Let's all just sidestep the repulsive news about Eric Swalwell, Benedict Donald's continued weird Jesus meltdown, and the deliciousness of JD Vance's sparsely attended rally in Athens, Georgia, to celebrate recent developments in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Governor Abigail Spanberger has been impressive in her first 100 days — giving the Democratic response to Trump's silly State of the Union, signing a flurry of executive orders in support of housing, healthcare, and education, and backing legislation to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution. Now she's signed a bill that ends tax breaks for groups aligned with the former Confederacy. Only 161 years after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, but heck, we'll take it!
The affected organizations include the United Daughters of the Confederacy's Virginia division and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, and for the life of us we have no idea why they didn't pay state property taxes in the first place.
"And oh, the horror," humorist and Substack star John Fugelsang wrote. "Somewhere, a bunch of genteel Lost Cause enthusiasts are clutching pearls —and wallets: 'If our Confederate organizations now have to pay property taxes, how will we continue honoring our ancestors who fought to keep other people as property?'"
Yes, the South lost the war but won the peace, thanks to the federal abandonment of Reconstruction, a hundred years of Jim Crow, and romantic literary and Hollywood treatments that whitewashed America's original sin right out of our collective consciousness. But there's no reason that taxpayers of the Old Dominion need to support Confederate monuments and mythologies. We cats PURR.
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