#Betrayed parents elected Youngkin and other commentary

Libertarian: Betrayed Parents Elected Youngkin

While Terry McAuliffe’s loss to Glenn Youngkin “was cemented very late on election night, in practice the day that he forfeited” the race was Sept. 28, when he told Youngkin, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” argues Reason’s Robby Soave. “That was his response to questions about school curriculum and the fury that had taken hold at many local school board meetings” over critical race theory. “But the other piece of the puzzle, undoubtedly, was public schools’ utter failure to serve kids and families throughout the pandemic. Schools shut down for months, offloading teacher duties to frustrated parents all over the country.” Parents rejecting the idea they have no authority over their kids’ education “broke decisively for Youngkin.”

Doctor: COVID Lab-Leak Likely

“The accumulating evidence suggests” COVID “was more likely the result of laboratory creation and accidental release,” not “natural viral evolution,” concludes Joel Zinberg at City Journal. The National Institutes of Health has finally admitted it funded “gain-of-function-type research with coronaviruses” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “While the particular experiments” the NIH revealed might not have created COVID, other US-funded WIV research could have. Crucially: “In previous animal-to-human viral transmissions,” such as China’s SARS outbreak, researchers found “intermediate animal hosts” within months; despite two years of “intensive efforts,” nobody’s “found a bat-source population” for COVID or even evidence it “was present anywhere else before it emerged in Wuhan.”

Conservative: Dems, Kill Mega-Spending Bill

“The Republican Party — which seemed to all observers to be spitting up blood in the state of Virginia — has just won every statewide race and has tied the House of Delegates, taking control of the chamber away from the Democrats,” notes National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke. “These developments raise some important questions. Such as: Why on earth would Senators Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema . . . continue to acquiesce with their party’s extraordinarily foolish attempt to shove a set of FDR-sized spending programs through a 50–50 Senate?” Clearly Democrats’ progressive agenda is failing. Virginia “swung 10-15 points to the right since last November,” a trend that “would be devastating for them in the House and Senate in 2022,” and “if that’s not enough to kill the bill,” then the party is really lost.

From the right: Terry’s Disastrous Weirdness

“Put simply, the McAuliffe campaign has been weird. Really weird. That weirdness helped enable McAuliffe’s downfall,” snarks Matt Purple at Spectator World. Not just “his infamous remark that ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.’ ” Then he “gushed about how he’d raised his five children in the wonderful Virginia education system — except that four of them had gone to private schools.” President Biden chipped in with his “bizarre statement . . . that extremism can come ‘in a smile and a fleece vest,’ a reference to Youngkin’s (rather normal) clothing choices.” Then came the “fake white supremacists, one of whom for some reason was black.”

From the left: WaPo Rushes To Protect Fauci

The bipartisan nonprofit White Coat Waste Project has long won media plaudits, including from The Washington Post, Glenn Greenwald reports at his Substack — but its exposure of the horrific #BeagleGate experiments “now reflects poorly on” Dr. Anthony Fauci, so the paper moved “to falsely smear it as a right-wing extremist group.” White Coat disclosures proved that it’s “funded almost entirely by small donors,” so the WaPo’s Beth Reinhard asked, “Have you turned donations away from pro-Trump or conservative groups whom I would expect would embrace your campaign targeting Fauci?” (No such donations arrived.) Another WaPo reporter “repeatedly demanded to know whether White Coat was concerned that the activism they were doing on these dog experimentation programs could end up harming Dr. Fauci’s reputation.” This, says Greenwald, is the paper “acting like the pro-DNC liberal advocacy group that it is.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board