Youngkin’s victory in Virginia is ‘revenge of the parents’ says Meghan McCain

In a column citing numerous misleading right-wing talking points, commentator and sometime View co-host Meghan McCain has celebrated Republican Glenn Youngkin’s shocking gubernatorial victory in Virginia as a triumph for conservative families.

“In the simplest terms possible,” Ms McCain wrote in her MailOnline column, “it is revenge of the parents.”

The Virginia campaign saw Mr Youngkin, who was endorsed by Donald Trump, hammer Terry McAuliffe hard on the issue over how much influence parents should wield over their children’s education, in particular whether or not they should be able to force schools to withdraw certain books and subjects they find offensive or disagreeable.

One of the key incidents Mr Youngkin cited was a campaign several years ago led by a mother who was outraged that her son’s school was teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a classic of Black American literature that deals with the horrific reality of slavery.

“It’s the culmination of the past eighteen months of teachers unions shutting down schools and refusing to reopen them, the rise and spread of Critical Race Theory, the scandal of a girl’s rape in a bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt and the subsequent coverup by the teachers’ board, of parents being called ‘domestic terrorists’ for daring to dissent and finally Terry McAullif’s (sic) tone-deaf comment that ‘parents shouldn’t be involved in the classroom,” she wrote.

“It has all resulted in a historic win, a historic wave of red – the Red Wedding of all election wins for Republicans.”

However, the reality of the trends and incidents Ms McCain refers to is quite different than she and other Republicans have claimed.

For example, the school bathroom rape case, which occurred in Virginia’s Loudon County, did not necessarily involve “a boy wearing a skirt”; a juvenile court judge found that the girl and her attacker had had several previous consensual sexual encounters in the girls’ bathroom at their school before the sexual assault incident, and the local school board’s policy on gender-inclusive bathroom access was not passed until after the assault took place.

Nonetheless, the incident has become a conservative lightning rod, with activists using it to further stir up rising outrage at the increasing acceptance of transgender rights and identities.

Critical race theory, meanwhile, is not taught in high school curriculums, and has been relentlessly misrepresented by Republicans who equate teaching children about systemic racism in America with teaching white children to hate themselves and their country. And the “domestic terrorists” label Ms McCain alludes to has been applied to specific threats directed at school board members over values and curriculum subject matter.

As Attorney General Merrick Garland explained at a recent Senate hearing: "Parents have been complaining about the education of their children and about school boards since there were such things as school boards and public education. This is totally protected by the First Amendment. True threats of violence are not protected by the First Amendment. Those are the things we are worried about here.

“Those are the only things we are worried about here. We are not investigating peaceful protests or parent involvement in school board meetings. There is no precedent for doing that and we would never do that. We are only concerned about violence and threats of violence against school administrators, teachers, staff.”

Describing vanquished former governor Terry McAuliffe (whose name she repeatedly misspells) as a “rotting political corpse”, Ms McCain – an unsparing Trump critic since before he became president – celebrates Mr Youngkin’s win as evidence that the Republicans can win purple-state races without making Donald Trump a party figurehead.

“What Virginia should make many Republican contenders consider is whether the Biden Democrats are now so utterly toxic to voters that the GOP could triumph in the mid-terms and the 2024 general election without pandering to the ego of Mar a Lago,” she writes.

“Which is where it gets really interesting.”