How to Mislead the Public, by Katie King, staff writer of the Virginian Pilot

 Katie King has written a front-page article blaming Governor Glenn Younkin for politicizing the closure of Virginia's public schools during the Covid epidemic.  

She admits that closing schools to in-person teaching hurt student grades.  She then quotes Younkin critics who say that everybody agrees with that.  But that's not true.  At the time, what was called "remote learning" was touted as a great substitute.  Here's an article from the Virginian Pilot that presents the "close the schools" approach to dealing with Covid.  The teacher's union was adamant that in-person teaching was not an option.  

That was then, this is now and we have to deal with the impact of school closings and lost educational opportunities that have put students behind for the rest of their lives.  What have we learned?  Katie King simply ignores the issue and uses the article to slime Younkin.

Here's the big thing that's missing from her article.  Nowhere in her article does Katie King cite actual studies that prove that closing schools had no measurable impact on spreading Covid or reducing deaths.  She refers to a CDC statistic that's totally irrelevant to the issue.  She glides over the fact that there is evidence that closing schools to in-person education only had negative effects and no measurable positive effects.  

The real reason for Katie King's article is that it's another in a long list of attacks but the Virginian Pilot on Governor Younkin and his policies.  

Finally, she quotes an academic - a member of Big Academia - to blame Younkin for a teacher shortage.  In Virginia, as in many other states, parents are taking their children out of public schools and enrolling them in private schools or homeschooling.  One of the reasons for Younkin's election was the fact that so many Virginia school districts actually put their students at risk, including the risk of rape, as well as introducing racism into schools via Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Parents, having seen what their children are being taught, are rejecting the public schools and educating their children in private schools that reflect their values and do a better job of teaching them how to think rather than what to think.

A Fresh Wind is Blowing In Virginia

 CHANGE:

● VA Governor Glenn Youngkin Overturns Mandates and Takes on Critical Race Theory Immediately Upon Taking Office.

● New Va. Gov. Youngkin issues executive orders on COVID mandates, CRT and more. “Executive Order Number Two delivers on his Day One promise to empower Virginia parents in their children’s education and upbringing by allowing parents to make decisions on whether their child wears a mask in school.”

● Winsome Sears to make history as first woman — and Black woman — to be Virginia’s Lt. Governor.

UPDATE: Virginia’s New AG Fires Civil Rights Division, Will Start Prosecuting Cases Dropped By ‘Social Justice’ DAs.

Before you get too excited, who wants to bet the Younkin will be more than a seat warmer?

 Every Republican I met over the weekend was excited about the last election.  Republicans got the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General's offices and also captured the House of Delegates.  

So just how excited should we be?  OK, the "Woke" Democrats will not be promoting transgender bathrooms from the Governor's Office for a while.  But does taking office mean anything more than pausing in the rush to go over the cliff?  

Here's Mark Stey's opinion, and if he's right we are going to be very disappointed.

The Republican candidate, Mr Youngkin, is a squish of no fixed beliefs who will govern as Mitt did in Massachusetts or Pataki did in New York. But he has been handed a winning issue that he would probably not have chosen save for public outrage - the state of Virginia schools in an age of "critical race theory" and trans-mania. It's bigger even than an education issue: The left is so boundlessly ambitious that it is abolishing biological sex, and if it gets away with it will leave an awful mountain of human wreckage in its wake, bigger even than its other innovations.

Every Virginian should vote on Tuesday - because Youngkin's campaign is a classic example of Milton Friedman's dictum: in politics you don't wait for the right people to do the right thing, you create the conditions whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right thing. That is what parents at school-board meetings have been doing, and they deserve to be rewarded for it.

Virginia is a state where a rapist gets transferred to another school because he/she belongs to a protected class, rapes again, and, when you protest the anal rape of your daughter by a known rapist, you're the guy who gets thrown to the ground and arrested. Whether one finds the foregoing objectionable shouldn't really be a Republican/Democrat thing, but such is the moral depravity of the cultural heights that Dems are all in on the convicted sodomizer and only squaresville low-status GOP candidates can muster even pro forma objections. So in 21st-century Virginia insouciance about schoolgirl anal rape is now a partisan thing. ....

Steyn wrote this on 2010:

Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

OK, then what? You'll roll it back – like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel'n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

'Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?'

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems' point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That's a huge prize, and well worth a midterm timeout.