Allers: Virginia’s Blue-Da Ba Dee Da Ba Dye

The sunlight streams through the window, pouring over a wrecked hotel room known as Richmond. The Republican Party is on the floor, eyes slowly opening, blinking, reaching around for glasses to put on. The Republican Party stumbles to stand. There’s a blue tiger in the bathroom. The Post-Election Day Hangover sets in.

How did we get here? Why did we lose the House and the Senate when the current Democratic administration was riddled in scandals of offensive Halloween choices, moon dancing, and possible rape? Where is Doug?

Let’s retrace our steps and receipts to August 12, 2017.

Greene County’s own Heather Heyer gave her life, mowed down for standing up to Jason Kessler and his Calvary of White Supremacy, who were there to stoke fear, hatred, and to defend icons of treason and slavery. She wasn’t Antifa. She was a woman who had a problem with Nazis invading the town she called home.

Local Republican representatives took their time to speak out, trepidatious as usual. And then, our State Party and our nominee for Governor — a good man and moderate from New Jersey — turned around and
made the choice to defend the statues of the Confederacy. The same statues that the Dixiecrats put up to glorify and rewrite the South’s history — to gaslight southern Americans into thinking the Civil War was just a state’s rights spat. Statues that were put up intimidate people of color all over the south. Statues that represent the sins of the Democratic Party, not the Republicans.

In Greene County last year the local GOP welcomed “Unite the Right” leader Jason Kessler as a member. The chairman allowed it. My father, Michael Allers Sr., stood up to the chairman for his egregious lapse in judgement and for allowing White Nationalism to be harbored in Greene.

My dad ran for Chairman — and a miniature GOP Civil War broke out in Greene. Republican against Republican, friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor … over an issue that Republicans should have been united on. Since when is allowing Nazi rhetoric a tenet of conservatism?

To add insult to injury, the Republicans put forth neo-Confederate and White Nationalist sympathist Corey Stewart as our nominee for U.S. Senate, spouting anti-immigrant language and vile demagoguery. And we wonder why we lost the suburbs, which are rapidly changing demographically and culturally?

From Richmond to Prince William, this ain’t a place that whistles Dixie anymore. The Confederacy wasn’t a welcoming place, and a party that embraces the Confederacy to gin up red meat votes isn’t a welcoming party — so voters looked elsewhere.

Voters in this 2019 cycle still have that vile after-taste of our Party at its lowest. That after-taste of spineless elected officials who don’t have courage and wait for others to tell them what to do. That after-taste of apathy and impotence, when officials bumble filing papers and put up yard signs at the last minute.

Hurricane McAuliffe is about to hit landfall for a second term in 2021. It’s gonna take quite the chaser to make voters forget our careless and thoughtless mistakes. But now it’s time to put on some coffee, sober up, get Doug off the roof , and start by earning Virginia’s trust again.

Michael Allers Jr. is an educator, politico, and artist. He lives in Herndon.