Terry McAuliffe retreats: Says war on parents is being taken out of context

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Terry McAuliffe Virginia governor public schools war on parents

Terry McAuliffe retreats: Says his war on parents is being taken out of context

After receiving some fallout for saying that parents have no place in the education of their children, Democrat gubernatorial candidate for the Commonwealth of Virginia Terry McAuliffe is retreating from his war on parents and claiming that his documented statement is being taken out of context.

In a Virginia gubernatorial debate earlier this month with Republican Glenn Youngkin, Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe emphatically stated that parents should have no input concerning the education of their children:

“I’m not going to let 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.”

Following the debate, McAuliffe doubled down on the issue in a media interview, saying the state’s Board of Education in conjunction with local school boards should determine what’s taught in the classrooms of Virginia’s public schools, not parents.

“Listen, we have a Board of [Education] working with local school boards to determine the curriculum for our schools. You don’t want parents coming in every different school jurisdiction saying this is what should be taught here, this is what should be taught here,” McAuliffe told CBS 19 of Charlottesville.

But either based on some internal polling or the pushback he’s receiving from parents, McAuliffe is retreating from his war on parents and claiming that he’s being taken out of context when he said what he now claims he didn’t say:

Critical Race Theory, COVID vaccine and mask mandates, and pro-LGBT policies that have essentially legalized the sexual abuse and exploitation of children (see yesterday’s piece regarding the Loudoun School District) have made Virginia’s public school system a major issue in the race for governor (via YAHOO News)

From fights over evolution to desegregation to prayer, education battles have been a staple of the country’s culture wars for decades. But not quite like this.

After months of closed classrooms and lost learning time, Republicans in Virginia are making schools the focus of their final push to capture the governor’s office, hoping to rally conservatives around their frustrations over mask mandates and mandatory vaccinations and their fears of what their children are being taught.

Vocal groups of parents, some led by Republican activists, are organizing against school curricula, opposing public health measures and calling for recalls of school board members. Youngkin, a former private equity executive, has capitalized, seizing on conservatives’ concerns about instruction on race and the rights of transgender children to argue that Democrats want to come between parents and their children’s education.

Youngkin’s attacks have forced Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic former governor trying to win back his old job, onto the defensive, and have thrust the ordinarily local issues surrounding schools into the middle of a rancorous nationwide shouting match. (emphasis mine)

A few days before Terry McAuliffe announced his retreat from the war on parents, the Trafalgar Group released a poll showing the Democrat trailing Youngkin by 1 point. The poll also showed that 54 percent of respondents disagreed with McAuliffe’s debate comment and only 37 percent agreeing with him.

For what it’s worth, Youngkin released a video after McAuliffe’s retreat that documents seven times where the former governor repeated his “out-of-context” claim that parents should stay out of matters concerning the education of their children in Virginia’s public schools:

Considering Virginia’s current status as a blue state along with the tyrannical abuse of power Washington is trying wield on state and local governments across the nation, parents in the Old Dominion state — and the other 49 states for that matter — need to be aware of the lengths government and public school bureaucrats are willing to go to shut them out of the education of their children.

Remember earlier this month when Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) essentially classified parents concerned about Critical Race Theory and the explosion of Marxist ideology being taught in public schools as “domestic terrorists?”

In the DOJ’s press release concerning Garland’s decision to begin treating concerned parents exercising their free speech rights as “domestic terrorists,” we learned some of the details of his tyrannical plan:

The Justice Department will launch a series of additional efforts in the coming days designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel. Those efforts are expected to include the creation of a task force, consisting of representatives from the department’s Criminal Division, National Security Division, Civil Rights Division, the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the FBI, the Community Relations Service and the Office of Justice Programs, to determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes, and ways to assist state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement where threats of violence may not constitute federal crimes. (emphasis mine)

I wrote an article about Terry McAuliffe in 2016 when he was being investigated for collecting illegal campaign contributions from a person with ties to the Clintons, and I drew a parallel between him and one of Aesop’s fables. In light of his desire to return to the Virginia governor’s mansion, I want to re-share a small portion of that piece:

The Farmer and the Stork is one of Aesop’s fables — a story that tells of a farmer who plants traps in his field to catch the cranes and geese that are stealing the seeds he has sown. After discovering that he trapped a stork, he listens to the bird’s plea to be spared because it is harmless and has taken no part in the theft. The farmer tells the stork that since it has been caught in the company of thieves, it must suffer the same fate. The moral of the story is that associating with bad companions will lead to bad consequences.

If you wanted to see a current day example of the truths found in this story, look no further than Terry McAuliffe.

Terry McAuliffe has a long history of living “in the company of thieves” — people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden — and like them, he must suffer the consequences for his war on parents.

By the way, don’t take today’s article as an endorsement of Glenn Youngkin. Even though he’s keeping his distance from Donald Trump, Youngkin’s gubernatorial bid has received the blessing of the Republican Party’s mango messiah. Trump tends to only give those out to Republicans who support him, so I’m not all that convinced that Youngkin isn’t a closet-Trumpist.

However, Terry McAuliffe is a proven far-left flunky willing to spin whatever lie he needs to spin if it will help him win his way into office. That’s why McAuliffe is retreating from his war on parents . . . and that’s why his statement about parents having no place in the education of their children is NOT being taken out of context.

 

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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