Outsiders. mostly of the leftist persuasion, seem to be taking an intense interest in Virginia these days. Some examples from today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch:

• Michelle Renay Sutherland, a New York activist, was arrested for indecent exposure yesterday after she exposed her breast when recreating the state seal on the capitol grounds. Sutherland, who goes by “Sister Leona,” belongs to a group called Radical Matriarchy. She was demonstrating in support of Virginia’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
• A California man was charged with misdemeanor vandalism and littering Monday after police say he threw red dye into a fountain on the state Capitol grounds. Patrick E. Talamantes, of Sacramento, had joined activists marching to demand the resignation of Governor Ralph Northam.
• Internet inventor and polar-bear advocate Al Gore and the Rev. William J. Barber II, a North Carolina civil rights leader, visited the Union Hill community in Buckingham County to protest Dominion Energy’s proposed compression station. (I’ll have more about them in a follow-up post.)

Meanwhile, in an act that may have been related to the red-dye-in-the-fountain incident, someone vandalized a pillar at the entrance to Thomas Jefferson’s boyhood home at Tuckahoe Plantation in Goochland County. The pillar was splashed with red dye, and graffiti said, “We profit off slavery.” Thee women with a black SUV were seen vandalizing the property. It is pure speculation to suggest that they were from out of state, but if they were linked to Talamentes, they, too, might well have been… from out of state.

Who are these people? Well, we know who Al Gore is. He is a huckster/entrepreneur who has figured out how to cash in on Global Warming  with his alarmist yet hysterically unprophetic movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” even as he lives in a sprawling mansion and jets around the globe, spewing CO2 into the atmosphere and creating an environmental footprint the size of a hundred normal American families.

But who are these other people? Do they have normal occupations? Are they on the payroll of foundation-funded activist organizations whose “job” is to rush around the country from one controversy to the next? Are they indulged trust fund babies searching for meaning? What kind of  country supports an entire class of “activists” whose function in society is travel from state to state, meddle in other peoples’ business, commit acts of petty vandalism and get arrested?