Glenn Youngkin

Republicans are continuing to backtrack on years of conspiracy-theory precedent after last year’s midterms taught them that demonizing certain popular types of voting for the sake of Donald Trump’s grievances might not be the best way to win friends and influence people.

The latest MAGA fan and one-time Big Liar to embrace the Republican National Committee’s early-voting about-face initiative: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

He should’ve known.

As we know, Virginia’s new Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is working furiously to make good on his campaign promise to essentially make combatting Republican grievances, real and imagined, the top priority of the Virginia state government. We wrote recently about his reversal of the state’s universal masking policy for schools. He also moved to ban the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts” (read: “Critical Race Theory”) in public schools on Day One.

During an interview with conservative radio host John Fredericks earlier this week, Youngkin announced a new tip line his administration had set up, asking parents to notify the state government with reports of public teachers “behaving objectionably,” aka talking about race and systemic racism in the classroom, concepts that the GOP continues to squeeze beneath the ill-suited label “Critical Race Theory” — an academic framework that’s ruffled the right into hysterics in recent months.

School district officials who oversee hundreds of schools in Virginia are actively defying their new Republican governor’s efforts to tamp down COVID-19 mitigation measures in the state.

The backlash is similar to what we saw play out in Texas and Florida when Republican Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis enacted similar executive orders late last year, attempting to block individual schools and municipalities from creating their own policies for combatting the pandemic.

Guest hosted today by TPM reporter Kate Riga.

In an election post-mortem, the Terry McAuliffe gubernatorial campaign in Virginia highlighted some of its findings in the immediate wake of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory.