Are you a parent who thinks it's a good idea to, you know, parent?
Well, you just might be a white supremacist.
Juan Williams seems like a nice enough fellow despite the fact that he is prone to parroting vacant DNC talking points while the adults around him are trying to have a conversation.
After a brief recitation of Republican opposition to the Stalinist purge of Confederate statues in Virginia, Williams makes his case.
Now Virginia Republicans are back with a new and improved "Culture Wars" campaign for 2021. The closing argument is once again full of racial division — but this time it is dressed up as a defense of little children.
It's not clear from the text if he's including defending the child who was raped in a Loudoun County High School bathroom and the ensuing coverup and additional assaults or not, but what the heck, he's on a roll.
The rallying cry is "Parents' Rights."
Scare quotes alert!
It is a campaign to stop classroom discussion of Black Lives Matter protests or slavery because it could upset some children, especially white children who might feel guilt.
To call this a straw man argument would be an insult to straw. Straw is an enduring and sturdy building material in comparison to whatever this argument is built out of, the gentlest nudge of which would cast it to oblivion like smoke in a soft summer breeze.
Unlike their earlier defense of Confederate monuments, the "Parents' Rights" campaign message at first glance looks to have zero to do with race.
He does have a legitimate point here. At first glance, the parents' rights campaign does look to have zero to do with race.
Also at second and third glance.
In fact, we'd probably run out of numbers before we got to the glance where that was no longer true.
That puts Democrats on the defensive. They are in the uncomfortable position of calling the attention of suburban white moms to divisive racial politics being used by Republican Glenn Youngkin's campaign.
His proof?
He has a lot! First, here's his opponent in a political campaign making some negative mouth noises.
Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate, calls the Republican message a "racist dog whistle."
See, McAuliffe made an assertion wholly devoid of support that benefits him personally.
"Youngkin's closing message of book banning and silencing esteemed Black authors is a racist dog whistle designed to gin up support from the most extreme elements of his party — mainly his top endorser and surrogate, Donald Trump," McAuliffe said in a statement.
Nothing helps your credibility quite like using as your main source of information a person with a vested interest in pushing a particular narrative. That's how you know that Williams is a genuine jOuRNaLiSt.
Are you ready for the next bit of evidence? You might want to sit down for this one.
Okay, here goes...
Recall, it was Trump who famously said there were "very fine people" on both sides of the violence sparked by "Unite the Right," the 2017 rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.
Imagine for a moment how deep a bubble you must live in to still believe that long-since disproved hoax. These are bubbles within yet larger bubbles, like a Russian matryoshka, or nesting doll, protecting the small, fragile figure at the center from the violence of unfamiliar ideas and inconvenient facts.
Now see if you can follow this next part. This is not edited. This is how it appears in the original and immediately follows the pull quote above:
Youngkin says he will back Trump if the former president is the GOP nominee for the White House in 2024.
Some of the Charlottesville white extremists are now on trial in a civil case for their violent attacks.
President Biden recently said the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was also "about white supremacy."
Here's the logic:
- Youngkin likes Trump
- People who committed unrelated crimes are on trial
- A political partisan said an unrelated riot was "about white supremacy."
It is not long ago that racist Southern politicians rallied against integration with an argument for "states' rights," a call to be free of federal laws seeking to end segregation.
Juan Williams is to non-sequiturs what Joe Biden is to naps.
Now back to the assertion for which he has thus far provided zero evidence.
Now the message is that white parents are being ignored when they complain that their children are uncomfortable learning about racism.
That would be a real zinger had it any relation to reality.
After that, Williams decides to mix it up a bit. Instead of making an unsupported assertion followed by a non-sequitur, he instead is either intentionally misleading or just flat-out oblivious.
Republican advertising now fails to mention the movement in Virginia was born from opposition to advanced placement high school students reading a prize-winning novel about the horrors of slavery — "Beloved" by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.
One commercial features a white Virginia mother complaining that McAuliffe opposed a law to allow parents to have their children opt out from studying unnamed books.
The mom, Laura Murphy, does not mention that she is talking about "Beloved." Nor does she mention that she is a conservative activist whose son went on to intern in the Trump White House.
Here's the ad Williams references:
She is talking about "Beloved," but not because it's about slavery. As she explains it very clearly in the ad, the content included:
...some of the most explicit material you can imagine.
As Common Sense Media puts it,
[The book] features a gritty infanticide, racial language, horrific sexual assaults, and even references to sex with animals.
According to Juan Williams, this Mom is a racist because she preferred that her high-school aged son not have to read about sex with animals.
Interesting take made all the more so by the fact that Williams calls it an "obscene attack on great writing," when what it really is is an attack on obscene writing.
I'm not familiar with the book, but while graphic portrayals of the brutality that was slavery certainly belong in the public sphere, ones that include sex with animals maybe don't belong in high schools.
There are other books out there that can do the trick.
It gets... yes, better.
Things have gotten so bad that the National School Boards Association pleaded with the Biden administration in a September letter to use federal law enforcement to protect school board members from threats of violence and other forms of bullying.
This would be the same National School Boards Association that had to apologize for that very same letter.
A word of advice to Williams:
But this movement is not about parents. It is about exciting the far-right base by stirring up racial division.
I'd like to see Williams make that argument to the parents themselves, of all races, to explain to them how they aren't really doing what they're doing.
Hey, he's on TV. He knows what's really going on.
I swear, sometimes I think Williams is a GOP plant implementing the greatest false flag operation of all time.
Or, more likely, this was written by the increasingly desperate McAuliffe campaign looking for any lifeline it can find.
