Interesting questions by Bob Holsworth – who previously was “Founding Director of the Center for Public Policy and the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University” and “also served as Dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences – the largest unit of the 31,000-student university.”
Cancelling Larry Sabato
The Virginia GOP has sent an official letter to UVA President Jim Ryan calling for an ethics investigation into Larry Sabato.
His sin: a series of tweets from his personal Twitter account that the Washington Times describes as “disparaging former President Donald Trump, particularly over his unproven claims of widespread voter fraud in the aftermath of the 2020 election.”
An ethics investigation for mean tweets from a personal account!
You can’t make this stuff up.
I’m trying to understand how this can possibly benefit Virginia Republicans.
In the first place, it makes the party’s attacks on cancel culture and the threats to academic freedom at Virginia universities appear completely hypocritical.
Moreover, it puts Trump’s arguments about election fraud front and center in the 2021 races, this in a state where he lost by double digits. Is Glenn Youngkin, for example, on board with his party’s demand to investigate Sabato’s tweets?
The more Trump remains an issue, the more difficulty the Virginia GOP will have in removing the millstone he placed around its neck.
Finally, regardless of what the GOP thinks of Larry’s opinions about the former President, his American Government classes at UVA were some of the largest enrolled and most popular for decades. I know hundreds of Republicans who have very fond memories of his course.
I’m also old enough to remember the early 1990’s when it was the Democratic supporters of Chuck Robb who were working to “cancel Sabato” when he said that the reports of Robb’s extracurricular activities as Governor had the ring of truth.
Why would a party that has been in the wilderness think that calling for an investigation into the tweets of the state’s most well known professor is a step on the path to victory?
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