Category: Civil Rights, Individual Liberties
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Richmond’s Disastrous Public Schools Expose Hypocrisy of State Equity Policy
by James C. Sherlock I am, tomorrow, going to report a hopeful note about the City of Richmond Public Schools (RPS). It will relate the story of an impressive woman who is working hard to turn around the absolutely horrendous reading and math capabilities of RPS students. But in order to put her challenge…
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Masks on Kids: State-Sponsored Child Abuse
by Kerry Dougherty If you came here expecting to find fountains of gratitude to Virginia’s governor for restoring liberties he should not have removed in the first place, you’ll be disappointed. Ralph Northam was prepared to keep the commonwealth’s face mask mandate in place for months, until he was blindsided by the CDC on Thursday…
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Maskless in Mississippi
by Kerry Dougherty There’s so much news we could discuss today. But it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. I’m here to be a little ray of Monday morning sunshine. I want to assure you that a lifetime of living as a free American can’t be wiped out by 14 months of living under the thumb…
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Chase Aide Pulls Gun in Self Defense
by James A. Bacon Sometimes Sen. Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield, goes out looking for trouble. Sometimes trouble comes looking for Amanda Chase. Yesterday the Washington Post published an account of an incident in which Chase’s aide brandished an AR-15 pistol at a man whom Chase said threatened them during a road rage incident. My immediate reaction…
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UVa’s Crying Game
by Jock Yell0tt “When Dean Goluboff took the stage to respond, she immediately started crying and was largely incoherent to the audience for much of the first part of her response … ” Risa Gobuloff, Esq., is Dean of the University of Virginia Law School. Dean Gobuloff’s crying spate occurred at a Town Hall meeting…
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Norfolk Sacks Police Officer for $25 Contribution to Rittenhouse Defense Fund
by Kerry Dougherty Lemme get this straight: A high-ranking Norfolk police officer with 19 years of service was fired yesterday because he anonymously contributed 25 bucks to the defense fund of then-17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who is accused of killing two people during riots in Kenosha, WI, last summer. It appears Lt. William K. Kelly III…
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More Free-Expression Suppression at Virginia Tech
by James A. Bacon In five years, the United States has gone from a country in which football quarterback Colin Kaepernick fought for the right to kneel during the national anthem into a country where Virginia Tech soccer player Kiersten Hening is fighting for the right to stand. During their opening match in 2020, women…
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Vaccine Passports: Let’s Pass
by Kerry Dougherty Want a peek at what some of the more authoritarian types in the U.S. have planned for you? Look no farther than St. Vincent, a lovely little archipelago in the Windward Islands. At least it used to be a lovely little island. On April 9 the most dangerous volcano in the Caribbean…
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UVa Response to Medical Student First Amendment Lawsuit
by James C. Sherlock Jim Bacon reported April 8 on the claims of Kieran Ravi Bhattacharya, a former student at the University of Virginia Medical School, who alleges that he was retaliated against for exercising his First Amendment freedoms at a panel discussion by the University’s chapter of the American Medical Women’s Association (“AMWA”). Senior…
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Hate, Hostility and Harassment at UVa
by James A. Bacon Last fall Nickolaus “Nick” Cabrera ran for election as a first-year representative to student council at the University of Virginia. His platform was anodyne — showing unity in confronting COVID-19, getting Class of 2024 t-shirts delivered, that sort of thing. He didn’t run on an ideological or partisan political platform, but…
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VDOE Transgender Policies Dangerous to Both Children and School Personnel
by James C. Sherlock Virginia’s Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia’s Public Schools is a bigger mess the more I study it. It is as far as I can tell unprecedented in scope. I checked parallel California, D.C. and Arlington County policies. None of them comes close to the dangerous nonsense…
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Two Police Officers Made Windsor Famous
by Kerry Dougherty Looks like Windsor, Virginia, is finally on the map. For all the wrong reasons. The tiny incorporated town in Isle of Wight County, just west of Suffolk, is home to about 2,758 people. It’s not a place that makes much news and the folks there probably like it that way. But a…
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When “Words Are Violence,” Only One Side Gets to Speak
by James A. Bacon Victoria Spiotto was brought up in a conservative, religious family of Italian descent in Loudoun County. It was at the University of Virginia where she found her political identity as a conservative. One day in her third year, she was walking the grounds when she came across a Young Americans for…
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Et Tu, Tech?
by James A. Bacon I have long thought of Virginia Tech as the most tolerant of free speech and expression among Virginia’s larger universities. There have been minor eruptions of cancel culture, but nothing as debilitating as the examples we’ve documented elsewhere. Looks like I was wrong. Speech First, a nonprofit group working to combat…
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The Bureaucratic Banality of Academic Oppression
by James A. Bacon Two-and-a-half years ago, Kieran Ravi Bhattacharya, a medical school student at the University of Virginia, attended a session on “microaggressions” in which psychology professor Beverly Colwell Adams gave a presentation about her research. In what he thought to be a collegial manner, Bhattacharya challenged her analysis. The challenge was not well…