It’s All Projection: McAuliffe Smears Youngkin as 2020 Truther While Embracing His Own Election Conspiracy

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we recount with pity the plight of the Virginia Democratic Party, slap CNN on the wrist for its obstinate and mistaken defense of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and hit more media misses.

Lyin’ Terry

Terry McAuliffe didn’t expect to have to work for a second term as Virginia’s governor. After all, when he left office in 2018, he was popular. And Virginia had seemed to have turned from purple to blue in the Trump era — Joe Biden won the state by ten points in 2020. 

And yet, the McAuliffe campaign is now floundering, with several recent surveys of the race between him and Republican Glenn Youngkin showing Youngkin ahead. Despite McAuliffe’s best efforts to tie Youngkin inexorably to former president Donald Trump, Youngkin has gained ground by remaining focused on key issues, such as education, crime, and job growth.

Virginia Democrats have responded not by meeting Youngkin on the field of ideological combat, but lashing out in increasingly dishonest attacks on Youngkin and Republicans more generally.

On Sunday, for example, McAuliffe invited former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to appear at a rally beside him. At the event, McAuliffe embraced not only Abrams — who has refused to concede the 2018 election she lost — but her absurd conspiracy theories, claiming that “she [Abrams] would be the governor of Georgia today had the governor of Georgia [Republican Brian Kemp] not disenfranchised 1.4 million Georgia voters before the election! That’s what happened to Stacey Abrams. They took the votes away.” In fact, the 1.4 million number comes from routine, and legally mandated maintenance of the state’s voter rolls that can be found in states all across the country. 

McAuliffe’s decision to embrace Abrams’s brand of election-trutherism is all the more galling when you consider that his campaign strategy to date has been centered on lying about Youngkin’s position on the 2020 election. While Youngkin has accepted Trump’s endorsement and emphasized the importance of election integrity, he has also repeatedly stated that Biden prevailed fairly, condemning both the events of January 6 and a recent rally at which attendees recited the pledge of allegiance to a flag used during the Capitol riot.

Nevertheless, McAuliffe and other Virginia Democrats have continued to mislead the public. McAuliffe’s campaign recently launched an ad campaign featuring footage of January 6 and implying that Youngkin supported the rioters. 

Manuel Bonder, deputy communications director for the Virginia Democratic Party, also outright lied about Youngkin, alleging that the Republican nominee “has peddled all of Trump’s dangerous lies. His supporters just pledged allegiance to Jan. 6th. Trump says Glenn will do everything he wants him to do — and Youngkin agrees.”

Youngkin has argued that “it is weird and wrong to pledge allegiance to a flag connected to January 6.” 

“As I have said many times before, the violence that occurred on January 6 was sickening and wrong,” he added.

McAuliffe’s lies have not been limited to the question of election integrity. He’s also massively exaggerated the threat that COVID-19 poses, overstating the number of daily cases in Virginia by thousands and insisting that it’s particularly “deadly for our children.” Only 15 children have died of COVID in Virginia since the start of the pandemic, per the state’s department of health.

The Democrats’ “deceive first, ask questions later” reaction to his fall in the polls should leave voters wondering: Does it betray McAuliffe’s lack of confidence in his own ability to articulate a positive vision, or in their own ability to discern the truth?

Rand Paul’s Revenge

When Kentucky senator Rand Paul pointed to evidence that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had funded gain-of-function research in China, Dr. Anthony Fauci and his reflexive defenders at CNN were indignant. 

Brianna Keilar tried her hand at eloquence, monologuing that “nothing brings out Senator Paul’s propensity to act like an ass like a congressional appearance by Fauci, and that is really saying something. . . . Like Elvis’s Kentucky rain, Rand Paul’s COVID BS keeps pouring down, and it’s enough to fill the swimming pool in the Senate gym.”

Brian Stelter said Paul’s attacks on Fauci were about “creating more content for GOP TV.”

Jake Tapper elided the substantive matter at hand to preen about “another kind of misinformation, the constant MAGA media and Republican lawmakers’ attacks on health experts, especially Dr. Anthony Fauci. Today on Capitol Hill, Fauci was confronted with an accusation basically from Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul. . . . I don’t want to get into the details of what Senator Paul was attacking there and all that, but just the bigger picture here as a health professional we keep seeing this. Trump allies in Congress and governors’ offices and the media trying to make Fauci a COVID boogeyman. This is a 40-year public servant, he received the presidential medal of freedom . . .”

Unfortunately for the haughty trio, as well as a number of other mistaken journalists, a letter released last Wednesday confirmed what Paul had said: The NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

Keilar responded to her error by writing, “I stand by my characterization of Sen. Paul” on Twitter. 

Like Elvis’s Kentucky Rain . . .

Headline Fail of the Week

 The Washington Post reports that “Travis Tritt, who is against vaccine mandates, to sing national anthem before Game 6 of NLCS.” Inside the bombshell story, the author muses that “the choice [of Tritt] is somewhat puzzling because it seems to court unnecessary controversy.”

In other words, the Washington Post is shocked to discover that the Atlanta Braves would hire a musician who dissents from its editorial board’s line. 

Media Misses

• ScreenGeek notes that “Michael Myers Said To Be Homophobic In ‘Halloween Kills.’” As far as we can tell, the fictional serial killer doesn’t seem to discriminate in choosing his victims.

• Investigative reporter Aura Bogado responds to the Alec Baldwin shooting and actor’s statement on it by writing “Halyna Hutchins, a wife.’ Halyna Hutchins was a person in and of herself. She was a cinematographer. She was a professional. For men, women continue to exist only in reference *to* men. It’s patriarchal, it’s violent, and in this particular case it feels especially disgusting.” Never mind that Baldwin praised Hutchins’ professional contributions in the same statement.

• Connecticut State Senate Democrats revealed what they really think of parents fighting for their childrens’ education when they shared an editorial cartoon that depicted parents protesting at school board meetings as a group of movie villains. 

• Former MSNBC host Touré Neblett accused Condoleezza Rice — who most will remember as the first black woman to serve as secretary of state — as being a “soldier for white supremacy” in an op-ed on Friday after Rice spoke out against critical race theory on a recent episode of The View. “Condoleezza Rice’s recent appearance on The View was offensive and disgusting for many reasons but she was who we thought she was: a soldier for white supremacy. Her thoughts on Critical Race Theory are completely white centric, as in, they revolve around the thoughts and needs of white people,” Neblett wrote.

• A small round of applause goes to Vox, which issued a correction to an article on Tuesday which initially claimed that COVID-19 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. The correction came after Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, called out the article about how biological detective work can reveal who engineered a virus. 

The correction reads: “While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies . . . assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty.”