Jim Acosta made a curious assertion yesterday. In conversation with journalist Molly Jong-Fast on CNN’s Democracy in Peril, the pair lamented Glenn Youngkin’s decision to . . . govern as he campaigned. They focused on Youngkin’s creation of a tip line “for parents to send us any instances where they feel their fundamental rights are being violated, where their children are not being respected [and] where there are inherently divisive practices in their schools” (such as, for instance, a Fairfax County high school’s decision to play a game of “Privilege Bingo” in which students who are Christian, male, white, or from military families are classified “privileged”).

To Acosta, this measure was unconscionable. Per Mediate:

“I seem to remember Glenn Youngkin campaigning in a fleece vest in Virginia,” Acosta said. “He was running as a different kind of Republican. I was told there was going to be a vest, not a Soviet-style police state across the Potomac from Washington.”

While it is, in a sense, heartening to see Acosta criticizing the Soviet Union (if only as a cudgel with which to bash a Republican), this criticism is off the mark. Youngkin’s policies are well within the guardrails of our politics, and in line with the campaign he ran.

I am not as quick as Acosta to resort to Soviet analogies. But if he wanted an example of excessive governance, he would look to the other side of the Potomac, where D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser is enforcing a biomedical tyranny in the form of a vaccine-passport system and a (recently extended) indoor mask mandate. In terms of policies that affect the everyday lives of citizens, D.C. is absolutely worse in this regard than Virginia.

Much like the original Soviet Union, moreover, the government seems perfectly happy to devote its energies to the excessive harassment of ordinary life while neglecting the basic duties one would actually expect of a state — and, of course, conveniently exempting those who make the law from its application.

Again, I wish to avoid hyperbole. But all this is enough to make those of us trapped on the other side of the Potomac look longingly at the opposite shore.