By CHRISTOPHER MANION
The January 15 inauguration of Republican Glenn Youngkin as Virginia’s governor marks a significant milestone in the efforts of families nationwide to restore their primacy of place in the education of their children.
In Virginia, the efforts have advanced significantly with recent events in Loudoun County, one of America’s richest counties and the home of thousands of powerful government employees, consultants, and contractors, along with the prospering infrastructure that supports them. (In fact, the wealthy counties surrounding the nation’s capital are uniquely immune to the economic hardships faced by the rest of the nation).
We recall that Loudoun was the focus of the rebellion by parents against the county’s school board and its efforts to advance the “gender” agenda, racist class content, and secrecy regarding the rights of parents to anything about their children’s public school experience.
That secrecy was shattered this week with the sentencing of a male teenaged student whose crimes on school grounds had been kept secret for months. The Loudoun School Board even had the father of one of the offender’s victims arrested and dragged by law enforcement from the school board meeting when he attempted to condemn the board’s outrageous conduct.
The tables have now been turned. We learned on Wednesday, January 12 that “The Loudoun County teenager charged with sexual assault at two separate high schools has been found guilty and sentenced to supervised probation in a residential treatment facility,” according to a Fox News report from outside the courtroom.
“The judge found the boy guilty on Wednesday, and ordered him to register as a sex offender, something she said she had never done to a minor before. He will be on supervised probation until his 18th birthday and placed in a residential treatment facility.”
“The judge told the boy that his psychological reports were scary and that he needed lots of help. ‘You scared me. What I read scared me,’ she said explaining why for the first time in her career she put a juvenile on the national sex offender registry for life.”
We withhold here the gruesome details of the crimes, but it is no surprise that the mother of one of the juvenile’s victims plans to file suit against the Loudoun County Board of Education. “Today is not just another day for our family,” she told Fox News through her lawyer. “It is a day that further vindicates my daughter against her attacker, holds him accountable for what he did, and helps advance the healing of both our daughter and our family from the suffering we have endured over these past months.”
The Big Picture
How did all this come to pass? Over the years, the Left has joined school unions to quietly fund the election campaigns of school board candidates who oppose parental rights while advocating radical programs designed to pervert the students morally, turn them against their parents culturally, and deprive them intellectually of any skills that might enable them to resist. As Hannah Arendt put it over seventy years ago, “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
The efforts of this powerful cabal feature expensive in-school programs and well-paid “experts” who concentrate not on thinking but feeling. “Feel good about yourself” is a universal mantra; “feel good” informs the sex-ed programs; and “feelings” rule when it comes to educational accomplishments.
That explains the quandary facing college professors. Various surveys over the years indicate that, while high school teachers consider the vast majority of their graduates to be ready for college, the profs teaching incoming freshmen say that most are woefully unprepared. But a majority of American “institutions of higher education” are desperate for paying students, especially those who have financed their schooling with college loans.
That’s why, once in college, soaring grade inflation has allowed the poor performers to stay in school and keep paying, while the majority of classes concentrate on perpetuating the “feelings” dimension, fomenting the “cancel culture” that forbids independent thinking while cashing those government checks.
The Left’s assault on education is just one facet of its overall offensive on American life, and the Biden Administration plays a central role. We recently covered the edict of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who sicced the FBI on parents throughout the country. We now learn that Garland’s effort, supposedly prompted by a complaint from the Nationals School Boards Association, actually originated with Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.
And that should come as no surprise. The Biden administration is using every possible effort to disrupt every aspect of American life, in order ultimately to control it. The “authorities” issuing such edicts seem almost random, but are carefully coordinated. OSHA’s threat forcing employers to fire unvaxxed employees has resulted in millions of layoffs and firings. Hapless Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg joins in to augment the shortages in several entire sectors of the economy. Meanwhile, Biden’s Fed causes the highest rate of inflation in forty years.
Clueless Kamala cheers millions of illegals trafficked across the border and quietly transited to cities coast to coast by the USCCB’s secular NGOs in the middle of the night. The designed chaos on the border has now spread throughout the country. Monopoly school unions have never been so unpopular, but they are fighting back with walkouts that have enraged even Chicago’s Marxist mayor, Lori Lightfoot.
The list goes on, but all the while we note Hannah Arendt’s proper choice of terms: this myriad of government and cultural efforts constitutes a truly totalitarian campaign to seize and maintain power thoroughly and irreversibly. Last week’s hysterical performances by Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and the “January 6th” Show Trial crew indicate that the Left will continue disrupting through spring, summer, and fall, aiming to seize control not only of state and local elections but of entire populations.
Looking Forward —
With Caution
Youngkin’s victory, and the Loudoun Left’s colossal collapse, are good signs, and the confidence of smart folks like Liz Sheld at American Greatness still abides: “As of today, it doesn’t look good for the Democrats’ plan to make it easier to cheat at voting. This is their last chance for a long time to transform the voting system since the 2022 election is predicted to be another shellacking.”
Ms. Sheld is right — if current trends don’t change.
That “if” spells out the Left’s marching orders. On Wednesday, Barack Obama stepped forward to support the faltering Biden and demanded that the Senate change its rules to allow the adoption of Pelosi’s election takeover legislation (in the past, both men supported the filibuster as senators when Republicans were in the majority).
We recall that it was Obama who promised “Change We Can Believe In.” Well, Joe Biden’s tanking in every poll, and that means that lots of folks don’t believe any more. To the Left, that simply demands more force, more suffering, more chaos, and yes, more “change.”
Remember: Attorney General Garland has declared “white supremacism” to be the most dangerous terror threat to America. Gen. Milley is busily cleansing the military of “resisters.” The January 13 London’s Daily Mail reports that “young Army soldiers will be battling ‘seasoned freedom fighters’ across two dozen North Carolina counties in a two-week ‘guerrilla warfare exercise’ where they attempt to overthrow an ‘illegitimate government’.”
“News of the training exercise comes just days after the anniversary of the Capitol riot and as the Justice Department announces the creation of a new ‘domestic terrorism’ unit to tackle what officials said is an ‘elevated threat from domestic violent extremists’.”
Nancy Pelosi’s Show Trial has forbidden any discussion of the possible role of the FBI in fomenting the January sixth occupation of the Capitol. Joe Biden’s Atlanta tirade this week made it clear that, if Congress doesn’t do as it’s told and pass Pelosi’s takeover of elections, well, he has something else in mind. Is Garland’s FBI going to help? Is Milley’s army?
“I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Biden said. Curiously, the latter phrase is required in the oaths of every federal officer except the president. A year ago, Biden swore a different oath, swearing to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
This year we’ll find out if he keeps it.
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