by Chris Braunlich
Richmond, like Washington, has always been a place where an โinsiderโs gameโ is played โ not in a pejorative sense, but simply as the way things are done.
Relationships are paramount, people speak in the arcane language of lawmaking, agendas are confusing for outsiders, and the activities of a subcommittee for an obscure commission are followed in detail because those in the know understand that what happens there will end up as a new regulation. (more…)
by Steve Haner
If the Commonwealth of Virginia was not paying Matthew Moran to serve as Governor Glenn Youngkinโs deputy chief of staff and point person with the General Assembly, as recently revealed, who was? Based on the websites for his employers, mainly the renewable energy industry.
For example, Moran is identified as on the Virginia advisory board of an advocacy group called Conservatives for Clean Energy, strong supporters of the push to eliminate fossil fuel use in the state and replace it with solar and wind-driven electricity. (more…)
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Glenn Youngkin recently declared, โI guess Iโm maybe not the normal governor. I think one of the differences is that I am an outsider and I come in with ideas on how we communicate.โ
We are beginning to find out how true that is. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that one of the Governorโs top policy aides is not a state employee, but a lobbyist on the payroll of a lobbying company. Matt Moran is on a paid leave of absence from Creative Direct, a political consulting firm, and LINK Public Affairs, an offshoot from Creative Direct. When Youngkin first announced his appointment, he listed Moranโs title as โdeputy chief of staff and director of policy and legislative affairs.โ A sign on his door in the Patrick Henry Building bore the title, โdeputy chief of staff.โ The statement of economic interest he filed upon taking office listed his position as โdeputy chief of staff.โย ย In appearances before legislative committees, he identified himself as โdeputy chief of staff.โ He is now labeled โspecial advisorโ and the January 21 news release announcing his appointment has been โcorrected.โ (more…)
by James A. Bacon
Eleven days ago the Editorial Board of the Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia student newspaper, opined that it could not condone the “platforming” of former Vice President Mike Pence by allowing him to speakย on the university grounds.
The blowback has been gratifying to see.
While some students have expressed support for suppressing ideas deemed hateful and hurtful, others have denounced the editorial. Crucially, UVa President Jim Ryan and Provost Ian Baucom weighed in in favor of free speech, stating in a CD piece that “all views, beliefs, and perspectives deserve to be articulated and heard, free from interference.”
Let us praise the Ryan administration when plaudits are due. But let us also recognize that at UVa “free speech” is a sub-set of a larger issue: an ever-narrowing range of permissible viewpoints. Threats to free speech spring from intellectual monocultures, which is exactly what UVa is becoming. A defense of free speech would not be necessary in a university that fostered more intellectual diversity. (more…)
by James A. Bacon
Andreas Addison may be a city councilman in Richmond, but it doesn’t look like he’s getting any special treatment from city hall. With plans to open a gymnasium, he is renovating an old brick building in Scott’s Addition, a neighborhood that is transitioning from light industrial and warehousing into a hipster haven.ย
He signed a lease early last year and applied for permits to remodel the space, reports Richmond BizSense. Five months later, he thought he was on track to get his building permit and start work. Then he got a call from City Hall.
The city rejected his permit because an access ramp he’d planned to install on the building’s exterior encroached upon the 10-foot-wide sidewalk. Addison would have to move the ramp inside the building. The change cost him $40,000 and eliminated space for a juice bar he’d intended to install. “The phone call came at month five and (the ramp) was on page two of the plans,” he told BizSense. “Why did it take four months to get to that point?” (more…)
by Steve Haner
In the coming weeks, Virginiaโs State Corporation Commission takes up one of the largest utility investments ever undertaken in the Commonwealth, where the cost and the risk will rest squarely on Virginiaโs citizens: Dominion Energy Virginiaโs $10 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project.
In applications and appendices filed late last year, probably running to hundreds of thousands of words and hundreds of technical drawings, Dominion outlined its request to build the project 27 statute miles (24 nautical miles) off the mouth of Hampton Roads. The project area covers 176 square miles of seabed. It uses about one square mile for each of the planned 176 turbine towers. (more…)
by Phil Leigh
(March 25, 2022) In this morningโs Richmond Times podcast, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Michael Paul Williams asserts that the reason there were no Confederate monuments in the city until the 1890s and afterward was because whites wanted them to symbolize the return of white supremacy after the end of Reconstruction. He implies that if the statues were intended to honor the fallen soldiers they would have been erected when the war ended in 1865. He further opines that the statues erected as late as the mid-1920s were chiefly intended to reinforce the symbolism of white supremacy while black voices were progressively silenced. He is wrong for two reasons.
First, penniless Southerners were unable to pay for monuments for many years after the war ended. They instead had to content themselves with laying flowers of the graves of the fallen, which sometimes also included Northern soldiers who died while in the South. According to professors William Cooper and Thomas Terrill in their textbook, The American South, as late as 1900 the per capita income percentile ranking in the South was half that of the national average. Even in 1930 it was only 55% of the national average. (more…)
Letter from VMI Senior African American Alumni to the VMI Board of Visitors.
The numerous articles about the Virginia Military Institute, both from alumni and non-alumni, have been troubling to us as Senior African American Alumni (SAAA) [several members of the classes of โ72 to โ76] of VMI. We have known the Institute to be a premier leadership institution and we have also experienced racial incidents. When wholly considered, VMI is an outstanding institution of higher-learning to which many of us owe a debt of gratitude.
This letter is in support of The Virginia Military Institute and Superintendent MG Cedric Wins, VMI Class of โ85. As Senior African American Alumni, each of us has immensely benefited from the VMI experience. In 1968, VMI welcomed five African American young men to become part of the Corps of Cadets and to be the first black students. By all accounts, it was successful because VMI prepared for it to be successful. At the end of the previous academic year, the upcoming First-Class was challenged to lead the way for the integration of these โnewโ students into the Corps of Cadets. They were told, if these five black cadets failed, the First-Class would have failed to do its job.
It has been disappointing to hear that various alumni have downplayed that racial incidents happened. Even more, it has been disheartening to read how certain alumni have questioned the integrity of MG Wins and members of his administration, something unheard of until he was appointed Superintendent. As stated by a member of the SAAA, โfor every one distasteful and belittling act that took place when I was there, I could count ten uplifting and enriching things. On the whole, VMI was life-enhancing for me and many others.โ (more…)
This column has been republished with permission from Vox Fairfax.
Do not pity the masses. Rather, exercise some sympathy for them as they attempt to sort through their daily lives while politicians โ elected and campaigning โ issue barrages of promises, criticisms, and non-answers to questions. With just a smattering of reflection, the separate universe cultivated by politicians may be withering away like the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In philosophy, dualism relates to distinguishing between mind and body, or subject and object, to identify the likely or reliable truth of competing propositions. In 1637, Rene Descartes coined his principle of inquiry as โCogito ergo sumโย meaning โI think, therefore, I am.โ The French philosopher sought to parse cognition, concluding that doubt concerning the world around us results in reasonably reliable conclusions.
Nationwide, Republicans are spearheading efforts to rid state electoral systems of fraud and theft of elected offices. The evidence to support those efforts is sparse to nonexistent, yet the campaigns and promises and criticisms continue. This phenomenon is no less true in Virginia, where Governor Youngkin adopted โelection integrityโ as a campaign plank. His popular vote margin to victory was 63,688 โ 0.0195% โ out of 3.262 million votes cast. (more…)
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
There has been a kerfuffle over another one of Governor Youngkinโs appointments. Late last week, the Governor named Susan Beals to be Commissioner of the Department of Elections.
In contrast to Chris Piper, whom she will replace and who had never worked on a campaign nor donated to a political candidate, Beals has a history of working on Republican campaigns. More to the point, she previously worked as a legislative assistant to controversial Senator Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield, and donated to her campaigns.
Democrats exploded. Because Chase had introduced legislation (SB 605) calling for an audit of the 2020 presidential election, a spokesperson for the Democratic Party of Virginia charged that Youngkin had embraced โthe fringe, far-right conspiracy theories of Donald Trump and The Big Lie.โ (more…)
by James A. Bacon
The Defund-the-Police movement in Virginia has passed its peak. Indeed, it may have disappeared, leaving barely a trace. People still may have concerns about the criminal justice system, but that doesn’t mean they want to throw out the good with the bad. Consider three stories in the news clips today.
SROs in schools. The City of Alexandria voted last year to end the School Resource Officer program in the city’s four middle and high schools. After a series of incidents involving students and guns, Council reversed course in October. Now, reports The Washington Post, school officials, while “reimagining” their relationship with police, are saying that safety considerations require keeping a police presence inside schools as the work continues.
The school system of 16,000 started the 2021-2022 school year without SROs for the first time in three decades. Police were called to schools 96 times in the first half of the 2021-2022 school year and made 18 arrests. (more…)
by Carmen Villani, VMI Class of 1976
Governor Glenn Youngkin was elected in large part to remove “inherently divisive concepts” such as Critical Race Theory (CRT). While his Executive Order #1 speaks to “K-12 public education,” his recent speech to the Jefferson Society at the University of Virginia suggested extending the ban to higher education. In South Dakota, Governor Noem just signed into legislation a bill banning mandatory CRT training.
As with other colleges in the Commonwealth, the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) is dealing with the issue of CRT. While VMI officials have denied the existence of CRT on Post (VMI Campus), documents, briefings by former Chief Diversity Officer Dr. Janice Underwood, and the hiring of outside consulting firms with clear ties to CRT suggest otherwise. For those reasons, VMI alumni have initiated a petition calling for Attorney General Jason Miyares to direct the appropriate agency to conduct an investigation into whether the tenets of CRT under the guise of DEI are in fact being woven into the fabric of the VMI Experience. The petition also requests a hold on any DEI contracts until the investigation is completed.
After less than two weeks, the petition has well over 900 supporters. I urge all Virginians opposed to the institutionalizing of divisive concepts in Virginia colleges and universities to join the alumni, cadet parents and grandparents , friends of VMI and military veterans in signing it. To sign the petition click here. (more…)
COVID data junkies might want to check out the latest iteration of the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association COVID hospitalization dashboard. It now provides a regional breakdown. After winter’s Omicron surge, the numbers are heading down fast, and could well dip lower than the level Virginia enjoyed last summer. The seven-day moving average of COVID hospitalizations statewide stands at 381 today. In the Far Southwest region, the number is only 19. Cross your fingers and hope the lull lasts.
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.
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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