Latest news with #Confederacy
UPI
20 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- UPI
Famous birthdays for June 3: Deniece Williams, Anderson Cooper
Deniece Williams arrives on the red carpet at the Songwriters Hall of Fame Induction and Awards Gala at New York Marriott Marquis Hotel on June 13 in New York City. The musician turns 74 on June 3. File Photo by Serena Xu Ning/UPI | License Photo June 3 (UPI) -- Those born on this date are under the sign of Gemini. They include: -- Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, in 1808 -- Automaker Ransom Olds in 1864 -- British King George V in 1865 -- Dancer/musician Josephine Baker in 1906 -- Actor Tony Curtis in 1925 File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI -- Poet Allen Ginsberg in 1926 -- Writer Larry McMurtry in 1936 -- Musician Curtis Mayfield in 1942 -- Actor Penelope Wilton in 1946 (age 79) -- Musician Deniece Williams in 1951 (age 74) -- Former U.S. first lady Jill Biden in 1951 (age 74) Photo by Chris Kleponis/UPI -- Actor Scott Valentine in 1958 (age 67) -- Musician Kerry King (Slayer) in 1964 (age 61) -- Actor James Purefoy in 1964 (age 61) -- Musician Mike Gordon (Phish) in 1965 (age 60) -- Journalist/TV anchor Anderson Cooper in 1967 (age 58) File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI -- Writer John Hodgman in 1971 (age 54) -- Actor Hong Chau in 1979 (age 46) -- Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in 1980 (age 45) -- Tennis legend Rafael Nadal in 1986 (age 39) -- Actor Josh Segarra in 1986 (age 39) -- Actor Lalaine Dupree in 1987 (age 38) -- Actor Imogen Poots in 1989 (age 36) -- Actor Anne Winters in 1994 (age 31) -- Actor Louis Partridge in 2003 (age 22) File Photo by Chris Chew/UPI
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The Billionaire Hoarders: How the Wealthy Became Our Biggest Threat
It happens every few generations. It's what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the robber barons to murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great Depression in the early decades of the twentieth century. And it's why wages have been stagnant while billionaires' wealth has exploded in the years since the Reagan revolution. What I'm talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness: what's either a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder or a defect in impulse control called 'hoarding syndrome.' Because most hoarders never invite people into their homes, it's an almost invisible illness. But, as Drs. Randy Frost and Gail Steketee write in their book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things: Recent studies of hoarding put the prevalence rate at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the population. That means that six million to fifteen million Americans suffer from hoarding that causes them distress or interferes with their ability to live. That's tough enough; people afflicted with hoarding syndrome are often tortured by their obsession and socially embarrassed to the point of removing themselves from all but the most essential social situations. They're functionally invisible. But from a societal point of view, they're generally only harming themselves: Hoarding syndrome is considered a psychiatric condition, not a crisis for democracy itself. With one giant exception: morbidly rich people who are also afflicted with hoarding syndrome but don't live in or even close to poverty. When people with hoarding syndrome are born with or come into massive wealth, suddenly what was once a personal, psychiatric issue can become a crisis for all of society. Like Scrooge McDuck of Disney comics fame, instead of filling their mansions with old newspapers, tin cans, and balls of string, they obsessively fill their money bins, overseas bank accounts, and investment portfolios with billions of dollars. And then, driven to continuously hoard more and more money—that now being the object of their addiction—they reach out to use the power of government itself to redirect more and more cash into their greedy hands. As historian and political scientist Michael Parenti notes: Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold. So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration. It blots out their concern for their fellow humans. It blots out their willingness to take climate science seriously. It blots out their ability to see the damage they're doing to their own country and its democratic institutions. Ultimately, they don't care about the damage they do to society; such considerations are overwhelmed by their obsession. They don't care how many children must grow up in poverty or even die young to support their massive wealth. They don't care about destroying everybody else's future, so long as they can get more, more, more money! We defeated Confederate oligarchs with this disease back in 1865. We beat money hoarders back again after the Republican Great Depression with FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society. We thought we were safe, as the middle class grew from around 10 percent of us to around two-thirds of us (with a single paycheck!) by the late 1970s. But then, in 1978, in the Bellotti decision written by 'Powell Memo' author Lewis Powell himself, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that money is actually 'free speech' and corporations are 'persons.' It floated Reagan into office in 1981 on a tsunami of oil and banking industry money. Five other corrupted SCOTUS Republicans doubled down on that bizarre ruling in 2010 with Citizens United, creating an entirely new form of corrupt political bribery via something they created out of thin air that is called a SuperPAC. As a result, today these morbidly rich hoarders shovel small amounts (millions) into the pockets of captured politicians who then provide them with tax breaks, profit-driving deregulation, and government subsidies that return billions to them. And the impact on average Americans over the past 47 years that we've been living in the Reagan revolution has been dramatic. While every other developed country in the world offers free or nearly free health care to its citizens; free or nearly free education, including college; and almost universal unionization and a high minimum wage, we're stuck living in the nation these billionaires have forced on us just to satisfy their own avaricious obsession with more, more, more money: —Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing them more than $1,000 in co-pays or deductibles would wipe them out. —Almost 12 percent of Americans, over 37 million of us, live in dire poverty, and 60 percent of us live in poverty: 201 million Americans. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, as CBS News reports, 'for the bottom 60% of U.S. households, a minimal quality of life is out of reach.' (And low-income Japanese and Italians have free health care and college.) —More than one in five Americans—21 percent—are illiterate. By fourth grade, a mere 35 percent of American children are literate at grade level, as our public schools have suffered from a sustained, four-decade-long attack by Republicans at both state and federal levels to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. —Fully a quarter of Americans (26 percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year: Over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11 years. —Every day in America, an average of 316 people are shot and 110 die from their wounds. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children, a situation not suffered by the children of any other country in the world. And these are just the tip of the iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan's 40-year-long GOP war on working-class and poor people that has managed to make America the nation with the world's largest number of the world's wealthiest billionaires. —Almost half (44 percent) of American adults carry student debt, a burden virtually unknown in any other developed country in the world (dozens of countries actually pay their young people to go to college). —Americans spend more than twice as much for health care and pharmaceuticals as citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for health care; it's $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5,496 in France, and $7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us). And we don't get better health or a longer lifespan for all the money; instead, it's just lining the pockets of rich insurance, pharma, and hospital executives and investors, with hundreds of billions in profits every year going to the morbidly rich. 'Dollar Bill' McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth, for example, took over a billion dollars in compensation. —The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada's is 82.3, Australia's is 82.9, Japan's is 84.4, France's is 83.0, and Germany's is 81.3. —Our public schools are an underfunded mess, as are our highways and public transportation systems. While every other developed country in the world has high-speed train service, we still suffer under a privatized rail system that prevents Amtrak from running even its most modern trains at anything close to their top speeds. In the 42 years since the start of the Reagan revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and savings of working-class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich money hoarders. As a result, America today is the most unequal developed nation in the world and the situation gets worse every day: Many of our billionaires are richer than any pharaoh or king in the history of the world, while a family lifestyle that could be comfortably supported by a single income in 1980 takes two people working full-time to maintain today. In the years since the Supreme Court first began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich. As a result, Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the slaughter of our schoolchildren with weapons of war; ignore or ridicule the damage fossil fuel–caused global warming is doing to our nation and planet; and continue to lower billionaire and corporate taxes every time they get full control of the federal or a state government. All because our courts and politicians, now well captured by right-wing billionaires, refuse to do anything about the ravages of hoarding syndrome among the very wealthy. Solving this problem won't be easy but also isn't complicated. Just like we did with the robber barons, the first step is to identify and publicize the problem of mentally ill people among the morbidly rich having seized control of our political system. We did this before. As President Grover Cleveland—the only Democrat elected during that post–Civil War period—proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address: As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters. And as FDR pointed out when he began to pull America out of the Republican Great Depression: For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things.… It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. FDR took on those 'economic royalists' and defeated them. He explicitly called them out when the Democratic Party renominated him for president in 1936 in Philadelphia: 'These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,' Roosevelt said. 'What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.' He paused for a moment, then thundered, 'Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!' The crowd roared, delighted that he'd turned back the Republican Great Depression and put millions to work while undoing the climate-destroying Dust Bowl by creating, among other three-letter agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, to plant millions of trees across the country. And he raised the top tax rate on the obscenely wealthy back up to 90 percent, while stopping an effort to kidnap him and turn the government fascist. 'In vain,' Roosevelt said, 'they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.' Cleveland's and Roosevelt's work now falls to us, as a new generation of obsessively money-hoarding robber barons have emerged from Reagan's tax cuts and these horrible Supreme Court decisions. It's thus now our job to educate the American people about the mental illness that's frozen our economy and is dismantling our democracy. Our task in this time of crisis is to create a societal consensus across America that we're done indulging these wealthy pampered babies' every desire, and begin the serious reforms necessary to put an end to this crisis and, like in the 1890s and 1930s, break up monopolies and raise their damn taxes so we can begin to pay down our nation's debt and rebuild the middle class. It'll take a few years, in all probability, but it's been done before. We can do it again.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Why we need a Memorial Day for civilian victims of war
The first observance of what came to be known as Memorial Day was on May 30, 1868, when a Civil War general called on Americans to commemorate the sacrifices of Union soldiers. It was initially called Decoration Day, for the practice of decorating graves with wreaths and flags. And there were so many graves — more than 300,000 men had died on the Union side, and nearly as many for the Confederacy. In total, more died on both sides of the Civil War than in every other US conflict through the Korean War, combined. It wasn't long, though, before remembrance began to be overshadowed by celebration. Within a year, the New York Times opined the holiday would no longer be 'sacred' if parades and speeches became more central than the act of memorializing the dead. Which is precisely what happened, especially after Congress in 1971 fixed Memorial Day as the last Monday in May, making it the perfect launchpad for summer, with an increasingly perfunctory nod to the holiday's original purpose. The gap between those for whom Memorial Day is a moment of remembrance versus three days of hot dogs and hamburgers will likely only grow in the future, as veterans of previous wars pass away and the divide between America's all-volunteer military and its civilians deepens. Fewer than 1 percent of the US adult population serves in the military, and those still signing up increasingly come from a small handful of regions and families with a history of military service. (You can include my own family in that ever rarer number: My brother is a retired Army captain who served in Iraq.) With ever-inflating military spending — now nearing $1 trillion, according to one estimate — the footprint of the US military is hardly shrinking, but the number of those who will potentially be called on to give what Abraham Lincoln called the 'last full measure of devotion' is. Yet there's a greater gap embedded in Memorial Day: It's between those who died as warfighters (to use one of the Pentagon's terms), and the far greater number around the world who have died not as war's participants, but as its victims. The past is not just a foreign country to us, but a bloody one. From the interpersonal to the international, conflict was a constant throughout much of human history. Between 1500 and 1800, there was hardly a year when great powers weren't enmeshed in some kind of war. Though war became somewhat less common as we entered the 1900s, it did not become less deadly. Far from it — while the death toll of war in the past was more chiefly concentrated among combatants, the 20th century saw the awful blossoming of total war, where little to no distinction was made between those fighting the war and the civilians on the sidelines, and new weapons enabled mass, indiscriminate killing. Go back to the Civil War, which sits at the junction between battle as it had long been practiced and the greater horror it would become. Over 600,000 soldiers were killed in the conflict, against at least 50,000 civilians, ranging from those killed directly to the many who died in the wake of war, from starvation and disease. That number was terrible, yet in the wars to come, it would only grow. In the First World War, a roughly equal number of combatants and civilians were killed globally — approximately 10 million on each side. In the Second World War, more combatants were killed than in any other conflict in human history, a toll nearing 15 million. Yet for every soldier, sailor, or airman who was killed, nearly one and a half civilians would die, totaling, by one count, almost 40 million. The last of the dead would come in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when as many as 210,000 people — nearly all of them Japanese civilians — died in the first and so far only atomic bombings. Not only were these new weapons capable of murdering at a vastly larger scale than ever before, but they existed chiefly to threaten the lives of noncombatants. Thankfully, given the weapons militaries now had at their disposal, World War II was the high mark for war deaths. In the decades that followed, deaths in battle for both combatants and civilians sharply declined, minus the occasional spike in conflicts like the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Even with the recent resurgence of conflict, people around the world today are much less likely to die in war than their ancestors, which is one of the most undeniable — if tenuous — markers of our species' under-appreciated progress. Yet even in this era of comparative peace, civilians still bear the brunt of war when it comes, including when it is fought by the United States. According to Brown University's Costs of War project, more civilians were likely directly killed in post-9/11 conflicts than fighters on either side — and when the number of indirect deaths from starvation and destruction are included, that gulf only widens. In Ukraine, at least 12,910 civilians have been killed in the war as of March 31, including nearly 700 children, while nearly 31,000 civilians have been injured. In a single large-scale Russian missile attack on April 24, at least nine civilians were killed and 90 were injured, including 12 children. In Gaza, accurately counting the civilian death toll has been all but impossible, but the most recent UN estimates put the number of dead children, women, and elderly people at north of 27,000, with thousands of dead bodies still unidentified. Even those civilians who have escaped death face the real risk of starvation, with Israel only now allowing trickled of aid in after a blockade that has lasted more than two months. And of course, Israel itself lost nearly 700 civilians in the October 7 attacks, while many noncombatants are still held hostage by Hamas and other militant groups. And the ongoing war in Sudan — which has received only a fraction of the global attention of Ukraine and Gaza — has led to horrifying levels of civilian death. Last year Tom Perriello, then the US envoy for Sudan, estimated that at least 150,000 people had died of war-related causes, while 13 million people have been forced to flee their homes. The US has its Memorial Day to honor fallen soldiers, while other countries have their Remembrance Day, their Victory Day. Yet there are only a handful of monuments to honor the countlessly greater number of civilians killed in war. It's not hard to imagine why. As the shift in perception around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has shown — from unpatriotic atrocity to a celebrated work of national mourning — we can honor the sacrifice of service members who died in a war, even if we don't believe in the war. But the death of those who died without a rifle in hand, who died in childhood and infancy, who died because they could not fight and could not be protected, shows war for what it ultimately is: a waste. And we can't begin to know how to mark the unmarked. America has been a historical exception in many ways, but perhaps no more so than that its civilian citizens have largely escaped the scourge of war. (Though the same, of course, can hardly be said for its Indigenous populations, so long treated as enemy combatants in their own land.) Americans have fought and Americans have died, but at an ever-increasing remove, a distance that grows with each Memorial Day. The general decline of war is one of our great accomplishments as humans, something to be unequivocally celebrated. Perhaps we would feel that more if we gave the deaths of civilians the same honor as that of soldiers — a new kind of Memorial Day that can begin here. A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe! This story was first published on May 31, 2023, has been updated to include new data on civilian deaths in Gaza, Israel, Sudan, and Ukraine.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Did You Know Black People Started Memorial Day? Here's The Tea.
Memorial Day may be the unofficial start of summer, but it is also time set aside to remember this country's fallen soldiers. Many Black folks roll their eyes at what this day means, but they shouldn't. We are the reason the holiday exists. The Civil War was bloody. In all, over 600,000 Union soldiers were killed fighting to free Black folks from the chains of American chattel slavery. Many of these soldiers were buried in unmarked graves because their commanding officers were more focused on winning the war than giving these people proper burials. The newly freed slaves were not pleased with that. So, they decided to do something about it. On Mat 1, 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, thousands of newly freed slaves organized a parade to honor soldiers who gave their lives that they might be free. This was not only a moving tribute, but it was also a symbolic one. The parade took place on land that was once a Confederate prison camp where many of the organizers had been held. This celebration, then, was a middle finger to the Confederacy. It was as much an act of defiance as it was a gathering to honor the fallen. Now, when we think of Memorial Day, images of white soldiers wearing uniforms come to mind. This is largely because after Reconstruction, this parade to honor what the formerly enslaved organizers called the 'Martyrs of the Race Course'was ignored by white historians. Americans did not know that it was Black folks, the people that this country treated like cattle, were the ones who gave them this holiday. Memorial Day was whitewashed until scholars shed light on the real origins of the day. (I'm sure this angered conservatives who wanted to think Regan, Bush or any other Republican were the reason this holiday existed.) But no, they can thank Black folks for the holiday. Or, to be more specific, Black people who were once the victims of America's original sin. So, feel free to celebrate Memorial Day. It is as Black as Juneteenth. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Politico
20-05-2025
- Business
- Politico
Virginia Republicans worry about their gubernatorial candidate who invoked slavery when criticizing DEI
Virginia Republicans are bracing for November with a growing sense of doom. The GOP already faced a tough climate in this year's elections thanks to tech billionaire Elon Musk's war on the state's robust federal workforce. Then came a bitter, intraparty feud over Republicans' lieutenant governor candidate. Now, some Republicans are privately expressing concerns about the viability of their gubernatorial nominee, Winsome Earle-Sears. 'With the demographics of Richmond, in an off year with the Republican White House, it's going to be tough,' said longtime Virginia Republican strategist Jimmy Keady. 'To be a Republican to win in Virginia, you have to run a very good campaign. You've got to have [tailwinds] and the Democratic candidate's got to make a mistake.' Virginia Republicans always knew this would be a challenging election year. In the gubernatorial race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger is a well-positioned candidate with a record of winning competitive races. But Virginia Republicans are growing increasingly worried about Earle-Sears' slow start to the campaign. According to nearly a dozen Republican strategists and officials in the state, her sluggish fundraising, a controversial speech in which she compared Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs to slavery and her frosty relationship with MAGA rising star John Reid, who is running for lieutenant governor, could make a bad year worse. 'A lot of us are looking at it and saying, 'I'd do it differently,'' said a senior GOP staffer granted anonymity to speak freely. 'She's a good person, she'd make a good governor, and she's just not as strong of a candidate as we'd like to have.' Recently, her campaign sent a fundraising email that tied American slavery to DEI. 'Slaves did not die in the fields so that we could call ourselves victims now in 2025,' said the email, signed by Earle-Sears, who is looking to become the state's first woman and second Black governor. The email went on to say that 'Democrats think minorities can't succeed without DEI' and highlights Virginia as 'the former capital of the Confederacy.' The campaign said it was not responsible for the email and declined to say who was, but a video shared with POLITICO showed her making similar statements at an event in 2023. The text is still posted on her campaign's WinRed fundraising page. 'Winsome is a strong candidate, running a smart campaign, and will win the governorship in November,' said campaign press secretary Peyton Vogel. 'We'll keep our focus on things that matter — like continuing to break fundraising records, earning endorsements, and sharing with Virginians the dark realities of Abigail Spanberger's two-faced balancing act.' When watermarked stock photos appeared on the issues page of her campaign website — an internal oversight suggesting not everything the campaign produces is fully vetted — Chris LaCivita, a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign who has worked for a number of high-profile Virginia Republicans, called campaign staff 'amateurs.' Others have criticized Earle-Sears for not firing back more forcefully when a Democratic-leaning group last month released audio of her saying she believes the Trump tariffs were positive for the economy in an effort to paint her as out of touch with many Virginia voters. And there are questions about her previous hard-line stances on socially conservative issues that the party has been trying to shed to better play in the blue and affluent suburbs of Washington. Earle-Sears has written her opposition on bills and constitutional amendments that she is constitutionally required to sign. The Virginia Mercury newspaper reported on a handwritten note Earle-Sears wrote expressing that she was 'morally opposed' to an amendment that enshrined abortion in the state constitution. And the Virginia Scope found she added a similar note to anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination bill, too. 'There are those kinds of glitches, [when] you see them, you manage them, you get through them, and you go to the next thing,' said Kay Coles James, the former head of the conservative Heritage Foundation with deep ties to GOP circles in Virginia. 'I am not in a panic mode at this point.' Virginia Republicans maintain that it's early — and even some of her harshest critics believe there's time for her to turn it around. There's some evidence that Earle-Sears is heeding those calls. The campaign launched its first ad this month, highlighting her immigrant roots, her service in the Marines and her willingness to buck traditional Republican orthodoxy. She was set to travel to Dallas on Monday for a fundraiser headlined by former President George W. Bush, according to a screenshot of an invitation reviewed by POLITICO. The campaign has also ramped up its attacks on Spanberger by amplifying her recent comments that she doesn't support a full repeal of Virginia's right-to-work law banning unions from requiring employees to join. Some Republicans who remain optimistic about Earle-Sears candidacy argue skeptics had similar critiques four years ago when current Gov. Glenn Youngkin was trailing then-Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe two months before the election. Youngkin eventually won the state by 63,000 votes and was seen as a sign of the GOP's comeback after losing the White House and the U.S. Senate in 2020. Earle-Sears, a Jamaican American woman running alongside an openly gay man for her lieutenant governor seat and the son of a Cuban refugee for attorney general, also represents an opportunity for Republicans to emphasize diverse credentials. 'It sounds like a Democratic ticket, right?'' said former U.S. Rep. Tom Davis, a Republican from Northern Virginia. 'That's the Republican ticket.' 'Look, there's always grumbling,' said Katie Gorka, chair of the Fairfax Republicans, who attributes Earle-Sears' fundraising earlier in the cycle to being hamstrung by her duties presiding over the state Senate and the Virginia legislature not wrapping its 2025 session until late February. Spanberger, no longer in elected office, could raise money for her campaign full time. So far, Spanberger has a big advantage: she raised $16.3 million in the first quarter compared with Earle-Sears' $5.6 million, according to campaign finance reports. Gorka, the wife of top Trump aide Sebastian Gorka, also dismissed assertions that the lieutenant governor made a blunder when comparing slavery to DEI programs in a fundraising blast. 'I think a part of her strategy is to make sure she reaches across the aisle and reaches a wide range of Virginians,' Gorka said. 'Her talk about slavery and DEI might not appeal to the Republican base, but I think there are a lot of people who do respond to that.' Still, many Republicans don't feel the lieutenant governor is positioning herself well for the general election. Unlike Youngkin four years ago, Earle-Sears did not face a drawn out primary. The governor, who according to Virginia law is barred from serving consecutive terms, effectively cleared the field for her when Miyares decided to seek reelection instead of running for governor. The lack of a competitive primary means that Earle-Sears has more work to do to introduce herself to Virginians, multiple Republicans said. 'I don't think the average voter knows there's a campaign on either side right now, to be honest,' Davis, the Northern Virginia Republican, said. 'We used to say voters aren't stupid, they're just not informed. This will come down as: Are they comfortable with the direction of the state, and how much does the national bleed over into this?'
