Tucker: Terry McAuliffe lied and Virginians knew it
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host analyzes the Virginia governor's race
Tomorrow is Election Day, an off-year election in the state of Virginia. Glenn Miller is an attorney from McLean, right across the river from Washington. Like most lawyers in the D.C. suburbs, he's a loyal Democrat. In 2016, he voted for Hillary Clinton. Last fall, he voted for Joe Biden. And yet, tomorrow he says he's voting for the Republican Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia governor's race. At a Youngkin rally over the weekend, he explained why. The tipping point, Miller told the New York Times, came one day as he was working from home and heard his teenage daughter’s teacher make a comment during a virtual lesson about White men as modern-day slaveholders. For Glenn Miller, this was too much. There are a lot of people like me, Miller said, who are annoyed. Yeah, and annoyed for good reason.
In Virginia, as in the rest of the country, Democrats have been yammering about race nonstop, specifically about the dangerous racism of White people, literally without ceasing for the last year and a half. It's all they talk about. It's a kind of monomania. Not surprisingly, therefore, questions about race have dominated the Virginia governor's election, and in a normal year, that would seem odd. In this case, both candidates are White, and the state they're hoping to run doesn't, objectively speaking, have a lot of race problems. Virginians of all colors tend to get along pretty well, as they do nearly everywhere in America, no matter what they tell you on CNN. And yet, listening to Terry McAuliffe, who's the Democratic nominee, you get the impression it's 1855 in Richmond. As we speak, human beings are being auctioned downtown.
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In Terry McAuliffe’s telling, Nothing has changed in Virginia. And so for months, McAuliffe has offered a one-word explanation for virtually every question he's been asked. And the answer, of course, is racism. Whatever Terry McAuliffe doesn't like is racist, seriously terrifyingly racist, like slavery. On the other hand, whatever Terry McAuliffe does like, such as accumulating more personal power for himself is, by definition, the answer to racism. In fact, the only answer. It's a very simple and very familiar formula. It's also incredibly divisive, not to mention stupid and tiresome.
The question tomorrow is, are Virginia voters finally fed up with this garbage? Does the race card still work? Is there a single sane person who believes that White racism is the root of all of the state's problems? We're going to find out tomorrow.
Polls suggest that McAuliffe is going to lose this race, and if he does, there's going to be an earthquake within the Democratic Party. Terry McAuliffe was the governor of Virginia just four years ago. Joe Biden won the state by 10 points last November. The most famous Democrats on the planet from the sitting President Joe Biden to the former President Barack Obama to Kamala Harris herself have personally campaigned for Terry McAuliffe in the state of Virginia. So, the Democratic Party has left nothing on the table, and there's a reason for that. Democrats understand this election is a referendum, not simply on an amoral sleazeball who wants to be the governor again for some reason, but a referendum on the performance of our entire leadership class. A referendum on them.
It didn't have to be this way. If Terry McAuliffe had been wise enough to keep this race non-ideological, he would without question have won it, widen the highways, fix 66, lower the car tax, shorten your commute to work, make Dulles Airport slightly less horrible. Who wouldn't vote for those things?
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But no, instead of promising to improve the lives of the people who live in Virginia, McAuliffe instead found himself defending Joe Biden's lunatic, openly racist equity agenda, something that unless you're directly benefiting from it as a consultant, you probably hate. The equity agenda is rooted in hostility and hatred. It is immoral, and on some level, most people understand that perfectly well. And yet here was Terry McAuliffe live on television, explaining that parents who insist on having a role in their own children's education must be White supremacists.
MCAULIFFE: People trust me on education. It's at the forefront here in Virginia as it now is in others. You see what's happened in Georgia and Florida because they're talking about this critical race theory. And as I said before and I'll say it again, it's never been taught in Virginia. I really hate it because it's a racist dog whistle.
Terry McAuliffe never recovered from that interview, and the polls showed it, and he didn't recover because what he said was a lie. And everyone with school-aged children in Virginia knew it was a lie. And if you're interested, take a look at the Virginia Department of Education's website right now, "Teachers must embrace theories such as critical race theory, settler colonialism, black feminism, dis/ability, critical race studies and other critical theories." That's in a book the state of Virginia recommends. The book goes on to instruct teachers to avoid phrases like "work hard" or "be nice" because those are expressions of White settler colonialism. There are other examples of this.
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The Virginia Department of Education also promotes race hustler Ibram X. Kendi, formerly known as Henry Rogers. Kendi has gotten quite rich by inflaming the masochism of affluent White liberals, the people who love to be told they're powerful and naughty as they send their kids to private school. It tells you how low their standards are that Ibram Kendi has done all of this despite being stupid. How stupid?
In an actual tweet, Kendi sent over the weekend, "More than a third of white students lied about their race on college applications, and about half of these applicants lied about being Native American. More than three fourths of these students who lied about their race were accepted." Oh, so in other words, Ibram X. Kendi is telling us America is such a White supremacist country that White kids can't even get into college without pretending not to be White. Right.
So eventually, gears turning slowly can be realized the tweet might not be helping his case, and so he deleted it. But the point remains: these are the people providing the education to children in Virginia. And if you live there, that's a problem, even if you're a Democrat.
So no wonder Glenn Youngkin is winning. It's all too much. And yet, interestingly, weirdly, Terry McAuliffe has not corrected course. He has instead doubled down on this stuff, which again, no one really likes. At a campaign event just last night, McAuliffe told the crowd that he's identified the actual problem in Virginia schools, and you'll never guess what it is. It's too many White teachers
MCAULIFFE: And we got to work hard to diversify our teacher base, 50% of our students are students of color, 80% of the teachers are White
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Now, to his credit, McAuliffe's opponent, Glenn Youngkin, who has really improved with every day of this campaign as people do sometimes in these campaigns, has called this kind of rhetoric for what it is. It's a racial attack. It's also an assault on the founding principles of the United States, which to sum up, is the Christian belief that all people, regardless of their skin color, are equal before God.
YOUNGKIN: But friends, let me be clear. One of the things we're not going to do in our schools is teach our children to view everything through a lens of race. We know it's not right. We know in our heart. I mean, we're all of one body in Christ. How in the world can we teach our children to be divided up into buckets with one group being privilege, another group being victims? That's just not right. It steals their dreams. We know that. // So let me just be clear on day one, I will ban critical race theory. It will not be in our schools. It just won't.
Well, exactly. Nicely put. I mean, these ideas aren't just annoying, they're poison, and they end with Rwanda and anyone who thinks it through understands that. If you wanted to unite the country, which badly needs to be united, you would emphasize our equality of value. We may be different in many ways and we are, but we are all worth the same. Period. And anyone who doesn't believe that should not be within a hundred yards of power ever.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, the racial unity message, which we so badly need, does not get Democrats elected. So last week, Democrats in Virginia concocted yet another fake race hoax to make voters hate each other and increase their electoral advantage. Democratic political operatives posing as neo-Nazis showed up outside of a Glenn Youngkin event, carrying torches. They stayed long enough to be photographed by a credulous local reporter, and then Terry McAuliffe's campaign team circulated pictures of those alleged White supremacists claiming they were Youngkin supporters. "He's a racist!" Many members of the media did the same, of course, and then within hours, the lie collapsed, and that's when we learned that the Lincoln Project was, or they said they were, behind this.
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CUOMO: You're getting crushed, by people, on the Right, as a dirty tactic. Do you stand behind what was done? And is that being what you guys say you oppose?
STUART STEVENS, THE LINCOLN PROJECT: No. Listen, every day, I hear people pleading with "The Lincoln Project," to help show Democrats how to win, how to play hardball. This is an example.
So they've told us for 10 months that Jan. 6 was a Nazi rally, there are Nazi rallies everywhere, it's a lie. There aren't any Nazi rallies in this country ever, because there's not that much racism in this country because it's a really nice country. But they have to tell us that there are. And at this point, they do to make one up. So they staged a fake Nazi rally.
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So you have to ask yourself, who's spreading hate in America? Well, they are. And then you've got to wonder, under the current rules to which we're all subject, why is the Lincoln Project still on Twitter and Facebook? Has Bank of America closed its accounts on moral grounds, as they've done to so many people on the right? Are these creeps that the Lincoln Project, some of them apparently covered for their child molester colleague? Are they still allowed on PayPal and GoFundMe? Of course, they are. Have their donors been doxed and exposed and driven from their jobs and their homes? No.
Some of their biggest and donors include Hollywood film producer David Geffen – he's given them half a million dollars. Hollywood film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg is giving them one hundred grand. Gordon Getty, son of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, has donated a million dollars to the Lincoln Project. All of these people are funding a group that staged a Nazi rally and blamed their political opponent and then didn't have the decency to apologize for it.
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Now that's a story. But it's not being covered. Instead, the media spent the weekend obsessing over whether a Southwest Airlines pilot may or may not have offended Joe Biden over the P.A. system, and if so, put that man in jail. So they're trying their best at every level, they are trying their best to drag professional sleazeball Terry McAuliffe across the finish line in Virginia. And despite all these efforts, the lying, the misdirection, a lot of people in the state, and not just Republicans, realize what's actually happening and who's behind it.
Tomorrow, they can send a very clear signal to the people doing it. Stop dividing us by race. Stop indoctrinating our schoolchildren to hate us. Stop treating parents like domestic terrorists. This is not about whether a Republican or a Democrat wins tomorrow. This is about where we go from here as a country.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the November 1, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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