According to the BBC, the world’s most powerful electron microscope is at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It has a resolution of one ten-millionth of a millimetre, narrower than one hydrogen atom.
That microscope might be able to pick up the amount of enthusiasm I have for Clinton-era retread Terry McAuliffe and his bid for Governor of Virginia. Today is the off-year election day in the Lovers’ state, and McAuliffe is fighting for his political life against surging Republican Glenn Youngkin.
If Youngkin wins there will be many post-mortems for the Democrats’ loss in a state Biden won by ten points…all of which will be discarded in favor of saying a state that went for Obama twice and elected an African-American Governor in 1989 is irredeemably racist.
Matt Welch says Democrats have badly overreached by denouncing everyone who so much as makes a peep about public schools as a secret Klansman:
…there is indeed something "fueling" the rise of the relatively unknown, younger–Mitt Romneyesque Youngkin. Democrats in Democratic-run jurisdictions tend to call this factor "divisive culture war," but the more accurate term may be "people passionately (if sloppily) criticizing Democratic governance of schools." Education policy, that largest and most local of government issues, has shot to the top of voter concerns in Virginia, and the people most keyed up about it are the most likely to prefer Youngkin.
It's the kind of political phenomenon in a purple state like Virginia that should be cause for examination and perhaps even self-reflection among Democrats, educators, and left-leaning journalists. Virginia, after all, had the seventh most closed K-12 system during the coronavirus-marred 2020–21 school year, clustered on the restrictive end of the spectrum with blue states like California, Oregon, and Maryland, while the open-school states were predominantly Republican.
Instead, far too many have followed McAuliffe's lead in pinning Youngkin's unprojected rise on a latent right-wing racism that had been so unsuccessful this century until now. School closures, distance learning, masking policies, quarantine guidelines, learning loss, the shuttering of Gifted and Talented programs—all get frequently collapsed into the reductionist notion that opposition to "critical race theory" overrides all, and that there's some kind of sleeper-cell potency in agitating against Toni Morrison.
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