Glenn Youngkin and Ben Shapiro’s big lie

Virginia conservatives are using, ahem, “education” to run enough rubes to win a statewide election, something they have never been able to massively resist doing if you know what I mean and I think you do. In addition to the CRITICAL RACE THEORY TONI MORRISON argle-bargle, they have been trying to sell an explosive story to whip up hatred against trans people. The problem, as Michelle Goldberg points out, is that the anti-trans angle on the story was pure bullshit:

Soon, however, Smith revealed why he’d been so distraught. In an interview with The Daily Wire, a website co-founded by the conservative wunderkind Ben Shapiro, Smith said that his ninth-grade daughter had been sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt. Smith was opposed to a proposed policy allowing trans kids to use bathrooms aligned with their gender identities, believing it made girls like his daughter vulnerable.

[…]

But this week, during a juvenile court hearing, a fuller picture of Smith’s daughter’s ordeal emerged. She suffered something atrocious. It had nothing at all to do, however, with trans bathroom policies. Instead, like many women and girls, she was a victim of relationship violence.

Smith’s daughter testified that she’d previously had two consensual sexual encounters with her attacker in the school bathroom. On the day of her assault, they’d agreed to meet up again. “The evidence was that the girl chose that bathroom, but her intent was to talk to him, not to engage in sexual relations,” Biberaj, whose office prosecuted the case, told me. The boy, however, expected sex and refused to accept the girl’s refusal. As the The Washington Post reported, she testified, “He flipped me over. I was on the ground and couldn’t move and he sexually assaulted me.”

The boy was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt didn’t authorize him to use the girls’ bathroom. As Amanda Terkel reported in HuffPost, the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault. This was not, said Biberaj, someone “identifying as transgender and going into the girls’ bathroom under the guise of that.”

The fact that the school didn’t even have an accessible restroom policy in place when the assault occurred is particularly damning, but Tucker Carlson can get around the world five times before the truth can even remember where it put its pants last night.