Bacon's Rebellion

  • Does Loudoun Need a Police Department?

    Posted on

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    James A. Bacon

    Phyllis Randall (left) and Mike Chapman (right). Photo credit: Loudoun Times

    by Ken Reid

    The latest battle between the Left and Right in Loudoun is not over CRT, but PD – as in, “police department.” Should Virginia’s most-populous county transfer key law-enforcement functions from the elected sheriff to a newly created civil-servant police chief?

    No crime problem in Loudoun is driving this debate. No scandals, budgetary issues, or layoffs are afflicting the sheriff’s office. Loudoun (population 423,000 and growing) is among the wealthiest in the nation.

    Rather, this is a conflict between the three-term Republican Sheriff, Mike Chapman and Democrat Board Chair Phyllis Randall, now in her 2nd term, primarily over her desire to have a Police Oversight Board, which Chapman, like most law-enforcement heads, opposes.

    The Democrat-controlled Board, which probably had the votes to put the issue to the voters, opted instead to hire the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IAPD) to study the matter and determine the costs. (more…)

  • Steve Descano: Will “Not Prosecute” Harry Jackson

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    James A. Bacon

    by Asra Nomani

    FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. — An attorney from the office of Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano has filed a motion to nolle prosequi, Latin for “not prosecute,” Harry Jackson, a former U.S. Naval intelligence officer and father who has been a strong parent advocate against the war on merit education in this Washington, D.C., suburb.

    A judge will hear the motion at a scheduled hearing on Friday, April 8, at 10 a.m. in Fairfax County District Court in Fairfax, Va.

    In this truly bizarre case, chronicled fully here, a local woke activist, Jorge Torrico, filed four criminal complaints starting in September 2021 with the local magistrate, alleging that Jackson broke a little-used criminal law against “slander and libel,” by posting a tweet asserting that Torrico had engaged in “‘grooming’ behavior” during a November 2020 Zoom meeting of the PTSA at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Jackson has a son at the school. Torrico is a 1998 graduate of the school and does not have any children who attend the school. (more…)

  • The Dude Had It Coming!

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Most people watching the Academy Awards ceremony were shocked to see movie star Will Smith stride unbidden onto the stage and slap master of ceremonies Chris Rock across the face. Smith later apologized for his action, and then resigned from the Academy. Condemnation was widespread. But the disapproval was not unanimous.

    Fletcher Norwood teaches high-school honors classes at a Title I school in Virginia, and he recalls how social media lit up the cell phones of the kids in his classroom the day after the awards ceremony.

    “Of course, Smith slapped him. Rock dissed his wife. That’s how you’d react to a situation like that,” says Norwood, summarizing the prevailing viewpoint. To his students, there was nothing remarkable about the incident. “If you’re going to say something like that, you should expect to get hit.”

    After a decade of teaching lower-income kids in Title I schools, Norwood was not surprised by his students’ attitude. Most come from broken families in low-income neighborhoods mired in a culture of poverty and violence. Attitudes and expectations are radically different from those of the middle- and professional-class educators, politicians, journalists, and activists who have been driving educational policy in Virginia. The political class is, in a word, clueless about what’s happening in schools. The theories of bureaucrats in Richmond and district offices are unmoored from reality. Adult authority at his school is disintegrating, disorder is rampant, and the quality of education, which was never great to begin with, is tragic. (more…)

  • Youngkin Donated His Salary to Charity. Sore Losers Complain.

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    We all understand that Virginia Democrats are smarting. They honestly believed that Virginia was a blue state and they could nominate a sleazy Clinton-crony retread and still win the governor’s race.

    They lost and their criticism of Governor Glenn Youngkin borders on derangement.

    Would it kill them to be gracious? To put aside their bitterness long enough to give Youngkin props when he does something undeniably good?

    If not that, how about if they just shut up and drop the petty partisanship for a few days?

    No sooner had Youngkin announced this week that he was donating his first quarter salary to the Virginia Law Enforcement Assistance Program, an organization “dedicated to helping law enforcement officers and first responders who have undergone traumatic critical incidents in the line of duty or inter personal lives” than the sniping began. (more…)

  • A Tale of Three Schools

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    One school allots time in its schedule for students “to engage in critical conversations around topics of race, antiracism, social justice, and inclusion.” Its student handbook endeavors to train a “lens toward fairness, equity, inclusion.”  Diversity training is required for all faculty and staff.   Summer reading included: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi and White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo.

    In its discussion on “building an antiracist community,” the school notes that “discomfort helps us to stretch and grow. Learning how to engage in difficult conversations, to listen respectfully, and to consider multiple perspectives are vital to building a strong educational community and preparing our students for future academic, community, and professional engagement and leadership.”

    Another school has expressed its commitment to DEI. During the summer, faculty were asked to read How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The latter work was also assigned to students during the year. (more…)

  • Exploding Requirements and Workforce Shortages – An Existential Threat to the Public Schools

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    The hottest buzz around many of the public schools, including my home area of Virginia Beach, is around the very real hardships posed by unprecedented staff shortages.

    On return from COVID, it seems that our schools faced record shortages of personnel to deal with students that were traumatized and afflicted with massive learning losses.

    I said “seems” because there is no accurate count. The new online report VDOE has recently published shows billet vacancies as of October 1 2021 to be 2 1/2 times a similar count it provided me two years ago.

    A compelling and disturbing trend. Yet the personnel problem is even worse than we presently have documented.

    The new, comprehensive VDOE report of public school personnel shortages is false because some of the inputs were false. The real numbers were higher.  In some cases much higher. Lies were told. I will demonstrate that in this article.

    Other well-documented data show both an outsized number of pending retirements from the schools and the ongoing and rapid collapse of the new teacher pipelines.

    And we don’t have a sufficient number of professional support specialists — school psychologists, social workers, school counselors and others. That also cannot be quickly remedied.

    So the trends are all going in the wrong direction. For the schools, supply is decreasing. Demand, driven by programmatic decisions at VDOE as well as the strain of remediation of COVID learning losses, has been increasing.

    This word for the crisis is existential. With a tip of the hat to Herb Stein, things that cannot continue will stop. (more…)

  • A Complete Disconnect from Reality

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    James A. Bacon

    Barbara Johns, a participant in the Prince Edward County school walkout, is pictured prominently in WTOP’s article.

    by James A. Bacon

    A group of Black leaders has launched an initiative to preserve the teaching of Black history against what it calls a “whitewashing” by Governor Glenn Youngkin. Black History Is American History, a collaboration of the Leadership Conference Education Fund, the NAACP, and People for the American Way, has formed in response to Youngkin’s promise to rid public schools of “inherently divisive concepts,” reports WTOP News.

    “Governor Youngkin’s misguided and ignorant attempt to whitewash history and gag educators only builds on the legacy of discrimination against Black communities, Native communities, and other communities of color across Virginia,” states the initiative’s web page.

    Amy Tillerson Brown, education chair of the Virginia NAACP, recounted the history of Barbara Johns and hundreds of Black classmates who walked out of school in Prince Edward County in 1951 in protest against segregated education. This watershed event led to the famous Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case.

    “There are some people who might find Barbara Johns’ contribution to civil rights history disturbing, divisive, even,” Brown said, as quoted by WTOP. “This historical reality makes some people uncomfortable, as it requires students to critique the historical circumstances that allowed this race-based inequity.”

    I defy Brown to find a scintilla of evidence that Youngkin would forbid teaching uncomfortable facts such as the Prince Edward walkouts in history classes. To suggest that he would represents one of two things: either a deliberate effort to distort the Governor’s intent — a knowing lie — or the product of group-think reinforced by a left-wing echo chamber totally unplugged from reality. In either case, Virginia’s mainstream media plays a critical role in perpetuating the falsehood. (more…)

  • Norfolk Police Chief’s Sudden Retirement

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Although it’s unlikely, I like to think we had a little something to do with Norfolk Police Chief Larry Boone’s surprise announcement Wednesday that he was retiring in two days.

    We’ve been critics of his leadership. Perhaps he was paying attention when we called for him to be fired just 15 days ago.

    Actually, we first called for him to be sacked last November.

    No one is saying the chief has been fired, of course. But it’s unusual for a chief with 30 years of service to the department to make such a hasty exit. His official retirement takes place April 29, but Boone’s last day on the job is tomorrow. He’s using accrued leave for the next several weeks.

    Odd.

    Boone’s retirement comes amidst an ugly spate of violence. According to reports, there have been 49 people shot in Norfolk so far this year in 39 separate shootings. (more…)

  • Updates: Missing Wind, Lazy Assembly, Gas Wars

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    by

    Steve Haner

    Germany’s energy generation mix, March 6 to April 6. When the wind and solar lag, the conventional (and related CO2 emissions) spike regularly. Click for larger view.     Source: Agora Energiewende, via Steve Milloy, @JunkScience

    by Steve Haner

    The German Energy Mix in March

    When you dig in, the amount of data available on energy usage is stunning, and the presentations are often quite clear and informative. Case in point is the illustration above of Germany’s energy mix during March, in the news now as Europe seeks to wean itself from fossil fuels imported from Russia. But it cannot go without fossil fuels. For that matter, neither can Virginia.

    Germany is far more dependent on onshore wind than offshore wind, as you can see in the chart. You can see the daily peaks and troughs from solar.  The vast majority of the delta between their output and the demand line is made up of conventional fossil fuels and apparently nuclear is in that category of “conventional.” But Germany is down to a handful of operating nukes now.

    The power output tracks demand well, but the upper thin line shows the fluctuating CO2 emissions that go along with the coal and gas Germany will be using more of, unless Europe opens itself to modern drilling techniques to release gas in its shale formations (a.k.a. fracking) to retire coal.

    Speaking of wind, check out this page from time to time. On windy days the output (again, watch both onshore and offshore) can be quite impressive. But not all days are windy. In the German example above, 19 of 31 days required big- time back-up. (more…)

  • Virginia Budget Deal Stalled as Democrats Demand $3B in Increased Spending

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Shaun Kenney

    Just to illustrate how fanatically out of touch Senate Democrats are as they frantically try to spend $3 billion on more government, check out State Senator Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax) on Twitter as he blasts Governor Glenn Youngkin’s proposal for gasoline tax relief:

    Remember — we are sitting on a $3bn surplus fueled by COVID relief dollars and not by any metric of economic success. Yet Senate Democrats continue to lean into the hammock of so-called budget cuts as they continue to shove money into the maw of state government for the sake of producing mediocre results. (more…)

  • Richmond University Cancels Douglas Southall Freeman

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    James A. Bacon

    by Phil Leigh

    The University of Richmond is “canceling” one of its most distinguished graduates, Douglas Southall Freeman (1886 – 1953). Specifically, they are dropping his name from Mitchell-Freeman Hall.

    After leaving Richmond University to earn a PhD at Johns Hopkins, Freeman returned to Virginia’s capital where he joined the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1909 and, in 1915, at the age of 29 became editor of the Richmond News Leader—a position he held for 34 years. During those years he wrote a four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee, a four-volume study of General Lee’s Lieutenants, and finished two volumes of a seven-volume biography of George Washington. He completed four more volumes of the Washington biography after retirement whereas two of his associates finished the seventh volume after his death. The Lee and Washington bios won Pulitzer Prizes and Lee’s Lieutenants put Freeman into a close circle of military friends including Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower. (more…)

  • Prosecutor “Evaluating the Facts” in Virginia v. Anti-Woke Dad

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Harry Jackson displays pornographic images taken from books in Fairfax County Public School libraries.


    by Asra Q. Nomani

    FAIRFAX, Virginia – A spokeswoman for Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano says the prosecutor’s office is “evaluating the facts” of four criminal cases that accuse a black father, Harry Jackson, of “slander and libel” for raising concerns that a local woke activist was engaging in “grooming behavior.”

    I have evaluated “the facts,” and there is only one conclusion to be reached: Descano is engaging in prosecutorial overreach to intimidate a parent who has dared to challenge the all-Democratic school board in court for its racist, anti-Asian admissions changes to America’s No. 1 high school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, affectionally known as TJ.

    The unprecedented criminal case, Commonwealth of Virginia v. Harry Randall Jackson, comes after the National Association of School Boards sent President Biden a letter on Sept. 29, 2021, accusing parents of engaging in “domestic terrorism,” leading to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland dispatching the FBI against parents in October 2022, even creating a terrorism threat tag, EDUOFFICIALS, to track incidents. (more…)

  • Keep Virginia’s Part-Time Citizen Legislature

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Mark Rozell, a political scientist and Dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, has a terrible idea. It’s not original. It surfaces from time to time.

    Let’s hope it goes nowhere.

    In an opinion piece published recently in The Washington Post, “Virginia’s Legislature Was Built for Agrarian Times. Is It Time for An Update?” Rozell points to the fact that Virginia’s General Assembly is back in Richmond for a special session to hammer out a budget as reason to switch from a part-time legislature to a full-time, year-round body.

    You know, like they have in California, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania. Such models of good government. (more…)

  • UVa Has Issues, But At Least It Is Not Yale

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    On March 10 the Federalist Society, a group promoting conservative/libertarian principles in law schools, hosted a panel discussion at Yale Law about freedom of religion and speech. About 120 student protesters descended upon the event, shouted down the speakers, and then, after repeated warnings, continued their noisy demonstration in the hallway. In the aftermath, more than 400 law students, about 60% of the student body, signed an open letter voicing support for the protesters and assailing the presence of armed police. While the protesters were excessively loud and “engaged in rude and insulting behavior,” wrote Law School Dean Heather Gerken, they did not violate the school’s “three-warning protocol.” Heated debate over the contours of free speech continues to this day.

    At the University of Virginia, by contrast, the Federalist Society held a symposium on the topic, “The Federalists Vs. the Anti-Federalists: Revisiting the Founding Debates.” The event went off without a hitch. There were no protests, no open letters, and no need for statements by the dean.

    The exercise of free speech and free expression leaves very much to be desired at the University of Virginia, but students, parents, faculty and alumni can console themselves: at least UVa is not Yale. (Which is fairly ironic, given the fact that President Jim Ryan, Provost Ian Baucom, and law school Dean Risa Goluboff all hold Yale degrees.) (more…)

  • Ski Masks in April? Enforce the Anti-Mask Law!

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    On Saturday evening at about 6:30 three people were shot at Norfolk’s once-upscale MacArthur Center.

    One man, 33-year-old Roosevelt A. McKinney, was killed. Two others were taken to the hospital with gunshot wounds.

    The Norfolk police would like your help in identifying the suspected shooter. They’ve even provided security cam stills:

    Helpful, no?

    Anyone recognize the suspect? You know, the guy wearing what appears to be a ski mask? (more…)

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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