The Trump administration has announced a list of “sanctuary” cities and counties that it is targeting. The President has threatened to pull federal funding and file suits against those localities that don’t change their practices that the administration deems make it harder for it to carry out its agenda of deporting undocumented immigrants.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, “We are exposing these sanctuary politicians who harbor criminal illegal aliens and defy federal law,” said Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Numerous counties and cities in Virginia made the list. The list includes ones that would be expected, but it also includes localities that might be surprised that the administration thinks they are sanctuary localities.
I knew this was coming — I just didn’t expect it so soon. In what is sure to spark a growing movement, 18 student groups at the University of Virginia have sent a letter to members of the General Assembly to block the confirmation of Board of Visitors nominee Ken Cuccinelli, according to CBS 19 News.
Ken Cuccinelli. Image credit: New York Times
The former Republican Attorney General has yet to attend his first board meeting or publicly utter a single word relating to his board role, but he has already been targeted by the same crowd that nearly axed Bert Ellis (whom Cuccinelli replaced) in his confirmation. Ellis survived the legislative gauntlet in 2023 but was fired this spring by Governor Glenn Youngkin for being too blunt in expressing his opinions.
The students have no recollection of Cuccinelli’s term as AG — some were wearing diapers when he was elected in 2009 — but others at UVA have long memories. Cuccinelli tried unsuccessfully to extract emails from then-professor Michael Mann, the global warmist inventor of the much-disputed hockey stick graph showing an exponential increase in temperatures in recent years, in an investigation into Mann’s possible misuse of state research funds. UVA fought him tooth and nail — which comes as no surprise to anyone who has tried to pry emails out of UVA.
Cuccinelli likely has not forgotten his ordeal with bureaucratic intransigence at UVA either. Neither do I expect he’s under any illusions that the Democrat-dominated legislature will confirm his nomination.
Delegate Katrine Callsen, D-Albemarle, has already indicated that she will not vote to confirm his nomination. “I do not know how my colleagues feel, but that will be a conversation to be had when we convene next,” she said.
In 1951 Virginia public education operated under the doctrine of “separate but equal,” but the definition of “equal” left much to be desired. In Farmville’s high school for African-American children, 450 students crammed into a building designed for 180. There was no gymnasium. No cafeteria. No science labs. No athletic fields. The newer school for white students up the road had all of these.
The response from city fathers to the overcrowding was to build unheated tar-paper shacks that surrounded the school like so many chicken coops.
For 16-year-old Barbara Johns, this was separate but far from equal, and so she planned to lead every student on a student strike – declaring they would not return to school until the school system agreed to build facilities truly equal to those Prince Edward County’s white students attended.
In 1951 this was, by all measures, a gutsy thing to do, and the students took the precaution of calling Richmond’s civil rights lawyers for tepresentation. There was not a great deal of support at first. Attorney Oliver Hill, who would later win the Presidential Medal of Freedom, recalled years later that “We were talking about these children being out on strike and we were fully of the opinion that we were going to advise them to go back to school …”
According to the 1965 book, They Closed Their Schools,Spottswood Robinson III, who would later become the first African American appointed chief judge of the District of Columbia Circuit Court, remembered, “I pointed out to (the students) that there were attendance laws. That was when one of them said that the jail was not big enough for all of us …”
Defenders of the higher-ed status quo don’t dispute the imbalance of partisan and ideological views in college faculties, a reality that is so well documented that there is no sense in pretending otherwise. Rather, they’ve adopted a rhetorical gambit to put their critics on the defensive — painting them as hypocritical for wanting to rectify the asymmetry.
Conservatives, they contend, reject preferential hiring to address racial and ethnic imbalances in college faculties, but they are happy to see hiring preferences to bolster the number of scholars with right-of-center sympathies. As my colleague Dick Hall-Sizemore sums up the logic in yesterday’s post: “Some might call it DEI for conservatives.”
Dick is hardly alone in his view. I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed, in the comments section of this blog and, more respectfully, from members of the University of Virginia faculty with whom I engage.
Some may be tempted to dismiss “DEI for conservatives” as mere sophistry. But I take the messaging seriously. It compels us to ask important questions: How do we restore a semblance of intellectual diversity to higher education? What is our ultimate goal? How will we know when we reach it? By what means do we accomplish it?
I don’t often dispute with my former colleague Dwayne Yancey, now running Cardinal News, but his short-sighted and one-sided column this morning on the changing tax environment for solar panel manufacturers demands an answer.
Yes, certain solar-specific tax expense subsidies are set to expire in the House-passed version of the new federal tax rewrite. Yes, the solar industry has its hair on fire and is blasting out warnings of economic collapse, including at a legislative energy meeting last week. Yancey follows the playbook page by page in his argument.
As is often the case, what really matters is what was left out, either not mentioned at all or left to a side comment. The pending tax package – and it will change and may even fail – includes a host of provisions intended to boost manufacturing of all kinds, none of them denied to the firms who make solar components.
The solar industry is whining, amplified by Yancey, because it is losing special privileges applied only to that industry, that energy production method. They don’t want a level playing field, they want an edge. They cannot compete without the tax breaks given to the industry and then really boosted by additional tax favors granted to their customers, also set to expire.
Yancey mentions none of the tax proposals that will benefit all manufacturing, highlighted for example by this from the Tax Foundation. Will all of these be in the final bill? Maybe not. Do they reduce revenue? Probably, but these are the kinds of things that economists do see as stimulating investment and potentially creating jobs and revenue long term. They include:
Permanent deductions for domestic research and development spending.
Permanent 100% bonus depreciation.
Permanent 100% first year expensing for qualifying structures.
Increasing the Section 179 expensing cap from $1 million to $2.5 million.
Increasing the Section 199 qualified business deduction from 20 to 23%.
In 1985, Daniel Jordan—a Ph.D. in history from University of Virginia—became president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and runs Monticello. He would preside over Monticello for the next 24 years, during which time Thomas Jefferson’s life and legacy would be radically transformed through information made readily available by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
Under his guidance, TJF created a $200-million-plus endowment, built the Thomas Jefferson library, purchased historic Montalto Mountain, established the Thomas Jefferson Parkway and walking trail, brought in the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies (1994), and began many educational programs.
Jordan realized that preservation of Monticello entailed increase in the number and amount of donations as well as telling the whole story of Jefferson. He was successful in the first. Concerning the second, said Jordan early in his presidency to his staff, “From January the first on, we’re going to try to tell the most honest [sic] story we can about Jefferson and slavery and race and the plantation, and it’s all going to be based on serious scholarship.” That was a promise he did not keep.
When Peter Onuf became Thomas Jefferson Foundation Scholar in 1989, things especially came undone.
Many Virginians, including this writer, have been warily following the financial markets and their investment portfolios as President Trump’s tariff policies change almost daily, seemingly on a whim sometimes. They should be encouraged by a term coined, as reported by the New York Times, on Wall Street to describe these wild fluctuations in policy and the markets — the TACO trade, as in Trump Always Chickens Out.
Turnabout
A current article lends credence to the frequent lament on Bacon’s Rebellion regarding what is regarded as the overwhelming liberal bent of university faculty. The source of the article may surprise some — the Atlantic.
The author describes efforts by Johns Hopkins University and leading institutions of higher education to attract conservative scholars. Some might call it DEI for conservatives.
From time to time, I highlight the bad behavior of Virginia elected officials as warnings that the public must remain ever vigilant in protection of honest government. These days, I can’t keep up. Wrongdoing has become so widespread that I could make it the subject of a blog all its own. More profoundly worrisome than run-of-the-mill graft, though, there is a deeper malaise in our country: a nationalization and politicization of local grievances that threaten respect for the rule of law.
Such is the case of Scott Jenkins, the former Culpeper County sheriff who was convicted of fraud and bribery charges in 2023, sentenced in March, and then pardoned yesterday by President Trump. Jenkins and his family, Trump posted on his Truth Social media platform, “have been dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden DOJ.”
(Lest anyone jump to the conclusion that I’m singling out Trump for his complicity in this trend, I see the problem as Democrats and Republicans engaging in a string of escalating abuses. There is plenty of guilt to go around.)
Jenkins had served as county sheriff for 12 years, running as both a Republican and an independent. He courted controversy in 2019 when he announced plans to deputize county residents if the Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed “further unnecessary gun restrictions” and to safeguard the right of “law-abiding citizens to protect their constitutional right to own firearms.”
At some point, the principle of protecting constitutional gun rights for all degenerated into a racket of doling out deputy-sheriff privileges in exchange for cash.
Here we go again. As the 2025 election year heats up and warnings rise about electricity shortfalls this summer, the legislators behind Virginia’s coming ban on hydrocarbon electricity are pretending they see the problem.
A May 22 headline out of a recent legislative meeting on energy claimed that “Democratic leadership signals willingness to reexamine Virginia Clean Economy Act.” The reporter cited comments to him by two legislators made after the meeting, after the microphones and public streaming camera were turned off.
Fool us twice, shame on us. During the 2024 session of the General Assembly, similar “signals” that VCEA would be reviewed were sent and widely reported. But the legislation proposed and passed by the majority party this year focused instead on ways to hasten the path to an electricity grid more dependent on weather-vulnerable, intermittent generation from wind and sun. Ask the folks in Spain how that is working out.
Virginia was saved from most of those new laws only by a series of vetoes from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin. The vetoes only kept an existing crisis from getting worse. It fixed nothing. The long outage in Spain and Portugal, coupled with fresh warnings from the regional electricity trading entity PJM and the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation, should keep Virginia’s shaky grid infrastructure in focus. Wrote PJM of this summer:
This season also marks the first time in PJM’s annual assessment, however, that available generation capacity may fall short of required reserves in an extreme planning scenario that would result in an all-time PJM peak load of more than 166,000 MW.
Stats on the rack. Torturing statistics until they confess. Image credit: Chap GPT
by James A. Bacon
The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office is making more traffic stops this year than last. The number of stops conducted between Jan. 1 and March 31 this year totaled 7,088, up roughly 65% over the 4,290 stops made during the same period last year.
Sofia Saiyed, director of New Virginia Majority, knows exactly what to make of those numbers. The stops, she says, are “pretextual,” and the Sheriff’s Office is “practicing racial discrimination to target the immigrant community and funnel them into the deportation pipeline,” reports Loudoun Now.
What’s her evidence? She’s not claiming that Hispanics are getting stopped disproportionately more than Whites, because they’re not. She’s saying that, if stopped, they are more than eight times more likely to get searched. “This is clear racial profiling,” she says.
Is it really now? Or is this just another case of abused statistics?
First, we’ll look at the statistics themselves, and then we’ll see what the Loudoun County Sheriffs Office says about them.
You can tell a few things simply from the limited information that appears on these headstones. Pvt. Moseley served in the 38th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Division and died on July 23, 1918. That would have put him, in all likelihood, along the Marne River near or east of Chateau-Thierry. The German Army launched its last great offensive of 1918 on July 15 and it quickly stalled along the Marne — an outcome to which the U.S. contributed greatly. The French and U.S. counter-attacked three days later and the Germans never regained the initiative.
Pvt. Mosely’s headstone sits in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, a First World War facility otherwise known as Belleau Wood. From Paris, it’s a relatively easy drive up the A4 to the exit at Château-Thierry and from there it takes 15-20 minutes to reach Belleau, the village that lends its name to this American Battle Monuments Commission cemetery.
Yesterday Fairfax City celebrated the annual “Ride of the Patriots” rally at Patriot Harley Davidson in Fairfax City.
A Memorial Day staple for 25 years in the City, the “Ride” is a fun way for ordinary citizens to connect with bikers, veterans and significant others who ride into our community from all points of the USA. The ride has gotten smaller over the years; in its heyday, we would have 10,000 bikes lined up on Lee Highway to go thundering down to the Pentagon — but the point and passion remain the same. Put simply, it’s about freedom. Yesterday morning, I had a chance to speak to the assembled crowd about “Heroes in our Community’.
The Fairfax High School boys who landed at Omaha Beach with the 29th infantry division; Sergeant James Robinson of Annandale, Virginia who won a posthumous Medal of Honor in Vietnam, Fairfax County Police Detective Vicky Armel (FHS’ 83) who was killed in the line of duty in 2006; and Lt. Col. Justin Constantine (FHS ’88) who survived a life-threatening wound in Iraq to live another sixteen years as an American hero.
“When will Virginia (and America) learn that the answer to increasing diversity in elite schools (and board rooms for that matter) is not quotas or lowering standards, but improving the academic outcomes of African American students — 40 percent of whom are trapped in failing public urban schools. We need DEI to stand for Diversity through Educational Improvement!”
— from his weekly Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy newsletter
The latest poll predicting a Democratic ticket sweep this fall doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody who has read my columns here. When Donald Trump was in the White House the last time, the Dem nominee for Virginia governor won by the party’s biggest percentage in 32 years. Ralph Northam also swept in his running mates. The only question remaining this November is whether the Democratic ticket eight years later can do better.
Take it from me: The last four elections have led to ticket sweeps by one party or the other. Virginia’s famed constituency of independent cross-ticket voters exists no longer. 2025 is going to produce the fifth straight ticket sweep, the first time since the end of the one-party Byrd Machine era. President Trump has made NOVA a radioactive zone for the Republican statewide ticket.
I doubt many Bacon Rebellion readers got a chance to listen to my radio interview last month with Andre Whitehead. In that interview, I explain why I thought John Reid had fallen into a trap far more his own making than he or the media has acknowledged.
I believe he has been played by Governor Youngkin and the MAGa crowd here in Virginia. He didn’t really see what was coming due to inexperience.
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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