Juan Williams goes off the deep end, calling parents' rights

Just when you thought Juan Williams was the "reasonable liberal" among assorted leftist talking heads, off he goes down the deep end into the sea of leftist crazies:

In an op-ed penned for The Hill, Williams claims that parents upset about their school boards' Critical Race Theory curricula are nothing more than white supremacists:

Now Virginia Republicans are back with a new and improved "Culture Wars" campaign for 2021. The closing argument is once again full of racial division — but this time it is dressed up as a defense of little children.

The rallying cry is "Parents' Rights."

It is a campaign to stop classroom discussion of Black Lives Matter protests or slavery because it could upset some children, especially white children who might feel guilt.

And this time, the Trump-imitating Republicans think they have struck political gold.

His argument pretty well reinforces the statement of down-in-the-polls Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe, who actually said that parents should have no role in their children's educations.

"I'm not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions," adding, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

With logic like that, it can only come back to Williams's logic that any parent who does want a role in his or her child's education is simply a white supremacist, which is an odd thing to claim in a state that voted for President Obama twice, supposedly voted blue in 2020, and currently sports a Democrat governor.

Williams specifically brings up the matter of a parent who didn't want her child reading Toni Morrison's Beloved.

I've never read the book, but if you look at the Wikipedia page on it, you can see that it's full of kinky sex matters that might not be appropriate to put around children even in the context of human rights issues.  We all know that kids read National Geographic for the naked people in other parts of the world and ignore the context they are supposed to be viewing them with.  Williams argues that the book is great literature and that anyone who doesn't want his kid subject to it can only be a flaming racist who has a problem with "white guilt."

It's specious logic, given that there is a lot of American literature out there denouncing slavery that gets the message across without including graphic coercive sex scenes.  One example: the often banned Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.  If that doesn't make kids hate slavery, nothing will.  But kids can't be exposed to that one, from an author who actually saw slavery up close during its era and wrote about it accurately.  Williams pretty well sums up all anti-slavery literature as Toni Morrison's expression of it, meaning that anyone who doesn't want kids exposed to that particular book is nothing more than a hooded Klansman out to destroy black people.

It's an outrageous argument, given that it's intended to chill free speech.  The number-one reason that Terry McAuliffe is down in the polls right now is his lunatic statements about parents having no right to have a role in their own children's educations.  That, combined with the sickening behavior of the unaccountable Loudoun County school board, which pretty well dismissed the complaint of a high school girl who had been provably raped and then released the rapist to go on to rape others, and after that tackled and arrested the father of the girl when he tried to complain at a public meeting, is why McAuliffe is going down in the polls.

Williams attributes the whole phenomenon of parents calling for more say in their children's education a "Republican campaign," as if this were some public relations narrative.  It's garbage.  What's happening in Virginia is based on a series of self-explanatory events, not narratives.  To smear anyone who's upset with what's going on with the label of "white supremacist" is a narrative.  Seeking to change a bad and unaccountable government that holds no regard for the views of parents or the traumatic experiences of children is real life.

Deal with it, Juan. 

The man has gone off the deep end.  This kind of bad logic is precisely why Democrats are flailing in Virginia and likely well beyond.  What a pity, as Williams could have parsed what's happening quite reasonably and issued smarter recommendations.  Instead, he chose to go lunatic, going down with the rest of the rabid left, which looks set for some bad days.

Image: Larry D. Moore via Wikimedia CommonsCC BY-SA 2.0.

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