A perfidious practitioner of poltroonery

“Folksy” Glenn Youngkin: Harvard Business School grad worth $400 million.

I’ve made a profession for nearly 50 years of writing about goofs like the newly hatched Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, and still my jaw drops at the shit they pull as naturally as putting on their socks in the morning.  The latest from this perfidious practitioner of poltroonery?  An email “tip line” for parents to report teachers and educational administrators for “divisive practices” and instances when their children were “not being respected” in school.   What might a “divisive practice” consist of?  Well, if you listened to Youngkin when he was running for office, that would be teaching children about slavery or racism or the Holocaust or even diversity, subjects which might make them feel “anxious” or “uncomfortable” because they are part of the white race.

Youngkin appears to be borrowing Texas’ new practice of deputizing citizen-bounty hunters to enforce its anti-abortion “heartbeat” law in establishing his Stasi-like “tip line” for parents to rat-out their kids’ teachers every time little Johnny gets his feelings hurt.  Youngkin also got his Trump card stamped on his inauguration day by quickly issuing an executive order against mask and vaccine mandates and the teaching of so-called “Critical Race Theory” in Virginia schools.  No school system in the state has ever had “Critical Race Theory” in its curriculum.  Seven school districts sued to overturn the ban on mask mandates, but dozens of other school systems around the state have simply kept them in place in defiance of the governor’s order.

All of this is particularly ripe when you consider that Youngkin is a former Co-CEO of the private equity firm, The Carlyle Group, with a personal net worth of $400 million and has sent all four of his children to private schools in the D.C. area for years.  His youngest son goes to Georgetown Prep, the same elite all-boys prep school Supreme Court Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch famously graduated from.  According to the school’s pandemic guidelines on its website, Georgetown Prep “mandated the COVID-19 vaccine for students, faculty, and staff for the 2021-22 school year” and “requires all persons, regardless of vaccination status, to wear masks while indoors on campus, except while eating meals or while residents are in their own dorm room.”  Youngkin’s other children have attended other elite prep schools in the Washington area including the National Cathedral School and St. Albans School which are (respectively) all-girl and all-boy prep schools affiliated with the Episcopal Church. 

The National Cathedral School website has a page entitled “Building an Anti-Racist Community” which includes these descriptions of the school’s actions over the last year: “We had conversations this summer and fall with students, faculty, staff, and alumnae to discuss race, systemic and institutional racism, microaggressions, and steps that will move us toward being a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive school community.”  The school’s summer reading list included White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo; Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi; We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be by Cornelius Minor; and Being the Change: Lessons and Strategies to Teach Social Comprehension by Sarah K. Ahmed.

The St. Albans School website promotes a long list of books under the subject line “Race” including Critical Race Theory:  An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic; Waking up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Debby Irving; and Stony Road:  Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

So while “Critical Race Theory” and the teaching of diversity and other subjects that might make Janie and Johnny “uncomfortable” and “anxious” are banned in Virginia public schools, Youngkin’s little darlings are being taught from the founding documents of the controversial curriculum.  And Heaven forswear, they’re being taught A People’s Story of the United States by that well known far-left radical, Howard Zinn.

So while Governor Youngkin is having his own children get an education that will prepare them for life in a diverse multi-cultural modern world at $75,000-a-pop, he’s taking inequality a step further by making sure that the kids stuck in the public school system never see the kinds of books or get taught the kinds of subjects his own kids are exposed to.  Not to mention making sure his own kids stay safe and healthy in schools that require masks and mandate vaccines, while banning by executive order the same precautions for public school children, teachers, and administrators.

Nice little system you got going there, Governor.  You didn’t stop at “do as I say, not as I do.”  You went straight to “go over there and sit down and shut up and take whatever is shoved at you while I fast-track my kids to Harvard.”