It’s a question that many political science classes may debate in the coming years. How did the Democratic Party, and progressives within the party, miscalculate so badly to assume that government could be inserted between parents and their children with no fear of backlash? It didn’t start with the pandemic in March of 2020, Democrats have been using the education system for years as a tool of indoctrination, but with children being kept home, to work exclusively from home giving parents a front-row seat seemed to magnify the level to which progressive ideology is rotting some school districts to the core.
Parents all across the country were given the chance to see what kind of work their kids were doing. Shame on some parents for not caring sooner, but it’s better to wake up late than never wake up at all to the travesty of left-wing ideology integrated into your kindergartener’s curriculum.
In Virginia, where the Loudoun County school district has become the global poster child for school boards run amock, parents are about to strike back in the first blow against educational bureaucrats who display outright disdain for parents. The vessel for these parents is Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, a mild-mannered yet ready-to-fight parent himself that managed to tap into this underlying disgust and form a political movement centered on restoring parental rights across the board.
In addition to the curriculum and other issues, Loudoun County’s school board actively participated in a cover-up of sexual assault on school grounds to avoid giving fuel to parents asking questions about transgender policies. It’s the most despicable example which had real-world consequences as the cover-up led to a second assault by the same attacker within the same district. This may be the straw that broke the parental camel’s back.
From Covid policies to transgender policies, and students being taught to feel guilty for their skin color from “critical race theory” being integrated into the curriculum, everything that parents have been voicing concerns over has been laid bare in the Virginia governor’s race.
The suburbs of northern Virginia outside Washington, DC, are as blue as they come, yet these suburban Democrat parents themselves have been fighting the Fairfax County school board’s attempt to water-down admissions standards at some of the area’s top specialized STEM schools. Once again, parents were being shut out. In this case, it was mostly Democrat parents being shut out by their elected school board filled with radical left-wing Democrat activists.
The point in all this is to say, every constituency has a breaking point, and many parents have reached their breaking point over the past year. They’ve been fighting with schools, fighting with the government, fighting with public health “experts,” it’s been an uphill battle, and exhausting. The most recent offense, the National School Board Association calling parents “domestic terrorists,” seemed to strike a chord that hasn’t stopped ringing.
In Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, parents noticed an easily recognizable trait. McAuliffe is the swamp, he is of the swamp, he was created by the swamp. Every move McAuliffe has made and every statement he has uttered has been in support of the current educational establishment that wishes to ban parents from school grounds. Lest no parent be mistaken that McAuliffe would not care to listen to their concerns, he made it plainly clear when he said he doesn’t think “parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” How much more than that do voters need other than the dozen other times he reiterated it, then tried to walk it back and apologize for it after he realized he just awakened the sleeping parental giant.
Parents have been activated in Virginia, parents of all political stripes, all ethnicities, all make-ups of family. Parenting is fairly universal, and when the government tries to steamroll parents one time too many, sometimes it backfires. Parents are often naturally averse to being heavily involved in politics because they’re already busy and tired. Between school schedules, after-school schedules, and everything else, it’s tiring, and every parent feels it.
To hit the point where parents are this mad, the left-wing educational activist wing of the Democratic Party has pushed things a little too far for too long, with too much insult.
On Nov. 2, in Virginia at least, parents seem ready to strike back. There will be plenty of parents voting for Glenn Youngkin that may not agree with all his policies, but they do agree that they’d prefer to have more say in their child’s education and be more respected when it comes to offering their voice to their local school board that they are rejecting more of the same from Terry McAuliffe.
Make no mistake, parents have a breaking point, and somehow the Democratic Party of mandates, authoritarian control, and left-wing indoctrination pushed far enough to find it.
