Category Archives: Demographics

Meet Abrar Omeish, Exhibit A in the Woke Army

Posted on March 15, 2023 by | 60 comments

by Asra Q. Nomani

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 here for the first time.
Continue reading →

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Posted in Book review, Children and families, Courts and law, Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Demographics, Education (K-12), Elections, General Assembly, Leadership, Money in politics, Political Influence, Politics, Uncategorized

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On to Richmond!

Posted on March 15, 2023 by | 18 comments

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

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.

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Virginia’s Best-Attended School Divisions 2021-22 – It’s Not About Money

Posted on March 13, 2023 by | 45 comments

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 →

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Posted in Attendance, Children and families, Demographics, Education (K-12)

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Virginia is the Future

Posted on March 9, 2023 by | 27 comments

by Arthur Bloom

I want to tell you why I like The 1619 Project. It has nothing to do with the history, all of which is known to any well-educated Virginian. Of course, these things are fundamentally propagandistic exercises, any leftist worth his salt would tell you that too. But it was symbolically very important. Here’s what it did: The New York Times shifted the locus and timeline of the American Founding from Plymouth Bay to Virginia, where it belongs.

It’s a common gripe of Virginians that when most Americans today think of the Founding, they tend to think of pilgrims in black-and-white, with buckles on their shoes, even though we were there first. The 1619 Project is helping to rectify this situation. I’m holding out for a 1607 Project. Give it time, the actual Jamestown fort wasn’t even rediscovered until around 25 years ago.

The New York Times was engaged in some powerful voodoo, not to be trifled with — if you look at everything through the lens of race you won’t see it — but it’s very real. Catholic education molded Nikole Hannah-Jones, and she went on to strike a hammer blow against Yankee cultural power. The Empire of Guadalupe rises.

This was necessary, because if the affirmative action lawsuit at Harvard is successful, Harvard will become even more Chinese, and its prestige will fall. Our people won’t go there anymore. That’s why I’m rooting for Conservative, Inc.’s devious plan to turn Harvard into a Chinese enclave, it’ll be the greatest thing they’ve ever done. These two things are mortal blows to the cultural prestige of Massachusetts. And as Massachusetts falls, Virginia rises.
Continue reading →

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Posted in Business and Economy, Civil Rights, Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Demographics, Economic development, Freedom, Individual liberties, Labor & workforce, Media, Political Influence, Politics, Race and race relations, Uncategorized, Virginia history

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Massive New Bureaucracy in JMU Faculty Hiring Procedures

Posted on March 6, 2023 by | 47 comments

The Academic Affairs Guidelines for Recruiting and Hiring Instructional Faculty manual provides a glaring look into the bureaucratic and deeply troubling hiring procedures for faculty at James Madison University. Highly bureaucratic systems and policies are nothing new in American higher education, but this manual of edicts from the Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs is highly prescriptive and cumbersome. Effectively, the provost has insisted on the review and approval for every hire on the JMU campus and her office has expanded to take on this new additional responsibility.

Since coming to JMU in 2017, Provost Heather Coltman has massively expanded the staffing in her office, including hiring Dr. Narketta Sparkman-Key, the Associate Provost for Inclusive Strategies and Equity Initiatives (APISEI) in 2022. According to the manual, Sparkman-Key and Coltman are basically the gatekeepers — not just for hiring any new faculty member at JMU, but even determining if a search committee may continue with a search based on the diversity within the applicant pool.

For example, even before a search committee can form, the steps shown below  must be taken. Understandably, there must be some top down controls to ensure departments are not hiring without proper approvals, but we note the first of many approvals by the Provost highlighted below.

1. The dean, the academic unit head (AUH), and faculty discuss and determine the need for a new faculty hire.

2. The AUH submits a justification for a new hire to the dean.

3. The dean reviews the justification and submits the position request form to the provost’s office by the established deadline.

4. Academic Resources prioritizes faculty hiring requests.

5. The provost confirms approvals and notifies the dean.

6. The dean notifies the AUH to proceed with the search.

7. The AUH completes and submits a “Request to Recruit” to Academic Resources.

There are protocols on who can be on the search committee, which is then approved by Sparkman-Key or another Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) leader. (As an aside, according to this report, JMU boasts 65 administrators and spends more than $5.3M on DEI salaries)
Continue reading →

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Posted in Blogs and blog administration, Demographics, Education (higher ed), Individual liberties, Planning, Political Influence, Uncategorized

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Sen. John Edwards Calls It Quits

Posted on March 5, 2023 by | 14 comments

by Scott Dreyer

In a highly-watched move, Democrat State Senator John Edwards announced this week he will not seek re-election after his current four-year term ends in January, ending his 40-plus-year run as a politician. Edwards, who will turn 80 in October, has been the subject of much speculation as to his intentions. Reportedly, he hosted a fundraiser just this past January and public records show he has a campaign war chest north of $100,000. Those aspects indicate his decision to retire to be somewhat mystifying.

However, with President Biden being less than one year older than Edwards, but with glaring displays of cognitive decline, and Americans increasingly on-edge regarding those gaffes and the president’s ability to function in a time of the Ukraine War, Edwards’ running for re-election as an octogenarian under increased scrutiny may have carried significant liabilities.

A native Roanoker, Edwards was born in the Star City in 1943, the son of the late Judge Richard T. Edwards. Growing up and attending school during the Jim Crow Era, Edwards graduated from the then-all-white Patrick Henry High School in 1962, because the school had not yet integrated.

According to Edwards’ campaign website, which is still up, “he was the first president of the student government [at PH]. He was a record setting pole vaulter and state high-school champion and voted by his classmates as ‘most likely to succeed’.”

Edwards graduated from Princeton University in 1966 cum laude. After graduation, he attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City for a year, and later graduated in 1970 from the University of Virginia Law School. Ironically, at UVA Edwards was a writing instructor assistant to Professor Antonin Scalia, who later became a well-known conservative Supreme Court Justice while Edwards went politically to the left.

Edwards served his country during the Vietnam War in the U.S. Marine Corps as a Captain from 1971 through 1973, as a JAG officer based first in Japan and later in North Carolina.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter (D) appointed Edwards United States Attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

In 1993, Edwards was appointed to fill a vacancy on Roanoke City Council and was elected in 1994 to a four year term and as Vice-Mayor. In 1995, Edwards defeated a Republican incumbent to win a seat in the Senate of Virginia, representing the 21st District. He was re-elected in 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015, and 2019. In a few of those races, he faced no or only token opposition.
Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Demographics, Elections, General Assembly, Political Influence, Politics, Virginia history

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Virginia’s New Population Growth Leaders

Posted on February 27, 2023 by | 39 comments

by James A. Bacon

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the dynamics of population growth in Virginia. For decades Northern Virginia, with Fairfax County at its core, led population growth in Virginia. And in the 2010s, Virginia’s central cities experienced a population renaissance. But the combination of COVID-19 and sky-high real estate prices have pushed growth out to counties on the metropolitan fringe, mainly around Richmond, but also around Fredericksburg, Charlottesville and Winchester, according to University of Virginia demographer Hamilton Lombard.

The fastest growing localities in Virginia between 2020 and 2022 were New Kent, Goochland, and Louisa counties, expanding by 7.5%, 5.6% and 5.4% respectively. Virginia’s most populous jurisdiction, Fairfax County, lost 26,000 residents. Virginia Beach lost 7,700.

Percentagewise, counties in Southside and Southwest Virginia were among the biggest losers. Some counties in those economically depressed regions also continued to experience out-migration, but several managed to buck the trend. A bigger factor was the fact that the populations of these localities are so much older that deaths outnumbered births. 

Writing in the UVa demographic research group blog StatChat, Lombard said it was “unclear” whether the COVID-era trends would continue or reverse themselves. Either way, the population movements between 2020 and 2022 were striking, as the following map shows. Continue reading →

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Forget Waldo! Where is ERIC?

Posted on February 25, 2023 by | 31 comments

by James Wyatt Whitehead, V

In 2012, seven states, including Virginia, formed the Electronic Registration and Information, Inc. (ERIC), with assistance from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Today, ERIC’s membership has risen to 32 states and the District of Columbia. ERIC’s mission is to assist states in maintaining accurate voting rolls.

Every 60 days, states that are members of ERIC send voting roll data to ERIC for analysis. Reports are generated and returned to the states who can then take any necessary action. The data sent appear to be the garden variety of voter information one would expect: who has moved in? Who has moved out? Who has died?

Security of the data seems to be of high importance to the leaders of ERIC. Membership in ERIC requires a one-time fee, plus annual dues. The budget requirements for ERIC are modest. What is not to like? ERIC provides a useful service to state election officials. Accurate voting rolls advance the common interests of all citizens.
Continue reading →

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Posted in Central planning, Democracy and Western Civilization, Demographics, Elections, Individual liberties, Open Government, Politics, Public corruption, Uncategorized

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Mental Health and Virginia Public Schools – Part 1 – Progressives, School Closures and Child Mental Health

Posted on February 7, 2023 by | 28 comments

By James C. Sherlock

Credit JAMA Pediatrics, April 6, 2020

We have arrived today at a situation in which huge percentages of Virginia children and adolescents exhibit mental health problems.

Both sides of the political divide acknowledge the problem.

It’s existence is not up for debate.

Both blame the soaring pediatric mental health issues, a problem before COVID, on COVID school shutdowns that caused children to lose foundational developmental experiences that depend in part on socialization in schools and in part on interpersonal relationships with friends, both of which were profoundly interrupted.

Both sides acknowledge that minorities suffered worse than white kids.

That is where the agreements end.

Conservatives blame the disparate mental health impacts largely on easily observable inappropriate responses to COVID insisted upon by progressives and executed for far too long in progressive-run school divisions — in which minority children are mostly educated in America and in Virginia.

Progressives, by dogma never acknowledging agency in any problem, have actively tried to blame those same disparate impacts on institutional racism.

The facts are on the conservative side.

This article will show what progressives did and the results.  Progressive dogma was the cause of extended school closures.  Both the closures and disparate impacts happened disproportionately in progressive school divisions and progressive states.

So progressives closed the schools, closed them disproportionately on minority kids and now bemoan the outcomes of those closures as artifacts of systemic racism.

It reminds one of the story of the young man who killed his parents and asked the judge for leniency because he was an orphan.

It takes some combination of denial, an assumption that people who hear those claims are idiots, and Olympic-level audacity.

Racism, unless it was progressive racism, had nothing to do with it.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Attendance, Children and families, Civil Rights, Culture wars, Demographics, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), Governance, Mental illness and substance abuse

Push to Return Federal Workers to Offices – Monsoon or Squall in Northern Virginia

Posted on February 5, 2023 by | 53 comments

The benefits of 60 years of headlong federal government expansion, Northern Virginia edition.

By James C. Sherlock

The federal government has for nearly three years been paying very expensive leases for D.C area office buildings that are virtually empty.

COVID emergency.  Or was.

Now it is a battle between the comfort of federal employees with working from wherever they can get a good network connection vs. actually showing up at the office.

The feds report that as of the beginning of this calendar year, 47% of federal employees were still working remotely.

Since civilian federal employees thankfully still include people who work in other than an office as their normal place of work, we can assume that more than 47% of Northern Virginia federal workers are working remotely.

And we can assume they like it.  Would you like to try to get to D.C. every day from, say, western Fairfax County, much less the exurbs, if you didn’t have to?

Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Democratic mayor of Washington D.C have formed an unusual coalition to get them back to the office.

Beltway Democrats in the House fought it there and have lost so far .  Senate Democrats and President Biden, mindful that federal employees are one of their most dependable voting blocs, are unlikely to follow the House’s lead.

But it is secretly kind of fun to consider that Northern Virginia would sort of explode if they all tried to return in the same week.

Perhaps the experience would prompt efforts to return some of NOVA to a semblance of livability by distributing the headquarters of most of the agencies across the country.
Continue reading →

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Posted in Business and Economy, Change Management, Demographics, Efficiency in government, Governance, Government workers and pensions, Infrastructure, Land use & development, Politics

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Part II: School Discipline, Virginia Data and Virginia’s Disproportionality Concerns

Posted on January 19, 2023 by | 34 comments

This is the second of a three-part series on school discipline. The authors present information and provide discussion questions for the audience to respond. We hope the discussion will further an understanding of the complexity of school discipline and safe and orderly schools within the context of the presented data.

by Matthew Hurt and Kathleen Smith

Findings from Virginia Data

Data on school discipline are abundant, but not always reliable. The reasons are many. Overall, data are reported by infraction to the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) and to the Office of Civil Rights by each school division. One kind of infraction in one school division may be deemed another kind of infraction by another division. For example, using a curse word while talking to a teacher could be considered disrespect or a threat, depending on who is entering the data in the system. Although the VDOE has attempted to clarify the language over time, it still may not be reliable. For this reason, the data used herein refer to only a few data points of what is reported to the Office of Civil Rights by divisions for each school every two years in 2015-2016 and 2017-2018. This data can be found here. Some data are highlighted below.

Congruency Matters in Learning and Discipline Data

Congruency means that percent of total of a discipline indicator should be similar or equal to the enrollment percent of total. In other words, in 2017-2018, if 22 percent of students are Black, then 22 percent of Black students should have been suspended. In 2017-2018, 51 percent of the total number of suspensions were of Black students. This means that the Black population’s results are not congruent to the actual percent of the Black students in the total population. Continue reading →

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Posted in Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Culture wars, Demographics, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), Government Oversight, Race and race relations, Uncategorized

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Politics, Virginia Style

Posted on January 6, 2023 by | 21 comments

by Bill Bolling

It has been said that if you love politics, Virgina is a great place to be because there is an election every year! This year, 2023, will be no exception with all 140 seats in the Virginia General Assembly up for grabs.

But 2023 will not be your typical General Assembly election year.

Thanks to the complete failure of the new Virginia Redistricting Commission to successfully complete its work, new legislative districts were drawn by the Supreme Court of Virginia, and to say that the Supreme Court shook things up would be a gross understatement.

For example, consider the Virginia State Senate.

Under the new redistricting plan approved by the Supreme Court, no less than 14 of the Senate’s incumbent legislators find themselves paired in districts with another incumbent Senator, often a Senator of the same political party.

Some of the notable pairings include: Continue reading →

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Posted in Courts and law, Demographics, Elections, General Assembly, Leadership, Politics, Uncategorized, Virginia Law

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Red States Have Significantly Higher Percentages of Minors than Blue States

Posted on December 23, 2022 by | 21 comments

Courtesy Public Domain Pictures

by James C. Sherlock

The Census Bureau yesterday released part of its 2022 population estimates.

It showed marked differences in the percentages of children and adolescents under 18 among the states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

Adults in red states are raising more children on average than those in blue states. And it is not a close call.

I did not have a figure in mind, but the magnitude of the imbalance surprised me.

Eighteen of the 20 states with the most kids as a percentage of their populations vote Republican. Of the other two, #12 Georgia has split its gubernatorial and Senate votes between the two parties. #16 Minnesota votes blue.

#30 Virginia is slightly below the national average in percentage of minors.

The United States population is estimated at 333,287,557 of which 72,450,827 are under the age of 18. The rule of large numbers applies.

#21 California, with nine million more people than #2 Texas, has only a million more minors. Continue reading →

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Posted in Children and families, Demographics

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Now It’s a Party: Local Elections May Be Decided in June for a While

Posted on December 17, 2022 by | 3 comments

by Joe Fitzgerald

It looks like 12 percent of people voting in Harrisonburg’s Nov. 8 City Council election cast a vote for only one of the four candidates instead of the two they could have voted for. But that number needs more asterisks on it than a home run record.

Single-shot votes are difficult to count. Count isn’t even the right word. Estimate, maybe. Guess, certainly. And although there were three local races, the same guesses and estimates don’t apply to all three, since one was for a single seat, one for two seats, and one for three seats.

All that means no exact numbers, but some clear trends.

One of those trends is that the city’s voters won’t vote against someone just because they’re Black. Nor will the electorate vote for someone just because the candidate is Black. There will be a three-person African-American majority on City Council come January 1, with one of them elected this year and one re-elected unopposed. But in the School Board race, two Black candidates lost, one of them an incumbent.

Each of the contests was apparently decided based on issues and personalities more than on race. We’re a century away from any southern city being color-blind, but this is as close as we’ll get for a while.

But if race wasn’t an issue, party was. Even without a race for Senate or president at the top of the ballot, the Democratic candidates won the city with almost two-thirds of the vote. The African-American candidates for City Council won with Democratic nominations, while the two running for School Board lost to three candidates endorsed by the Democratic committee.

That means the observation above about issues and personalities may be half-right. They mattered more than race, but less than party. That’s in keeping with my frequent claim about my political predictions and analyses: I’m right more often than anybody in the city and I’m wrong more often than I’m right.
Continue reading →

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Posted in Demographics, Elections, Electoral process, Governance, Uncategorized

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Data of the Day: Lusting for Luxury Lifestyles

Posted on October 23, 2022 by | 8 comments

Virginia scores 8th nationally in the frequency of Google searches for “luxury,” “luxury cars,” “Luxury goods,” “luxury travel,” and “luxury apartments,” according to Chrono24, the maker of luxury watches. The fascination with luxury goods appears to be mainly an East Coast phenomenon, with New York topping the list. Lest you think that the metric of luxury-goods searches is a proxy for per-capita income, consider that Mississippi appears third on the list. As a Chrono24 spokesman noted, “It is important to realize that having an interest in luxury living is different from actual living a life of luxury.”

The fascination with luxury eludes me. I subscribe to the philosophy of living within your means. In my case, living within my means rules out driving BMWs, wearing gold-plated watches, and sojourning in 5-star resorts. I don’t spend a lot of time drooling over things I cannot have. Similarly, I’m not remotely interested in the lives of the rich and famous, especially those who think that the ostentatious display of luxury will give purpose and meaning to their existence.

— JAB

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