Those opposing the spread of radical progressive ideologies among school children have bagged a significant victory last weekend. The candidate for governor opposed to Crtiical Race Theory (CRT) came out on top of the candidate who supports its presence in the Virginia public school curriculum.
Republican Glenn Youngkin pulled a narrow but important victory over his Democrat rival Terry McAuliffe. This is no small feet in a state that only a year earlier, during the presidential elections, went to the Democrats with a 10-point majority.
According to research, the deciding factor seems to have been the introduction of CRT into state school curricula, some 25 percent of voters have said that this issue was their top concern before the elections, and 72 percent said it was important. Inflation, public safety and high taxes introduced by the Democrats were also mentioned as topics that voters were concerned about. McAuliffe had, according to observers, lost the election on this major issue, despite receiving support from top-tier Democrats, ranging from President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, but former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama also endorsed the radical leftist candidate.
The background to the Virginia election drama is the ongoing scandal around divisive progressive political ideologies being forced on children in schools within the state, where educational establishments in Loudoun County have become the testing ground for the Democrats’ social experiments, such as actively promoting the Black Lives Matter movement, CRT, LGBTQ ideology, gender neutrality, and others. However, in Loudoun County, they have encountered unexpectedly fierce organized resistance from parents, whose children, especially those of a White background, have often been subjected to humiliating discrimination during school lessons.
Students have been forced to watch graphic footage of alleged police brutality, or the death of George Floyd, and were also forced to confess their “White guilt” and to denounce the history of the United States as racist and oppressive.
Even school teachers opposed to radical progressive ideologies were bullied by the county school board to the point where they decided to resign in protest. Yet, what seems to have started the tide of discontent, was the rape of a 15-year-old schoolgirl in one of the gender-neutral toilets. A boy dressed in a skirt took advantage of the shared facilities championed by the school and brutally assaulted the young girl. The School Board had first tried to deny that the assault took place at all, instead the girl’s father was arrested during a school board meeting for trying to complain about his daughter’s ordeal.
Despite emotions running high on the issue, McAuliffe had, rather astonishingly, told concerned parents that he will not allow them to have a say on what their children are being taught in school. In contrast, Youngkin promised to ban the teaching of CRT in public schools on his first day in the office.
The Democrat’s candidate also strongly misread the public mood when he based his campaign on constant parallels between former President Donald Trump and Youngkin. The approach clearly backfired as the Trump turn-off effect, if any, does not appear to be as strong in Virginia as Democrats would have liked to believe.
In fact, after election night, liberal media tried to explain the result by describing it as “dog whistle racism,” as a CNN pundit put it. MSNBC went so far as saying “Glenn Youngkin’s victory proves White ignorance is a powerful weapon.” Yet a democrat strategist, James Carville, told reporters that McAuliffe’s defeat came as a consequence of “stupid wokeness” and the progressive agenda.
The battle for what children are being taught in schools, and the pushback against the radical left’s social experiments seems to be a phenomenon that had engulfed North-American as well as European democracies, with the Hungarian government, for instance, being ostracized for its legal proposal to ban LGBTQ propaganda and politicized gender ideologies being taught in schools.
Any attempt to put the decision regarding children’s sexual education into the hands of parents had been met by strong condemnation from European Union bodies and left-wing political parties. The European Parliament is currently threatening legal action against the European Commission if it does not start Article 7 infringement proceedings against Hungary in an attempt to ensure LGBTQ activists have free access to Hungary’s public school system. Yet, despite the extreme pressure facing his country, Hungarian Prime minister Viktor Orbán pledged to protect children from inappropriate interference and promised to defend parents’ rights to ultimately decide on how they wish to bring up their children.
