Virginia Foxx Letter To 10-Year-Old Wins This Episode Of 'Are You Nastier Than A Fourth-Grader?'

To be fair, the kid wrote in favor of EV tax credits, and that's communism.

Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina) yells at a reporter who questioned Mike Johnson, Oct 25, 2023. Queen City News on YouTube.

In April, 10-year-old Christian Mango of Greensboro, North Carolina, was given a pretty standard assignment for his fourth-grade class: write a persuasive essay on a topic of your choice, back up your arguments with facts from research, and address it to a real-world person who’s in a position to act on it, like a business owner or elected leader.

Christian is concerned about climate change and thinks electric vehicles would help reduce the use of fossil fuels, so he wrote an essay suggesting that the federal government offer a $5,000 tax credit to people purchasing new EVs. He addressed his essay to his member of Congress, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R), an actual fossil.

And in a demonstration that American democracy is all about representatives hearing and interacting with the concerns of We The People, Foxx (or someone in her office) wrote back! Her letter thanked Christian for sharing his concerns, then upbraided him for calling for wasteful spending of the sort that will destroy America, suggested he read a bunch of science-denying articles from rightwing publications, and accused Christian’s teacher of “indoctrinating” him instead of teaching him to think, because everyone knows the schools are full of Marxist radicals. (The lad attends Canterbury School, a private Christian school in Greensboro, for what that’s worth.)

Foxx’s nastygram to the little kid blew up nationally after his mom, Emily Mango, posted a copy of it to social media, telling Foxx in a Facebook post, “Reprehensible response. You crossed a line when you attacked a child and attacked teachers. You don’t deserve to be on a Committee for Education when you talk to children like this and think so lowly of teachers.”

Here’s the local Fox affiliate’s story on the weirdness, featuring Christian reading the spiciest parts of Foxx’s letter, parts of which he had to ask his mom to explain to him.

We’re sure Christian learned a valuable lesson about democracy, which is that sometimes Americans elect some Grade-A jerkwads to high office. Also, we must here note that “Christian Mango” would be a terrific name for a character in the Veggie Tales franchise of Jesus-y kid videos. (Shame on us, attacking an innocent child like that.)

---

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.

---

In his letter, Christian expresses his concerns about the effects of climate change, like melting glaciers and millions of potential deaths, and argues that “electric cars produce less pollution so that could not happen and the future could be better.” The letter contrasts the amount of CO2 produced by gasoline vehicles with electric cars, “which don’t even have tailpipes to produce pollution.” It’s a nice, polite letter urging a specific action to help make the world a little better, and we’ll note that Christian doesn’t even call for reinstating the Inflation Reduction Act’s full $7,500 tax credit.

Foxx’s letter is … something that makes me wish I was still teaching business and professional communication, because wow, it would make for some good classroom discussion!

The letter starts off fine, thanking Christian for sharing thoughts and even establishing some common ground, kinda, by saying “We agree about the importance of fostering innovation and American competition in the automobile industry.” (Which isn’t really what Christian wrote about.) It then shifts into a lecture about the need to rely on free market policy to address environmental problems, not government regulations that stifle economic growth and innovation, blah blah blah.

The tone becomes increasingly hectoring, telling the little whippersnapper that he needs to think differently about calling for “government” to give people money for anything, because

What many folks do not realize is that the money that “comes from” the federal government actually comes from ordinary citizens who pay taxes to support that government. Therefore, your request that “the federal government should give a $5,000 tax rebate for all new electric car purchases” means that the federal government must take that money out of the pockets of hardworking people who may not have the means to buy an electric vehicle in the first place.

Foxx then does a little class war, pointing out that “This is true especially since it is mostly people with higher incomes who are able to purchase ‘new’ electric cars.” Clearly, Christian should have mentioned that the IRA included a smaller credit on used EVs.

The letter then directs Christian to some helpful reading on “the disastrous record of policies enacted to address ‘climate change,’” which isn’t even real because it’s in scare quotes. Those screeds come from the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, Fox News, and the National Review — and of course Foxx’s letter fails to note that several of them are written by fossil fuel lobbyists from outfits like the Heartland Institute.

That’s followed by another lecture, this time about the national debt and how the US will go bankrupt, a crisis that “YOU and your classmates will be responsible for.”

Finally, we get to the rotten meat of Foxx’s reply, in which she or an aide tells Christian to ask his teachers why they’re poisoning his mind:

Incidentally, please ask your teacher to explain propaganda to you. While I will never be able to know. my guess is that your teachers will not give you a good educational experience and help you learn to think as they are too interested in indoctrinating you. How sad.

Christian told local teevee station WGHP that when he read the letter, “I could understand half of it. But not all of it,” and said that when his mom explained what that stuff about indoctrination and propaganda meant, he thought it was really unfair to his teacher and his school, which it darn well was.

“I think that was wrong ... because the school didn’t do anything,” he said. So you can see how completely the Marxist America-haters at his private Christian school have brainwashed him; he thinks he’s learning something about writing and backing your claims with documented evidence, when in fact he should be reading far better pro-fossil fuel propaganda written by industry flaks.

So far, Foxx’s office doesn’t appear to have clarified whether the letter attacking Christian’s teachers was written by the representative or by a staffer, but a spokesperson did tell the New York Post that “A close read of the letter from Rep. Foxx, coupled with an understanding of Rep. Foxx’s record of holding educational systems to account, simply reveals a concern for indoctrination stemming from those responsible for educating students.”

The Foxx spox went on to say that heavens no, the letter expressed no ill will toward the kiddo: “The motives of the individual student who wrote the letter to Rep. Foxx were never being impugned — not in the slightest.”

Isn’t that a passive-voice comfort? All the impugning was directed at his teachers, whom he must never trust because they are evil.

As an evil liberal commie socialist writing teacher myself, I sure hope Christian’s teachers will continue to encourage kids to write for real audiences. That’s what writing is all about — and hell yes, democracy too. And maybe it’s also useful to learn that however well you frame an argument, it may not persuade someone who’s determined not to listen.

---

Guess GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx Heard Her Name When Dem Colleague Said 'White Folks Of Low Character'

---

[News & Observer / WRAL / WGHP / NY Post / Charlotte Observer]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or make a one-time (or recurring) donation with this here button.