Capitulation in Virginia

The resignation of Dr. Ann Hunter McLean from her Youngkin appointment to the Virginia Historic Resources Board is of seismic consequence for the Governor and his administration and for the Commonwealth.

The Governor and his team were on the ropes in a very tight race in which the electoral outcome was in the balance. His low-key campaign worked to draw in the Northern Virginia left-leaning moderates and particularly working moms to vote Republican but avoid the RINO moniker. His team presented a clean-cut image of a Democratic diversity and inclusion storefront whose underpinnings were lashed together with the sinews of the current hardcore right-wing Republican talking points of anti-abortion, support for the police and law and order, Second Amendment rights, fiscal responsibility, the advancement of corporate capitalism and the creation of jobs, strung together by evangelical fervor. The former image was presented to the general public, and the later reserved for the Republican elites.

Much was made of the race, ethnicity, and bootstrapping second-generation immigrant qualities of the team’s Lt. Governor and Attorney General candidates. They hoped to undercut the Democratic Party’s new agenda and definition of “people of color”, the Party’s cornerstone voting bloc. This well-thought-out political strategy of the Democrats is nothing less than a racist agenda to magnify America’s black voting population (roughly 12%) by incorporating immigrants and anyone not white (approximately 70% of the population are white) into a class of “oppressed” peoples who they attract to their Fabian dream of egalitarian world order. This new proletariat they posit will gain political control of a nationalist socialist society dominated by the fringe. Their only similarity will be their universal disdain for traditional American society and “structural racism.” This globalist vision is not new. It was the agenda of the communist internationals led by Trotsky and Lenin in the early twentieth century.

The inclusive coalition that put the Governor in office and brought in new Northern Virginia suburban housewives to the party is not what ultimately won the election. What tipped the scale was when Glenn Youngkin began attacking Critical Race Theory (CRT), a vague academic target with a definition most voters could not pinpoint. But this was an encapsulated acronym that rallied people in the countless “red” counties all across the Commonwealth whose populations are composed of the sons and daughters of twice over rebel patriots. To this forlorn and abandoned constituency, CRT resonated with great expectation. The wavering and disillusioned main core of Virginia Republican Olde Guarde were drawn to the polls. But the reality of that expectation has not been felt, nor satisfied by this backbone of the Republican Party in Virginia, the vast numbers of rural county Republicans. Victory is not enough, change was expected.

The Governor and his team still appear to be in campaign mode. Like most “conservatives,” they  have forgotten that they actually won. By capitulating on McLean, it looks as if the Governor is only interested in raising campaign money and paying bills rather than governing and following through on his promises to restore Virginia. Dr. McLean spoke the truth, even if she seemed to do so with tepidness and apologies. But the Governor not only refused to support her, but instead he supported and thereby encouraged and justified Governor Northam’s actions and that of the radical legislature and those of the ignorant and spineless Mayors and Councilors in Charlottesville, Richmond, Portsmouth, Norfolk and various other smaller communities throughout the Commonwealth by accepting and perhaps asking for her resignation. The fact that the Governor and his staff have put it out that they think that monuments that were taken down should not be returned to their place of honor in their public places, but plotted and shadowed away in parks, museums and cemeteries shows that he is as cowardly as Ralph Northam.

It is important to place capable and qualified individuals in places of decision-making on public commissions and boards, sometimes to give a public voice for change, or to gain control of policy. Sometimes it is not good to have firebrands in such positions. But one thing is certainly important, and that is the executive should have a well-defined plan and timetable for reform and change and sometimes, particularly following a revolution, that plan needs to be definitive and the antithesis of prior events. The executive cannot be equivocating and weak. In consideration of what has just transpired in Virginia’s governance over the last few years, it is imperative that Governor Youngkin ends his policy of “get along – go along” and “working with the other side” in the spirit of political accommodation.

The old guard of the Republican Party in the red counties of the Commonwealth did not vote for the Republican ticket to see the party extending the Maoist policies of Governor Northam and his Democratic minions. They voted for reform and dynamic change, not weak wristed platitudes. The Governor should have appointed a hundred individuals like Dr. McLean. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources has too long been sitting on its soft hands and not doing the rough work necessary to protect Virginia’s battlefields, architecture, historic districts, and above all its monuments! They have the tools but do not deploy them, and they have played a bureaucratic game of namby-pamby far too long. A purge is called for in that department, but it won’t come if milk toast leadership is appointed to oversight commissions in that department or any other.

Virginia has become a Southern embarrassment, and Governor Youngkin is failing to reverse that perception. Tourism is Virginia’s biggest business, and Americans come to Virginia from all over the United States and the world just to touch and feel our great monuments, historic homes, walk our old streets, and breathe in the history of our air. Virginia has been known the world over as the cradle of America. The recent dustup over Dr. McLean shows that Governor Youngkin and his team are willing to accept Virginia as defined by the previous administration. Virginia’s historic monuments and memorials to our Heroes and Veterans need to be restored to their places of honor forthwith. This would be the truly “conservative” position to take.

Cliff Page

Cliff Page is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, with roots that run deep, and precede the Revolution, but spread from the red clay of the mountains to the sandy loam and swamps of the low country. He has lived, worked and traveled all over America and the world. As an artist, he was Sculptor in Residence at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, NH in 2015, during the 50th Anniversary of the site and the 150th Anniversary of the assassination and death of Abraham Lincoln. He studied at the National Institute for the Fine Arts in Mexico and was a Fulbright Fellow to Italy and was nominated as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar and Indo-American Scholar in the past. He holds degrees from Old Dominion and East Carolina Universities. Twice, he ran for Mayor of Portsmouth, Virginia, where he lives and maintains his studio and has served on numerous public architectural design, urban planning, and civic planning organizations. He put asside his own work as a sculptor for six years to take up the pin and direct his energies and efforts towards preserving and protecting Southern heritage, monuments and memorials honoring our Confederate Veterans and the brave heroes of Dixie.

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