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Culture Jul 13, 2026 Charlottesville's Lee statue melted down, transformed into 'racial diversity' monument "To transform the very material of a monument is to acknowledge that history cannot be erased, but it can be reimagined." Charlottesville's Lee statue melted down, transformed into 'racial diversity' monument Image Libby Emmons Brooklyn NY Jul 13, 2026 4 minute read A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was at the heart of the Charlottesville protests in 2017, followed by the Unite the Right rally where Heather Heyer was killed. The rally was funded in part by the SPLC, which paid for so-called informants...

A Virginia judge informed state officials in a Tuesday letter that a newly passed ban on modern semiautomatic firearms was blocked across the state, citing the potential for a “treacherous patchwork” within Virginia. Shortly after Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed the ban on so-called “assault weapons,” SB 749, into law on May 14, pro-Second Amendment organizations, including the National Rifle Association (NRA), Gun Owners of America (GOA), Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) filed lawsuits seeking to have the ban invalidated on Second Amendment grounds. The letter from Washington County...

Largest U.S. power grid operator PJM ​said on Friday ​it was ​under a federal alert to cut electricity consumption across its territory as ⁠it ‌battled generator outages, massive overloading ⁠on its transmission lines and a surge in air conditioning use from prolonged sweltering ‌heat. PJM said it told utilities to reduce electricity to customers ​who are under contract to reduce consumption during emergencies. PJM serves 67 million people ⁠in the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., area. Spot ‌wholesale electricity prices ‌in northern Virginia, home to the largest collection of data centers in the ⁠world, have surged beyond $2,000 per megawatt...

Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger's efforts to enact a sweeping gun-control agenda have been placed on hold by courts in June, while the state Legislature pushed back the effective date of another law. Since Thursday, judges in Lancaster County and Washington County issued preliminary injunctions preventing enforcement of a ban on modern semiautomatic firearms, while Spanberger had to request that the state Legislature delay the effective date of a ban on carrying such firearms. The National Rifle Association trumpeted their legal success in a Monday evening post on X. "The NRA's world-class legal team delivered a clear, powerful argument demonstrating...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told 7News Reporter Nick Minock that ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Washington, D.C. officers arrested Jose Jairo Rivas-Santiago in June 2026. ICE says 32-year-old Rivas-Santiago is a suspected MS-13 gang associate convicted of first-degree murder and armed robbery. In April 2019, ICE said Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Richmond agents found and arrested Rivas-Santiago on charges of armed robbery and conspiracy related to an MS-13 gang murder. ICE says HSI turned him over to the Richmond City Police Department for prosecution. In April 2021, ICE says a judge convicted him of murder and armed...

Lynchburgh, Virginia Circuit Court Judge F. Patrick Yeatts has sided with Gun Owners of America and Virginia Citizens Defense League and rejected the attempt by Gov. Abigail Spanberger and Attorney General Jay Jones to resume requiring background checks on the private transfers of firearms. In a ruling delivered from the bench after a hearing on Thursday, Yeatts declared that his previously-issued injunction on Virginia's universal background check scheme is still intact, despite Democrats' efforts to do an end-run around the injunction. [.....] Yeatts has been dealing with this issue for several years now, and has previously ruled that adults under...

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) — A Virginia Beach man was found guilty and sentenced on several charges related to sex trafficking. Pankaj Joshi’s trial was held in Virginia Beach Circuit Court on June 2, 2026. On Feb. 27, the Virginia Beach Police Department Special Investigations Bureau (SIB) received a tip through the Virginia State Police tip line about a possible human trafficking victim in Virginia Beach. Detectives located the individual and began an investigation. SIB detectives identified 33-year-old Pankaj Joshi as the suspect in this case. Investigators charged him with human trafficking, pandering, and aiding prostitution. Detectives also helped the...

Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a scathing dissent Tuesday as the Supreme Court refused to let Florida sue California and Washington over their lawless practice of handing out commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens who cannot read English road signs. The Court denied Florida’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint in the original jurisdiction case, leaving the state with “nowhere else to bring” its claims, Thomas wrote. He was joined by Justice Samuel Alito. This decision comes after the horrific August 12, 2025, crash on the Florida Turnpike. Illegal alien Harjinder Singh, an Indian national who entered the...

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) on Monday signed into law a bill eliminating tax exemptions for multiple organizations connected to the Confederacy. Democrats in the Virginia House and Senate passed HB167 with vote totals of 62-35 and 21-17, respectively, earlier this year. The bill specifically removes the Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, among other similar groups, from the list of organizations exempt from state property taxes. The UDC, a nonprofit, was founded in 1894 by women “seeking to honor their family members and ancestors” who served in the Confederate...

the issue continues to be dead in the water. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee who helped organize the hearing, simply said that if Washington residents want full representation in the House and the Senate, Maryland should take back part of the district. “A better option, in my view, would be to retrocede a large portion of the district to Maryland. Retrocession is the preferable way to provide D.C. residents with voting representation in both chambers of Congress,” Portman’s suggestion has been offered before, largely because the federal city was...

INTRODUCTION On April 29, 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders convened a 75-minute panel in the US Capitol on “the existential threat of AI.” Two of the four panelists were Chinese government affiliates: Zeng Yi, Dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance, and Xue Lan, a Tsinghua University professor who chairs China’s national AI governance expert committee and serves as a Counsellor of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. From a US Senate platform, Xue called the US-China AI race “an inaccurate narrative” and argued for “safe zones” of cooperation on AI safety. The event was...

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — A former assistant principal at an elementary school in Virginia is due in court for trial, accused of ignoring warnings that a 6-year-old student brought a loaded gun to school that was later used to shoot his first-grade teacher. Ebony Parker’s criminal trial is set to start Monday in Newport News, Virginia. Parker is charged with eight counts of felony child neglect, one for each of the eight bullets in the gun that was brought into the classroom of Richneck Elementary schoolteacher Abby Zwerner in January 2023, prosecutors have said. Each count carries a maximum...

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Friday rejected Virginia’s bid to restore a congressional map that would have given Democrats a chance to pick up four seats in the closely divided House of Representatives. The court’s order is the latest twist in the nation’s mid-decade redistricting competition. It was kicked off last year by President Donald Trump urging Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines and was supercharged by a recent Supreme Court ruling severely weakening the Voting Rights Act that opened up even more winnable seats for the GOP.

The National Rifle Association is suing Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger for her signing of a measure to make illegal the buying, selling, importing, manufacturing and/or the transfer of assault weapons in the state. The NRA filed lawsuits in both federal and state courts, arguing the law is unconstitutional. Supporters argue the legislation removes "weapons of war" from the streets, making Virginia safer from violence, but opponents argue the law punishes law-abiding citizens, WRIC reported. “As promised, we are taking Abigail Spanberger to court," the NRA, the Second Amendment rights group said in a statement. "Throughout the legislative session, the...

Sounds like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has conceded defeat in the 2026 redistricting battle, but like George Costanza and the Jerk Store, he’s already plotting his revenge in 2028. If you take a deep breath, you can smell the failure laced with no small amount of humiliation… “In advance of 2028, where we will have additional states that will come online, including but not limited to New York, New Jersey, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, and Maryland,” says Jeffries. “That’s at least seven states. We will be able to unleash a decisive and forceful response to what they are...

WASHINGTON — Vulnerable Rep. Jen Kiggans, a Virginia Republican, is under fire after she agreed with a radio show host who said that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — the highest-ranking Black lawmaker in Congress — should get his “cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.” NBC News Icon Kiggans, one of Democrats’ top targets in the November midterm election, later posted that the host “should not have used that language” and that she did not condone it. But that did little to satisfy Democrats, who have condemned Kiggans and urged her to formally apologize. The second-most powerful House Democrat has called...

The Democrats have not been sending their best people for a long time, but at least they can avoid the errors an elementary school child makes. Not disgraced Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones, however. As The Gateway Pundit reported, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the Democrat Party’s rigged gerrymandering referendum last week in a 4-3 decision, ruling the entire sleazy process to sneak it onto the ballot was unconstitutional from the start. This was the latest devastating blow to radical Democrats’ blatant attempt to rewrite Virginia’s congressional maps mid-decade and hand themselves a super-majority in the U.S. House by turning...

Democratic officials in Virginia asked the US Supreme Court on Monday to reinstate a congressional map that would benefit their party ahead of this year’s midterm elections, the latest map drawing appeal to reach the high court amid a flurry of mid-decade redistricting. The emergency appeal follows a decision from the state Supreme Court last week that voided Democrats’ attempt to redraw Virginia’s US House map via an April referendum in a way that would help Democrats pick up four additional seates. The Democrats are asking the US Supreme Court to effectively put that order on hold for this year’s...

RedState reported Sunday on the sheer desperation that has set in among Democrats at the state and congressional levels after the Virginia Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the process state Democrats used to put their gerrymander referendum on the ballot was a violation of Virginia's Constitution. Advertisement This effectively nuked the Democrats' plan to implement a new map that potentially would net them another four seats in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, which would have made the congressional delegation 10-1 Democrat-Republican. Perhaps the most extreme of the measures that, per The New York Times, were being considered during a...

Democrats are struggling to respond to a major redistricting setback in Virginia, with some party leaders discussing an audacious and possibly far-fetched idea for trying to restore a congressional map voided by the court but showing little indication they have a clear plan. During a private discussion on Saturday that included Democratic House members from Virginia and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, the lawmakers vented anger at their defeat at the Virginia Supreme Court, spoke about a collective determination to flip two or three Republican-held seats under the existing map and discussed a bank-shot proposal to...