Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia was due in great measure to ticked off parents. To tell them that the government, not them, had the ultimate say in the education of their children was political suicide. But Democrats are so feverish on this issue that seppuku was their only option. Let’s hope they stay the course. Ian Prior, a former Trump DOJ staffer, explains in detail.

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Prior: Loudoun County, Virginia was the epicenter of a parents’ movement for the past seventeen months. It began over the summer of 2020, when moms and dads began organizing and pushing its school board to re-open schools.

Meanwhile, Loudoun County Public Schools was focused on something else – embarking on a massive social justice overreach based on a false narrative that the school district was “systemically racist” because of the sins of the past.

That false narrative was aided by racially discriminatory focus groups, teacher trainings grounded in critical race theory, and a cooked-up report all by a company called “The Equity Collaborative,” which billed Loudoun County taxpayers $500,000 in 2019, and was retained through 2021 at $625 per hour.

When parents spoke out against this, they were targeted for cancellation by “The Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County,” a private Facebook group that included six school board members.  This led several of us – Democrat and Republican – to form an organization called Fight for Schools, which would attempt to use a legal process to remove these school board members from office. It required gathering thousands of signatures to submit to the court and, while tedious, this process brought together hundreds to volunteer.

Loudoun residents couldn’t wait to sign and join this movement, which was further energized when a teacher named Tanner Cross was put on administrative leave for exercising his First Amendment rights at a school board meeting concerning a proposed transgender policy that, among other things, would have required him to potentially violate his religious beliefs by using students’ preferred pronouns. That policy would also allow children to use the bathrooms of the gender with which they identified, something that would rock the community months later.

While the buildup over the summer was intense, the events of the fall turned parental rights and education into THE issues in the Virginia elections. First, former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe said in a debate that “parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach.”

Second, the National School Board Association sent a memo asking for the Department of Justice to utilize domestic terror provisions to investigation parents that were showing up at school board meetings. When the Department of Justice complied and issued its own memo under the name of Attorney General Merrick Garland, parents everywhere became even more fired up…There are two things that people should take away from this election.

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First, the politics of grievance, identity, and division should be shoved in the dustbin in favor of optimism, substance, and listening to everyone’s point of view. Second, parents fighting for a better future for their children are more powerful than special interests, billionaire donors, and career politicians with a machine behind them.