Virginia is my home, where I was born and grew up. It is the land I love more than any other. I love Virginia’s history, her amazing natural beauty, and the genuine “Southern-ness” of her people and way of life. I’ve always considered it a blessing that God would allow my roots to have emerged from the same soil that gave rise to Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Lee, Jackson, Stuart, and so many other of this country’s greatest heroes. Sadly, however, my beloved Virginia has come to resemble less and less the country I knew growing up and more and more the ultra–politically corrupt and oppressive States of the Northeast and Pacific Coast.
In the 419 years since Jamestown’s founding, Virginia has endured three hostile invasions, by the British in 1780 and 1812, and the “Union” in the War of Southern Independence. Virginia survived those earlier threats, but the one she now faces is far more insidious. Instead of a marauding foreign army, Virginia is under siege today from within, from a political party that boasts members whose publicly stated goals are to engineer a communist revolution in the United States [1] and ultimately the “total eradication of Western civilization” [2]. Political and social discord are spreading over the country like a flood, a flood that is rapidly sweeping Virginia away. To borrow from Barack Obama, Virginia is being “fundamentally transformed”, transformed into something I no longer recognize as my home, something wholly at odds with our history, culture, values, and traditions.
In truth, Virginia has been changing for decades. Though once one of the most solidly “conservative” Southern States (Jimmy Carter lost Virginia in 1976 despite winning all the other southeastern and Deep South States), Virginia now votes more like New York than other Southern States [3]. Since 2008, Democrats have won every presidential election in Virginia, joining Maryland as the only Southern States for which this can be said. Shifting demographics—driven largely by in-migration of an extremely progressive liberal population [4]—has created an increasingly solid Democrat voting bloc in Virginia’s most populated regions, regions that increasingly dictate the State’s direction. The three counties bordering Washington DC claim 25% of Virginia’s House of Delegates seats and 13 of 40 Senate seats. Virginia’s leftward political shift becomes clearer when we consider that the overwhelmingly liberal Richmond and Washington metro areas now hold fully half of the State’s population (Fairfax County alone claims 13%). The political voice of the more rural and less populated—but traditionally more conservative—areas is being rapidly drowned out.
Election maps consistently show the vast majority of Virginia’s 95 counties voting “red” (ostensibly conservative), yet the comparably few liberal-voting counties and large cities (blue islands on a vast red sea) often steer the entire State leftward like a rudder. It is not uncommon to see conservative candidates in the lead late on election night, only to watch that lead flip once returns from the DC suburbs (especially Fairfax County) come in (a State-scale illustration of why we have a federal Electoral College).
The consequences of these changes became alarmingly apparent after the election of November 2025, when Virginia’s transformation into the image of ultra-progressive Northern Virginia accelerated in earnest. Add to that consequences of the election 2026 “blue tsunami”, and what made Virginia distinctly Virginia and distinctly Southern may soon disappear completely, I’m afraid.
Though Virginia was once one of the South’s lowest-taxed and most fiscally responsible States, it is rapidly moving toward the reckless tax-and-spend fiscal irresponsibility of California. The year 2026 saw new proposed taxes on everything from food deliveries to gym memberships to dog grooming/walking and home/vehicle repairs, and massive increased spending.
Though Virginia was once relatively friendly to gun owners, new laws enacted in 2026 instantaneously made her one of the most oppressive States in America for Second Amendment rights. Virginians are being effectively disarmed even as violent illegal immigrants are given inviolable sanctuary [5].
Virginia’s incredibly stable and long-lived Constitution is under assault too. A proposed but failed amendment would have redrawn congressional maps to give Democrats a 10/1 majority (struck down by the Virginia Supreme Court). Election 2026 saw the passage of two particularly transformative constitutional amendments, one that protects abortion up to birth as a “fundamental right” (while a new companion law criminalizes prayer or peaceful pro-life counseling judged as impeding abortion access [6]) and another that constitutionally enshrines same-sex marriage, with potential prosecution of clergy who refuse to officiate such unions. Though diametrically opposed to Virginia’s history, culture, and traditional Judeo-Christian values, the amendments passed easily, in part due to the “Fairfax Effect”. It is safe to say Virginia as we’ve known it has ceased to exist constitutionally.
Since taking power in 2025, Democrats have worked tirelessly to finally cleanse Virginia of all reminders of its Confederate history and Southern identity, a process begun in earnest with the destruction of Richmond’s Monument Avenue in 2020 under Democrat Governor Ralph Northam. Robert E. Lee commemorative license plates have been cancelled, and the last three Confederacy-related statues on Capitol Square (Stonewall Jackson; Dr. Hunter H. McGuire, Jackson’s medical director; and William “Extra Billy” Smith, Confederate General and two-time Virginia Governor) were removed. (Might the magnificent equestrian statue of Washington be next?—George was a slaveowner, after all.)
The tax-exempt status of Virginia’s Confederacy-related non-profits has been revoked. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Confederate Memorial Literary Society, Stonewall Jackson Memorial, and JEB Stuart Birthplace Preservation Trust are now subject to property taxes. Several proposed bills would have stripped State funding from the Virginia Military Institute (many graduates of which served in Confederate armies), dissolved its Board of Visitors, and placed the Institute under the governance of Virginia State University, a little-known historically Black college [7]. Given today’s political climate, it is safe to conclude the objectives were to transform the Institute’s culture, curriculum, and interpretation of its history to match the woke, anti-Southern progressive agenda. These actions represent only the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Virginia is degenerating into yet another progressive-dominated failed State.
Thomas Jefferson warned that the natural course of things is for government to gain ground and liberty to recede (i.e., tyranny). It is heartbreakingly ironic that this truth is being demonstrated so clearly today in Jefferson’s own Virginia.
What should those of us who cherish liberty and the values Virginia used to represent do? How do we arrest the political/ideological cancer threatening to destroy Virginia and in turn protect the rest of the South and the country as a whole? The ideology of the party now controlling Virginia and the federal Congress is as incompatible with her true history and culture as is the notion that a room can be simultaneously filled with light and darkness. One or the other must dominate. Every God-given blessing our forebears fought, bled, and in many cases died to secure and defend are under assault and could be lost, perhaps for generations. The original American concept of liberty espoused by Jefferson’s Declaration and defended by our ancestors could be reduced to a mere historical relic if our course doesn’t change.
Tyranny cannot thrive where a godly people refuse to be enslaved, however. Like every form of tyranny to ever ensnare mankind, the authoritarian, godless ideology sweeping over the country today was birthed in spiritual darkness; it is wholly incompatible with the biblical worldview that has characterized Virginia and the South since 1607. It cannot withstand a people who remember that liberty is a gift from Almighty God and live accordingly.
Virginia is at war, whether or not her citizens know it, and the stakes are every bit as high as what lay in the balance in 1780, 1812, and 1861. Her State motto—Sic Semper Tyrannis (Thus Ever to Tyrants)—is being tested in real time. Here, I believe we can take the example of Stonewall Jackson, who saw God as Virginia’s—and the South’s—true defender and vindicator. I believe Jackson would say Virginia will survive and liberty prevail primarily upon the prayers of the faithful. Freedom, Jackson might say, will be won or lost not at the ballot box so much as at the point of contact between the knees of godly patriotic men and women and the carpet of their prayer closets.
Jackson considered the Army of Northern Virginia a flesh and blood extension of the spiritual army of the Lord. His life mirrored that spiritual warrior ethos, as he spent far more time in his tent praying for the favor of the God of all Creation than he spent in Little Sorrel’s saddle directing his troops on the battlefield. Prayer was Stonewall’s greatest weapon, as it was Lee’s, and Washington’s, and Henry’s, and so many other heroes of our past. The old adage popular at the time that said even the devil himself would run with Jackon in his rear has merit for us today. It wasn’t just an exaggerated illustration of Jackson’s piety. Old Stonewall continually cloaked himself in a mantle of prayer, grounded in unshakeable faith in the righteousness of his cause and complete submission to the will and sovereignty of his Heavenly Father, for he recognized that it is God who holds every kingdom and every battle in His hands. And therein lies the lesson for us. If Virginia—and by extension the rest of the South and the rest of America—is to be truly free, she must be prayed free first, imploring God to release His mercy and grace and vindicating power upon the land we love.
Our forebears never shrank from the struggle for liberty, and neither can we. Some might say, “Leave. Virginia is lost. Move to a ‘red’ State while you still can.” But no State is truly safe, as November 3, 2026, demonstrated. Besides, how could a native son or daughter of Virginia abandon her at such a perilous time? How could we surrender the sacred ground that still bears more scars of war than any other State, ground soaked with the blood of countless numbers of her sons and the sons of other States who died in her defense? Such is not who we are. How could we be worthy of the honor and memory of the ancestors in whom we Southerners take so much pride if we did not stand when it counts the most, as they did?
No war can be won by ceding the field to the enemy without a fight. That is especially true of battles waged over existential questions of right versus wrong, truth versus lies, light versus darkness, liberty versus tyranny. We have to stand our ground on our knees and fight the good fight, and we have to do it now. We have to Appeal to Heaven as our revolutionary forefathers were the first to do and declare and proclaim that the powers of darkness and enemies of liberty and Almighty God cannot have Virginia. Neither can they have West Virginia, or Tennessee, or North Carolina, or Kentucky, or South Carolina, or Mississippi, or Louisiana, or Florida, or Alabama, or Texas, or Arkansas, or Georgia. Neither can they have any of America. Let us declare in faith as Jackson might have that “The scepter of the wicked will not remain over the land allotted to the righteous” [8].
We may be outnumbered at present, just as our ancestors so often were, but we are defending our home, and like them, I believe we are in the right. Perhaps we can borrow a cry made popular on many progressive college campuses the last few years and turn it into our own rallying call:
“From the mountains to the sea, Virginia will be free!”
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[1] https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/08/25/dsa-our-goal-is-communism-the-daily-signal/ [2] https://www.westernjournal.com/mamdanis-socialists-sweep-primaries-started-org-total-eradication-western-civilization-demand-world-without-prisons-called-america-disgrace/ [3] https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/the-new-dominion-virginias-ever-changing-electoral-map/ [4] https://depts.washington.edu/moving1/Virginia.shtml [5] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/out-of-control-killings-spanbergers-virginia-reaches-insane-point-migrant-charged-stabbing-spree?msockid=3fb95f4525196c172cb54da2240b6d9e [6] https://nrlc.org/nrlnewstoday/2026/03/the-2026-general-assembly-wraps-up-creating-huge-challenges-for-defenders-of-life-in-virginia/ [7] https://www.vmialumni.org/landing/mobilize-for-vmi-speak-up-for-state-support/bill-information/ [8] Psalm 125:3 (NIV)The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
