, I don’t, uh, I don’t have that much knowledge on it, but it’s something that I’m not – that I don’t care for.”
Well now. As topical comic George Carlin once said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
Oh excuse me, does that make me “elitist”? Or am I merely pointing out the obvious – that millions of people have relieved themselves of the responsibility of exercising whatever brain power they may actually possess, preferring instead to subcontract their minds to the idiocies they scan on social media and recycle amongst themselves?
For their information (information that means nothing to the willfully deaf and dumb), critical race theory is a 40-year-old academic concept which posits that racism is embedded in legal systems and public policies. It isn’t taught in any Virginia K-through-12 classes, nor is it taught virtually anywhere outside of some law schools and advanced grad programs. But conservatives are ginning up today’s Virginia turnout by marketing the term as a catch-all for any attempts by educators to expose white kids to the racist practices that are regrettably part of the American experience.
Glenn Youngkin, a former hedge fund CEO, doesn’t rant on the stump in the Trump tradition. Instead he has leveraged his Trump endorsement to speak softly and carry the Trump shtick.
He promises to ban critical race theory on his first day in office (Trumpists are good at slaying phantoms), and, more generally, he has complained that “we don’t need to teach our children to view everything through the lens of race,” which is a cleverly Orwellian way to warn public school teachers that they should never mess with white kids’ tender sensibilities by exposing them to reality. Youngkin’s message is driven home in a campaign ad that features a Virginia mother who tried eight years ago to remove Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Beloved” from her son’s high school English curriculum after he complained that the slavery scenes gave him nightmares. (The boy, now grown up and presumably nightmare-free, later worked in the Trump White House.)
This is all red meat to Virginia’s MAGA base, which Youngkin needs in order to win, but it’s appealing as well to some white suburban parents in the swing exurban counties that voted blue in the last two gubernatorial races.
Youngkin’s rise in the polls – at the expense of Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe – tells us something important. In the words of Dana Williams, president of the Toni Morrison Society, “It is evidence of just how petrified this nation is of its past, especially when that past challenges American myths of freedom and justice for all…What Youngkin’s choice to raise this issue at this point in the campaign reveals is his understanding of the appeal of anti-intellectualism among a specific segment of voters. The goal of all great literature is to teach and to enlighten. Clearly, not everyone is interested in that kind of lesson or enlightenment.”
If McAuliffe (a former Democratic national chairman and former Virginia governor seeking to return) does manage to eke out a win, he will have done so in spite of himself. In a notoriously inartful moment, during a debate when Younkin was waging his culture war against the schools, McAuliffe said: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” What he meant to say (but didn’t) is that educators have a wide range of responsibilities to a community and that the most vocal parents should not have veto power; alas, candidates often live or die by the soundbites they emit, and McAuliffe’s was a gift to the opposition.
It’s useless right now to speculate what the Virginia results may or may not portend for the ’22 midterms, but what we do know for certain is that Youngkin’s campaign is further proof of the MAGA GOP’s nationwide mission to market ignorance (check out Texas) and suppress the teaching of true history in our public schools. If that isn’t cancel culture, what is?