The Culture Wars Are Key to the Future of the GOP
CLAY: Glorious Wednesday all across the land. We are celebrating a monstrous day for the Republican Party in the state of Virginia. Sanity returning, the woke agenda going down and defund the police in Minnesota. A tight race that looks like Democrats are gonna narrowly pull out in New Jersey, which no one expected to be remotely close.
Massive movement in favor of the Republican Party there. Quadruple wins in Virginia. Seattle elects a Republican inside of the city government, whichever happens. All of those things transpiring on 2021. The Democrats are trying to make sense of exactly what caused all of that. We’ve got a montage of some of the reaction from MSNBC and CNN trying to make sense of the calamity that has befallen the Democrats.
JAKE TAPPER: Republican Glenn Youngkin has been elected governor of Virginia, defeating Democrat Terry McAuliffe. This is the announcement that Joe Biden will not be happy to hear.
SARAH SANDERS: A very bad night for Joe Biden and Democrats — and, frankly, a great night for America.
JUJU CHANG: Biden winning the state, as you’ll recall, by 10 points against former president Trump. And tonight, Democrats, they’re facing a bruising defeat.
DAVID CHALIAN: Trying to make Glenn Youngkin Donald Trump clearly didn’t work.
BRIAN WILLIAMS: This will be a big, uh, postmortem for the Democrats.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Bad night for Democrats.
DANA BASH: The party is not where those voters are.
WILLIE GEIST: Bad night for Democrats. Good night if you’re an Atlanta Braves fan.
CLAY: (laughing) “Good night if you’re an Atlanta Braves fan.”
BUCK: It turns out the Democrat approach to anything they don’t like is it’s racist. It’s very obvious. It’s what they do all the time. That’s not a compelling message, and it’s particularly weak in terms of politics. Look, it’s effective sometimes in some contexts, unfortunately, but it’s particularly weak in an election where you don’t have Trump. They tried to bring the bogeyman, so to speak, of Trump into this Virginia election.
Now, I know Trump is very effective in other places and other ways. This was not about Trump. This election that happened in Virginia was in no way about the former president. The Democrats were desperate to make it about him to try to come up with some reason for why they should be in charge. Oh, ’cause they’ll defend you from January 6th and the Trump insurrectionists, which is completely insane.
And they’ve never had a compelling message. And it’s amazing. Every time Terry McAuliffe spoke about education, it kept getting worse. So this is what I think is part of the takeaway here. Make Democrats talk about this. Make rich, often white Democrats explain why you should have no school choice, why you shouldn’t have the right as a parent to even go and voice your concern about what’s being taught to your kids.
Why you should sit down, shut up, get your kids vaxxed, mask them up all day in school and do as you’re told, peasant, because the education experts know what’s really supposed to happen here. I hope that that is their approach all across the country, because this can be — Virginia can be — replicated in so many other states as a political fight, and conservatives will win.
A lot of people been saying for a while, “Why isn’t school choice, why isn’t actually making a better future for all kids — one that is blind to skin color, intersectionality, critical race theory, all of the stuff?” Doesn’t take any of that into account. Just the best schools for every kid possible in every place. That’s a compelling message that can actually get people who are honestly transactional in the way they approach voting. “What does it mean for me? I vote for you; what do I get? Oh, I get better schools for my kids, or I at least have somebody that will speak to those issues in a way that’s earnest and serious?” Winning. It’s winning.
CLAY: Buck, so well said. I think we’re also seeing the postreaction to school having bun shut down for all of 2020. I think that was the ignition that got all the moms so fired up. I think in retrospect, if Donald Trump could go back in the fall of 2020 and argue for opening up all schools forcefully, that might have won him the election, right? If he had said, “I believe as president every school needs to be open,” and he had started…
I know he said it, but if he had made that the focal point of his campaign. I think he started to light the ignition, right, started to light the fire that is burning so brightly for so many suburban women right now over education. Let me just say this, too, Buck. “Everything is racist,” which is effective the Democratic Party’s default platform right now, that’s a luxury of good times argument, and let me explain what I mean by that.
Not that racism isn’t significant. But just that when you are focusing on racism as a primary campaign issue, it means that lots of other things are pretty good, right? That there isn’t a major crime issue, that the border isn’t a sieve, that inflation isn’t skyrocketing, that unemployment isn’t at a high rate. Because right now, the border’s a mess, inflation is a disaster, the economy is an unmitigated disaster, crime is at 30-year highs.
Covid still isn’t in any way contained like Biden claimed it was, and education is a mess. All of those things are pocketbook issues that directly affect white, black, Asian, and Hispanic people on a day-to-day basis, and they aren’t necessarily going to focus on something as systemic as racism, right? Like “everything is racist” doesn’t register when you’re having to pay $5 or more for a gallon of gas.
BUCK: Republicans need to lean into — to put their shields up and their helmets on — on the culture war issues. They have to do this. They have to actually say, “We are not going to just cede all of this to the other side and pretend that we’ll establish some neutral playing field in the future.” I think one of the great — and, by the way, a hat tip I meant to give on the show to Chris Rufo all the work he’s done over the last…
Well, for years but particularly over the last year showing people — I mean, literally showing them — critical race theory as in the training material for municipal employees, for schools, obviously. Showing people what’s really going on, this has real impact. They do not live in a world in which if we let the left have their way, they’re going to play fair and they’re gonna just educate our kids well. They’re going to indoctrinate your children to their preferred ideology.
And while they’re doing so, let math scores slip, get rid of advanced math and reading classes, create equity — so-called equity — at the exclusion of excellence in the classroom and think they’re doing a favor for everybody in the process because, oh, they’re so virtuous. These are issues, these are areas where it is essentially for any conservative anywhere in the country in a race or if they’re in office right now to say, “We will take up this fight.” Let the Democrats be the party of there are 37 genders and there’s climate change that we have to be up late freaking out about.
CLAY: And 74 pronouns.
BUCK: Yeah, 74 pronouns, Greta Thunberg is a global hero for her lectures about climate change, the whole thing. Let them be the party of lib elites who then just promise to spend all of your money while inflation’s going up now, people are realizing, nothing — nothing’s really free. Let them be the party that lives in fantasyland. Let the Republicans, let conservatives be the party of, “We’re going to do things rooted in reality that will make your lives better,” incrementally.
We’re not promising to make all your problems go away. We’re not gonna take away the ability you have to make the wrong choice, even, sometimes for yourself. This goes now, of course, to a whole lot of health issues and other things. It’s about whether we create a framework for freedom and prosperity. You can’t do it unless you lean in on these cultural issues. You can’t do it unless you take up the fight in the culture war.
CLAY: Republicans should be the party of freedom, period. Republicans should be the party of jokes. Republicans should be the party of creative expression. I think that’s the direction things have gone. Republicans should be the party of the First Amendment. Shout-out to all of our listeners who made Virginia happen. Many of you made it out to the polls. I also think we need to gave a shout out: Daily Wire, they did a fantastic job with Matt Walsh, the stories out of Loudoun County that otherwise might have been ignored.
BUCK: Luke Rosiak broke that.
CLAY: Broke that story for the Daily Wire. Jeremy Boreing, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, that crew, I think did a really good job of illuminating that issue in addition to all you guys out there listening to us who made big investments and big moves as well to make this happen.
