Trump Republicans remain laser-focused on the material needs of working class voters

MAGA empty fleece Glenn Youngkin is seeking to OUTFLANK his opponent by...arguing that his voters are special snowflakes that have been triggered and the state should be legally obligated to provide them with safe spaces:

With only a week to go until Election Day, Youngkin released an ad Monday featuring Fairfax County resident Laura Murphy, who waged a battle against “Beloved” in schools beginning in 2013 after her son — a high school senior at the time — said it gave him nightmares while reading it for an advanced placement literature class.

Murphy eventually took her fight to the Republican-led General Assembly, which in 2016 passed a bill with bipartisan support to give parents the right to opt their children out of sexually explicit reading assignments.

At the time, about half of Virginia school districts already followed that practice, but the bill would have enshrined that in state law. The “Beloved bill,” as it was known, would have made Virginia the first state in the nation to give parents that opt-out power. McAuliffe vetoed it as well as a similar bill in 2017.

McAuliffe on Monday condemned the ad, saying Youngkin was using “our schools and children as political pawns.”

“In the final week of this race, Glenn Youngkin has doubled down on the same divisive culture wars that have fueled his campaign from the very beginning,” McAuliffe said in a written statement. “Youngkin’s closing message of book banning and silencing esteemed Black authors is a racist dog whistle designed to gin up support from the most extreme elements of his party — mainly his top endorser and surrogate, Donald Trump.”

[…]

In the 60-second video, Murphy speaks directly into the camera.

“When my son showed me his reading material, my heart sunk,” she says. “It was some of the most explicit reading material you can imagine.”

McAuliffe’s vetoes show that “he doesn’t think parents should have a say,” she says. “He shut us out.”

Her son, Blake Murphy, is now a lawyer at the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Well, you have to admit her son turned out all wrong, at least. I share her horror at his immoral lifestyle choices, but I’m not convinced that book burning is the right solution.

I have nothing against Kevin Drum in general, but his assertion that it’s the left that’s driving “culture war” politics in America deserves some kind of world record for point-missing. Republican political discourse in 2021 is virtually nothing but this kind of bullshit, and being able to master the congnitive dissonance of pivoting constantly between “LOL triggered much lib?” and “the state must protect my precious fee-fees” is a prerequisite to enter Republican politics now.

The rapid shift from "why is everyone an easily triggered snowflake participation trophy recipient" to "we gotta ban these books because my senior in high school had nightmares" is more indication that maybe the former was a bad faith operation all along https://t.co/x3RLz6NtvX— Jane Coaston (@janecoaston) October 25, 2021