Monthly Archives: May 2021

Educate Leaders, Not Snowflakes

by Donald Smith

“My generation just had thicker skin. These young kids today are getting caught in the moment. They take it more personally,”

Those are the comments of Ron Carter, the first Black battalion commander at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Carter was a star basketball player for the Keydets. He was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers, and eventually VMI retired his jersey. He later served as an administrator with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That’s the resume of an adult with accomplishments.

Those are not the comments you want to hear, if the commenter (Carter, in this case) is commenting on your behavior, judgements and temperament. They are especially not the comments you want to hear if you’re the graduate of an institution that prides itself on training future leaders. A place like VMI.

I am not a VMI man  I’m a Virginia man; I graduated from the University of Virginia. But for much of my professional career, I’ve either been an Army officer or taught them. For much of the past 20 years, I’ve taught Army lieutenants and captains. And, if I were an VMI graduate, or prospective Keydet, I’d be really concerned about the impact of this past year’s hysteria on my school’s reputation. Continue reading

Great Moments in Virginia Jurisprudence

Arenda Wright Allen

by Hans Bader

Shouldn’t a judge at least know what’s in the Constitution, before getting a promotion? Left-wing trial judge Arenda Wright Allen confused the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution in her ruling striking down Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban, noted ABC News. Yet now she is being recommended for a promotion to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, by Virginia Senators Mark Warner (D) and Tim Kaine (D).

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that in “a letter Monday the senators recommended U.S. District Court judges Arenda Wright Allen and M. Hannah Lauck and Virginia Solicitor General Toby J. Heytens” for elevation to the Fourth Circuit.

In 2014, ABC’s Erin Dooley wrote about how Judge Allen attributed a phrase to the Constitution that it doesn’t contain: Continue reading

Mayor Stoney and His Left-Wing Critics

Photo credit: Richmond Times-Dispatch

by James A. Bacon

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney published an op-ed in the New York Times a few days ago defending his actions last summer during the tumultuous protests and riots  following the George Floyd killing. I was thinking of writing a post this morning critiquing the piece from a conservative perspective. But then I read an analysis in the Richmond Times-Dispatch blasting Stoney from a left-wing perspective, and I found that more interesting.

While Stoney has adopted social-justice rhetoric the past year, by the standard of City of Richmond electoral politics, he is a centrist. During his mayoral re-election campaign last year, he had strong, credible challengers from both the right and left, and he threaded a narrow needle between backing the protesters’ social justice causes while also trying to maintain a semblance of public order. In his NY Times editorial, he focused on his role in removing 14 pieces of Confederate “iconography” from city property and working for racial justice, while apologizing for the “unintentional” release of tear gas during one of the demonstrations.

The mayor has been criticized from the right for allowing protesters to gather unmolested for months in a virtual police-free zone around the Lee Statue on Monument Avenue even as they harassed and terrified nearby residents. But that was never a consideration for RTD reporters Ali Rockett and Chris Suarez in their take-down of the Stoney column. Continue reading

Layne Going to the Dark Side

I do not know if this is good news or bad news for Jim Sherlock’s campaign, but Aubrey Layne, currently the Secretary of Finance, will be joining Sentara on July 1.  (This is about the time during an administration that Cabinet members start jumping ship.)

Virginia Democrats Are Stuck with the Parole Board Scandal

by Kerry Dougherty

Looks like someone’s trying to defuse what’s going to be a red hot campaign issue this fall:

Public safety.

Gov. Ralph Northam yesterday boasted that Virginia had one of the lowest recidivism rates in the country. He claimed that only 24% of the commonwealth’s convicts reoffend within four years of release.

That is good news, but not for the reasons the governor cited.

Here’s Northam’s statement, accordion to CBS:

“Our success is the direct result of effective reentry programs and strong partnerships across our Commonwealth. I remain grateful to the hardworking professionals at the Virginia Department of Corrections who are dedicated to rehabilitation, transforming lives, and building safer communities.”

Notice the governor gives absolutely no credit to Virginia’s tough-on-crime “no parole” law passed in 1995 as part of former Gov. George Allen’s Truth in Sentencing initiative. Continue reading

Math and Reading Remediation Coming to Richmond Public Schools

by James C. Sherlock

I spent the past couple of days writing about thousands of human tragedies playing out in Richmond Pubic Schools (RPS), their complexity and the large bureaucracy responsible for fixing it.  

Half of the Black kids in fourth grade in RPS schools could not read in 2018-19.  Nine year olds. Half could not multiply. Discipline problems were severe. Ten percent of black RPS middle schoolers who started school in the fall of 2018 were arrested for in-school violations of the law. Large numbers of kids, 13% on the average day, were absent. Now two school years interrupted by COVID.

Someone has to start somewhere. RPS is starting with a program to mitigate deficient student reading and math skills. Continue reading

Dishonoring the Dead

by Jake Spivey

Earlier this month, the Virginia Military Institute Board of Visitors voted to “expand the symbolism” of the Virginia Mourning Her Dead statue that memorializes the 10 VMI cadets who died in the Battle of New Market to include all former cadets who have died in battle. The board also approved a motion to “devise a program of contexualization for the painting The Charge of the New Market Cadets, a 21-by-18-foot oil-on-canvas painting showing the VMI Cadet Corps advancing across a wheat field at the pivotal moment of the battle.

In 1893 VMI had requested the VMI alumnus and internationally famous sculptor Moses Ezekiel to design a memorial for the New Market cadets. It was never meant as a memorial to alumni who died since the Civil War. The painting by Benjamin W. Clinedinst, a VMI alum and member of the National Academy of Art, conveyed the traits of duty, honor, country, and selfless service by showing the Cadet Corps doing together what no one cadet could do individually.

What does it mean to “contextualize” a work of art celebrating timeless virtues? Does it not strip away the original meaning and intent? What anyone living today the right to reinterpret the intentions of the original artists? Continue reading

Virginia Project Sues for Defamation

The Virginia Project, a Northern Virginia organization that exposed the existence of an online effort to harass and discredit foes of Critical Race Theory in Loudoun County, has filed suit against Jaime Ann Neidig-Wheaton for defamation.

In a March 18 livestream podcast, Neidig-Wheaton accused The Virginia Project of encouraging or “spurring” unnamed people to threaten her, other members of Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County, and their children, the lawsuit alleges.

According to the lawsuit, she said, “As a matter of fact, the Virginia Project, who has been a vocal force in this is spurring other people to threaten us. … We’ve been threatened with kidnapping; our children have been threatened. … They’ve gone after my business; they’ve gone after our jobs. … Again, we are being threatened. … The threats are real; the FBI has been notified.” Continue reading

Teachers’ Unions Frightened by Implications of Remote Learning

by James C. Sherlock

Well, never mind.

Mayor de Blasio announced Monday that New York City schools will be all in person this fall with no remote options.

Surprised?

If you haven’t been keeping up, the teachers’ unions have discovered that a lot of their members are replaceable by remote instructional content from commercial sources.

A lot of schools nationwide tried it this year and found it was not only better content, but way cheaper to pay for these services from commercial vendors than to pay their own teachers to provide it.

The National Guard won’t be able to keep many formerly stay-at-home teachers from their classrooms next year.

Paul Marik: COVID Quack or Pandemic Hero?

Dr. Paul Marik

by James A. Bacon

Across the state of Virginia, the fatality rate for COVID-19 patients entering hospitals has been 37.7%. Put another way, nearly two of every five patients died, according to Virginia Department of Health data. But in Norfolk, only 25.8% died. What accounts for that disparity? One possibility is that the dominant hospital in Norfolk is Sentara General Hospital… which is affiliated with the Eastern Virginia Medical School… where Dr. Paul Marik, an EVMS professsor, may have co-developed an inexpensive but highly effective treatment for COVID-19.

Marik is virtually unknown to Virginians. The only local news story I could find about him, dated about a week ago, tells how he was reprimanded by the Virginia Board of Medicine for prescribing controlled substances to five people who were not his patients. That article noted only in passing that Marik has written more than 400 peer-reviewed journal articles, 50 book chapters, and four books about critical care, and that he has developed a new treatment for sepsis.

You will get a very different picture of the 63-year-old South African native by reading, “The Drug that Cracked COVID,” written by Michael Capuzzo and published in Mountain Home, a Pennsylvania magazine. Other than to say that Capuzzo obviously did an enormous amount of research for the article, I cannot testify to its fairness, balance or accuracy. But from a surface reading, the reporting seems credible enough that Marik’s story at least warrants telling.

Marik and four U.S. colleagues who are experts in critical care developed an early treatment protocol for COVID-19 centered on the generic drug Ivermectin they dubbed I-MASK. If the article is to be believed, the protocol has saved millions of lives in poor, developing countries desperate for affordable ways to respond to the pandemic. But the protocol, developed through trial and error in front lines of hospital treatment, did not meet the gold standard of randomized clinical trials demanded by COVID guru Anthony Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and Big Pharma. With the active cooperation of the masters of the media/social media universe, the “follow the science” crowd has worked to suppress the findings of Marik and his colleagues. Continue reading

The Complexity of Richmond Public Schools

by James C. Sherlock

Yesterday I wrote a column  about the broad and deep failures of the Richmond Public School (RPS) system in educating the children in its care.

Today I will present RPS’ organizational structure, budget and headquarters staffing for managing the complexity of the system. I suspect RPS’ level of complexity is similar to other urban school systems in Virginia.

It will show that whatever is done to improve the schools faces management challenges in addition to the student achievement and school climate problems discussed yesterday. Continue reading

Bacon Bits: Snitchers and Whingers

The only good snitch is a woke snitch. The Loudoun County School Board has introduced a “Bias Reporting” form as part of its “Detailed Action Plan to Combat Systemic Racism,” reports the Washington Times. “The specific reason behind this action step is to utilize it as a means to amplify and elevate student voice,” a schools spokesman told the Times. A 2019 “systemic equity assessment” had revealed that some students “felt marginalized or had experienced bias.” A Loudoun County parents group, Fight for Schools, termed “Orwellian” a system where students and parents can anonymously report other students for “bias.”

Whinging about women’s rights. Mary Sue Terry, the first woman elected as Attorney General in Virginia, is still stumping for women’s rights — and she sounds as if little has changed in a hundred years. “A 100 years ago a man could beat his wife with impunity, women weren’t allowed to own property, they couldn’t vote, it was ingrained in them at a sub-conscious level to feel like they were not powerful,” Terry told a Martinsville-area gathering Sunday, reports the Martinsville Bulletin.

Balderdash. Women have been able to own property in the U.S. since the 18th century, and in an unrestricted way since 1900. In my history of the Massey family, I recounted how Wilmoth Massey, who owned a farm adjacent (or very nearby) the Terry family farm in Patrick County inherited the property after her husband’s death around the turn of the 20th century. As for the right to vote, women’s suffrage was enacted in 1920– 101 years ago. Do I really need to recite all the ways — mental illness, suicides, over-medication, dropout rates, college attendance, life expectancy, the denigration of dads as dolts, legal rights for children — in which men get the short end of the stick? Can you imagine all the blubbering we would hear if the disparities were reversed?

School Closings Negatively Affect Female Employment

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

by D.J. Rippert

Mom at home. An article from The Center Square summarizes a number of studies relating COVID-19, school policies during the pandemic, and the number of women in the workforce. A study by the journal “Gender & Society” characterized the matter as a “tidal wave of women” leaving the workforce in 2020. Center Square notes that, “Researchers found that women primarily left the workforce (in addition to layoffs and job closures) to help educate their children when schools reverted to virtual learning and children were no longer physically at school.” Statistics indicate that the employment gap between mothers and fathers was less in states where the schools stayed open for in-person instruction, either full-time or part-time. As the article states, “But the gap grew by an average of 5% in states where only virtual learning was offered, such as in California, Delaware and Virginia.” Continue reading

Richmond’s Disastrous Public Schools Expose Hypocrisy of State Equity Policy

by James C. Sherlock

I am, tomorrow, going to report a hopeful note about the City of Richmond Public Schools (RPS).  

It will relate the story of an impressive woman who is working hard to turn around the absolutely horrendous reading and math capabilities of RPS students. But in order to put her challenge in context, I feel I must set the stage for the challenges she faces.

They are monumental.

But this is not tomorrow, and RPS is a disgrace. It is ruining thousands of children’s lives every day it operates under current conditions.

The Governor lives a seven-minute walk away from RPS headquarters on North 9th Street, but he seems not to know that school system exists. His famously aggressive equity czar, Janice Underwood, takes no notice.  

Neither does his Department of Education, although VDOE is directly responsible to the federal government for the annual improvement of most Richmond schools in return for receipt of Title I funds.  

That neglect is not for lack of evidence. Continue reading

Virginia Needs More Brave Teachers Like Christel Coman

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) closed out comments on its proposed new guidelines for evaluating teachers on its Regulatory Town Hall two weeks ago. Jim Sherlock critiqued the standards on Bacon’s Rebellion, but nary a peep was heard anywhere else in the media.

If accepted in the current form, teachers will be evaluated on their willingness to incorporate left-wing dogma about racial and gender identity into their classrooms. One of the “performance indicators” will require teachers to “eradicate discrimination and bias” while addressing “classroom  power imbalances (based on race, ethnicity, gender, identity, ability and/or socioeconomic status) that perpetuate fear and anxiety of difference.”

Thanks to the media blackout on the imposition of Cultural Marxism in Virginia schools, the Regulatory Town Hall received only one comment, submitted by Christel Coman. But it’s a doozy. I replicate her comment in full. — JAB

Today is Mother’s Day — which gives me a perfect vantage point from which to reflect on the children and grandchildren in our family. It also brings to mind a 5th grader in my school who gave me a gift the other day — one of those multi-colored “rubber-band” rings. My reflections and that simple gesture — that silly little multi-colored “rubber-band” ring — said it all. For you see, that student walked with classmates of all persuasions and they liked each — some perhaps loved each other in the sense that good, lasting friendships have built-in. So you see….

NO — I will not be bullied by this push to assert that group membership defines the essence of humanity. Continue reading