The election of 2025 isn’t a surprise. Nor the end for Virginia. It is a clarion call warning.

Here is a piece, in two parts, written in 2020 after the Democrats won back the General Assembly in 2019 and an update after the 2021 Republican win state-wide. The pieces point to some key reasons – not all – for why Virginia Republicans just had our November 2025 loss.

Political Violence

Jay Jones, the Virginia Democrat candidate for Attorney General texted about shooting a Republican, Todd Gilbert, and his wife and children to death. Murdering a family for the parents’ politics. Democrats defend those words as just a bad joke or try to establish moral equivalence with their Trump outrage de jour.

What Is Ground Truth

In younger years I believed the nightly news, newspapers, 60 Minutes, and wire services actually provided the real deal, ground truth news of the day. I knew there was a bias, but I thought the slant was measured by only a few degrees. Nowadays, I don’t know where to get news that even approximates ground truth. Somewhere among the cacophony of voices screaming in cyberspace, there’s reliable information. Real news. Where is it?