Media Think High Schoolers Skipping Class Is More Newsworthy Than A War On Parents

Democrats and their cohorts in corporate media were filled with delight on Tuesday after a left-wing activist group led nearly 100 walkouts across Virginia schools to protest Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s newly proposed policies that acknowledge the biological sex of students and provide parents greater oversight of their children’s lives at school.

As The Federalist recently reported, the newly issued model policies by Virginia’s Department of Education “explicitly state that students’ participation in school programming and use of school facilities such as bathrooms or locker rooms should be based on their biological sex and that modifications should be offered only to the extent required under federal law.”

The new guidelines also state that “students who are minors must be referred to by the name and pronouns in their official records unless there is explicit parental approval for the use of something else” and that “schools may not conceal information about a student’s so-called gender identity from his or her parents.” Furthermore, “parents must be given the opportunity to object before any gender-related counseling services are offered.”

In demonstrating their ignorance about the state’s proposed policies, students participating in the walkouts have since issued blatantly false assertions about what the new protocols entail, with one person who purports to be trans saying that the state was “trying to take away our rights.”

“How are we supposed to focus on our classes — like calculus or biology — if we’re worried that our teachers are going to out us to our unsupportive parents?” another student told NBC News.

According to The Daily Caller, the protests were organized by a group known as the Pride Liberation Project, which appears to be, at least in part, funded by “the Democratic donor hub, ‘ActBlue.’”

“Pride Liberation Project’s website was not created by students, according to an attribution at the bottom of the site. The website was donated by Z2B Media, which is owned by Tyler J.D. Begley, an anti-Israel activist who openly advocates for the Pride Liberation Project on his social media pages,” the report reads. “Begley did not respond to the Daily Caller’s inquiry into whether he creates the graphics featured on the ‘student-led’ social media pages.”

Despite the fact that only 10 percent of Virginia school boards had adopted former Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam’s policies regarding transgenderism in schools, which allowed “transgender students to use school facilities in accordance with their gender identity and required teachers to accept a transgender student’s name and pronouns without parental consent,” Democrats and their allies in legacy media have gone out of their way to lavish heaps of praise on the uninformed, protesting students and smear the new policies as “anti-trans.”

“Thousands Of Students In Virginia Hosted A Walkout Over New Anti-Trans School Policies,” a BuzzFeed headline reads.

USA Today writers Cady Stanton and Alia Wong similarly complained in dramatic fashion that the policies “put decisions on students’ identities and preferred names at school exclusively in the hands of their parents” and also regurgitated talking points from leftists that “the changes put LGBTQ youth in danger because it bans they/them pronouns and allows students to be deadnamed or misgendered.”

In a statement provided to The Federalist, Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter emphasized that the new guidelines are designed to provide parents with greater access to their children’s school life, while adding that “when parents are part of the process, schools will accommodate the requests of children and their families.”

“Parents should be a part of their children’s lives, and it’s apparent through the public protests and on-camera interviews that those objecting to the guidance already have their parents as part of that conversation,” she said. “While students exercise their free speech … we’d note that these policies state that students should be treated with compassion and schools should be free from bullying and harassment.”

In 2021, parents in Virginia counties such as Loudoun, Augusta, Wise, and others saw parents turn out in significant numbers to protest their school boards’ consideration and implementation of various radical ideologies such as gender theory and critical race theory in their districts’ curricula. And while America’s corrupt, left-wing media covered Tuesday’s student protests with fawning adoration, they conversely couldn’t find similar passion to properly cover the concerns raised by Virginia parents over the past year.

Not long after Youngkin’s election victory last year, for instance, then-CNN host Brian Stelter claimed during a segment on “Reliable Sources” that terms such as “parents’ rights” and “critical race theory” are little more than “slogan[s]” or “catchall phrase[s].”

“Which parents?” he asked. “Whose rights are we talking about?”

Taking a different approach, fellow CNN talking head and political analyst Natasha Alford contended that the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election wasn’t decided by the issue of parental rights, but skin color.

“These are America’s issues with race and identity and the sort of this moral outrage that just gets repackaged for a new era,” Alford said.

Outlets such as The Associated Press also went out of their way to run cover for the National School Boards Association (NSBA), which in September of 2021 sent a letter to the Biden administration asking that the federal government treat parents protesting their school districts’ radical policies as domestic terrorists.

The NSBA “is not asking Biden to label parents who protest at school board meetings as terrorists,” the AP “fact-check” claimed. “The NSBA asked the administration to do an interagency investigation of threats of violence against school board members and said the threats ‘could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.’”

The NSBA has since apologized for issuing the letter, which Attorney General Merrick Garland used as a pretext to target parents.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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