BUCK: We have a massive victory just earlier in the week in Virginia which we’ve been talking to you about, and one of the things that comes up immediately is, “How do the Democrats respond to what was just an enormous kick in the face?” If you’re paying attention to national politics, it’s a huge warning. In fact, if anything, my concern is that they start to adjust in response that they turn down the wokeness.

They recognize that dissatisfaction with the Democrat control of the school system, treating it like a bunch of Soviet commissars who don’t have to answer any questions, who will have the secret police come and get you — courtesy of Merrick Garland from the DOJ — if you show up at a school board meeting parent-teacher meeting and ask too many questions.

So that’s what we would think about now. Well, how do they respond? Joe Biden’s out there always a little bit confused, and if you’re looking for intellectual heft, well, there’s been no room at the Joe Biden Inn for a long time on that one. But here he is telling everybody that the election loss in Virginia, you know, it’s a bunch of stuff, always happens, you know, no big deal. Play it.

KRISTEN WELKER: As leader of the Democratic Party, how much responsibility do you take for the dismal results in Virginia and beyond last night?

BIDEN: (slurring) Well, look, yesterday reminded me of, uh… (gasp) that one of the scared rights we have is to be able to (gasp) go out and cast our votes. And remember that we all have an obligation to accept the legitimacy of these elections. I was talking to Terry to congratulate him today. He got 600,000 more votes than any Democrat ever has gotten, and no governor in Virginia has ever won when he is of the same — where he or she is the same party as the sitting president. What I do know is… (pause) I do know that people want us to get things done.

BUCK: Clay, it’s the same speech in different variations from this guy probably for the last 40 years, but it’s as though he’s living in a fantasyland. And then you look at the actions of the Democrats taking. Instead of reviewing this as a repudiation, they’re actually finding ways to justify this. “It’s racism and the people just didn’t get enough of what we have. We gotta give ’em more! We gotta triple mask ’em,” if you know what I mean, Clay. “We gotta lock ’em down longer. We gotta force them, bend them to our will. Then they’ll love us!” That’s what the Democrats actually think.

CLAY: Yeah, and I think it’s gonna lead to even more abject disaster in 2022. But the way to think about this from a larger perspective is, Joe Biden’s an accidental president. And what do I mean by that? Jimmy Carter was an accidental president in that something that he did not control in any way arose and benefited him at the exact right time: Watergate. Jimmy Carter gets elected, his presidency is mostly a disaster — and on the positive side, it led to Ronald Reagan.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Everyone has gone insane in the Democratic Party, but what’s amazing is, Buck, they can’t even take the right lessons from the ass kicking that they took on Tuesday. We got a montage here of left wingers on television saying, “Hey, the only reason we lost was because Americans are a bunch of racists.” Listen to this.

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON: Glenn Youngkin played the race card for reason, because he knows it works on certain white voters.

CHRIS HAYES: He did stoke white-grievance politics to mobilize a Republican base.

NICOLLE WALLACE: He’s laundered Trump’s (sputters) really sort of disgusting, flagrant out racism.

JOY REID: Yeah.

NICOLLE WALLACE: He’s wrapped it in education.

JOY REID: Education!

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

JOY REID: Which is code for “white parents don’t like the idea of teaching about race.”

ALEX WAGNER: That’s the fundamental problem for these parents and this anti CRT movement. They don’t like the way whiteness is being portrayed in these new, more inclusive lessons.

VAN JONES: This wasn’t about those pocketbook issues. This was about how white kids feel talking about what black kids go through.

TIFFANY CROSS: The substance of all this was, “We can’t let these black and brown people run the country.”

VAN JONES: I think all this CRT stuff is trumped up dog whistling.

BRIANNA KEILAR: Some of it was, uhhhhhh, ra… dog whistle racism.

BUCK: So wait. Is there CRT or not? Because they can never seem to agree, Clay, on whether that exists. Does CRT exist or not even? Then they’ll say, “Okay, I guess it does exist.” Let’s understand this. Critical race theory, first of all, it’s not something… They always pretend like, “Oh, it’s some complicated legal PhD thing you have to understanding of.”

No, it’s basically white racism is everywhere and white people not to constantly apologize for it and check their privilege and all this other stuff. That is… The “Everything Is Racist” line that you and I talk about that the Democrats have, is actually the distillation of critical race theory. Okay? “Everything Is Racist.” That’s what critical race theory is actually teaching people at the end of the day.

I find it fascinating that in all these lesson plans they’re learning, they talk about white oppression and white privilege and there’s all this essentially attack on “whiteness” as a deeply damaging and oppressive force in America. And if you say to that “I don’t like that. I think that’s divisive. I think that’s unfair. I actually think it’s kind of racist,” then they say your objection to it is racist. So there’s no way out of this, right? This is the circular game they play.

CLAY: Everything. Again, it boils down to the three-word Democratic Party plan as we roll into the midterms now, “Everything Is Racist,” and the lesson that they took, unfortunately, from their win in 2020, which, as we said earlier was an aberrant result predicated on covid — a once-in-a-century, new, novel virus arriving in the same year as in a presidential election year.

The lesson they took is, “Our woke agenda worked!” The reality is, what you saw in suburban voters, is, “No, no, no, no, no.” There was a lot of fear, and what is marked was covid fear porn got a lot of people in the suburbs to be willing to support Joe Biden, and as soon as the covid… I think it was like seventh or eighth on the list of the polls that I saw for Virginians about what mattered the most.

As soon as covid receded back down the flowchart — it was number one or number two for a lot of people who voted in 2020 — then all of a sudden the Democratic overreach becomes more excessive, and that’s why Democrats are trying to shove through so much right now, Buck, ’cause they know they may not have the presidency and the House or the Senate again for 10 or 15 years.

BUCK: And the Democrats are lying to themselves about who came out against this and why they came out against this in Virginia. There’s also been some interesting analysis in the last couple days from people including Democrats who want to look honestly at what happened here not delude themselves in “Everything Is Racist, Everything Is Racist,” which we know is what the Democrats always tell themselves when things don’t go their way.

Of course it’s fascinating, especially when you have a lot of white multimillionaires on TV who are also parroting the “Everything Is Racist” mantra. You’re like, “What about your white privilege? Somehow you…?” No, you don’t count, right, because you vote Democrat. But anyway, the truth here is that in Virginia and other states as well, there were all of the…

Even center-left parents, people that are kind of more moderate Democrats, are furious about what they’ve been put look at with the school system, absolutely furious about how long they were shut down. Blue states shut down longer, they shut down harder, they were more extreme than red states. And what benefit did those places get from it? So you had the shutdowns, the anger from that.

From people who are really observing this, you had greater actual parental connection to the lesson plans. Then you had, “Oh, don’t you dare get upset about what you as a parent are observing now.” Clay, we often think, “Oh, what’s the part of the state — big S or little S state — that most interacts with people?” We think, oh, maybe law enforcement. We always talk about the DMV.

It’s actually the public school system. That’s actually the government that people are dealing with the most, and I think there was a much broader frustration including a lot of Democrats and independents in places like Virginia from what they’ve seen. So they were more open to, “Oh, yeah, the CRT thing is crazy. I can’t believe they’re learning this stuff! They shut down our schools, and then they teach our kids this crap?” So I think it was kind of a double whammy.

CLAY: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any doubt that what’s going right now is Democrats on some level have, at least early on, allowed a panic to set it based on what happened on Tuesday. And they’re going to try to mandate you harder and they’re gonna try to Big Government you more, and they’re gonna try to push all of this through under the guise of “we have to do something” as their game plan for 2022.

The problem, I think, that they’re going to have — and I’m curious whether Manchin, for instance, in West Virginia is willing to hold the line — is the moderates are saying, “No, no, no, no, no. You’re leading us directly off a cliff. If you thought 2021 was bad, national federal vaccine mandates coupled with the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Baines Johnson with the smallest majority that we’ve ever seen is going to destroy us in 2022.” Who wins that internal Democrat civil war?