By Steve Haner
Reading Chap Petersen’s biographical “Rebel,” it is pretty easy to understand why a year ago his fellow Democrats threw him out of office in a primary. In fact, the mystery is that he survived as long as he did.
The book tells a history that many would like to ignore or actively suppress. That the Democratic Party in Virginia no longer has a place for Petersen should depress us all. He is not shy in returning like for like, so reward his efforts and buy his book. Then dog ear the good parts for later reference, because that crowd now in charge is just getting started.
Petersen was always hard to pigeonhole, and like all the legislators who have made it to my personal MVP list, delighted in doing the unexpected and doing it with panache. He came to the House of Delegates in 2002 and then the Senate in 2008, defeating Republican incumbents in both elections. Many of the best known struggles of those years are detailed from his point of view in the 300 plus pages. I also engaged in some of them, not always on the same side.
But his biggest fight of all, and the one that finally did him in, is one we are all engaged in. Petersen was one the fiercest opponents of the absolute and needless destruction of commercial and personal freedoms during the panic over COVID-19. He was a patron of successful 2021 legislation supposed to reopen Virginia’s public schools. In reality, the oppression of school kids continued for another year or longer, intensifying the educational losses.
He also took his own party’s governor, who had been a close associate in the Senate, into both federal and state court in efforts to end the commercial lockdowns. The suits failed but the noise and heat he created had to help loosen the tyrannical chokehold at least a bit.
Petersen blames the mask mandates in part on a desire to reduce COVID spread, but only in part. It also flowed from:
…an increasing desire to control other people by determining where they could go, what they could say, and how they could appear in public. Ironically, the impulse behind the second motivation – which was Fascism by another name – was often coming from the same people who branded themselves as “anti-Fascist” in their opposition to Trump. Isn’t it funny how we tend to resemble our own darkest fears?
Over the course of the battle, his contempt for the teachers’ union set deep roots as it refused to let children back into public classrooms long after it was totally clear the danger was nil:
The same teachers who refused to work in-person were going out to retail stores and purchasing meals at fast-food restaurants, where they were served by the same teenagers who were ostensibly their students – but few people had the guts to call out this irony. Instead the angst of teachers and staff to return to work in school buildings was excused and accepted.
Petersen, who can name his Confederate ancestors and who defended doomed Civil War historical markers in his home Fairfax County, had an equally politically incorrect reaction to the other 2020 “crisis,” the racial reckoning following the homicide of George Floyd.
Riots had broken out and laid waste to large parts of Richmond, as well as most major cities in the U.S. Crime rose quickly, as gangs descended on retail stores, confident in the fact that police would not intervene. The end of times seemed near on many fronts.
In late July, after four months of chaos, the Governor finally called a special session of the legislature. But it was not to address the crisis in small business or the lack of a functioning school system. Instead, the “crisis” which drove the special session was criminal justice reform and the need to “fix” our justice system. Our charge was not to “reopen Virginia” or “restore freedom” to its citizens who were walking around under a mandatory mask order – it was to achieve “equity” in our legal system.
A page or two later he dismisses then-House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn as “a shallow vessel of progressive truisms whose reactions to the COVID19 pandemic usually pandered to the loudest voices in the Democratic party.”
Yeah, the Democrats were clearly itching to get rid of him and installed reliably left Senator Saddam Azlan Salim in his place. Petersen also details in the book his efforts to defend the name of the Washington Redskins, which was actually quite popular with American tribes across the country. He is married to a Korean American and ruffled the feathers of the woke by defending the race-blind admission standards of the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, another failed effort on his part.
And see, I’ve gone this far without mentioning that Petersen was one of the more effective skeptics when our mutual friends at Dominion Energy Virginia would come around with their complex bills to “protect consumers” and “lower costs.” On those issues he and I were indeed allies. His own legal work in that realm gave him a perspective unique among the 140 legislators.
Not surprisingly, Petersen has been cheered on by Bacon’s Rebellion before, with a handful of columns recognizing his fight to fully reopen the public schools and to help small businesses survive the unconstitutional shutdowns. It is satisfying to those of us who called out the tyranny at the time to have our worst fears confirmed by somebody who was on the inside Zooming with the tyrants.
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