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JF in the News: Glenn Youngkin Just Showed Us Why He’s Already Going Full Trumpist On Schools

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OPINION By Greg Sargent. Article courtesy of The Washington Post. 

Almost immediately after Glenn Youngkin unexpectedly won the Virginia gubernatorial race, some observers spied a tantalizing possibility: Youngkin might show that in today’s Trumpified GOP, there’s still a place for a center-right politics that rebuffs Donald Trump’s worst impulses and charts a new route to a right-leaning majority.

But Youngkin is already going full Trumpist on at least one issue: Banning school districts from requiring masks. In the face of widespread resistance to his efforts, he’s hitting back in a way that’s positively Trumpy in its toxic bad faith and utter contempt for judicious governing.

In an interview with influential right-wing radio host John Fredericks on Monday night, Youngkin demonstrated why he has brought on this controversy. The episode, reported by The Post, captures something essential about the pathologies that Trump has unleashed in our politics, and the tendency of so many GOP politicians to eagerly go along with them.

{Truncated article, The Washington Post}

On top of all this, Youngkin’s own stance on this represented a shift. The Post reports this important nugget involving Fredericks, the conservative talk radio host:

Youngkin’s recent position on masks takes a harder line than he did shortly before and after November’s election, when he said he would leave it up to localities whether to impose mask mandates. Some Trump supporters were unhappy with that position — including Fredericks, who now says he is pleasantly surprised by Youngkin’s firmer stance.
“He’s Trump in a red vest,” Fredericks said in an interview with The Post after he had Youngkin on the air, referring to the governor’s ever-present fleece vest while on the campaign trail. “It’s exceeded everybody’s expectations.”

He’s Trump in a red vest. There you have it: Youngkin might have followed the more judicious path of another GOP governor in a blue area, Larry Hogan of Maryland, who left this up to local officials. That would have been in keeping with the pragmatic center-right approach that Youngkin advertised during the campaign, a sort of conservatism that nominally respects local control.

Read the full article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/25/glenn-youngkin-mask-mandates-trump/

 

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