Category: Culture wars
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Lies, Damn Lies, and Presidential Debates
by James A. Bacon Virginia played prominently in the disinformation spewed by President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in their first 2024 presidential debate last night. Biden brought up the seemingly unkillable canard that Trump referred to the White supremacists in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville as “good people.” Meanwhile,…
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Virginia Dems Find Enemies to the Left
BREAKING: The Virginia Democratic Convention has been disrupted by protesters advocating for Palestine. “Democrats, Democrats, can’t you see. Genocide is your legacy.” pic.twitter.com/A7T6zTkCW7 — Stu (@thestustustudio) June 22, 2024 by James A. Bacon At Virginia’s Democratic Party convention three days ago, Senator Tim Kaine wrapped up the proceedings with a good old-fashioned bashing of the…
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The Battle Over African-American History
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell by James A. Bacon The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is working on revisions to an advanced-placement course on African-American history, and the forces of wokeness are agitating to preserve the ideological framework they wrote into the course…
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Keeping Up with Wokeness: “Indigiqueer”
by James A. Bacon In the thought bubble of intersectional oppression, language mutates faster than COVID-19. It’s almost impossible for us normies to keep up. I consider it a point of professional pride to stay up to speed, but even I find it astonishing at how rapidly the woke mind virus is evolving. Delving into…
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EOCR: the Enforcement Arm of DEI
by James A. Bacon How many Diversity, Equity & Inclusion employees work at the University of Virginia, and how much do they cost? Those are important questions, but they miss the big picture. Employees classified as “DEI” are only part of a large bureaucratic apparatus designed to transform the University in line with a social-justice…
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Is Something Wrong at UVA Health?
by James A. Bacon An anonymous group of Charlottesville residents has organized to bring attention to issues troubling the $3.3 billion UVA Health division of the University of Virginia. Calling itself Parrhesia — Greek for speaking candidly and freely — the group of “concerned citizens of Charlottesville and patients of UVA Health” portrays the healthcare…
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The Cost of DEI? That’s the Easy Part.
by Dick Hall-Sizemore This whole argument over the cost of DEI at UVa. is a tempest in a teapot in budget terms. Even if one accepts the inflated figure of $20 million put forth by Open the Books, that is less than one percent of UVa.’s adopted budget of $2.40 billion for the academic division…
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Another Rubber-Stamped UVA Budget, But Some Useful Discussion This Time
by James A. Bacon The University of Virginia Board of Visitors unanimously approved a $5.9 billion budget for UVA in 2024-25. The $2.4 billion budget for the academic campus in Charlottesville represents a 6.8% spending increase over the current year. The budget also includes $3.3 billion for the UVA medical center and $76 million…
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Acampora Previews Religious-Diversity Recommendations
by James A. Bacon The University of Virginia’s task force on religious diversity and belonging won’t issue formal recommendations until the end of the month, but task force chair Christa Acampora gave the Board of Visitors a preview today of the topics it likely will address. At the top of the list will be integrating…
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The Open the Books Webinar
In a recent post Dick Hall-Sizemore, a retired Virginia budget analyst, critiqued the Open the Books methodology for calculating the size and cost of the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion bureaucracy at the University of Virginia. He based his observations in part upon Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski’s explanation provided in the Jefferson Council webinar…
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Study of DEI at UVa is Shoddy Work
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Today I participated in a Zoom webinar with our Jim Bacon and Adam Andrzejewski of Open the Books. The title of the session was “How the Open-Government Movement Can Revolutionize Public Policy At UVA.” In reality, it was a rant against DEI and how UVa is “pushing this radical ideology.” The focus…
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DePasquale Owes an Apology
by James A. Bacon A year ago, University of Virginia Board member Bert Ellis was called to task for referring — in private text to two fellow board members — to his UVA critics as “numnuts.” He also referred to unnamed employees in President Jim Ryan’s office as “shmucks,” and expressed disappointment in the leadership…
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Yes, You Can Fight City Hall
by James A. Bacon Sometimes it takes grumpy old men to get things done. Ken Davis, retired from a career in the Attorney General’s Office, lived with his wife in the Willow Lawn area of Richmond for more than 40 years. They paid their property tax bills on time and without complaint. But in July…
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A Curmudgeon Counts His Blessings on Memorial Day
by James A. Bacon It’s Memorial Day, and I should be choosing an uplifting and patriotic image like an American flag to accompany this post. But I’m feeling more than ordinarily cranky this morning, so I’m using this image of an old man shouting at birds and the rain. That’s me, alright. Set aside my…
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Open the Books Digs Up 100 More DEI Employees at UVA
by James A. Bacon Back in March, Adam Andrzejewski and his team at Open the Books, a non-profit dedicated to transparency in government spending, concluded that the University of Virginia is spending $20 million in payroll for 235 employees (including student interns) on work relating to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Describing Andrzejewski’s numbers as “wildly…