Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares on Parental Rights

BUCK: Here’s a headline from just a few days ago: “Virginia attorney general leads 15 other states in asking Supreme Court to stop race-based high school admissions policy.” A story I want to ask him about, also what’s going on in the state of Virginia when it comes to crime and how other states, perhaps, could bring down crime levels, too, by making smart decisions about prosecution and criminal justice. Attorney general of the state, the commonwealth of Virginia, the state of Virginia, Miyares is with us now. Sir, thanks for calling in.

ATTORNEY GENERAL MIYARES: Oh, it’s awesome to be with you. Thanks for having me.

BUCK: Let’s just start with the race-based admissions case that you are, along with a bunch of other states, writing into the Supreme Court. What’s going on here?

ATTORNEY GENERAL MIYARES: Well, just for your listeners, Thomas Jefferson High School is a public school, it’s a magnet school for science and technology. It’s considered one of the best public schools in the country. It has always been merit-based, which is if you have the grades, if you have the academic background, you are admitted in.

Well, in the name of, quote, “fairness and equity,” the Fairfax school board decided that even though a majority minority, the majority of the students that attended are Asian American, it’s the wrong minority. So we know from communication that had been released that the purpose of the Fairfax school board was changing from a merit-based admissions policy to achieve a certain desired, quote, “racial balance.”

Well, at the end of the day, you have gone a 20-point-plus drop in Asian-American students that attend TJ. And what has happened is, I’ve said before, you know, one of the oldest forms of bigotry is anti-Semitism, but the only state-sanctioned form of bigotry that’s acceptable in America today is anti-Asian bigotry.

And, as I had one parent share with me, “My child has had straight A’s since the first grade and now I’m realizing they’re being denied their dream to possibly attend TJ solely because the fact they’re Korean-American.” And nobody should be having their dreams denied to them because of who they are, and that’s exactly what’s happening right now with Thomas Jefferson High School.

It’s state-sanctioned bigotry, violates all of our principles of equal treatment under the law, and that’s why I filed the amicus brief on behalf of these parents. Certain parents said, “Enough is enough.” Brave parents, they’ve accepted and received a lot of abuse on social media, concerned parents for Thomas Jefferson who filed this suit on behalf of their kids.

And they just want their kids to be treated equally. And that’s exactly what we should be doing, the standard that we should be striving for as Americans, as Virginians; so I’m proud to stand with these parents that are saying, “Treat our kids no differently than anybody else. Let them rise or fall based on their merit,” and I think that’s to be what we should strive for in a color-blind society.

CLAY: Jason, I agree with you, all the arguments that you just made there. You guys have been fighting a lot of battles in the state of Virginia and winning many of them relating to schools. In particular, the masking debate inside of Virginia schools got massively contentious. Obviously, we’re celebrating today on the show the ruling from the federal district court down in Florida, which has effectively ended the mask mandate all over the country for airplanes and trains and everything else.

What is the current status of that mask mandate that it becomes so contentious that you guys ended in Virginia schools almost as soon as you came into office? Have those battles ended? Are they on pause? How would you assess them at this point in time?

ATTORNEY GENERAL MIYARES: Well, they’re largely victorious. We also had a bipartisan bill that essentially confirmed what the governor had signed in an executive order. And so essentially in Virginia we have gone from these mandatory masks on our kids to doing this really radical notion, which is let parents decide. You know, if your child…

If you decided as a parent you want your child to be masked, that’s your right as a parent. But if you’re a child that has asthma or as one parent shared with me, “My daughter wears heavy glasses, they were constantly fogging up, school was absolute misery for her,” You get to make that decision. And we’re kind of at this stage right now I think the pandemic is let’s treat people like adults.

As I’ve pointed out the last time, prior to getting our kids unmasked, the last time our kids had a normal school year was 2019, and the data points we’re seeing right now on the mental health impact this has had on our kids — the two-plus years of social isolation, the virtual learning. We went in Virginia… We have these standards of learning which allow us to really assess how our kids are learning.

We went to prior to the pandemic over two-thirds of our African-American, Latino kids were passing our SOL tests. Now two-thirds are failing. The virtual schooling, the lockdown have had not just a dramatically negative impact on so many people in our society, but it’s the mental health, and it’s creating this… You know, the left talks about inequality. Guess what?

Wealthy liberal parents can afford the private tutor and send their kids to private, in person instruction. It is so many in our society were denied in-person instruction, they were denied the ability of actually being with their classmates, and it has been just dramatic. So we are proud to stand with parents. If there’s anything that we had in our campaign, candidly, it was parents matter.

And that was a big thing for bot Governor Youngkin and myself, is we’re gonna empower parents. And you have too many elected officials — when Terry McAuliffe said he didn’t think parents should have a say in what their kids are learning in school. He said the quiet part out loud, you know, that there are so many people in government who don’t think parents should have a say and want to minimize parents.

We want to empower parents, and that’s the difference between the way we view the world and maybe some other elected officials view the world. And we’re proud to stand with the parents every chance we can.

BUCK: We’re speaking to attorney general for the state of Virginia, Jason Miyares, and Mr. Attorney General, what can you tell us about how you’re gonna turn around some of the rise in crime that’s had occurred in recent years in your state. Notably I remember when Youngkin was running, Governor Youngkin was running against then candidate McAuliffe he said that under McAuliffe’s tenure there have been dramatic —

ATTORNEY GENERAL MIYARES: Yeah.

BUCK: I think it was over 40% increase in homicides while McAuliffe was government in the state of Virginia. People always… You know, we hear about this, we talk about it at this broad, sweeping level. What does soft on crime mean? What has that meant in your state? What are the ideas and policies the Democrats have implemented that have contributed to greater lawlessness and violence in the streets, and how do you turn that around?

ATTORNEY GENERAL MIYARES: Well, just for your listeners’ background, for two years the Democrats controlled all aspects of state government in Virginia. They controlled the governor’s mansion, the state senate, and the state house, and they really pushed this criminal-first, victim last mind-set. They push legislation after legislation that really made it easier on criminals, the early release of violent offenders, ending the mandatory reporting requirement of sexual assault in schools, changing our sentencing guidelines.

You had a parole body that let out cop killers, murderers and rapists some of which had life sentences, they let them back out on our street so the murder rate literally has skyrocketed. We’ve seen also I call it de facto defunding police. When your rhetoric and your language and your policies essentially turn law enforcement to a catch-and-release program, they leave law enforcement.

We’re down… We’re still just trying to get caught up. We’re still down over 300 state police officers, just state police. You go every single major locality, you’re down police. Well, community policing is also a huge component ’cause it builds trust in the community. It gives you information on who are the bad guys of the community that are preying on the vulnerable and the weak.

So they say the only thing you learn from history is nobody learns from history? Well, guess what? We-of-we tried all these policies of this recovering door of violent criminals, getting them back on the street in the seventies and eighties and it led to a crime explosion. We were having a 22-year-straight drop in violent crime from the early nineties through about 2044, ’15, and then we started seeing an uptick in the last two years of the Obama administration.

A lot of it, too, are these local progressive prosecutors, these so-called social justice prosecutors that are deciding not to prosecute entire categories of crime. So when you talk about violent crime, some of your listeners may be aware of that serial killer that shot five people both in the D.C. and in the New York Metro area went after homeless people recently. Well, that individual had 88 prior charges.

He was out on probation for a federal armed robbery charge. He gets picked up on a abduction with intent to defile, breaking and entering of a home, and then possession of ammunition by a felon. The Soros prosecutor, the progressive prosecutor elected in Fairfax County decided to reduce those charges to a misdemeanor. This happened in December of 2020.

He was sentenced in March of 2021; he was back on the street since this was misdemeanor charge with a probation violation pending in Maryland, he was allowed back on the street. In June of 2021. Those killings of those targeted killings of our homeless population started happening just months after he got back on the street. So elections have consequences.

And this criminal-first, victim last mind-set has had a real impact on crime in Virginia. You’re seeing it all over the country where this kind of soft on crime, let’s have a revolving door, let’s have a catch-and-release program… You’re seeing story after story after story of individuals that should have been off our streets and not harming innocent Americans back on our streets, preying on innocent Americans.

And criminal justice reform without criminal justice is not reform. It is only gonna create more victims. And so we are pushing back. We don’t control the state senate in Virginia; so a lot of pushing back on some of these I think really dangerous, quote-unquote, “reforms,” we haven’t been able to repeal. We are putting more money in law enforcement; we are hiring more police.

Our office is aggressively going after organized gang activity as well. But there’s only so much we can do candidly until we make sure we have local prosecutors that actually have a criminal-last mind-set instead of a criminal-first mind-set and it’s a problem all over the country, and you’re seeing in a large number of these areas right now. I can almost guarantee you we’re seeing a spike in murder rates. You also have a, quote, “progressive” prosecutor that’s deciding not to really prosecute violent criminals and you’re seeing the results every day.

CLAY: Thank you for joining us, Mr. Attorney General. Jason Miyares of Virginia. You guys are doing fantastic work there and hopefully setting a template for what can happen in 2022 with how well you guys ran a campaign in 2021. Thanks for the time.

ATTORNEY GENERAL MIYARES: Thanks so much! Have a good one.