Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, called his Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin “the most homophobic, anti-choice candidate in Virginia history.”
But according to several historians a statement that reveals his ignorance or willful disregard of the state’s history—one in which Democrats have a troubled record of oppression.
Normally Democrats want to emphasize slavery in American history, but McAuliffe ignored that era to score political points against Youngkin.
Hillsdale College dean Matthew Spalding said that this irresponsible charge against Youngkin “establishes yet again that Terry McAuliffe doesn’t care one wit about history,” Fox News reported.
“As with his allies teaching critical race theory, he constructs his own history regardless of actual facts to make political arguments,” said Spalding, who lives with his family in Virginia. “The Left today does not care about history unless it serves their ideological purposes.”
Wilfred McClay, a history professor at Hillsdale, pointed out that few—if any—historical Virginian politicians would have tolerated homosexuality or abortion until quite recently.
“Does anyone really believe that the Virginia politicians of the Jim Crow era, years when McAuliffe’s own Democratic Party had a complete stranglehold on the state’s politics, was more racially enlightened, and more tolerant of gays and abortion, than any politician of the present day?” McClay asked.
McAuliffe has a record of making claims that lack historical context and perspective.
He said in 2017 that Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie had run “the most racist campaign we’ve ever seen in Virginia history.”
Hillsdale history lecturer Miles Smith IV, who previously lived in Virginia, reminded McAuliffe about the state’s racial history and called his comments “off base.”
“Ed Gillespie never campaigned on racial division but late as the 1950s, Virginia’s Democratic governors and senators ran campaigns based on segregation and racist policies,” Smith said. “It was called ‘Massive Resistance’ and was led by Harry Byrd Sr. He and his supporters ran on a platform of explicit school segregation.”
McAuliffe, who was Virginia’s governor from 2014 to 2018, wrote in a tweet this summer that he “inherited the largest budget deficit in the history of the state from the Republicans,” a reference to former Gov. Bob McDonnell, R-Va., who held office from 2010 to 2014.
Even the far-left Washington Post ranked McAuliffe’s assessment as an outright lie by awarding it Four Pinocchios.
Virginia had a balanced budget when McDonnell’s term expired.
Smith also noted that Virginia had a much higher budget deficit at the beginning of the Civil War.
“Virginia’s modern debt issues under McDonnell pale to what it dealt with historically,” he said.
