By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Washington, D.C., usually gets the most attention from the political class, but 2020 might see the Commonwealth of Virginia taking center stage.
Vladimir Lenin called his magazine “Iskra” — the “Spark.” And, while scholars can easily trace the causes of past revolutions, they find it much more difficult to predict when the “spark” will light the fuse of the next one.
A year ago, few would have expected Virginia to merit the nation’s attention. Its scandals were local in color. Pictures of Governor Ralph Northam in blackface, alongside a man arrayed in full Ku Klux Klan regalia, appeared in February. Soon thereafter, blackface pictures of Democrat Attorney General Mark Herring also surfaced. If that weren’t bad enough, fellow Democrat Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax was hit with two allegations of rape and sexual assault. The accusations were far more credible than those concocted to derail the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but Fairfax was a Democrat, so no problem.
Many Virginians expected all three tarnished pols to resign in shame. But the media’s high moral standards for Republicans don’t apply to Democrats. The stakes were too high. Had they resigned, Virginia’s quirky term-limits law could well have installed a Republican in the Governor’s mansion until 2025.
So Democrats toughed it out, coddled by the lapdog media. In the end, of course, nothing happened. In fact, according to the Richmond News-Leader, Justin Fairfax actually bragged that he was “very hopeful about the future.” After the rape accusations went public, he said, “”Many people a year ago would not have recognized me, now they really do.” Fairfax was even “thinking very seriously” about running for governor in 2021.
Seldom has the bias media’s noxious been so cynically exposed. Once could almost hear the laughter in the newsroom as the New York Times cheered the disappearance of the scandals. “It Just Went Poof,” gloated the paper’s April headline. Of course, the scandals evaporated because the usual suspects in the media unanimously stuck to the flip side of their mission: while they concoct and purvey “Fake News” with abandon, they exercise equal discipline in refusing to report real news.
Uh-Oh
And then came Virginia’s November elections, always held in the odd-numbered years. Suddenly, for the first time in decades, Democrats controlled the Governor’s Mansion and both chambers of the legislature.
But wait — how did this happen? After all, Virginia has long been revered as a guardian of liberty, the home of Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry.
Well, in the past two decades, that tradition was wiped out as Virginia changed from red to deep blue. President George W. Bush’s “Big Government Conservatism” at home, combined with his wars for exporting democracy abroad, brought untold thousands of liberal federal bureaucrats, contractors, lobbyists, and defense firms to northern Virginia. In 1977, Bishop Thomas Welsh, the founding bishop of the Arlington Diocese, told me that the diocese was “the bedroom of Washington,” and history has only proven him right. In the forty years since, the diocese’s population has become much larger and much richer: the counties surrounding Washington are now just as rich as those surrounding Silicon Valley, and just as liberal.
And the result? Virginia’s Democrats, now in full control, are wasting no time in advancing their radical agenda. The most prominent is Gov. Northam’s “gun control” campaign. He leads a radical party that advocates banning all “assault weapons,” as well as arbitrary gun-seizure measures known as “Red Flag Laws.” In the month after the November election, government meetings throughout the Commonwealth were inundated by thousands of citizens demanding that supervisors declare their counties as “gun sanctuary zones.” When the vast majority of counties adopted the measures, Northam and Herring threatened to arrest those who refused, using the National Guard if necessary. Northam’s budget proposal even included funding for enlarging prisons to hold those arrested.
Northam also advocates a second level of radical change that has escaped widespread notice. A pediatrician, he has publicly advocated infanticide when a child survives abortion. And Democrat lawmakers have prepared a slew of proposals that write that view into law.
In fact, Virginia’s Democrats find themselves in a situation similar to Washington ten years ago. In 2009, Obama had won the White House, and Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate – and with those majorities they passed ObamaCare. They lost both Houses in 2010, but ObamaCare was on the books, and much of it still is.
In like fashion, Virginia’s Democrats might well lose both houses of the Legislature in 2021, but that prospect will serve only to drive them all the harder to act now. In the next two years, they will get as much radical legislation on the books as possible. Clearly their brazen agenda will invite a response, and possibly violence. But the Left prospers when violence reigns — in fact, leftist agitators often foment it. Violence will give Northam the excuse he needs to use massive state force to “restore order,” and Virginia will become a disarmed state.
Virginia’s Silent Bishops:
An Instant Replay of 2010?
Like their colleagues nationwide, Virginia’s Catholic bishops are silent on the Commonwealth’s pro-abortion Catholic politicians. Richmond Bishop Barry Knestout is famous for removing the faculties of a priest who denied Communion to a flagrant lesbian, but there is no record of his ever publicly criticizing pro-abortion Catholic Senator Tim Kaine (D-Richmond), whose pastor leads the applause when Kaine arrives to attend Holy Mass. Likewise, Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge is silent regarding U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Fairfax), a former Maryknoll seminarian who supports abortion until birth.
In 2020, will Virginia’s bishops operate on the USCCB’s 2010 playbook? Consider: back then, America’s bishops ardently supported Obama’s two major initiatives – nationalized health care and immigration. Strongly supporting ObamaCare, and assured by Obama that abortion would not be included, they focused on a massive postcard campaign, organized down to the parish level nationwide, advocating amnesty for illegal aliens.
And then Obama betrayed them on ObamaCare. Yes, they were shocked, but it was too late. What followed was a disaster for Catholics, and everybody else. The results are all too familiar ten years later: the HHS Mandate, ObamaCare policies requiring abortion coverage, and untold millions of dollars that private groups, including many religious orders, were forced to spend on lawsuits defending religious liberty.
What does this playbook imply for 2020? We can count on Virginia’s bishops to support Northam’s gun control measures, that issue is a USCCB staple. And so is their silence on pro-abortion Catholic lawmakers, which will continue as the Democrats ram through abortion legislation as radical as that which now prevails in New York.
And we can also count on the unexpected. Who remembers how, in March 2010, Obama quietly signed the bill authorizing the federal takeover of the student loan program? No one expected ten years ago that Obama’s stealth move would give radical leftist presidential candidates in 2020 the opportunity to promise that all student debts will be wiped out – an unprecedented taxpayer-funded bribe that approaches a trillion free dollars offered in exchange for votes.
So Virginia is left with the prospect of abortion one demand until birth (and possibly after), with opposition led not by the bishops but by the laity; bishops supporting gun control as strict, and ineffective, as that in Baltimore, Chicago, and Saint Louis, where dozens are murdered every weekend by illegal guns; and the prospect of the passage of hidden agenda items that will haunt Virginians far into the future, as ObamaCare has done to Americans for a decade and more.
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