Opinions | Youngkin banishes Trump, but he can't clean the stench of Trumpism
Underneath his fleece vest, the Virginia gubernatorial candidate is all Trump. Opinion by Dana Milbank
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/24/youngkin-rally-trump-virginia-governor/
"What we won't do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race," Youngkin vowed, adding that "on Day 1, I will ban critical race theory." It was perhaps the biggest applause line of the night.
Preceding Youngkin onstage, the Republican attorney general candidate, Jason Miyares, argued that "you cannot survive as a nation if you're raising an entire generation of children to hate their country, and that is exactly what critical race theory is."
Critical race theory isn't taught in Virginia schools. It's a phantom menace, whipped up by Fox News to fill White people with racial terror. Youngkin urged his supporters to fear a "20-year high murder rate," even though overall violent crime decreased in 2020 in Virginia, among the safest states in the country.
Fabrication:
Youngkin complained that "Virginia ranks 50th in the nation in standards for kids to progress in math, reading," but Virginia kids' actual proficiency exceeds the national average.
He suggested that Virginia "children cannot pass an 8th-grade math equivalency test" because of pandemic school closures — "so we will proclaim that Virginia's schools will never be closed again to five-day-a-week, in-person education." In reality, Virginia's 38 percent proficiency in 8th grade math topped the national 33 percent. And the test results to which Youngkin referred were from before the pandemic-related closures.
Youngkin claimed that McAuliffe "said there's no place for parents in their kids' education" (a line that prompted boos and shouts of "communist"). But McAuliffe didn't say there's "no place" for parents. He spoke out against vigilantism in which "parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach" and "running down teachers."
Why does Youngkin traffic in Trumpism?
Because it's the only way he can win.
