“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 (1788)

On July 5, 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 of 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.”

Virginia is part of the bedrock of American Liberty. It is the home state 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, George Washington.

Washington is, for all time, the model for what our national leaders should be — humbly devoted first and foremost to Liberty and those he served. To that end, in 1783, before he was called to serve as president, Washington was the subject of a conversation between American-born painter Benjamin West and King George III, whose portrait West was at the time completing. After the British defeat and surrender at Yorktown, the King asked West what General Washington planned to do after his victory. West replied, “They say he will return to his farm.” In response, King George exclaimed, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

At that time, a victor held in such high esteem as Washington might have declared himself king. But Washington honored the spirit of our Declaration’s affirmation of Liberty and returned to his home in Mount Vernon.

That is the context for Sic Semper Tyrannis — and indeed, that great motto was restored to its glory in Virginia’s off-year election this week in a contest between the now-tyrannical socialist Democrat Party and its cadres of power-hungry leftists, and those who, like Washington before them, are devoted to the Grassroots American Patriots they represent, and who honor their oaths “to support and defend” our Constitution and the Liberty it enshrines.

This critical election was between Republican Glenn Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the retread heir to the throne currently held by Democrat Ralph “Blackface” Northam. McAuliffe is a one-time Bill and Hillary Clinton bagman and a career political hack who served as governor from 2014 until 2018.

I spent most of the hours between poll closings in Virginia and sunrise this morning conversing with our political analyst Douglas Andrews as the victory of Youngkin and his fellow Republicans slowly but surely availed itself. Doug covered the Virginia election outcome in detail earlier today, as he and our editorial writer, former Virginian Thomas Gallatin, have covered the election layup in recent weeks.

As a backdrop for understanding this election, Virginia, once a bastion of Liberty, has in recent decades been increasingly under the oppressive thumb of millions of federal bureaucrats who have spilled outside the Beltway into the Northern Virginia counties of Fairfax, Prince William, and Loudoun. While most Virginia counties are populated by majorities of conservative Americans, those three counties, and of course counties that include the urban centers of Richmond, Charlottesville, and Norfolk, have besieged the state with their leftist political sludge. That, combined with increasing numbers of fashionably leftist wealthy white-privileged suburbanites, has resulted in an uphill battle for “regular folks.”

Thus, this was an election that every pundit declared would be a harbinger for Democrat Party prospects under the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris regime ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Moreover, I believe it has significant implications for Biden’s political agenda, which is already on the rocks. Previously, the main impediment to Biden’s agenda was Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who stood with the Republicans in the split Senate on key issues like Biden’s budget. Manchin will no doubt be more empowered to stand in that gap with the Virginia Republican win.

In the 2020 presidential contest, Biden won Virginia by a significant margin of 10 points. Thus, McAuliffe nationalized his campaign, basing it on the Biden model — adopting the Democrat Party’s tried and true hate-hustling tactics of racial, ethnic, and gender division. He relied on support from Biden, Barack Obama, and other celebrated leftists, and endeavored to hang Donald Trump’s endorsement around his opponent’s neck. That was abundantly evident when Biden crossed the Potomac two weeks ago to campaign for McAuliffe and mentioned Trump more than he mentioned McAuliffe.

Youngkin, on the other hand, was very disciplined in his approach, keeping his focus on the people of Virginia, particularly given the explosion of parental-rights protests in Northern Virginia’s Demo territory. His focus was family, faith, and freedom. And that focus was victorious.

In his final rally in Loudoun County, Youngkin declared what had become his core educational appeal: “We all know education starts with curriculum. We will teach all history, the good and the bad. America has fabulous chapters and it’s the greatest country in the world, but we also have some abhorrent chapters in our history, we must teach them. We can’t know where we are going if we don’t know where we came from.”

He concluded: “But let me be clear: what we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race, where we divide them into buckets; one group’s an oppressor and another group is the victim; and we pitch them against each other … We know it’s not right. We know in our hearts it’s wrong. We are all created equal and we’re trying so hard to live up to those immortal words of Martin Luther King Jr., who implored us to be better than we are; to judge one another based on the content of our character and not the color of our skin.”

He summed up his campaign in these words: “We won’t be a commonwealth of dream-stealers. We’ll be a commonwealth of dream-enablers.”

I should note that Youngkin’s narrow victory was helped by the fact that Virginia is not among those nine states which have adopted the Democrats’ bulk-mail ballot fraud strategy. However, Gov. Northam did sign into law a bill revoking the photo ID requirement in Virginia, which is tantamount to requiring no ID.

Not only did Youngkin win, but the number-two- and three-slot down-ballot victories are also significant.

Much to the surprise of the racist Democrat Party haters, Virginians elected Republican Winsome Sears, a Marine veteran mother of three, as their lieutenant governor — the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia.

Like Kamala Harris, Winsome has Jamaican roots. Unlike Harris, Winsome is a Patriot.

Of her victory, Winsome said: “When I joined the Marine Corps, I was still a Jamaican. But this country had done so much for me, I was willing, willing, to die for this country.” Her election demolishes the Demos’ racist division narrative. As Winsome concluded, “We are framing too many issues in terms of race. It just continues to divide us and unfortunately politicians are using it … to advance their nefarious purposes … I’m destroying all the narratives about race. Look at me.”

It will be difficult for the legions of Democrat race-hustlers write off Winsome Sears as a “white supremacist” in black face, but mark my words, they will try!

No sooner had Sears won than leftist set out to attack her. Typical of those attacks was that from MSNBC talkinghead Joy Reid, who gave Vanderbilt University Divinity School Professor Michael Eric Dyson a platform to insist that Sears was “a black mouth moving but a white idea running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices.” He insists she is a “white supremacy ventriloquist.”

Seriously, this delusional faculty lounge potato said that, in what can only be described as the latest manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Sears responded, “I wish Joy Reid would invite me on her show — let’s see if she’s woman enough to do that…”

Additionally, Virginians elected Republican Jason Miyares, the state’s first Latino attorney general – another Demo narrative buster. According to exit polls, Hispanic voters supported Youngkin by a nine-point margin.

Memo to Kamala, who also showed up to campaign for McAuliffe: This is the “diversity” America really needs!

Regarding the significance of this election, Harris declared last week: “Every four years when this election happens … it’s a tight election, it’s a close election, and it is a bellwether for what happens in the rest of the country.” She concluded, “What happens in Virginia will in large part determine what happens in 2022, 2024, and on.” Oh, we hope so. Notably, Republicans also flipped the Virginia House of Delegates…

Joe Biden, when asked about the impact voter dissatisfaction with his administration had on the election, insisted: “I’m not sure that I would be able to have changed the number of very conservative folks who turned out in red districts who are Trump voters.”

Of course, Biden was a major factor in conservative turn out – and a lot of others who were not archetypal “Trump voters.” His Virginia polling, much like his national approval polling, is deep under water.

Indicating just how entrenched in the Beltway bubble he really is, Biden is attempting to pivot back to his bloated so-called “build back better (AKA "Build Back Bolshevik”) budget and his ruinous tax plan: “People are upset and uncertain about a lot of things, from COVID to school to jobs to a whole range of things and the cost of a gallon of gasoline. And so if I’m able to pass and sign into the law my Build Back Better initiative, I’m in a position where you’re going to see a lot of those things ameliorated quickly and swiftly. I do know that people want us to get things done. They want us to get things done. And that’s why I’m continuing to push very hard for the Democratic Party to move along and pass my infrastructure bill and my Build Back Better bill.” (Forget about “Build Back Better” and put it back the way it was!)

But dour Demo strategist James Carville, in a moment of lucid honest, went after the Left’s woke supremacist narrative: “What went wrong is stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island. Buffalo. Look at Minneapolis. Even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this ‘take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools’ — people see that. And it really has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something.”

There will be months Leftmedia pundit post-mortem spin on this election, and on the close gubernatorial election in New Jersey, where a Republican political novice unseated the Demo State Senate President, which nobody expected. The Left has already declared the results a “five alarm fire.”

However, today, here are a few observations and questions we will be considering moving forward.

Democrat strategists think they OWN female voters (sorry, I know that is a “binary gender” assumption). They think women are emotionally incontinent dupes. But based on the number of irate moms who proved that arrogant assumption false in Virginia, Biden will have to reconsider how his national policies, like his upcoming vaxxing mandates for children, will undermine his standing with women voters.

Demo strategists think they own Black and Latino voters, but they will have to consider if Biden’s “white supremacist” bogeyman and their phony “systemic racism” claims are still viable. It is becoming clear to an increasing number of moderate and independent voters that, in fact, Democrats are the architects of white supremacy.

Can they continue to promote their racist Critical Race Theory curricula across the nation and insist, as McAuliffe arrogantly did, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach”? Can they get away with bald-faced lies as McAuliffe attempted to do by declaring: “CRT is not taught in Virginia and it’s never been taught in Virginia. … It’s a dog whistle. It’s racial. It’s division”?

Can they continue to assert, as McAuliffe did, that Republicans “are using our kids and our schools as pawns in his political game,” precisely what Democrats are actually doing? Can they continue to load up children’s libraries with pornography and claim, as McAuliffe did, that Republicans are “focused on banning award-winning books from our schools and silencing the voices of Black authors”?

Clearly, politicizing the Department of Justice to silence angry parents at school board meetings was not a good strategy. As political analyst Miranda Devine observed, “It turns out that siccing the FBI onto Mama Bear and Papa Bear is not a vote winner.”

Demos will have to reconsider if reliance on their Marxist so-called “Black Lives Matter” radicals and their so-called “antifa movement” of self-styled “anti-fascist” fascists is sustainable.

Can they lie, as McAuliffe laughably did, by insisting he had support from across party lines? “Tonight,” he said, “I have the leading conservative in America here, Bill Kristol, who has endorsed my campaign for governor.” No, Kristol isn’t the “leading conservative.”

Strategically, both Democrats and Republicans will have to determine the extent to which the Virginia results constitute a referendum on Youngkin and McAuliffe, and Biden and Trump.

Clearly, McAuliffe did his best to play the Trump card, even boldly telling this lie hours before the polls opened: “Guess how Glenn Youngkin is finishing his campaign. He is doing an event with Donald Trump here in Virginia.” (No, he wasn’t.) But McAuliffe’s constantly invoking Trump’s name in association with Youngkin failed.

However, in the final analysis, clearly Biden and McAuliffe underestimated the momentum of the “Let’s Go Brandon” movement in Virginia.

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Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

(Updated)

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