The Now Obvious to All: Virginia Voters Made a Big Mistake

As numerous posts on this blog argued, Glenn Youngkin was never the moderate he pretended to becase that he was running a slick and totally dishonest campaign to dupe Virginia voters into believing his lies.  It ahould have been a blaring alarm to anyone sentient that someone who was the darling of The Family Foundation and endorsed by an extremist group like Family Research Council was no moderate. A week into Youngkin's regime and we now no that his "parental rights" charade meant that the desires - and safety - of the majority would be subordinate to the "rights" of an ignorance embracing minorty of parents.  Now, thanks to their own stupidity, I suspect that amny Northern Virginia soccer moms are distraught that their children face an increased risk of Covid infection as a direct result of their vote.  Most frighteningly, I suspect we have seen the mere tip of the ice berg when it comes to the nightmare policies that will be pushed by the Youngkin/Sears/Miyares triumverate who clear put the desires of white supremacists and Christian extremists above the best interests of the Commonwealth and the majority of Virginians.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the disaster Virginia voters brought on themselves.  Here are excerpts:  

Virginians are discovering — a bit late, unfortunately — that there’s no such thing as Trumpism Lite.

When voters elected Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor, Winsome Earle-Sears as lieutenant governor and Jason S. Miyares as attorney general, many doubtless thought they were following a pattern that had served the state well: The year after one of our major parties wins the White House, they almost always put the other party in power in Richmond. Arguably, that worked to produce balance and moderation — until Donald Trump transformed the GOP from a political party into a cult.

Already, we’re seeing what a mistake Virginia voters made.

This week, we learned that Miyares has fired the University of Virginia’s counsel, Timothy Heaphy, supposedly because Heaphy does not share the new attorney general’s “philosophy and legal approach.” My strong suspicion is that Heaphy’s firing has more to do with the fact that he is presently on leave from his university position, serving as chief investigative counsel for the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

To the Trump cult, Jan. 6, 2021 was no more than what former vice president Mike Pence has called “one day in January.” To the rest of us, and to future historians, it was an unprecedented violent assault on the citadel of our democracy and an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Surely, Virginia’s chief law enforcement officer should praise a staff member — counsels for the state’s public colleges and universities are technically assistant attorneys general — who uses his time and expertise to learn the full truth of the events of Jan. 6. Republicans who previously held Miyares’s post might have done so. But that was before the GOP lost its mind.

Youngkin, who squeaked into office with a two-point margin of victory, campaigned as an unthreatening, fleece-wearing suburbanite who was the soul of moderation. Political analysts saw his refusal to break with Trump or forthrightly deny the former president’s “big lie” about the “stolen” election as a mere tactic — not an indication of how he would behave as governor.

But Youngkin’s first week in office showed him to be a Trumpian culture-warrior. He immediately issued an executive order banning the teaching of critical race theory or any “inherently divisive concepts” in Virginia schools. Because critical race theory is not actually being taught at K-12 public schools in the commonwealth, the order could only be an attempt to ban the accurate teaching of African American history, which necessarily covers slavery, Jim Crow repression, lynchings, “massive resistance” to school desegregation, systematic discrimination and persistent disparities.

If you teach Black history without bringing up any “divisive concepts,” you’re not teaching it at all.

Youngkin also issued an order banning mask mandates in Virginia’s public schools — although, during the campaign, he said whether to require masks in schools would be left to “localities” to decide. On Monday, seven school boards filed suit in an attempt to block Youngkin’s order, saying that the governor is trying to usurp local control of the schools; parents in Chesapeake have also sued to block the order. According to The Post, at least 58 of the roughly 130 school districts in the state say they will continue requiring that students wear face coverings.

[H]is lieutenant governor, Earle-Sears, offered more definitive words to the Trumpist base. Appearing on Fox News last week, she said Youngkin “could withhold” some state funding from school districts that defy his order and continue to require that students be masked.

Another of Youngkin’s early initiatives was to expand the duties of the state’s chief diversity officer to include acting as an “ambassador for unborn children” — thus ticking the right-to-life box on the list of culture-war issues. And he pledges to seek tougher voter ID requirements in the name of “election integrity,” though he acknowledges there was no “material fraud” in 2020.

Youngkin, Earle-Sears and Miyares might look like something new — fresh-faced and laudably diverse — but so far, at least, they act more like members in good standing within the Cult of Trump. Someday, I hope, the Republican Party will escape the grip of a certain angry pensioner in Florida. Until then, don’t be fooled — and don’t give them your votes.