The Patriot Post® · Virginia, Sic Semper Tyrannis?
“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.” —Patrick Henry (Before the Virginia convention in 1788)
(Publisher’s Note: The Patriot Post is making a lot of behind-the-scenes technology upgrades and refinements in this, our 30th year. One notable change that’s visible: This week we launched the in-house production of most of our article imagery, a fitting complement to our original editorial content.)
What the heck happened to some of Virginia’s once-patriotic citizens?
Five years ago, in “Virginia Voters Restore Their State Motto,” I wrote about the election of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. He defeated one-time Bill and Hillary Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe, the retread heir to the throne that was being vacated by fellow Demo Ralph “Blackface” Northam. McAuliffe had served as VA’s governor from 2014 to 2018 and was succeeded by Northam. (Virginia governors are prohibited from serving more than one consecutive term.)
Despite the fact that the nation had just elected the clown combo of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, with a little help from the Demos’ bulk-mail ballot fraud strategy, and despite the fact that Virginia’s two senators were Demos Mark Warner (2008) and Tim Kaine (2012), and its 11 House districts were split seven Ds and four Rs, the election of Youngkin signaled a potential shift in Virginia politics.
And that was an important shift.
Historically, Virginia has been the bedrock of American Liberty. It was the home of our Declaration of Independence’s principal author, Thomas Jefferson; our Constitution’s principal author, James Madison; and the leader of the Continental Army and the American Revolution, our first president and our nation’s Indispensable Man, George Washington, among many other noted Founders.
Those Founders gave rise to 250 years of Liberty.
Notably, on 5 July 1776, the Virginia Convention — which had adopted the state’s first constitution, affirmed its delegate signatures on the Declaration of Independence, and elected Founder Patrick Henry the first governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia — authorized fellow Founder George Wythe to design the state’s seal. On the front of that seal is the now-familiar Roman figure Virtus (Virtue), resting on a spear with sword in hand, treading on defeated Tyranny — a prostrate figure whose crown has fallen. In the margin of the seal below Tyranny is what would become the motto of the Commonwealth: Sic Semper Tyrannis — meaning “thus always to tyrants.”
It seemed that, with the election of Youngkin after a succession of statist Democrats, Virginians were on their way to restoring the spirit of their state motto.
Unfortunately, in recent decades, the state has increasingly been under the oppressive thumb of millions of Democrat federal employees and contractors who have spilled outside the Beltway into the Northern Virginia suburbs of Falls Church and the counties of Fairfax, Prince William, and Loudoun.
While many Virginia counties are populated by Republican majorities, those four areas, and of course the urban centers of Richmond, Charlottesville, and Norfolk, with their legions of wealthy white-privileged suburbanites, have shoved the state left toward the socialist Democrat Party. (Note that three of the five wealthiest counties in the nation are among those Demo strongholds in Northern Virginia.)
Thus, in the most recent gubernatorial election last year, Demo interloper Abigail “Bait-n-Switch” Spanberger, a New Jersey native who ran as a moderate, defeated Youngkin’s Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. And when Spanberger took office in January, she quickly realigned herself as the ultra-leftist Demo hack she is.
That resulted in significant buyer’s remorse among Virginia voters, who last month gave her an approval rating of just 47%. According to The Washington Post, “The approval mark for Spanberger is 13 percentage points lower than the average for Virginia governors in Post polling since the 1990s.”
Then came her most recent attempt to disenfranchise millions of Republican Virginia voters.
Despite her previous declaration that she was opposed to launching a redistricting war, and acknowledging it would violate the state constitution, Spanberger did just that. As our Douglas Andrews noted three weeks ago: “The measure barely passed — 51.6% to 48.4% — despite the Democrats outspending the Republicans 4-to-1 on the issue, but that’s of no consequence to the power-mad Democrats behind it. … What we have, then, is a radical redistricting plan that will likely give the Democrats 10 of the state’s 11 congressional districts instead of the narrow (and appropriate) 6-to-5 advantage they currently enjoy. And what this means nationally is that the Republicans’ chances of holding the House in the November 3 midterms just got that much more difficult.”
Once Virginia voters understood Spanberger’s redistricting map, many who supported it felt deceived.
As Andrews noted: “The language of the ballot referendum was dripping with deception. It read: ‘Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?’ Restore fairness? How is that language even remotely truthful?”
National Review’s Rich Lowry declared, “The map is not just a partisan power play, but a means of giving Northern Virginia hugely disproportionate sway over the state’s congressional delegation.”
Yeah, kinda like how the Democrat Party nationwide is controlled by two leftists in one state, New York: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
According to Republican strategist Josh Holmes: “I think this is one of the most audacious, deceptive campaigns I’ve seen in modern history. I mean, this is gerrymandering on steroids. … What they did from a ballot-question standpoint is blatantly illegal. It violates the black letter of the statute on how you’re supposed to frame a ballot question.”
And Virginia Demos just found that out the hard way.
Last Friday, a Virginia Supreme Court ruling struck down Spanberger’s 10-to-1 Demo gerrymander as unconstitutional.
How did she and her Demo tyrants respond?
During a conference call after the VA court decision, there was talk between Minority Leader Jeffries and Virginia state lawmakers about expelling their state Supreme Court justices by lowering the mandatory retirement age from 73 to 54 — which happens to be the age of the youngest justice among the majority who struck down the Demo gerrymander charade.
Now that is a truly unhinged scheme, but as Jeffries justified it: “We are going to have to explore massive judicial reform, state by state and at the federal level. And everything should be on the table as far as I’m concerned. … We’re gonna need nationwide judicial reform. We’re gonna need nationwide electoral reform. We all have to come together to push back against this unprecedented attack on our democracy, unprecedented attack on free and fair elections, and unprecedented attack on black representation in the American south and all across the country.”
The tyrants have arrived.
On whether this latest VA Demo scheme would work, political analyst Ari Fleischer noted: “This is a Virginia Supreme Court striking down a Virginia law because it was not consistent with the Virginia Constitution. There’s nothing complicated, nor should there be anything controversial about this. But the bigger issue here too is Republicans for decades lived with federal Supreme Court rulings that they didn’t like: Roe v. Wade, the Warren Court, measures on crime that made it easier to protect criminals than to protect victims of crime. And Republicans didn’t say, ‘We need to jerry-rig the Supreme Court.’”
Likewise, Daniel McCarthy added: “Virginia’s constitution doesn’t seem to allow removal of sitting justices by imposing a mandatory retirement age. But it’s the thought that counts — and this one is of a piece with the way Democrats nationwide think about not only the U.S. Supreme Court but also the Electoral College, the filibuster and the U.S. Senate itself.”
Of such thinking, GWU Law School professor Jonathan Turley observed: “This whole concept to sack and pack the Virginia Supreme Court is based on this ‘by any means necessary’ philosophy that has taken over the left. There seems to be no institution or value that is sacred. It’s all about taking that power by any means necessary.”
Former VA House Delegate Nick Freitas issued this warning: “To any red states that think this can’t happen to you… Less than 10 years ago, Virginia Republicans had a 64-seat majority in a 100-seat state house, and 7 of the 11 congressional seats were Republican. Stop treating the current fight like it’s business as usual and start acting like it is culturally existential. Because it is.”
Freitas added, “The Left only invokes the ‘Rule of Law’ when they’re trying to prevent themselves from being subject to it.”
McCarthy noted further, “Virginia today is exactly what James Madison and other framers of the Constitution were afraid of: A faction — the Democrats — is using its success in the most recent election to try to rewrite the rules for future elections and is prepared to intimidate or destroy any institution that stands in its way, including the state’s supreme court.”
And that brings me full circle to a warning from Virginia Founder Patrick Henry.
Our readers certainly recognize the quote, “Give me Liberty or give me death” from Henry’s 23 March 1775 plea before the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond. He was asking for the allocation of troops for the Revolutionary War, and his words captured the spirit of the American Revolution a month before the clash of American Patriots at the battles of Lexington and Concord.
But what should Virginians and all Americans make of Henry’s impassioned argument in the 1788 debate before the Virginia ratification committee for the Constitution, in which he stated: “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.”
To our Patriot friends in Virginia, have your Demo neighbors read that quote twice and ask themselves, Does Sic Semper Tyrannis still mean something?
(Footnote: I just received an invitation from those who manage Thomas Jefferson’s home estate, Monticello, proudly announcing that to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, their keynote speaker will be … drum roll please … Abigail Spanberger.)
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776
Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.
Please join us in praying for our Creator’s blessing upon our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail so we could be united as Americans. Pray for the protection of and provision for our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Lift up your Patriot Post team and our mission to support and defend our legacy of American Liberty, that we would ignite the fires of freedom in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.
Thank you for supporting our nation’s premier online journal of Liberty.