The Left-Cheek Ass Clown for January, 2022

Well, if you thought that the lessons of 2021 might mean somewhat less ass clownery in 2022, you are surely sorely disappointed already, and there are still eleven months still to go.  Buckle up, it's going to be quite a ride.

The year is starting off with the usual bumper crop of amazingly "worthy" ass clowns, but the one that stood out to me is closer to home than many. Our award for 

The Left-Cheek Ass Clown for January, 2022

is presented to

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin

Virginia has an interesting political geography, with the strongly liberal Northern Virginia and Tidewater regions balancing out strongly conservative rural counties to give the commonwealth a purple character.  Last year's governor's race gave a narrow victory to Republican Glenn Youngkin, a wealthy businessman whose campaign was based on walking a tightrope between keeping Der Furor at arms length yet appealing to his fevered base, while saying as little as possible about his own political positions so as not to alienate liberal voters. Once elected, however, Mr Youngkin moved quickly to demonstrate a far more conservative agenda than his deliberately vanilla campaign had led voters to suspect.

In recent days, Mr Youngkin has already banned the teaching of "critical race theory" in Virginia schools and established a special hotline for people to report teachers who present such "divisive" material to impressionable grade school and high school students. In an interview with a conservative radio host, Mr Youngkin this past week said,

"We're asking for folks to send us reports and observations that they have that will help us be aware of things like privilege bingo, be aware of their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia. And we're going to make sure we catalog it all ... This gives us a great insight into what's happening at a school level, and that gives us further ability to make sure we're rooting it out."

Mr Youngkin appears to be unaware, as are many on the right, that "critical race theory" is not taught anywhere in the country as a topic in elementary or high schools, and that antebellum Virginia has been out of business since 1865. His e-mail "tip line" has been criticized by parents and educators, and has been flooded with e-mails from parents citing positive support for teachers and the hashtag #ThankATeacher."

Mr Youngkin has also drunk the Kool Aid of mask mandates in school as a violation of the rights of parents rather than a public health measure to protect students and school staffs from disease - one of his first executive orders on taking office this month was to end such mandates ... an action that generated strong and immediate opposition from educators and school administrators more interested in health and safety than in pandering to those who imagine the mask mandate as an unconstitutional infringement of their right to be sick and cause sickness in others. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Readers, the Left-Cheek Ass Clown for January, 2022, is Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin - another right-wing political animal who places rights over responsibilities and beats the drum of cultural divisiveness in the pursuit of a social reality which has been dead since the end of the Civil War.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming tomorrow, when Cartoon Saturday helps ease us out of a yucky month.

Bilbo