Compiled by The Bull Elephant
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Jeanine’s Memes
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A Peninsula Tale and a Commission’s Work
Captain Newport hits a reef.
by Gordon C. Morse
Thanks to The New York Review of Books, we have this 1994 observation by the late Yale historian Edmund S. Morgan:
“The distinguishing mark of American politics has been the absence of irreconcilable differences between the two parties that successively dominate the national government. Each party rests on a coalition of interests so diverse and inclusive as to prevent the formulation of any program that the other party will find intolerable.”
Intolerable is avoidable, in other words. We just have to apply that peculiar American genius for maneuver and resolution. We find our way to tolerable postures. We discover ways to live with each other. We steer clear of absolutes.
Morgan cites the Civil War as one occasion when we did otherwise.
In this regard, we should consider Virginia’s “Commission to Study the History of the Uprooting of Black Communities by Public Institutions of Higher Education in the Commonwealth [the Commission].”
With its enhanced mandate and recent infusion of additional financial support, the Commission may soon gain momentum.
But where is it headed? What outcomes does it seek? It’s already talking about “repairs.” What does that mean?
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Bacon Meme of the Week
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Governor Northam Raises Your Fuel Tax Again
By Steve Haner
For the record, since the dying traditional media do not cover this, a brief note that Virginia’s motor fuel taxes will rise once again July 1. The increase will be automatic, based on consumer price inflation, because of legislation passed in 2020 and signed by Governor Ralph Northam.
Another example of the long reach of tax legislation passed under Northam is Fairfax County’s rulers just voted to impose a meals tax, something the county’s voters had rejected in a previous referendum. Before 2020’s law change, another vote of the people was required to impose the tax.
As reported about a year ago, the indexing rule coupled with a direct gas tax hike in that bill had increased the gasoline and diesel tax rates by 150% in the four years after the new law. Inflation was far lower (2.9%) in the last 12 months so the changes this time are slight, at about 1.2 cents per gallon.
It is still the case that Virginia has divided the tax into different buckets and hides the total cost imposed on drivers on its various websites. There is a retail fuel tax, a wholesale fuel tax, and a third small tax imposed to cover the cost of the program managing old underground storage tanks.
Perhaps that storage tank “fee” will be like the business license tax imposed by Virginia to fight the War of 1812 and never go away.
The combined state taxes will be 41.7 cents per gallon on gasoline and 42.7 cents per gallon on diesel fuel. The Highway User Fee collected as an alternate to gas taxes will also rise 2.9%.
A separate federal tax of 18 cent per gallon is also collected at the pump and hasn’t changed since President Ronald Reagan, if I recall correctly. Congress should just copy Virginia’s legislature and index its gas tax. Nobody notices or squawks about the incremental increases. Inflation is the government’s most powerful and opaque tax increase tool. It will work like a charm with tariffs, too.
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In the AG Race, Who’s Fighting Illegal Alien Crime?
Image of Jay Jones created by Restoration News by Jacob Grandstaff
This November, Virginia faces a clear choice between an attorney general who protects its citizens and a candidate who defends illegal aliens.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’ fight against illegal alien crime contrasts starkly with Democrat challenger Jay Jones, who supports giving free benefits to illegal aliens and shielding them from deportation. Miyares has relentlessly prosecuted violent foreign gangs, partnered with the federal government to deport illegal aliens, and opposed redistributing Virginians’ tax dollars to foreign lawbreakers.
Prosecuting Violent Immigrant Gangs
Jason Miyares In contrast to Jones, who thinks Virginia law “criminalizes black and brown communities” and voted to limit law enforcement’s ability to detect illegal aliens, Miyares has made Virginia safer by empowering law enforcement and prosecuting members of violent foreign gangs.
Under Miyares, Operation Bold Blue Line, Operation Free Virginia, and Operation Ceasefire have contributed to a 34% decrease in murders, a 12% decrease in violent crimes, and the seizure of a full ton of narcotics, including 415 pounds of fentanyl.
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George Floyd Hysteria Cancelled President John Tyler
by Kerry Dougherty
The death of convicted felon and Minneapolis drug addict George Floyd five years ago at the hands of a police officer did more than trigger race riots across the nation, cause an estimated $1-2 billion in damage and take the life of at least one person, retired St. Louis Police Officer David Dorn, father of five.
After the death of Floyd angry leftists attempted to excise unpleasant chapters of American history by toppling statues and renaming schools and buildings.
Many historical figures associated with slavery, no matter their contributions to our young nation more than 200 years ago, were marginalized, vilified and erased.
Even Virginian John Tyler, one of the commonwealth’s most interesting — if controversial — figures.
I’m thinking about him today because his grandson — yes, you read that correctly the grandson of the 10th president, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, 96 — died last Sunday in the Westminster-Canterbury facility in Richmond.
The fact that a man born in 1790 still had a living grandson until this week is a testament to good genes, young wives and late marriages.
John Tyler served as governor of Virginia and a U.S. Senator before running for vice president. When President William Henry Harrison died after just 31 days in office, Tyler became the first man to become president without being elected to that office.
The Richmond-Times Dispatch wrote this week that Harrison’s cabinet loathed Tyler and referred to him as “His Accidency.”
Very clever.
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Sanctuary Localities All Over Virginia
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
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.
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Canceling Cuccinelli
by James A. Bacon
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.
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Separate But Unequal Lives On Without School Choice
By Chris Braunlich
Barbara Johns May 17 marked the 71st anniversary of the 1954 court decision called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS — but the case began here, in Virginia.
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 …”
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DEI for Conservatives?
by James A. Bacon
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?
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Solar Advocacy Argument One-Sided, Short-Sighted
By Steve Haner
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%.
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The Destruction of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation
by Andrew Holowchak
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.
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Kernels
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Chicken Tacos, Please
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.
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Chipping Away at the Rule of Law: Scott Jenkins Edition
Scott Jenkins. Photo credit: Dailyvoice.com by James A. Bacon
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.
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Warned Again of Energy Shortfalls, Democrats Again Pretend to Care
By Steve Haner
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.
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