When Republicans have sturdy majorities in a state legislature, our nationwide media usually discover their actions nationally controversial on points like weapons or transgender advocacy or DEI. When Democrats are dominant, the nationwide media are nice with it. That’s simply comforting enterprise as standard.
In Virginia, with a Democrat majority in each homes and new Governor Abby Spanberger, they’ve handed a invoice prohibiting public faculties from educating that the January 6 riot on the Capitol was a “peaceable protest” or that there was “intensive election fraud” in 2020. The invoice requires any instruction on January 6 to explain this “rebellion” as “an unprecedented, violent assault on U.S. democratic establishments, infrastructure, and representatives.”
The primary objection is historic. Violent assaults on the Capitol usually are not “unprecedented.” Begin with 1954, when 5 Puerto Rican terrorists shot into the Home chamber, wounding 5 members of Congress (all survived). In 1998, a mentally disturbed man killed two Capitol Cops and wounded one other.
However secondly, why would it not be thought-about obligatory to show a “unit” in historical past lessons on January 6? Within the previous days, American historical past lessons usually stopped a couple of a long time shy of present occasions, maybe to forestall school-board controversies over lecturers pushing one political get together’s current speaking factors.
It’s apparent that the Democrats have tried to rework one horrible afternoon into Pearl Harbor and 9/11 as Massively Historic Occasions, regardless of the small drawback that the dying toll isn’t comparable. Even the George Floyd riots within the earlier summer season carried a dying toll of a minimum of 25. Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 Committee was rigidly constructed to keep away from any and all comparisons to the 2020 race riots. Erase that from historical past.
Even The Washington Put up report on this invoice seems like Democrat legislative lingo: “5 individuals died throughout or within the aftermath of the Jan. 6 rebellion on the U.S. Capitol, and 140 cops had been assaulted as 1000’s of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the advanced to attempt to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 election received by Joe Biden.”
Nowhere in The Put up article does it point out that one particular person was shot lifeless within the riot – Ashli Babbitt, by a Capitol Police officer. Three different Trump supporters died – of a stroke, a coronary heart assault, and an unintended drug overdose. This depend contains Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who had a stroke after the riot, which the media wrongly offered as a violent dying for months. The hardened Pelosi narrative excludes numerous context.
Gov. Spanberger hasn’t commented on this invoice but, and this isn’t a nationwide story. However there was a nationwide media freakout in 2023 when Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) put in a coverage to forestall woke topics like “essential race principle” from being promulgated in public faculties. Again then, the spin was politicians shouldn’t become involved.
CNN anchor Sara Sidner protested: “So what if Crucial Race Principle is in it? Who cares? Educate children to assume, not what to assume.” MSNBC common Jelani Cobb attacked “this heavy-handed diktat about what may be taught and what cannot be taught.” Then-MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan mangled the precise coverage in his low cost shot: “Beneath DeSantis, Florida has gone from do not say homosexual to do not say black.”
Politicians and oldsters can have some say in what public faculties train, simply as they’ll have a say in what books are chosen for the varsity library. However let’s not fake that it’s an outbreak of righteousness and reality when Democrats do it and it is dreadful censorship when Republicans do it.
