It's been fascinating to watch and read the past 48 hours of so-called "analysis" on cable news and corporate, legacy media platforms dissecting the Republican wave victory in Virginia this week. OK... well, it's been more than fascinating... it's also been amusing and it's been infuriating.
The amusing part has been watching all the well-paid experts whose main job is to go on television and explain American politics and elections to the dwindling audience and continue to get it wrong time after time after time.
The same pundits who completely missed the 2016 election's Trump revolution and then got the Russian collusion fiasco completely wrong and then missed the major pandemic story of the Wuhan lab leak and then willfully ignored the blockbuster Hunter Biden story in the 2020 election were all right back there on the "expert panel" portion of election coverage telling you exactly what happened in Virginia... and, naturally, they got it wrong.
First, please understand that I think I have a pretty good handle on this issue. My daily radio show is heard on Washington DC's WMAL and is broadcast through the Washington area, including all of Northern Virginia going as far south as just outside the state capital of Richmond. I've been broadcasting for several hours per day for the past nine years, and this is the third gubernatorial election I've covered for listeners in Virginia.
The most ridiculous analysis is the opinion that the Virginia results were a repudiation of Joe Biden. And this opinion cuts both ways.
We saw Republicans jumping up and down, calling Biden a lame duck and claiming that Virginia rejected Terry McAuliffe as a way of rejecting Joe Biden, that this was a victory for DC Republicans who held the line and resisted Biden's multi-trillion-dollar expansion of the federal government. I'm sorry, pals, that wasn't even in the mix last Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Democrat pundits will insist that the "message" from their historic defeat this week is to push through the Biden/Bernie spending orgy because Virginians were angry that the Democrats didn't pass enough expensive socialism in DC so they chose a right-of-center Republican government that promised to cut taxes and government regulation.
Makes sense, right?
No, this election was not a repudiation of Biden or DC politics. It was about Virginians. And, more specifically, it was about the Virginia government infringing on the lives of Virginians over the past several years of Democrat control.
That infringement was best exemplified in the destruction of the Virginia public schools.
There's been a lot of talk about Critical Race Theory (CRT) and how the destructive pedagogy has wormed its way into the formation of curricula in Virginia schools. Make no mistake, Yamiche Alcindor and Joy Reid and multitudes of other activists/journalists are flat-out wrong when they tell you that concerns over CRT are dog whistle lies. (Isn't it amazing that they're the only ones who actually hear these dog whistles of racism? Doesn't that make them the racists?)
Alcindor's question to Biden on Wednesday about CRT and the Virginia election is quite revealing in this regard:
.@Yamiche Alcindor, Democratic Party hack: "What's your message, though, for Democratic voters, especially black voters who see Republicans running on race, education, lying about critical race theory & they're worried Democrats don't have an effective way to push back on that." pic.twitter.com/0krFGxj5nb
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 3, 2021
"What's your message, though, for Democratic voters, especially black voters who see Republicans running on race, education, lying about critical race theory and they're worried Democrats don't have an effective way to push back on that?"
Let's take Alcindor at face value here. She claims that CRT is a "lie" and that "Democrats don't have an effective way to push back on that."
This is quite revealing, indeed. How does one push back on a lie? You call it a lie. And, if necessary, you show evidence to prove that it is a lie.
Well, McAuliffe first called CRT a "conspiracy theory," then a myth. His flying monkey minions in the media picked up the talking point and have been repeating it for months... to no avail. Why hasn't this been effective? It's obvious: Because parents have seen and heard it with their own eyes and ears over the past year.
While the incompetent Virginia school boards and state education establishment forced schools to close during the pandemic, children were piping their classrooms directly onto every kitchen table. Mom and Dad heard exactly what their kids were being taught about their race and the inherent, systemic racism that separated Virginia children into the oppressors and the oppressed.
The lie about CRT is that CRT is a lie. And Virginians know it.
But the energy we saw in Northern Virginia school board meetings over the past year has gone much further than just the CRT debacle.
Fairfax County began the Open FCPS movement when parents were angry that school boards did the bidding of the teachers' unions and kept schools closed all last year. Loudoun County's school board meetings were lit rhetorically aflame with parent Brandon Michon's passionate speech about his children suffering without a normal classroom experience. "Figure it out!" Michon pleaded. They still haven't figured it out.
Even earlier than the pandemic, Fairfax County changed the admittance rules at Thomas Jefferson High School (literally the finest high school in the nation) based on racial equity protocols rather than academic achievement. The end result of this formula was that Asian-American students were excluded from TJHS despite their academic excellence. They were excluded solely due to their race.
This activated Asra Nomani, and she has become a fixture at school board meetings, protests, and Fox News appearances!
School closures, exclusionary racial admittance policies, CRT, transgender bathroom policies, the cover-up of sexual assaults to help promote a radical agenda at the expense of our children... are all issues that motivate voters a lot more than an infrastructure bill, I assure you.
The election in Virginia ultimately was about many things, of course – the economy, taxes, regulation, black face, Klan hoods, radical abortion bills, infringement of Second Amendment rights, McAuliffe's awful campaign management, and a whole lot more.
But when you tie that nasty package up with a bow that pisses off parents who normally wouldn't even pay attention to a gubernatorial election (let alone a boring school board meeting), you've set yourself up for a historic victory. And Glenn Youngkin is smart enough (and earnest enough) to see how important these issues are and how politically powerful they became.
Bottom line: In politics, don't piss off parents.