“We’re all making choices today” was the ineffectual (originally written as “effete”) response Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin gave to a woman in Alexandria, Virginia, when she called him out on not wearing a mask in a grocery store. She replied, “Read the room, buddy!” Alexandria is one of the seven school districts that won a stay on Youngkin’s executive order lifting the wearing of masks in public schools.
The Tea Party knew that it could develop leverage for their conservative goals by taking over school boards to further its agenda nationally by beginning at the local level. With groups like Fight for Schools, led by Ian Prior, a former senior official in Trump’s Department of Justice, the Loudoun County school board has been under similar attacks gaining national attention for their plight.
Remember this guy?
Back in November when #Old45 was still trolling his golf course in my hometown of Sterling, Virginia, and throngs of protesters clashed almost every weekend, I reported on an incident involving Raymond Deskins, a notorious pool float-wearing Trump supporter who coughed on two protesters. A video that caught part of the incident went viral.
In the past …
Ash Wednesday 2001 was also in February, just a few months after a close election decided by Bush v. Gore in December of 2000. I was a Catholic graduate theology student at a Methodist institution, in a suburb of Atlanta, filling my car up with gas. The station was literally across the tracks in a poorer part of town where the cheaper gas fit my budget. I had just come from a church that was hard enough to locate in the days before GPS.