The
Sad, Sad State Of Virginia
Ever since its citizens liked Ike in ‘52 (other than one
brief hiccup in 1964 when Johnson trounced Goldwater almost everywhere), the
Commonwealth of Virginia had voted reliably Republican, until 2008. That year,
in a wave election, Democrat Barack Obama won several states Republicans
typically win, like Florida, North Carolina and Arizona. One could have been
forgiven, then, for thinking Virginia would come back to the fold after the
hipness wore off and the cold, hard reality of quasi-socialist governance
became all-too-real. After all, this is Old Dominion we’re talking about, the
land of Monticello and Williamsburg, of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and
more prominent founding Americans than anywhere else. From Nathaniel Bacon to
George Mason to Patrick Henry and countless more, freedom and resistance to
tyranny have been an indelible part of that great state’s heritage.
But sadly, the blue never wore off. It only grew deeper and
more dominant, until last week, when the tiniest tint of red faded into the
darkness like the last sunset of a dying man, never to return.
That’s right, folks. With a Democratic governor, lieutenant
governor, attorney general, both United States senators, seven of 11
representatives, and now both State houses, the Commonwealth of Virginia is now
officially a blue state on par with the socialistic dystopias of California,
New York, and New England. It’s been a long time coming, albeit a slow, gradual
march to the abyss, but the land of the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of
Independence, and “sic semper tyrannis” has now become the land of the
snowflakes and social justice warriors.
Which
leaves many wondering, how on earth did this happen? Fox News host Laura
Ingraham’s Wednesday night analysis may have gotten the attention of
Media Matters, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less true. To Ingraham, the “road
to Democratic dominance” in the formerly right-of-center state was paved with
demographic changes that began taking place long before Trump’s 2015 trip down
that New York City escalator.
“Virginia's foreign-born population nearly
doubled from 2000
and 2017,” said Ingraham,
“and these immigrants are mostly concentrated in
Northern Virginia. Fairfax County, Loudoun
County, Prince William County,
outside of D.C.,
and they are altering the demographic makeup of
the state -
and, as The Washington Post and others
have pointed out, the electorate.”
Quoting The Washington Post’s reporting, the Fox News host
noted that a full third of Fairfax County’s population is now comprised of
foreign-born individuals. “Half of the elementary school students there speak a
foreign language at home,” said Ingraham. “And since immigrants are more likely
to vote Democrat, well, this, of course has dragged the electorate to the left.
That's just a fact of life.”
As much as the left wishes to curb discussion about such
things, she’s not lying. The Hispanic percentage of Virginia’s population alone went from 7.9
percent in 2010 to 9.6 percent in 2018, accounting for almost half of the
state’s overall population growth during that time. While most are undoubtedly
good people, hard workers, and solid economic contributors, the fact that they
come from ‘big government’ countries with little regard for personal freedom
makes them more likely, sadly, to vote for such policies in their new country.
And exit polling shows that 60 to 70 percent of them do, without fail, election
after election. Such voting behaviors, of course, are likely over time to lend
themselves to turning their new homes into the same sort of hellholes they
left, but for whatever reason, most are either unable or unwilling to see the
tragic irony.
Hispanics and other immigrants aren’t the only factors, of
course. Northern Virginia has experienced an exodus of people seeking an escape
from the bleak economic conditions of both Maryland and Washington D.C. for
years. They too fail to see the irony as they poison their new home with the
same failed policies as their old ones. Either way, demographics will always be
destiny. It’s a fact the left has
understood for decades, but Republicans have either failed to
see or feared to point out.
I live in
deep-red Tennessee, almost literally a stone’s throw from the Virginia border.
My town, Bristol, has a half in Tennessee and a half in Virginia. Already, many
are wondering how a $15 minimum wage will affect small businesses already
struggling to survive on the Virginia side. Others worry about new gun
legislation that will automatically make criminals out of the law-abiding and
take away their right to defend themselves. Several I know personally are at
least talking about moving over here to Tennessee, and freedom, and state
governance by people who, despite their faults,
at least understand the concept of basic economics.
Obviously, elections have consequences, and Virginians will
get to bear the consequences of their poor choices, and that quite soon. Look
for
bloated budgets, higher taxes, economic misery,
and more social unrest as
Virginia slowly but
surely goes the way of California. It’s sad, tragic even,
but in another sense it’s also part of the beauty of federalism and why the
nation’s founders left the states the powers not expressly given to the federal
government. Virginians failed to learn the lessons of quasi-socialist
California and others, so they’ll just have to experience it themselves. It’ll
be a lesson that we Tennesseans and other red state residents can observe and
hopefully learn from firsthand - never, ever, ever go full blue.
Fairfax County, Virginia
Presents Dire Warning to America
My home county of Fairfax, Virginia was
once a safe suburban area with some of the best performing public schools in
the nation. It's now a blinking warning sign to America as it hangs
on the edge of complete disaster thanks to unchecked immigration and Democrat
takeover of the government.
Even with the high concentration of
government workers, Fairfax County was once a Republican bastion before it
became a political battleground. The Bush/Cheney ticket won the county in a close race in 2000 and then lost it badly in
2004 due to a significant increase in Democrat votes.
Fairfax's descent into its current state
started with a wave immigration, much of it illegal, into the area which washed
away Republican political viability.
Fairfax County became a nullification (sanctuary) county in 2018 and now puts a significant
chunk of money into its budget to defend noncitizens from U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, although the problem started long before
that. By 2015, 30% of the county was foreign-born.
MI-13, a brutal criminal gang, is now more
active than ever, and the once marquee schools have started what will be a long
slide through mediocrity to abysmal.
Fairfax just ranked seventh among the highest-crime sanctuary
jurisdictions, ranking just below Chicago and tied with a nearby Maryland
county that has had at least nine illegal alien sexual assaults since its sanctuary policy was
declared in late July. That's staggering. Fairfax County
now is on a list of shame with Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and San
Francisco.
Even apart from the rapidly deteriorating
safety, the schools are sinking under the fiscal and social
costs. It costs on average $15,283 to educate each of the 188,000 students
in the county. That's an enormous bill, and the cost for
limited–English proficiency students is likely about $10,000 higher per
student.
Back in 2015, when the problem was nowhere
near as acute as today, nearby Alexandria County spent over 45% of its instructional funding on
limited English proficiency students.
In this context, flooding the county with
noncitizens who are contributing little tax revenue must result in worse
schools and far higher taxes. It's a mathematical certainty.
But the flood of new residents achieved
its primary purpose, which was to make the ground here far more hospitable for
Democrat politicians. Nearly 12,000 county residents were in deportation proceedings late
last year, which the county is vigorously fighting in the interest of political
power.
This once Republican bastion is now a no
man's land for Republicans. On the single greatest day of 2016,
Donald Trump was way ahead in Virginia with most of the vote
counted. But anyone who dared to hope that this was still a
battleground state was in for a rude awakening when the votes from the northern
Virginia counties were added to the tally.
Virginia is gone. The only
difference between Virginia and California is in the shade of
blue. The state will trend ever darker blue barring a significant
change in the voting patterns of the newer residents.
The dominoes continue to
fall. Fairfax fell early, even as neighboring Prince William County
remained in Republican hands. But that county is also now in
deep trouble, and other dominoes will spread out from there, county by
county. This is the same path that Texas is on, only it is a little
farther behind.
The Democrat votes brought a Democrat
school board, along with local county leadership. This meant the
adoption of a policy framework called "One Fairfax" in November 2017.
"One Fairfax" is representative
of what is happening across the country. A constellation of groups
with backers like George Soros are active across America, subverting local
governments and education. As the Daily Caller noted, these groups are already active in 33 cities and
counties, covering 10% of Americans.
The "One Fairfax" name brings to
mind Sauron's one ring to rule them all from The
Lord of the Rings. Like that ring, One Fairfax is
intended to destroy all dissent or resistance and to force absolute
subservience and surrender. The key buzzword used to squash dissent
is "equity," which is intended to shut down debate.
All policies are now looked at through the
rubric of race and the liberal conception of social justice with the goal of
absolute political power. Liberals use friendly terms like
"equity" to hide their true goal, which is a complete reshaping of
the county in a Marxist image, where the only thing that matters is some
conception of equality of outcomes.
One can almost envision the superintendent
holding a map and redrawing lines, muttering, "My precious."
The social engineering leftists of the
school board were secretly plotting to redraw district lines for the express
purpose of achieving equal racial balance across the schools, to include
reinstituting failed busing schemes of yesteryear. They were only
temporarily thwarted in this agenda when county residents grew wise to their
scheme and stormed their meeting.
There is scant attention paid to actually
improving the schools and equipping the teachers to deal with the challenges
created by failed policies. My wife is a teacher in the county and
brings home horror stories beyond belief. The teachers, who all must
attend equity training, have little authority to discipline increasingly unruly
kids, some of whom barely speak English, even as class sizes grow.
Even as the teachers face incredible
challenges due to the bad policies that wrecked the schools, the school board recently spent an hour debating "International
Menstrual Equity" in the belief that what was really hurting student
achievement was that girls had to go all the way to the clinic to get free
menstrual products and had to conduct a "walk of
shame." This is apparently a dire problem even in elementary
schools. Lack of discipline or support in overfilled
classrooms? No problem. The lack of tampon Pez dispensers
scattered throughout the hallways? Major crisis.
The lens of race is now the primary
weapon, even at the local level, used to justify the most corrosive and
destructive policies, and anyone who objects to their social engineering
schemes is automatically branded as a racist.
Their "race lens" is
outrageously racist, since it assumes that some races need their social
engineering help. There is little difference between the schools
with more resources going to schools in less affluent areas. So they
are tacitly arguing that the difference is in the students
themselves. They would rather move the students great distances to
achieve a racial balance than focus on providing education where they live.
In the politicians' quest for power, the
kids and teachers are sacrificed as pawns, left to fend for themselves in
failing classes that have been social engineered into lunacy.
Fairfax is our country in a
microcosm. What happened here is happening all over
America. If we don't reverse the trends, both at the local and
national level, the long-term prognosis on America is not promising. While
the battle will rage on at the local level, Virginia is lost to the Democrats
at the national and soon state level. Other states, to include
Texas, aren't far behind.
Fletch Daniels blogs at
deplorabletouchdown.com and can be found on Twitter at @fletchdaniels.
JUDICIAL WATCH:
America builds the La Raza
“The Race” Mexican welfare state
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S LA RAZA WELFARE
STATE ON OUR BACKS… Not one Legal voted for it!
Who's coming in and getting that instant customer service legal
immigrants don't get? Well, people like Mirian Zelaya Gomez, a single mom with
two kids and a fondness for Instagram luxury-life glamour shots who got her name in the news as "Lady
Frijoles," the Honduran caravan migrant who disdained donated Mexican
food in Tijuana, and who told the press she was migrating to the states to
get free medical care for her kids. She's since been arrested for
assaulting a relative who had given her
housing in Dallas. Here she was, being booked:
MEXIFORNIA: Where La Raza Loots First
and by Invitation of the Democrat Party!
Where To Go When Your Local Emergency Room
Goes Bankrupt?"
*
During the past ten years 84 California
hospitals have declared bankruptcy and closed their Emergency Rooms
forever. Financially crippled by
legislative and judicial mandates to treat illegal aliens have bankrupted hospitals! In 2010, in Los Angeles County alone, over 2
million illegal aliens recorded visits to county emergency rooms for both
routine and emergency care. Per official
figures, the cost is $1,000 dollars for every taxpayer in Los Angeles County.
OTHER FACTS ON MEXICO’S
SECOND LARGEST CITY OF LOS ANGELES:
93% OF THE MURDERS ARE BY
MEXICANS.
THE TAX-FREE UNDERGROUND
ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION
YEARLY.
Los Angeles County Pays
Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid
nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That
figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy
population, according to Fox News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other
state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in
California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants
reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with
children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los
Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food
stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9
billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than
60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in
2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior
fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of
the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can
cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things
like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution
making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal
protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In October 2017, former California governor
Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made
California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice
Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A
federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan.
1, 2018.
According to Center for
Immigration Studies, “The new law
does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer
notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the
popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police
from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined
the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants
did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is
just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the
expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One
California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens,
including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities
easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal
Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal
immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116
billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after
deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF
ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY,
THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY
LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million
non-citizens now live in the United States.
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