A new report, “The Future of Appalachia,” outlines economic development strategies for one of the most intractably poor regions in the country. Drawing a distinction between “southern” and “northern” Appalachia, the study observes that southern Appalachia has achieved far more economic success than its northern counterpart. Unfortunately, for purposes of this analysis, Virginia is deemed part of “northern” Appalachia.
The difference in dynamism can be seen in the map above, which shows net in-migration between 2021 and 2022. Each dot represents 100 people. The mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama are experiencing significant in-migration — Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky almost none.
Alas, I do not have the time to explore this study in any detail. I’ll settle for filing this under, “Virginia has lost its mojo.” I invite readers to dip into the study and report their observations. — JAB
Back in November 2019, the Commonwealth of Kentucky was well on its way to being a blue state. That is, until the state’s Republican leadership saw the trend and decided to do something about it. Aided by terrible Biden numbers, Kentucky’s GOP reversed the decline in short order:
If you’re like myself, the palpable groan about seducing moderates and independents into the Virginia GOP becomes audible. Yet that is the old way of doing voter outreach. Today’s Virginia is more transient than ever, with military families and highly educated suburban families — particularly immigrant communities who share our traditional values — migrating into places such as Northern Virginia and Richmond.
To make matters even more digestible, it may shock many a reader to find out that evangelical Protestants and pew-sitting Catholics simply do not vote in similar numbers to our more secular “nones” and liberal friends — politics being a sordid and nasty thing.
So there are three constituencies where Virginia Republicans stand to gain:
1. Rural and suburban Christians.
2. African-American voters.
3. NOVA and Richmond immigrant communities.
I mean — it would be just perfect if Virginia Republicans elected three statewide candidates who just happen to have inroads to all three, right?
Freedom High Seniors Waiting to Receive their Diplomas. Credit Hazel Nguyen, Design Editor, Uncaged (student Newspaper at Freedom)
Part 1 of a series.
Sometimes, even at my age and experience, I am legitimately surprised.
After writing about the growth of leadership, support and administrative staffs in both institutions of higher learning and the public schools, I thought I had the picture.
I did not.
Then I looked at Freedom High School in Loudoun County.
This article is not meant to reflect criticism, just amazement. Continue reading →
The Bureau of the Census has issued its estimates of the population changes in Virginia and its 133 jurisdictions since the 2020 census.
They are always of interest, but perhaps more so since 2020-2022 spanned the COVID years.
The categories of change calculated by the Census Bureau are total change, natural change (births minus deaths) and migration. They provided the raw numbers.
In the attached spreadsheet, I let Excel calculate the percentages, which I find more meaningful. Some are surprising given that it was only a two-year period, but perhaps not, since it spanned the COVID years.
We’ve been hearing about the post-COVID declines in scores on the National Assessment of Educational Process (NAEP) tests. The NAEP database offers some (in fact, an abundance of) details.
Here, as a small sample, are the 4th and 8th grade reading and mathematics data for the nation and Virginia.
The University of Virginia measures its diversity efforts by statistics. We’ll hold them to their own standards.
That seems only equitable.
President Ryan has said that the demographic composition of students is easy to measure. The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office, proving him right, proudly displays a Diversity Dashboard.
All eyes, including their own, go to race.
But we’ll look at sex. And we’ll remember the requirements of Title IX of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments.
no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
It is demonstrable statistically that males are woefully underrepresented in the undergraduate population of the University of Virginia at rates inexplicable by chance.
We will examine as potential root causes the skewed demographics of:
the undergraduate student population on the one hand; and
the Undergraduate Admissions Office and Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights on the other.
And then we will see if we can identify any other potential causes of those discrepancies.
Do you assume that Virginia’s medical schools are strict meritocracies, taking only the most well prepared and accomplished applicants?
And that their efforts are then focused entirely on creating the most skilled physicians possible?
If so, you are mistaken.
The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), written by the American Medical Association (AMA), a proudly progressive organization, measures everything they know to measure.
The AMA knows MCAT is by far the best predictor of success in medical school and brags about it. The MCAT itself was redesigned in 2015 to include sections that required test-takers to have an understanding of the social and behavioral sciences.
The current MCAT sections breakdown is as follows:
Section 1 – Biological and Biochemical Foundations of Living Systems (BBLS);
Section 2 – Chemical and Physical Foundations of Biological Systems (CPBS);
Section 3 – Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior (PSBB);
Section 4 – Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills (CARS).
Remember that women and minorities who take the MCAT are not so “disadvantaged” that they do not feel ready to apply to medical school.
The AMA hoped the change would produce more women and “underrepresented” (as opposed to Asian-American) minorities with high MCAT scores.
Fair enough.
Yet the rest of the woke medical leadership refuses to accept the results of AMA’s MCAT because that test still does not yield the “correct” candidates. Continue reading →
by Shaun Kenney Last week, The Republican Standard had the opportunity to follow Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears as she toured the Richmond Slave Trail — which included not only the site of the notorious Lumpkins Slave Jail but also the site where Gabriel Prosser was executed and presumably buried in 1800.
Winsome Earle-Sears brought a narrative rooted in the role of hope in human liberation, whether it was in her own tradition from Jamaica to the hopelessness that seems to infect so much of our political discourse today. TRS was able to sit down with the Lieutenant Governor in order to explore her thoughts on this topic and many others.
We just toured Lumpkin’s Slave Jail site. Clearly this is a place with a lot of hurt and anguish, but a little bit of courage and heroism. Where do you think that resilience — that hope — comes from given the experiences of the past?
People look at me and think that I have courage, but I don’t. I have no special store of courage more than the next guy, but I have counted the cost and what I say and do comes with consequences.
There are times when people believe that I am not willing to take that stand, but God comes along and tells me to pick up my cross. Many people attribute that to me being a Marine, but it is really not: it is attributable to my Christian Faith. Continue reading →
We had so much fun with the Texas-Virginia comparison, I offer additional demographic estimates of jurisdictional growth and decline in the one year from July 1, 2021 to July 1, 2022, courtesy of the Census Bureau.
Virginia Top 5 Jurisdictions in Numeric Growth July 1, 2021 – July 1, 2022
Texas is now one of only two U.S. states with a population of 30 million or more.
The Census Bureau reported today that from 2000 to 2022, Texas gained 9,085,073 residents, more than the entire population of Virginia.
From 2000 to 2022, the population of 11 of Texas’s 254 counties more than doubled, according to July 1, 2022 population estimates released today.
Those new nine million people have not yet been counted for redistricting of the U.S. House of Representatives. But it is coming as a result of the 2030 census.
Late Wednesday afternoon, in Courtroom 4B of Arlington County’s Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, Sean Jackson beamed widely as a judge granted him and his parents, Carlos Makle and Kim Jackson-Makle, joint custody of Sean’s baby girl, Amoria, instead of relegating her to foster care or instability with a mother struggling with drug addiction.
Kim later said, “Hallelujah,” thinking the nightmare they had been living for over a year with the County’s inept Division of Child Protective Services was finally over. But it was just about to begin all over again. Arlington County’s Child Protective Services was about to dispatch a social worker to an apartment in Arlington to seize Amoria’s second cousin, London, also a cute baby girl, from her mother, Paris Adams.
Why?
Over an alleged missed dosage of Tylenol Wednesday morning that the baby wasn’t even required to get, per doctor’s orders, but was rather prescribed “as needed.” With so much written in the news about public policy, legislation and politics, this story is disturbing because of the sheer inhumanity of bureaucrats operating with complete disregard for actual child welfare or a mother’s heartache.
Exclusive: In 2019, Abrar Omeish canvassed for support at a fundraiser for the anti-Semitic group American Muslims for Palestine and said she wanted to change the “narrative” on Palestinians. She was elected to office and launched a tirade against the state of Israel, which she smeared as an “apartheid” nation, repeating the talking points of an anti-Semitic brigade in the Woke Army. Here is the full transcript.
Last month, at Luther Jackson Middle School, parents gasped as a Fairfax County Public Schools board member, Abrar Omeish, stumbled through a clumsy speech and called the historic battle of Iwo Jima “evil,” even though the decisive victory by U.S. Marines led to eventual victory by Allied forces against Japan and Nazi Germany and its leader Adolph Hitler, ending the brutal genocide of Jews in the Holocaust.
In the days after, the remarks sparked a national outcry, even spilling over globally, with Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears, a former U.S. Marine, assailing the remarks and a pair of comedians asking indelicately: “How did this clown get elected to a school board?”
Editor’s note: For Asra’s twitter conversation on the event see here.
I know the answer because I witnessed it happen, and the answer reveals an unholy alliance that I expose in my new book, Woke Army, between the Democratic Party and rigid anti-Israel, anti-Semitic establishment Muslim leaders in the United States. These establishment Muslims include activists, politicians, and academics — from Women’s March co-founder Linda Sarsour to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), University of California at Berkeley academic Hatem Bazian. and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
What is particularly disturbing is that this Woke Army set its sights on K-12 schools and their children. School board member Abrar Omeish is Exhibit A in this dangerous alliance in K-12.
I saw it first-hand one Saturday night on Sept. 7, 2019, documenting the evening in video shared herefor the first time. Continue reading →
For all those Northern Virginia critics of Richmond on this blog, e.g. Don Rippert, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported yesterday that the Richmond metro area has grown faster than Northern Virginia for two years in a row. In fact, the growth rate of the Richmond metropolitan area is at least triple that of each of the rest of Virginia’s five largest metro areas.
Furthermore, a lot of that growth is coming from Northern Virginians moving to Richmond, drawn by the lower cost of living and aided by the growth of remote working.
Personally, I would not mind the area not growing so much, but it is nice to know that not all Virginians view the Richmond area as a provincial outpost.
Overall best attendance among Virginia Public School Divisions 2021-22
by James C. Sherlock
We often, because it is important, concentrate on what is not working in Virginia’s state and local governments. Occasionally it is equally important to congratulate the winners.
In this report I will list Virginia’s best-attended school divisions in 2021-21, both by all students and by sub-groups.
You will be surprised by some of the winners.
These rankings offer crucial measures of school division effectiveness and reflect the efforts and values of students, families and teachers. Continue reading →
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.
Fund the Rebellion
Shake up the status quo!
Your contributions will be used to pay for faster download speeds and grow readership. Make a one-time donation by credit card or contribute a small sum monthly.
Can't wait until tomorrow for your Bacon's Rebellion fix?
Search Bacon’s Rebellion
Content Categories
Archives
The Jefferson Council: Protecting Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy at the University of Virginia
Want More Unfiltered News?
Check out the Bacon’s Rebellion News Feed, linking to raw and unexpurgated news and commentary from Virginia blogs, governments, trade associations, and advocacy groups.
Submit op-eds
We welcome a broad spectrum of views. If you would like to submit an op-ed for publication in Bacon’s Rebellion, contact editor/publisher Jim Bacon at jabacon[at]baconsrebellion.com (substituting “@” for “at”).
Forgot Your Password?
Shoot me an email and I'll generate a new password for you.
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
