Oh look. Desperate Virginia Democrats — along with their pals in the media — are trying to weaponize COVID-19 vaccines against what appears to be a resurgent Republican Party in the commonwealth.
It isn’t enough that gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin has said REPEATEDLY that he’s vaccinated, that he believes Virginians should be vaccinated and has even recorded a public service announcement urging his fellow Virginians to take the vaccine so the commonwealth can be open and prosper.
Nope. That isn’t good enough for the lockdown-loving authoritarians on the far left.
Terry McAuliffe maliciously refers to Youngkin as an “anti-vaxxer” because the GOP candidate doesn’t believe the government should be forcing people to be vaccinated. (more…)
Yesterday I noted polling of the race for governor in which Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin showed remarkable strength among minorities — 25% support from Blacks and 55% from Hispanics — along with a shrinking majority of Whites. That poll might have been an outlier, so I don’t want to make too much of it. But, if it is a fair representation of popular sentiment, it lends credence to the idea that American politics is undergoing a seismic realignment, and we’re seeing that realignment here in Virginia.
For most of my life, Democrats were viewed as the party that stood for the interests of the “working man” and minorities, especially Blacks. Republicans were seen as representing the interests of the overwhelmingly white middle and moneyed classes. That’s rapidly changing. Increasingly, the Democratic coalition encompasses a highly educated White vanguard allied with the “marginalized” elements of society against the interests, represented by Republicans, of the broad working class and middle class regardless of race or ethnicity.
The key to understanding this transfiguration is what I have referred to often as the “political class” — most recently in a post headlined, “Parents and the Political Class.” In that post, I suggested that the aims of the political class were antithetical to the interests of the middle class.
In the comments, Bacon’s Rebellioncontributor Dick Hall-Sizemore asked me what I meant by “political class.” It’s a reasonable question. The meaning is not self evident, but understanding the nature of the political class is fundamental to comprehending the deep structure of society and politics underlying the daily headlines. (more…)
“The mission of the Virginia Department of Education,” says the Road Map, “is to advance equitable and innovative learning.” The document acknowledges senior staff, four departments and ten “organizations and thought leaders” for their research and scholarship contributions to EdEquityVA for Culturally Relevant/Responsive Teaching (CRT) — not to be confused with Critical Race Theory (also referred to as CRT).
While educators deny they teach Critical Race Theory in schools, they are up front about their commitment to Culturally Relevant/Responsive Teaching. What they seem unwilling to admit is that culturally relevant teaching is an outgrowth of Critical Race Theory. (more…)
Sometimes teenagers make school-shooting threats to trigger school closures and avoid class. School authorities make such bogus reports more likely by closing school — rewarding the person by giving him he wants. Most threats recorded in the K-12 School Shooting Database are “not credible threats of violence,” note researchers.
Today, Arlington County encouraged threats and bogus reports by closing Washington-Liberty High School after receiving an anonymous call falsely “claiming that there was a shooter in the building.” Officials closed school before 9 a.m., moving the students like my daughter to a “secure location” — a public park where they could have been mowed down en masse by a shooter had he actually existed. But the school system waited until 10:03 a.m. to notify parents like me of the school closing.
Brandon Jarvis, author of the Virginia Political Newsletter, sums up the latest Emerson College/Nexstar Media poll of the Virginia gubernatorial election. Democrat Terry McAuliffe leads Republican Glenn Youngkin by one percentage point, with two percentage points undecided. Yes, it’s a tight race, but the demographic breakdown is what’s most interesting.
McAuliffe leads with women 51% to 45%, while Youngkin leads with men 50% to 46%. McAuliffe also leads among Black voters (72% to 25%), while Youngkin leads among White voters (53% to 45%) and Hispanic voters (55% to 45%).
Wait, what? Youngkin garners 25% support from Blacks? He gets 55%, an outright majority, among Hispanics? But his lead among White voters has shriveled. When was the last time a Republican candidate got such numbers?
It looks like a major political realignment is going on. Despite Democrats’ fervent efforts to portray Republicans as the party of racists, it is apparent that a lot of minorities are not buying the message.
What is the new fault line in Virginia politics? I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow.
Here’s the Washington Post’s take on the Critical Race Theory furor in Northern Virginia: Nothing to see here, move along now.
The controversy over implementation of social-justice ideology in Virginia public schools has gotten so intense that there is simply no ignoring it, as the WaPo did for months. WaPo may be the last media outlet to acknowledge the tumult in its own back yard.
Now the WaPo is giving credence to the Democratic Party talking point that Republicans are creating a “scare tactic” or sending out “dog whistles” to stir up the base this fall.
A recent article addressing the controversy quotes Stephen Farnsworth, a University of Mary Washington political science professor, as saying that turning CRT into a target is a way to motivate Republicans to vote in a nonpresidential election year. “The threat that there’s some evil outside force pushing a radical agenda into your elementary school is a vehicle for getting people energized,” he said. “It’s more about turnout of the base than persuasion.” (more…)
Header for the Fairfax County Public Schools request for proposal
by James A. Bacon
Fairfax County Public School (FCPS) system, the state’s largest, is aggressively taking on a new role — mental health provider — under the rubric of Social Emotional Learning (SEL).
As monitors of children’s mental health, teachers and school administrators will do double duty as social counselors and psychologists.
That expansive new mission is made clear in the controversy surrounding FCPS’s June signing of a $1.8 million contract with Panorama Education, a Boston-based data analytics firm, to provide a “universal screener for social and emotional learning.”
Through the Freedom of Information Act, Parents Defending Education, acquired the contract and the Request for Proposal upon which it was based.
“FCPS is committed to provide social and emotional learning for all students across all of their classrooms throughout the school day,” states the “background” section of the RFP. “Currently, schools operate as the de facto mental health provider in communities throughout the U.S. As a result, it is essential that school staff are able to appropriately and proactively identify social-emotional barriers to students’ ability to access the academic curriculum.” (My bold) (more…)
Virginia’s “Lewis and Clark” energy future calls for an adaptable energy policy responsive to new information as it is gathered.
by Bill O’Keefe
Politicians are not known for engaging in reflection or looking back on legislation, but they should. The experience that Europe is having with its version of the Virginia Clean Economy Act is the reason why. Presently, Europe is experiencing energy shortages and surging prices. Some of this turmoil is due to global forces but some is due to energy decisions that European nations have made, in particular the decision to move rapidly to renewables and eliminate coal, nuclear and natural gas as major sources of electricity.
Green ideology blinded Germany and other European countries to the fact that wind and solar don’t provide around-the-clock reliable sources of energy. This summer there have been extended periods of low or no wind. Last winter, European nations experienced colder-than-normal temperatures which had the effect of reducing both solar and wind power and leading to steep price increases. Without reliable and commercially viable electric storage systems, renewables are vulnerable to cloud and snow cover and periods of low wind.
The General Assembly and Dominion Energy would do well to take a close look at Europe’s experience and determine how Virginia can avoid a similar fate. One important lesson is that major transitions are complex and beset with many uncertainties. Another is that government has at best a mixed record when it comes to industrial policy. (more…)
The Tide light rail in downtown Norfolk. Photo by Dean Covey, Virginia Department of Transportation.
by Randal O’Toole
The Tide, Norfolk’s light-rail line, has been open to the public for ten years. As noted in this article in The Virginian-Pilot, it opened 18 months late after a 60% cost overrun.
The article claims the light-rail line carried its first million rides “five months ahead of original projections,” but that’s a transit agency lie. The original projections estimated that the rail line would carry 10,400 riders per weekday in its opening year. That would be about 1 million riders in less than four months. In fact, it carried less than half that, just 4,900 riders per weekday in its first year, and took eight months to reach 1 million riders.
In a typical transit-agency lie, Hampton Roads Transit later reduced that projection to 2,900 trips per weekday, and then claimed that was the “original” projection. This made it appear to anyone who didn’t look closely at the numbers that the line was doing well.
In fact, not only did it do poorly in its first year, it only went downhill from there. By 2019, seven years after it opened, ridership was down to 4,641 trips per weekday. (more…)
Kevin Hennessy, Dominion Energy’s senior director of state affairs, expresses confidence that the electric power company can meet the Northam administration’s goal of creating a zero-carbon electric grid in its service territory by 2045. It does take a leap of faith that electric batteries or some other energy storage system will make great strides in efficiency, he admits. Also, he caveats, it’s essential to continue generating nuclear power. Further, he acknowledges, costs and rates will go up. But the job can be done.
Ask Hennessy about gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s plan to accelerate the shift to a zero-carbon grid by 2035 — a decade earlier — and you get a very different response. The Dominion exec professes not to know much about the proposal, which appears in McAuliffe’s plan for fighting climate change, and did not address it directly. But he does observe that Dominion’s internal projections show consumption of natural gas through 2035 — even as solar and wind generation surge. (more…)
Disturbed by a “spike” in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members across the country, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has called on the FBI to use its “authority and resources” to discourage and prosecute “the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel,” reports The Daily Caller.
Meanwhile, in the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, it turns out that Garland’s daughter Rebecca is married to entrepreneur Xan Tanner, cofounder of Panorama Education, which has built a booming national business with school boards collecting data on students. So reports Asra Q. Nomani, vice president of strategy and investigations for Parents Defending Education, in her Substack column, “Asra Investigates.”
Not just any old kind of data. Panorama Education surveys students on such questions as, “How confident are you that students at your school can have honest conversations with each other about race?” Or “Do you identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, aromantic / asexual, or questioning?”
It is precisely this kind of highlighting of “woke” issues regarding race and gender that has parents up in arms in the first place.
Garland, contends Nomani, has a conflict of interest. She writes: “Panorama Education will profit from Garland’s outrageous silencing of parents who are challenging its data mining of K-12 students.” (more…)
This is third in a series of articles about Virginia’s Standards of Learning assessments.
by Matt Hurt
Teachers play a central role in the education of our students. Therefore, it is important to identify the characteristics of effective teachers, especially those who demonstrate success at educating at-risk students.
Prior to the COVID epidemic, the Comprehensive Instructional Program (CIP), an independent consortium of mostly rural school systems, held fall meetings in which teachers shared resources and strategies, vented to peers, cried on each other’s shoulders, and generally supported one another. While some detractors believe that teaching is a pie job, nothing can be further from the truth. If teaching were easy, there would be no teacher shortage. Education is a people business, and people are messy. Teachers must effectively deal with problems their students bring into class before they can make sure their students attain the required skills. They must also deal with a host of organizational and school culture problems.
In these fall meetings, the teachers most successful at helping at-risk students, whether those who had disabilities or were economically disadvantaged, were called out in front of the group and asked how they helped their kids pass the SOLs. In every instance, they would relate three things in common — curriculum alignment, relationships, and expectations.(more…)
Do you ever find yourself longing for the days of rampant, in-your-face, shameless cronyism in Virginia Beach?
Ever wish the Three Amigos were still on city council fetching water for their favorite developers?
Ever miss the days when the city’s business was conducted in secret with public votes just for show?
You may be in luck. Virginia Beach City Council is picking a replacement tonight for long-time Councilman Jim Wood who suddenly quit last month because of business demands.
Among the candidates is Linwood Branch, one of the Three Amigos, a trio of council members who were exceptionally developer-friendly. In fact, my former column-writing colleague, Dave Addis, once referred to Branch as a “goat boy” for the developers. (more…)
To show you the list of nursing facilities that I would use to begin a search for one for me and my family, I have built a spreadsheet of the very best facilities in Virginia.
Because they are available, I made it a true list of all stars. Five stars composite rating and not a single individual rating below four stars.
There are 40 of them, surprisingly and welcomingly spread around the state. If you read my previous posts, or read the notes on the spreadsheet, I don’t have to comment extensively.
Eight of them are for-profits. So it can be done. (more…)
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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