Only one party in Virginia has a recent history of running candidates who engaged in what leftists have deemed irredeemable racism. The Washington Post pretended it was Republicans in the form of businessman Glenn Youngkin.
Those who followed the paper’s coverage throughout the season are likely well-acquainted with Youngkin’s pledge to ban critical race theory in schools, a form of systemic racism that indoctrinates students to see the entire world through a racial lens.
“Youngkin is using the critical race theory bogeyman to rile up the Trumpian base,” headlined a September editorial casting the Republican candidate’s crusade against racist education as itself, racist.
“There’s little mystery about what impels Mr. Youngkin’s false statements,” Post editors wrote after denying the presence of critical race theory in K-12 curriculums, despite the numerous examples Republicans have exposed. The paper indicted Youngkin’s motivation as “dovetail[ing] with national Republicans’ strategy of using the critical race theory bogeyman to foment racial resentments among the GOP’s heavily White voting base.”
The McAuliffe campaign talking point that critical race theory is not in schools is a lie, by the way, regurgitated by NPR and CNN as late as the morning of Election Day despite McAuliffe’s own Department of Education’s demand that teachers “embrace critical race theory.”
Terry McAuliffe's closing argument is that critical race theory is a "racist dog whistle" that has "never been taught in Virginia." But I can debunk this lie—and prove that McAuliffe himself was the first Virginia governor to promote CRT.
Let's go.🧵
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 30, 2021
Another opinion piece published in the Post on Monday suggested that calling Youngkin’s campaign against state-sponsored racism in schools a “dog whistle” wasn’t going far enough.
“Youngkin has no secret agenda here,” Post columnist Paul Waldman insisted after citing Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe’s charge that Youngkin is employing racist coded language. “[Youngkin] isn’t using subtle hints to appeal to a subset of the electorate while everyone else remains blissfully ignorant. We all know what he’s doing.”
In October, the Post ran a news piece that suggested Youngkin was “antisemitic” for mentioning George Soros and a “perspective” piece which lied about the candidate’s position on Toni Morrison’s book, “Beloved.”
Headlined, “Banning Toni Morrison’s books doesn’t protect kids. It just sanitizes racism,” the article accused Republicans of running a campaign to ban the Pulitzer Prize-winning work from classrooms along with any education on the history of slavery.
“In this instance, those who criticize ‘Beloved’ and want to ban what they call critical race theory claim that any works addressing the country’s history of racial inequality and violence pose a threat to impressionable young minds,” wrote Columbia literature Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin.
But Republicans, including Younkin, aren’t endorsing the erasure of history from classrooms — in stark contrast to the far-left revolutionaries engaged in the nationwide destruction of statues. Youngkin ran an ad attacking McAuliffe for twice vetoing bipartisan legislation as governor that would have given parents the choice to opt their children out of being assigned to read the sexually explicit text.
The Washington Post ran a “fact-check” of that too which complained it lacked context.
The debate over Morrison’s book highlighted Youngkin’s platform to give parents a voice in their children’s education compared to McAuliffe who, on the debate stage in September, pledged “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision.”
Yet while Youngkin was tarred as a racist Republican who sought to ban history from the classroom while running on a cooked-up conspiracy against critical race theory, the Post ignored the Democrats’ own costume history.
After McAuliffe demanded Virginia Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam resign over past photos of Northam dressed in either blackface or as a Ku Klux Klansmen, McAuliffe now celebrates his support. McAuliffe is also campaigning with Attorney General Mark Herring on the same ticket with the Post’s endorsement, despite Herring previously admitting to wearing blackface.