The progressive journalist Zaid Jilani, who lives in northern Virginia and teaches part time there, retorted on an episode of The Fifth Column podcast Wednesday that Toobin’s vision bore no resemblance to what he’s experienced on the ground.
“Those debates actually have been happening for a number of months, before this all became like a national thing,” Jilani said. “There were debates about some of the selective high schools, and…should they use testing to get people in, should it be a holistic process. There were debates about curriculum, there were debates about COVID and masking. And I don’t think at any point in those debates did any white supremacists show up. I didn’t see anyone in a Klan hood.”
There is something revealingly incongruous about a news organization that in one breath conducts hair-splitting fact-checks deferring to the government’s of view (“In fact, there’s no mention of ‘parents’…at all in the memo, none,” Cooper said triumphantly Wednesday, about the controversial October 4 Justice Department directive to have federal agents be on the lookout for anti–school board violence), then in the next being content to nod along when a colleague accuses citizen participants in democracy and a major political party of being primarily motivated by white supremacy.