What would happen if I stood out in front of my election precinct door and offered each voter a specific amount of money to vote for my candidate?

I’d be arrested, of course. It is called election fraud, buying votes and it is—at least I thought it was—illegal.

Yet Donald Trump, the president of these United States, can stand up at the Republican Mid-term Convention in Texas and promise every adult American a $5,000 check if the GOP candidates win in November.

Of course he was lying, just as he had previously lied about the other $5,000 Doge check and the $2,000 tariff check that every person in this country was going to get.

But those were just hollow promises that no one—except the very gullible MAGA faithful— thought would ever be fulfilled. This is promising each voter a specific dollar amount of money ($5,000 per person would amount to $1.3 trillion) to vote for specific candidates. This is voter fraud. Bribery.

It reminds me of a story my great uncle, who worked in the factories of the Midwest in the early 1920s, used to tell. He said that before labor unions, the owner of a factory might post a sign on the bulletin board that stated, in large letters, “If John Jones doesn’t get elected, this factory will close.”

Of course, the factory wouldn’t close if Jones lost, but the workers, who had families to feed, couldn’t take that chance. So, they all voted for Jones. In this way, the wealthy factory owners controlled the elections.

Trump is attempting to do the same thing, in effect paying voters to keep him in power. He knows that if Democrats win in November, his day is finished and he will likely be impeached—for a third time. So, he is turning to bribery to stay in office.

Trump, who has a dismal 30 percent approval rating, rambled on for nearly two hours at last week’s poorly attended GOP convention. He said that we are winning the war with Iran—which he has claimed we won on numerous occasions—and declared that he would rename the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait” in the very near future.

He also insisted that New Mexico is now New America, Lake Ontario is now Lake America and the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. And he added that he had considered renaming one of the two major oceans that he said border the U.S. (he didn’t mention the Arctic), joking that he could get away with renaming one but maybe not both.

Each of the declarations or proclamations or fantasy ideas drew applause and cries of joy from the small turnout of Trump fanatics in attendance (the president himself alluded to the half full auditorium during his speech).

He also spoke of his grandiose ballroom, now under construction at a time when gasoline is at an all-time high ($4.15 a gallon, with diesel at $5.89) and the price of groceries continues to rise.

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Trump’s GOP speech, part of a push to raise money for Republican candidates, came just two days after the president recounted being lifted out of the World Trade Center rubble by heroic New York first responders, a story which within hours was proven to be a fabrication.

And it came three days after this man sent out a fake photo of himself as a four-star general in full military uniform, again to the delight of Trump cult members, many of whom actually fought in America’s wars.

A decade ago, if someone had even suggested such folly from the president of the United States, no one would have believed it. And no one would have put up with such malfeasance of office. Now it is common practice, just “Trump being Trump.” That’s like saying Hitler imprisoning Jews was “Just Hitler being Hitler.”

What kind of nation have we become? The president is a combination of Bozo the Clown and Joseph Stalin, and his followers think that is wonderful.

The mid-term elections worry me. No matter how they turn out, there may be violence. Non-Trumpers (competent Republicans, Democrats, and independents), have had enough, and if the elections result in the GOP controlling Congress, the inner cities may go up in smoke.

On the other hand, Trump and his followers will never accept the truth if the GOP loses big, and the president will likely have the military confiscate all results long before any newly elected Democrats have a chance to take office.

I am concerned that the GOP will win, and we will have two more years of utter chaos. Many Republicans would vote for Hitler if he was on the ballot with an R beside his name. That’s the GOP mentality. And Trump told his convention audience to pretend that HE was on the ballot.

And if elected, Republicans will continue to do the bidding of the man in the White House.

If Democrats win and Trump is impeached, I worry that he may decide to go out in a blaze of glory—nuclear style. After all, he has on several occasions threatened to blow Iran off the map.

The mid-terms are eight weeks away. The last time we had an election of this magnitude was in 1860. It resulted in a civil war.

Regarding the mid-terms, Trump asked his Texas audience to pledge their loyalty to him and to “cheat like hell!” And the people cheered. Think how this would have gone over if a Democrat had sought such allegiance and dishonesty.

Last week, several noted scientists and engineers were quoted as saying that there is a 10 percent chance that artificial intelligence will wipe out the human race within a decade.

These mid-term elections may move up the timetable.

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There are relatively few things that I know for certain. One is that my daughter’s room is a testimony to controlled chaos. The second is that I will sorely miss that chaos when she heads to college. And the third is that there are unlikely to be long-term solutions for land conservation at a scale large enough, in any city, without private landowners taking steps to contribute to the overall conservation mosaic.

“Private lands” doesn’t only mean vast lands—although, those are good too. Think instead of a back, front, or side yard of any size, whether owned or rented. Decks, porches and community gardens also pull their own weight.

Enter Fredericksburg, where—by 2011—roughly half our city lands had been given over to impermeable surfaces. This is more than just a loss of scenery. Impervious cityscapes mean more toxic wash-off, thermal pollution, ecosystem mortality, and habitat fragmentation. They also mean more extreme rainfall, flooding, and storm water runoff.

Private lands can help mitigate some of this. Conceptualize a conservation mosaic consisting of private lands with native habitat across Fredericksburg: How much acreage would this be? It’s hard to say with precision, but a crude calculation points to about 30 percent of Fredericksburg’s 6688 acres. A little less than 20 percent of our city lands are in public parks and recreation, and another 48-50 percent are paved/impervious, leaving a hypothetical amount of roughly 30 percent or about 2000 acres to work with.

If an initial 10 percent of that were planted with intention to support wildlife, create habitat ,and reduce urban runoff, that would yield 200 acres—comparable to an 18-hole golf course or 200 football fields—although not laid out side by side. That’s a good start. A better one would be 20 percent, or about 400 acres.

It’s also the case that native plants have ambitions of their own. Left to their own devices, they will tend to spread naturally, such that 10 percent grows to 20 or 30 percent with relatively little tending.

Conservation has many levels, and elsewhere I’ve written about what the city can do to safeguard Fredericksburg’s conservation future. The focus here is on how city residents can make a personal commitment from the convenience of their own yards.

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What Can I Do?

There is a human tendency to over-engineer things, and native plantings are no different. Plot maps, seasonal charts, and a sense that conversion to native habitat must be immediate and complete rather than incremental can all lead to throwing in the trowel. Instead of “How to,” think “How easy.”

1. Where to Start? Tree Fredericksburg makes choices simpler and more accessible via its fall (and spring) native plant festival menu featuring free native trees, many of which are keystone species (those that have a disproportionately large, beneficial effect on local biodiversity ) and low-cost native shrubs. This year’s fall pickup date is Oct 4, and a handful of plants can transform a yard: Oak, Black Cherry, Spicebush, Elderberry, Highbush Blueberry, and Canadian Serviceberry, to name just a few.

2. Prefer seeds? Test out a small plot, say 5 by 5. Spring or fall, sun or shade, rake the ground to bare earth or cover it with a few inches of soil, add some seeds of your choice, water it and walk away. Let it expand naturally from there.

Where to find native plant seeds? Try a neighbor’s native plant garden, or look into free and low cost seeds:

The seed library at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library enables both giving and receiving seeds that are native to the ecoregion. It’s currently unstocked. but presumably will be replenished during the fall season.

Save Our Monarchs has a wide offering of milkweed seeds (and will send some for free if a self-addressed, stamped envelope is included).

The Alliance of Native Seedkeepers offers thirteen seed packets native to Virginia. (More about the seedkeepers’ story here).

For other seeds and mixes appropriate to the ecoregion, try Ernst Conservation seeds.

3. Unsure what flowers to plant? The non-profit Plant Virginia Natives takes the guesswork out with a booklet highlighting natives in the Central Rappahannock Region.

Each of these natives provides both beautiful color and critical wildlife food sources: Swamp Milkweed, Wild Senna, Crownbeard, Sensitive Partridge Pea, Coneflower, Wild Bergamot, Common Evening Primrose, Early Goldenrod, Mountain Mint, Joe Pye Weed, and Blue Mistleflower. Spanish needles are prickly—but their vivid, late-season blooms are a magnificent pop of yellow. Horseweed and Burnweed can be left to stand for late season wildlife forage.

For a collaborative environment, the Homegrown National Park site has 52,000 joiners. The Virginia Land Conservation Assistance Network offers an impressive array of conservation tools, funding and expertise for private landowners.

4. Love fruit? Consider starting a small food forest with Virginia natives: Paw Paw, Black Cherry, Wild Strawberry, Sugarberry, Common Elderberry, American Persimmon and Plum, Muscadine Grape, Canadian Serviceberry, Black Huckleberry, Dewberries, Mulberries, Virginia Ground Cherry, Purple Passionflower, Indigenous Cranberry, Highbush or Lowbush Blueberries, Alleghany Blackberries and more. This list from the Feeding Appalachia substack offers comprehensive choices.

5. Prefer grasses? Check out PlantNova Natives and The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

6. Non-native plants in the yard? Removing non-natives (which include many of the showy ones thrust at us by big box stores and nurseries, and which do little to provide habitat and support wildlife) slowly over time can have big benefits with relatively little effort. I’m reminded of a neighbor stopping by a few months ago and noticing that our non-native roses seemed to have acquired a systemic pathogen known as Witches Broom—characterized by alarmingly large thorns and gnarled, broom-like rose clusters. We replaced those roses with the native Rosa Virginiana (Virginia Rose), whose delicate pink blooms instantly attracted native bees.

7. Herbicides? Avoid them to the greatest extent practicable. Over time, they will tend to deaden a landscape and drive away wildlife. Use them not at all or in a surgical fashion.

8. Identification? A plant ID app can help avoid accidentally removing natives. Many in the native plant world use “Picture This” which has a higher degree of accuracy than most and the added benefit of also identifying birds and bugs, including the insects inside a home.

9. Winter habitat? Leave leaves and stalks to stand over winter. This simple act provides vital nesting and overwintering food, forage and shelter for wildlife.

10. Mulching? It has benefits, especially for street trees in utility strips (moisture retention, root protection and more), but the propensity to mulch under trees also undermines the natural relationship between trees and the plants underneath them. Check out this article on Soft Landings: “Defaulting to turf or mulch misses an opportunity to realize the full potential of the trees and our landscapes.” Try native plants under trees. The same article charts what to plant under a tree depending on soil condition and sun exposure.

More Habitat, More Hope

Personal stewardship of private lands makes a manifest contribution to our city’s, or any city’s, conservation collage. Each newly-created native habitat counts towards the longer arc of success. The idea is to change the balance, year on year.

And while the reasons to do this are many, Stevie Wonder put it best: “We’ve got to get it together for nature and humanity.”

*** Rebecca R. Rubin is a landscape-scale conservationist and a board member of several non-profit conservation organizations.

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FREDLINES

Claire Marshall Watkins, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR

Fredericksburg Free Press

King George School Board settles ACLU lawsuit

By Adele Uphaus 09/15/2026

The King George County School Board and the ACLU of Virginia have reached a settlement in a lawsuit brought last month on behalf of three students who attempted to start a Genders and Sexualities Alliance (GSA) club at King George Middle School last year.

The settlement reverses the school board’s previous policy change, which prevented middle school students from being able to form non-curricular clubs.

Caroline School Board starts digging into 1% sales tax vote

By Taft Coghill Jr. 09/15/2026

When the Caroline County School Board and the board of supervisors met jointly in late July, the governing bodies discussed the new state law that allows localities to add a 1% sales tax for school construction to a referendum this November.

The school board and the board of supervisors agreed that there wasn’t enough time to properly inform residents about the referendum, so they wanted to establish a robust informational campaign in time to potentially vote on the issue in a special election in the spring of 2027.

Q&A with Stan Jones, write-in candidate for Fredericksburg School Board

By Adele Uphaus 09/15/2026

Stan Jones is running a write-in campaign for at-large representative to Fredericksburg School Board. He was appointed last month to serve as interim at-large representative until the end of this year.

Jones has worked in public education for 30 years, including as superintendent of Danville City Schools and deputy superintendent of Stafford County schools. He has also served on boards and in leadership positions at education and youth-oriented nonprofit organizations.

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The Free Lance-Star

Another Spotsylvania man convicted after predator trap

By Keith Epps 09/15/2026

A trap set by a Houston-based Internet predator group has resulted in the conviction of yet another Spotsylvania County man.

Steven Andrew Devan, 27, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Spotsylvania Circuit Court to five child pornography-related offenses. In exchange for his guilty pleas, numerous other charges were dropped. Devan is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 11 and is facing the possibility of up to 55 years in prison.

Convicted murderer again facing the possibility of more time

By Keith Epps 09/15/2026

Arelatively minor traffic offense has a Virginia Beach man again facing the possibility of serving time that was suspended following his conviction for murder in Stafford in the 1990s.

Phillip Mark Wheatley, 58, was convicted of second-degree murder in 1996 as a result of the October 1995 slaying of 38-year-old Nicholas F. Evans. He pled guilty after prosecutors dropped a robbery charge and reduced a capital murder charge. He received a 40-year prison sentence with 22 years suspended.

Jeremiah Community in Fredericksburg begins to take shape

By Pilar Davis 09/15/2026

Leaders from various housing groups met with Senator Tim Kaine on Thursday at Oberle Academy to discuss how to address housing needs in the community.

The occasion also included viewing a prototype house built in only 72 hours, signifying the launch of the building phase of the Jeremiah Community, a project of Micah Ecumenical Ministries. The prototype was built across the street from Oberle Academy — a private school in Fredericksburg that offers specialized instruction and support for students with academic, social, emotional and behavioral challenges.

Five things to know on Fredericksburg’s Jeremiah Community

By Pilar Davis 09/15/2026

The project, led by Micah Ecumenical Ministries, is designed to provide permanent supportive housing for people who have experienced homelessness for more than a year. The community will place homes near the support services residents need while creating an environment focused on long-term stability and dignity.

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ADVANCE READS

Steve Watkins, Theodore Blackwell, Phil Huber

Fred Flock Cameras by the Numbers

Steve Watkins, ADVANCE EDITOR

11 Number of Flock cameras officially deployed by Fredericksburg Police Department.

100s Number of Flock cameras deployed by local businesses, to which FPD can have access.

$3,000 Annual fee the city pays per Flock camera for maintenance and usage.

0 Number of physical locations of FPD Flock cameras released publicly.

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Big Brother Is Watching. How Much Should We Let Him?

Theodore Blackwell, GUEST COLUMNIST

The word “panoptic” comes from the Panopticon, a prison design proposed by Jeremy Bentham. The prison would be built in a circle around a central tower. From inside their cells, the prisoners would not be able to tell whether someone in the tower was watching them. Because they could not know, they were expected to assume that they might be watched at any time.

I have been routinely reminded about the concept as Flock cameras have appeared along the roads throughout our community. The cameras are visible, but almost everything that happens behind them is not. As we pass one, we do not know whether it captured our car, whether another camera captured us later, whether those records will ever be searched, or who might eventually be able to see them. Most of the time, probably no one is actively looking for us. But we have no way to be sure when someone is.

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The Kitchen Table Test

Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST

The kitchen table is where economic policy becomes real.

It is where the mortgage statement lands beside the electric bill; where the grocery receipt competes with the prescription refill; where the credit-card balance waits beside an estimate for a broken water heater. Politicians can celebrate stock indexes, tax cuts, and applause lines. Families live somewhere else: in the narrow space between payday and due date.

The best test of an economy is not a speech, a campaign hat, or a headline unemployment number. It is a simple question: After the bills are paid, what is left?

READ ON

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STATE OF THE STATE

VaNews/VIRGINIA PUBLIC ACCESS PROJECT

Dominion and NextEra up the ante, say they’ll extend Virginia residents’ bill credits, add jobs if merger approved

By SARAH RANKIN, Associated Press

Power companies NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy, which are seeking approval to merge into one behemoth, announced plans Monday to sweeten the deal in Virginia, Dominion’s home base, where the proposal has faced skepticism from the Democratic governor and legislative leaders. The companies said in a news release that in “response to feedback from policymakers” and others, they would commit to a set of Virginia benefits that includes: a new shareholder-funded co-headquarters tower in the capital city’s downtown, a promise of 600 new jobs, more money toward workforce development and a doubling of previously announced residential bill credits. Amid rising voter frustration toward data centers and concerns about their impact on electric bills, the companies said they plan to extend a $10 monthly bill credit for residential customers to four years from two years.

Spanberger kills Youngkin-era transgender rule

By BRAD KUTNER, WVTF-FM

Governor Abigail Spanberger quietly ended a rulemaking process initiated in the waning days of former Governor Glenn Youngkin’s administration. The rule would have limited transgender students’ ability to play sports and use facilities. But Spanberger said over the weekend the rule is now dead. ... Spanberger told a crowd at Virginia Pridefest Saturday she was moved by the story of a transgender child and the issues their families face.

Va. revenues climb 2.8% in August, remain ahead of forecast

By MARKUS SCHMIDT, Virginia Mercury

Virginia’s general fund revenues rose by $58 million in August compared with the same month last year, keeping collections slightly ahead of the state’s forecast despite signs of weakness in Virginia’s labor market. Collections increased 2.8% for the month and totaled nearly $4.61 billion during the first two months of fiscal 2027, according to the August revenue report released by Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s administration on Friday.

***

Articles from newspapers throughout the Commonwealth and Washington D.C. Firewalls will block you from reading some, but you’ll at least have some idea about what’s going on from the headlines and summaries. CLICK HERE.

This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”

The kitchen table is where economic policy becomes real.

It is where the mortgage statement lands beside the electric bill; where the grocery receipt competes with the prescription refill; where the credit-card balance waits beside an estimate for a broken water heater. Politicians can celebrate stock indexes, tax cuts, and applause lines. Families live somewhere else: in the narrow space between payday and due date.

The best test of an economy is not a speech, a campaign hat, or a headline unemployment number. It is a simple question: After the bills are paid, what is left?

For too many families, the answer is less every month. The administration promised to put working Americans first and make it easier to build a secure life. That is a fair promise to test. But the test is not a rally, a cable-news argument, or a corporate report. The test is the kitchen table.

The administration’s policies must be judged together, not one at a time. A tariff may be sold as toughness. A cut in food or health aid as discipline. A tax cut as relief. A work requirement as responsibility. But families experience the combined result: higher prices, more expensive repairs, less help when illness strikes, and more debt when there is no other choice.

The kitchen table does not care about ideology. It records only the arithmetic.

When the “what remains” line gets thin enough, poverty does not arrive in one dramatic event. It arrives one bill at a time.

Start with food. A family that loses food assistance does not stop needing food. The cost shifts—to a credit card, local pantry, church voucher, or the child who eats less. Food banks are essential, but they cannot replace federal nutrition assistance at the scale families need. Feeding America has warned that current SNAP changes put nearly 6 billion meals at risk.

Transportation is another unavoidable cost. In much of Virginia, including the Fredericksburg region, a dependable car is the price of getting to work, school, child care, medical appointments and the grocery store. That means gasoline, insurance, tires, inspections, repairs and often monthly payments.

A tariff that raises the price of imported parts, tires, appliances or consumer goods does not remain an abstract trade-policy debate. It appears in the mechanic’s estimate, at the register and on the credit card statement. Analyses have found that the combined effect of tariffs and federal fiscal policy could leave lower-income households with the largest proportional losses, while the top 1 percent gains overall.

Health care is where many careful budgets collapse. Beyond the premium come deductibles, copays, prescriptions, dental bills, lab work and emergency-room fees. A family may handle an ordinary month. Then a child breaks an arm, an aging parent needs help or a spouse needs a procedure.

Cuts to Medicaid and other health supports do not make illness disappear. They move costs from a government ledger to a household ledger, where the margin for error may already be small.

Then comes debt—the quiet accelerator of poverty. A credit card pays for groceries one month, a car repair the next and a medical bill after that. Soon the family is paying interest on food, transportation and health care.

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Poverty Is Not Always a Lack of Work

Often, it is the interest charge on a life that costs more than a working family can cover.

Critics call this “welfare,” as though every recipient chose not to work. That is not the full story. SNAP and Medicaid serve children, older adults, people with disabilities, caregivers, students and people working in jobs without adequate wages, stable hours or health coverage. Children represented about 39 percent of SNAP participants in fiscal year 2023.

Many recipients work. The Government Accountability Office found that about 70 percent of adult wage earners in households receiving Medicaid or SNAP worked full time in a typical week. Among Medicaid adults under 65 who are not receiving disability benefits or Medicare, 64 percent worked full- or part-time; most of those not working were caring for someone, in school, ill or disabled.

A safety net is not a hammock. It is what keeps a temporary setback from becoming a permanent collapse.

Taxpayers deserve accountable programs directed to people who qualify. But accountability is not cruelty. Paperwork that pushes eligible people off assistance shifts costs elsewhere—to families, hospitals, churches, local governments, food banks and ultimately other taxpayers.

There is little evidence that punitive work requirements produce their promised result. The Congressional Budget Office found that SNAP work requirements increased employment less, while Medicaid work requirements appeared to have little effect on employment. Good policy should help people find stable work and preserve their health, not remove food or health coverage over a bureaucratic deadline.

And When the Household Budget Finally Breaks, Where Does a Family Go?

First, it turns inward. Relatives are called. Payments are deferred. Prescriptions are delayed. Then come harder choices: groceries on a credit card, a missed doctor’s appointment, the minimum payment instead of the full amount, or postponing the power bill to keep the rent current.

After that, the family enters America’s emergency maze. It calls 211 and seeks utility help, food aid, rental support, Medicaid, charity care or a church voucher. In Virginia, 211 connects people with food, housing, healthcare and utility resources; Fredericksburg directs residents there for referrals to local assistance.

But the referral line is not a magic checkbook. It cannot create affordable apartments, restore benefits, erase medical debt or repair a transmission. Families fall onto a patchwork of nonprofits, local agencies, churches, food banks, emergency rooms and high-interest lenders. That safety net was never meant to replace sound national policy.

Nor does the problem stop with lower-income families. They feel the first blow because they have the smallest cushion. Middle-class families feel the same pressure through the disappearance of theirs.

The retirement contribution gets cut. The college fund stops growing. Emergency savings are drained. A medical bill goes on the card. One layoff, illness, divorce or major home repair can turn a solidly middle-class household into one living paycheck to paycheck.

Middle-class status should mean the ability to survive an ordinary emergency. It should not mean merely being able to postpone one.

A modest tax cut is not a raise if tariffs, insurance increases, health costs, food costs and debt payments take it back before the month ends. A household experiences an economic plan as automatic withdrawals, app alerts and due dates.

This is not about telling Republican voters they were wrong or that Democrats are always right. It is about asking whether the administration’s promises to working people are being kept.

The utility company does not lower the bill because a customer voted Republican. The pharmacy does not discount prescriptions based on party registration. The mechanic does not reduce the cost of tires because the driver supported tariffs. A working-class Republican family, a middle-class independent family and a Democratic family living paycheck to paycheck all face the same arithmetic.

Many Republican voters believe in work, thrift, family obligation, local community and taking care of one’s own. Those are honorable values. But none can overcome an economy that raises costs while reducing help when a job, car, home or family member is in trouble.

Responsibility matters. So does a government that does not punish responsible people for ordinary human emergencies.

The administration should face one plain question: How many families must exhaust savings, delay medical care, rely on a food pantry or turn to high-interest debt before it admits that its policies are not producing the security it promised?

A Responsible Government Changes Course Before a Crisis Becomes Normal

Every voter—Republican, Democrat, independent and unaffiliated—has the right to ask every elected official: “Are your policies making it easier or harder for my family to build a stable life?” That is not partisan. That is citizenship.

The kitchen table is the great nonpartisan fact-checker. It records what came in, what had to go out and what remained at the end of the month.

For too many Americans, what remains is worry, debt and the fear that one emergency will push them from precariousness into poverty.

If the administration cannot recognize that reality—or chooses policies that deepen it—the problem is not the family budget.

The problem is the policy.

***

Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, federal civil servant and consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.

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[Editor’s Note: The League of Women Voters is forming a task force to examine questions about privacy, public-safety, and other surveillance technology issues. They’ll be holding an open meeting at Capital Alehouse, 917 Caroline Street, on Thursday, September 17 at 6:30 p.m. for a conversation about the local deployment and use of Flock cameras.]

panoptic
adjective
relating to the ability to consider or control every part of a subject

The word “panoptic” comes from the Panopticon, a prison design proposed by Jeremy Bentham. The prison would be built in a circle around a central tower. From inside their cells, the prisoners would not be able to tell whether someone in the tower was watching them. Because they could not know, they were expected to assume that they might be watched at any time.

I have been routinely reminded about the concept as Flock cameras have appeared along the roads throughout our community. The cameras are visible, but almost everything that happens behind them is not. As we pass one, we do not know whether it captured our car, whether another camera captured us later, whether those records will ever be searched, or who might eventually be able to see them. Most of the time, probably no one is actively looking for us. But we have no way to be sure when someone is.

For some, the cameras provide comfort. They feel watched over and reassured that police may have another way to find a stolen vehicle, locate a missing person, or identify someone connected to a serious crime. Others experience the same system differently. To them, the cameras are a chronic notice that their ordinary movements are being recorded for possible use in a criminal investigation, even though they are not suspected of committing a crime.

Both feelings are real, but the second raises a question we have not yet adequately answered: Should every citizen be placed under that kind of notice for the mere possibility that recording all of us may help catch some of us?

I do not ask that question because I oppose law enforcement or believe surveillance never has a legitimate purpose. Surveillance can be extremely important in protecting a community and making justice accessible. At a recent discussion hosted by the League of Women Voters of the Fredericksburg Area, Police Chief Betsy Mason described a case in which information from Missouri helped Fredericksburg officers recover a young trafficking victim. It is not difficult to understand why police value a tool that can produce that result.

But the fact that a system can be used for a good purpose does not tell us where its boundaries should be. It does not tell us how much information should be collected about people who are not suspected of anything, how widely that information should be available, or how much control over it should be placed in the hands of a private company.

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Imagine a police department with hundreds of thousands of photographs of vehicles traveling through a city. The department might technically possess a photograph showing that a particular car was near a particular place, but finding that photograph among all the others could be so time-consuming that the information had little practical value.

Systems such as Flock have changed that. The photographs are logged in a database and made searchable. An authorized user can enter a license plate, a partial plate, or a description of a vehicle and search for matching records in moments. The important difference is not simply that a photograph exists. It is how easily one person can search many photographs and begin piecing together where a vehicle has been.

This is also why Flock is different from a traditional local camera whose recordings remain on a server in the back room of a police station. Flock is a nationwide system operated by a private company. The company says its network now includes more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states. Its usefulness is built around the ability to organize information from many cameras and, when access is permitted, share it across jurisdictions.

Virginia law limits how Virginia agencies may share the information collected here, particularly with federal and out-of-state agencies. Those limits are important, but they do not turn Flock into a local system. The cameras, software, accounts, databases, and security protections are still parts of a much larger structure. Fredericksburg may own the information collected by its cameras, but our ability to control and protect that information still depends on technology that Fredericksburg did not build and does not independently operate.

At our recent discussion, Chief Mason assured us that she and her officers use the system in accordance with Virginia law, and that she would not tolerate its misuse. I appreciate her position, but I do not have to question her sincerity to question the system.

Chief Mason can set expectations for the officers under her command. She cannot make the same promise for every authorized user at another Virginia department. She cannot personally review every search made through every shared connection. She cannot guarantee that every account will always be configured correctly, that every claimed reason for a search will be truthful, that every improper search will be recognized during an audit, or that the company operating the platform will never experience a mistake, security failure, or breach.

There are too many hands in the pot for any one person’s assurance to cover the whole system. Local officers use it. Other departments may be given access. Supervisors are expected to review searches. Administrators manage accounts and sharing settings. Flock operates and updates the platform. Other companies provide parts of the infrastructure on which the information is stored and processed. These people and organizations do not all have the same access, but each forms part of a chain that must work properly for the protections we have been promised to mean anything.

Virginia law can require a reason for each search. Department policy can prohibit personal use. The system can keep a record of who searched for what. But someone must still determine whether the reason entered was honest, examine the record closely enough to notice a problem, and take action when a search was improper. The existence of an audit trail only tells us that misconduct might be discovered. It does not assure us that the trail is being followed.

The concern is not hypothetical. Officers elsewhere have been accused of using Flock to track romantic partners and other people for personal reasons. Virginia’s own State Crime Commission also found, in a survey conducted after the state’s new ALPR law took effect, that some agencies reported access arrangements that the law did not allow. None of that proves misuse by Fredericksburg police. It does show why rules and assurances should not end the discussion.

The original Panopticon had one tower. With Flock, there is no single tower and no single person inside it. There are cameras along the road, records gathered in databases, users in different departments, agreements about sharing, company employees maintaining the technology, and laws and policies that the public must largely trust others to enforce. We can see the cameras, but we cannot see most of what happens after we pass them.

Our government and law-enforcement agencies have a duty to protect us. That means giving police effective tools when those tools are necessary. It also means making sure those tools do what we have been told they do, that their reach does not quietly expand, and that people who have done nothing wrong are not treated as possible criminals simply because it has become easy to record and search their movements.

We are not prisoners in our community. We are citizens participating in a relationship with our government that depends on mutual trust. That trust cannot consist only of the public being asked to accept that the people inside the tower are behaving responsibly. It must also allow the public to understand what can be seen from the tower, who is allowed inside, and who is checking their work.

***

Theodore G. Blackwell is president of the League of Women Voters of the Fredericksburg Area. He is a 2026 graduate of the University of Mary Washington, where he studied political science with a focus on public policy, government administration, and intergovernmental relations. Originally from Western North Carolina, Blackwell has lived in Spotsylvania County since 2025.

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11 Number of Flock cameras officially deployed by Fredericksburg Police Department.

100s Number of Flock cameras deployed by local businesses, to which FPD can have access.

$3,000 Annual fee the city pays per Flock camera for maintenance and usage.

0 Number of physical locations of FPD Flock cameras released publicly.

2 Number of FPD Flock cameras at the entrances to the Idlewild subdivision.

9 Number of the rest that everybody knows about as well because they’re easy to spot.

451,649 Number of unique license plate reads by FPD Flock cameras over the past 30 days according to the most recent FPD public report

137 Number of Flock data “search sessions” reported by FPD during that period.

2,540 Number of times the Fredericksburg Flock camera system was “queried” in the past year.

0 Number of times FPD reported that Flock data was queried in Motor Vehicle Theft investigations.

209 Number of times FPD reported that Flock data was queried in Embezzlement investigations.

100 Percentage of FPD police vehicles with ALPR cameras.

1 Number of department use audits required by the state to be conducted each month by Captain Aimee Lynch, the FPD’s Automated License Plate Reader Coordinator.

0 Number of Fredericksburg Police ALPR use audits conducted by outside auditors.

0 Number of instances of misuse of ALPR systems self-reported by FPD in the past year, according to the city’s mandated annual report to the state.

9 Number of required statistics NOT included on FPD’s 2026 mandated report to the state: Number of vehicles stopped based on alerts; Race, ethnicity, age, and gender of drivers stopped based on alerts; Race, ethnicity, age, and gender of individuals charged with criminal offenses as a result of searches.

1 Number of state and federal databases in FPD Flock data system, according FPD’s mandated state report, not counting any left out under exemptions allowed if “the existence of any such database itself is not public.”

1 Number of state and federal databases in FPD Flock data system that is the U.S. Justice Department’s National Crime Information Center, NCIC, overseen by Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel.

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166 Number of state agencies allowed access to Fredericksburg’s Flock camera data, over which FPD has no oversight or control.

1 Number of state agencies allowed access to Fredericksburg’s Flock camera data that are, weirdly, the Virginia Lottery.

21 Number of days Virginia law enforcement agencies are legally allowed to retain Flock camera data, according to Virginia Code 2.2-5517—unless it is tied to an active criminal investigation or prosecution, in which case it can be retained indefinitely.

462 Number of “Hotlist Hits” in Fredericksburg—real-time notifications sent to law enforcement when Flock or Axon scans captured license-plate, make, model, and/or color that were a match when compared against a digital “hotlist” of flagged vehicles—reported over the past 30 days.

0 Percentage of ALPR system data and audit trail data subject to the Virginia Freedom of information Act.

40 Approximate percentage of U.S. law enforcement agencies that have contracts with Flock.

1 Number of states that don’t have Flock cameras monitoring highways (Alaska)

0 Number of people Flock founder Garrett Langley says he’s met who don’t want to be safer.

38 Percentage of Americans who support the use of government surveillance cameras in their communities, according to a recent YouGov poll in the Washington Post.

46 Percentage of Americans who oppose the use of government surveillance cameras in their communities, according to the YouGov poll.

140,680 Number of Flock cameras monitoring and recording license plates, makes, models, and colors of passing vehicles in the U.S., according to the anti-Flock crowd-sources data app DeFlock.

1 Number of times Garrett Langley called DeFlock “terroristic.”

2 Number of deep red-state governors—Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis—who recently put the brakes on spending and/or permits for ALPRs on their state highways.

153 Number of U.S. cities that have rejected ALPRs, according to DeFlock.

20 Approximate number of Virginia localities at the beginning of September that have stopped using Flock cameras since July.

80,000 Number of Flock cameras in data pool a sheriff’s deputy in Texas used recently to incriminate a woman who had allegedly had a medication abortion.

50 Documented number of law-enforcement officers charged or accused of using license-play readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their consent, according to a Washington Post analysis of police and court records.

26 Number of those cases in which investigators said police officers used the technology “to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes’ new partners or women they wanted to meet.”

$300 million Amount exceeded in annual revenue last year by Flock.

$7.5 billion Amount Flock recently announced that the company is now worth.

***

Sources: Fredericksburg City VA PD Transparency Portal, Email response to requests for information from Fredericksburg Public Information Office Caitlyn McGhee, Fredericksburg City Police August 7, 2026 Annual “Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) Data Collection” report, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Cardinal News, DeFlock.

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FREDLINES

Claire Marshall Watkins, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR

Fredericksburg Free Press

Registrars: third-party mailings causing confusion among voters

By Adele Uphaus 09/14/2026

Mailings from a nonprofit voter outreach group are causing “confusion and chaos” for Fredericksburg-area voters and general registrars.

“These mailings have been awful,” Kellie Acors, Spotsylvania County’s general registrar, wrote in an email. “We certainly understand that the company is trying to be helpful, but the confusion and chaos they are creating for our office and voters has been really frustrating.”

The mailings come from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Voter Information, which is a nonprofit partner of the Voter Participation Center. Both organizations, according to their website, were “founded to provide resources and tools to help voting-eligible citizens register and vote in upcoming elections.”

Fredericksburg Regional Food Bank open house highlights community response to hunger

By Grace Wagner 09/14/2026

The warehouse at the Fredericksburg Regional Food Bank was filled with more than boxes of food Saturday as community members gathered to learn about hunger and the people working to address it across the region.

The Food Bank’s 5th Annual Open House, held during Hunger Action Month, brought together residents, volunteers and community organizations for an afternoon of food, activities and conversations about food insecurity.

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The Free Lance-Star

Man pleads guilty electronic solicitation in Spotsylvania

By Keith Epps 09/14/2026

A Stafford man who came to Spotsylvania last year to have sex with a girl he thought was 13 pleaded guilty to multiple charges Monday.

Jason Lee Zirkle, 25, was convicted in Spotsylvania Circuit Court of electronic solicitation of a minor, three counts of possessing child pornography and two counts of sexual abuse of animals. As part of a plea agreement, several other charges were dropped.

Dr Marcia Conston named to Virginia 500 power list 2026

Tidewater Community College President Dr. Marcia Conston has been named to Virginia Business magazine’s Virginia 500: The 2026-27 Power List, according to a Sept. 10 press release from the Virginia Community College System. Conston was recognized in the Education category as one of the business and civic leaders included on the magazine’s annual list.

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ADVANCE READS

Matthew Jeans, Phil Huber, Daniel P. Cortez

I Bought Protein Seltzer. We Need to Talk.

Matthew Jeans, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR

I bought protein seltzer water the other day. So before anyone accuses me of standing outside the protein craze throwing stones, let the record show that I, too, have participated. Was I curious about what protein-infused sparkling water would taste like? Absolutely. Did carbonated water desperately need protein? I’m less convinced.

I say that as someone who takes protein seriously. I pay attention to it in my own diet.

I understand its importance for maintaining muscle and supporting recovery, and I think plenty of people could benefit from being a little more intentional about getting enough. But somewhere between Greek yogurt and protein seltzer, we seem to have decided that adding protein automatically makes a food healthier. It doesn’t.

READ ON

Questions for the CD-7 Candidates at UMW Debate

Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST

A debate is not merely a political show. It is an opportunity for citizens to ask whether people seeking power have done the hard work of thinking through the consequences of their promises.

Campaign slogans are easy. “Cut spending.” “Protect Social Security.” “Secure the border.” “Support our troops.” “Put Americans first.” “Stand up for human rights.” Most voters can agree with the sentiment behind at least some of those phrases. The important question is what a candidate would do when the slogans collide with one another—and with budget realities, constitutional limits and the real needs of working people, retirees, veterans, farmers, employers and families.

READ ON

Column Response: Our VA Hospitals Should Not Be Political Pawns

Daniel P. Cortez, GUEST OPINION

In late August, the nation’s finest United States Marines were on ceremonial display at the final parade of their season at Marine Barracks 8th & I Street in Washington, D.C.

Like the United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps stationed at Fort Myer, their military symmetry and precision remains unmatched in a region known for its pomp and circumstance. It is the same expectations we have across the military, especially for active duty warfighters and our veterans who expect responsible benefits and medical care in both war and peace.

Unfortunately, not everyone agrees, and sometimes the standards of professionalism come expected rather than worked for as a team. I remain disheartened and dismayed that Steve Watkins—the editor in chief of this publication—decided to opt for criticism in the face of a request for accuracy from Quinn Slaven, the press secretary for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, regarding a recent FXBG Advance commentary by a columnist Phil Huber.

READ ON

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STATE OF THE STATE

VaNews/VIRGINIA PUBLIC ACCESS PROJECT

Century-old Virginia law gives lawyers who serve in the General Assembly broad power to delay court cases

By MARKUS SCHMIDT, Virginia Mercury

More than four years after Buchanan County Supervisor Trey Adkins was charged with dozens of felonies, his case has yet to reach a jury. Adkins was indicted in May 2022 on 82 counts stemming from allegations that included election fraud, absentee-voting violations, forgery, conspiracy and embezzlement of public property. He has maintained his innocence. The case is now scheduled for trial Oct. 19 in Dickinson County, nearly 54 months after the charges were filed. Court motions obtained by The Mercury show that Virginia House Minority Leader Terry Kilgore, R-Scott, one of Adkins’ attorneys, invoked a century-old Virginia law at least three times in 2023 and 2024 to seek continuances tied to his legislative responsibilities. ... The provision has drawn criticism over the years from attorneys who say clients can face lengthy delays when opposing counsel serves in the General Assembly.

Virginia tells Richmond airport to reduce its use of ‘forever chemicals’

By LAUREN HINES-ACOSTA, Bay Journal

Concerns around the nearly indestructible family of pollutants known as PFAS have been growing as environmental groups have pushed Virginia to add limits in permits across the state. But the Richmond International Airport may be one of the first required to reduce PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” in its discharge. The Richmond airport is renewing its stormwater discharge permit, and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) added general requirements for the airport to monitor and lower its discharge of PFAS. Some stakeholders say that’s not enough and are asking for specific reduction targets. DEQ is still reviewing public comments and plans to host a public hearing on the permit.

Virginia lawmakers move closer to regulating self-driving vehicles

By NATHANIEL CLINE, Virginia Mercury

Virginia is moving closer to regulating self-driving vehicles, with lawmakers and experts recently agreeing on a plan ahead of the next legislative session as the technology expands and safety concerns grow. Last year, the General Assembly directed a workgroup to consider rules for autonomous vehicles, or AVs, which have been tested in states including Arizona and Texas and restricted in California. Meanwhile, the federal government announced a national strategy plan to accelerate the development and deployment of self-driving vehicles across the country. Leaders in the commonwealth are drafting proposals to establish a framework for implementing AV policy and create an ongoing advisory committee after the group concludes its work. The panel held its most recent meeting on Aug. 28.

***

Articles from newspapers throughout the Commonwealth and Washington D.C. Firewalls will block you from reading some, but you’ll at least have some idea about what’s going on from the headlines and summaries. CLICK HERE.

This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”

In late August, the nation’s finest United States Marines were on ceremonial display at the final parade of their season at Marine Barracks 8th & I Street in Washington, D.C.

Like the United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps stationed at Fort Myer, their military symmetry and precision remains unmatched in a region known for its pomp and circumstance. It is the same expectations we have across the military, especially for active duty warfighters and our veterans who expect responsible benefits and medical care in both war and peace.

Unfortunately, not everyone agrees, and sometimes the standards of professionalism come expected rather than worked for as a team. I remain disheartened and dismayed that Steve Watkins—the editor in chief of this publication—decided to opt for criticism in the face of a request for accuracy from Quinn Slaven, the press secretary for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, regarding a recent FXBG Advance commentary by a columnist Phil Huber.

Watkins’ August 31 post was titled “Veterans Affairs Top Press Secretary Has a Cow, Says He Wants Advance Commentary Taken Down.”

Huber, a Vietnam veteran, took issue with the staffing levels and wait times of Fredericksburg’s new Veterans Affairs medical center where I, also a wounded, totally-disabled veteran, receive treatment.

As a fellow Vietnam veteran who served more than 20 years on active duty and received a combat promotion to sergeant, and as someone who served on both Democratic and Republican Virginia state veterans commissions, I have fixed opinions regarding service and loyalty.

Huber disagrees regarding staffing levels and expediency of effort in serving the large veteran community in this region, citing numbers from two Democrats: U.S. Senator Tim Kaine and Rep. Eugene Vindman. Vindman is running for reelection this fall.

The attempt to frame the present administration as lacking with respect to veterans’ service is purely political, and more importantly, when faced with countervailing facts, absolutely wrong.

That the editor of this publication is willing to quibble with the actual numbers demonstrates not just that this publication printed information in error, but that the object of this disinformation was certainly not to serve the veterans utilizing the new Veterans Administration hospital in Spotsylvania, but rather a cheap and tawdry effort to attack President Trump during the mid-term elections.

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As a veteran, I have found the new Fredericksburg region VA hospital to be exceptional. Surely every new public facility—much like new publications—requires some tinkering on the edges. Surely there are other issues in the Fredericksburg region such as public schools, test scores, the collapsing Renwick Courthouse, and other pet projects of the political left in which patience is urged and results judged by intentions and not impact. Yet put a Republican in charge of the government and all of a sudden hard questions become the norm.

Case in point? Forgive me for being a little jaded, but I’m a 50-plus-year independent writer/broadcaster, and I found the extensive diatribe of gotcha questions in the response to the pushback from the Veterans Affairs bent not just on finding fault rather than common ground, but a mask for one salient point: Huber got his numbers wrong.

What I did find positive was according to statistics provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs, more than 250,000 new vets have chosen to use VA healthcare in Trump’s second administration. This has led to 1.4 million completed or scheduled appointments with these veterans this year.

One might even point out the fact that Veterans Affairs has permanently housed 51,936 homeless vets in FY25 and will invest another $5 billion to modernize and improve health care facilities. These are both record setting numbers.

Certainly there is the need to expand and better utilize the Mission Act to expedite the approval of needed dental or medical services in the private sector when VA clinicians are backed up. This remains an issue I personally presented to VA Secretary Collins and officials during a recent White House function.

I have total confidence that both Collins and Rep. Rob Wittman are working to solve problems rather than assign blame.

The question Huber perhaps wants to ask is something a bit less politically slanted and a bit more human. Are we moving fast enough to meet the needs of our veterans? Surely this should be a question that rises above politics.

According to the math provided by the VA, veterans waiting for their benefits are down more than 70 percent since 2025. During the Biden Administration it had increased by a whopping 24 percent.

Yet if Kaine and Vindman seek to collaborate in the praise, they should have the maturity to take their fair share of their own criticism. After all, Kaine and Vindman are in power. For 18 months we have heard and seen little from Vindman. Why now does he seek to fob the blame on others when the VA hospital and the veterans served are right here at home?

The fact of the matter is that there remain too many individuals willing to cash out the public trust just to make a temporary political point. All of us should be working to make our VA hospitals better. Those who attempt to point out failures while getting the basic facts wrong aren’t making anything better.

In fact, it is the shallow politics of theater that continue to make Virginia worse. Shame on those who participate in it.

Good order and discipline are military hallmarks. Dare we even use the word virtues? Thus the military doctrine promoting good order and discipline—whether active duty or veteran—should be looked at as teaching tools for state officials and members of U.S. Congress.

Vindman’s volcanic temper during town halls, combined with his refusal to engage in debates, signals just how deep entitlement and self-serving has become. His Republican challenger—Doug Ollivant—has campaigned both as an officer and gentleman. Some of us still value these qualities as the core of one’s character, not a stepping stone to something else.

Shame on those who sacrifice truth and accuracy for cheap political talking points. And shame on this publication if it willfully chooses to become a partisan mouthpiece willing to sacrifice truth and accuracy for political position.

That is not what the founders of the Fredericksburg Advance envisioned when this publication was begun. It is not what the readers of this publication should come to expect in the future.

***

Daniel P. Cortez is a presidential and gubernatorial appointee, political writer, and broadcaster who lives in Stafford County.

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The University of Mary Washington just announced that they’re moving the Tuesday, Sept. 15, congressional election debate to Tuesday, Sept. 22. The debate will feature three of the four candidates seeking Virginia’s 7th Congressional District seat: Republican Doug Ollivant, Independent Alaha Ahrar and Libertarian Taner Lopez. The Democratic incumbent, Eugene Vindman, had other commitments and won’t be there. The event begins at 7 p.m. in Dodd Auditorium at George Washington Hall. It is free, requires no ticket, and is also expected to be available by Zoom. UMW’s Student Government Association is hosting the event with local civic and media partners.

***

A debate is not merely a political show. It is an opportunity for citizens to ask whether people seeking power have done the hard work of thinking through the consequences of their promises.

Campaign slogans are easy. “Cut spending.” “Protect Social Security.” “Secure the border.” “Support our troops.” “Put Americans first.” “Stand up for human rights.” Most voters can agree with the sentiment behind at least some of those phrases. The important question is what a candidate would do when the slogans collide with one another—and with budget realities, constitutional limits and the real needs of working people, retirees, veterans, farmers, employers and families.

The following are questions I would like the candidates to answer. If you think they are fair and useful, copy one or more, bring them with you and submit them at the door before the program begins. If you have better questions, write those down and submit them instead.

The point is not to stage a “gotcha” moment. It is to encourage specific, accountable answers.

First: Social Security, Health Care and Debt

For Doug Ollivant:

You have said you would preserve current Social Security benefits while also reducing federal spending and taxes. With an aging population and a federal debt exceeding $40 trillion, what specific changes would you support—or oppose—to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act? What specific spending would you cut to put the federal budget on a sustainable path?

For Alaha Ahrar:

What specific steps would you take to protect Social Security and Medicare and make health care more affordable while also addressing the federal deficit? Would you raise taxes, reduce benefits, cut other federal programs, or accept continued large deficits—and where would you draw the line?

For Taner Lopez:

As a Libertarian, you advocate substantially smaller government and reducing the national debt. Social Security, Medicare and other health programs account for a large share of federal spending. What specifically would you change in those programs, and would today’s retirees or people nearing retirement see any reduction in benefits?

These questions matter because Congress cannot responsibly promise to protect every major program, cut taxes, increase defense readiness, lower health-care costs and reduce debt without explaining the tradeoffs. Every serious federal budget has winners, losers and consequences. Voters deserve to know which choices each candidate would make.

Subscribe now

Second: Immigration, Tariffs and Our Economy

For Doug Ollivant:

Our region depends on federal workers and contractors, small businesses, construction, agriculture and consumers already dealing with high costs. Do you support the administration’s tariffs and current immigration-enforcement policies? Where would you draw the line if tariffs raise prices or immigration enforcement reduces the workforce that farms, construction companies and other local businesses depend upon?

For Alaha Ahrar:

As an immigrant and human-rights advocate, what changes would you make to America’s immigration system to secure the border while treating undocumented immigrants already living and working here fairly? Specifically, who should be deported, who should be allowed to remain, and should there be a path to legal status or citizenship?

For Taner Lopez:

Libertarians traditionally favor both individual liberty and limited government, while you have said America’s immigration system is broken. What should happen to undocumented immigrants already living and working in the United States, and what role should the federal government play in border enforcement, detention and deportation?

Immigration policy cannot be reduced to a choice between “open borders” and “mass deportation.” It involves border security, criminal enforcement, due process, labor needs, family unity, employers’ responsibilities and the basic question of what to do with millions of people who have lived and worked here for years.

Likewise, tariffs are not an abstract Washington argument. They can affect prices paid by consumers, costs faced by local businesses and the competitiveness of American producers. Candidates should explain not only the principle they favor, but also how they would respond if their preferred policy produces harm at home.

Third: War, Peace and Military Power

For Doug Ollivant:

You have considerably more national-security experience than most candidates for Congress and advocate “peace through strength.” What specifically should America’s objectives now be in Iran and Ukraine? How much more American money and military support are you prepared to commit to each, and under what circumstances would you vote to end that support or authorize U.S. forces to enter a conflict?

For Alaha Ahrar:

Given your background in Afghanistan and human rights, what should America’s objectives be in Iran and Ukraine? When should the United States provide military or financial assistance to another country, and what limits would you place on American involvement?

For Taner Lopez:

You argue that American tax dollars should primarily serve Americans and that our troops should not continually be sent into other countries’ wars. Would you therefore oppose further U.S. military assistance to Ukraine or involvement in Iran? Would you also oppose tariffs because they interfere with free trade and can raise prices for American consumers?

Congress has enormous responsibilities in matters of war and peace. It appropriates money, oversees the executive branch and holds the constitutional power to declare war. A candidate should be able to state clearly what American interests are at stake, what resources the nation should commit, what limits should apply and when Congress—not simply a president—must make the decision.

Democracy Requires Participation

UMW has assembled a valuable local civic event: candidates with different political affiliations and sharply different assumptions about government, the economy and America’s role in the world. The announced participants are Ollivant, Ahrar and Lopez.

Go. Listen carefully. Take notes. Pay attention not only to which candidate gives an answer you like, but also to which one answers the question actually asked. Notice who identifies tradeoffs, who relies on slogans and who is willing to acknowledge uncertainty or change course when facts warrant it.

Bring your own question—or borrow one of these. Submit it at the door before the debate begins.

Then practice democracy in action.

***

Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, federal civil servant and consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.

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On Tuesday, Sept. 22 the University of Mary Washington will host a public debate for three candidates seeking Virginia’s 7th Congressional District seat: Republican Doug Ollivant, Independent Alaha Ahrar and Libertarian Taner Lopez. The Democratic incumbent, Eugene Vindman, has other commitments. The event begins at 7 p.m. in Dodd Auditorium at George Washington Hall. It is free, requires no ticket, and is also expected to be available by Zoom. UMW’s Student Government Association is hosting the event with local civic and media partners.

***

A debate is not merely a political show. It is an opportunity for citizens to ask whether people seeking power have done the hard work of thinking through the consequences of their promises.

Campaign slogans are easy. “Cut spending.” “Protect Social Security.” “Secure the border.” “Support our troops.” “Put Americans first.” “Stand up for human rights.” Most voters can agree with the sentiment behind at least some of those phrases. The important question is what a candidate would do when the slogans collide with one another—and with budget realities, constitutional limits and the real needs of working people, retirees, veterans, farmers, employers and families.

The following are questions I would like the candidates to answer. If you think they are fair and useful, copy one or more, bring them with you and submit them at the door before the program begins. If you have better questions, write those down and submit them instead.

The point is not to stage a “gotcha” moment. It is to encourage specific, accountable answers.

First: Social Security, Health Care and Debt

For Doug Ollivant:

You have said you would preserve current Social Security benefits while also reducing federal spending and taxes. With an aging population and a federal debt exceeding $40 trillion, what specific changes would you support—or oppose—to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act? What specific spending would you cut to put the federal budget on a sustainable path?

For Alaha Ahrar:

What specific steps would you take to protect Social Security and Medicare and make health care more affordable while also addressing the federal deficit? Would you raise taxes, reduce benefits, cut other federal programs, or accept continued large deficits—and where would you draw the line?

For Taner Lopez:

As a Libertarian, you advocate substantially smaller government and reducing the national debt. Social Security, Medicare and other health programs account for a large share of federal spending. What specifically would you change in those programs, and would today’s retirees or people nearing retirement see any reduction in benefits?

These questions matter because Congress cannot responsibly promise to protect every major program, cut taxes, increase defense readiness, lower health-care costs and reduce debt without explaining the tradeoffs. Every serious federal budget has winners, losers and consequences. Voters deserve to know which choices each candidate would make.

Subscribe now

Second: Immigration, Tariffs and Our Economy

For Doug Ollivant:

Our region depends on federal workers and contractors, small businesses, construction, agriculture and consumers already dealing with high costs. Do you support the administration’s tariffs and current immigration-enforcement policies? Where would you draw the line if tariffs raise prices or immigration enforcement reduces the workforce that farms, construction companies and other local businesses depend upon?

For Alaha Ahrar:

As an immigrant and human-rights advocate, what changes would you make to America’s immigration system to secure the border while treating undocumented immigrants already living and working here fairly? Specifically, who should be deported, who should be allowed to remain, and should there be a path to legal status or citizenship?

For Taner Lopez:

Libertarians traditionally favor both individual liberty and limited government, while you have said America’s immigration system is broken. What should happen to undocumented immigrants already living and working in the United States, and what role should the federal government play in border enforcement, detention and deportation?

Immigration policy cannot be reduced to a choice between “open borders” and “mass deportation.” It involves border security, criminal enforcement, due process, labor needs, family unity, employers’ responsibilities and the basic question of what to do with millions of people who have lived and worked here for years.

Likewise, tariffs are not an abstract Washington argument. They can affect prices paid by consumers, costs faced by local businesses and the competitiveness of American producers. Candidates should explain not only the principle they favor, but also how they would respond if their preferred policy produces harm at home.

Third: War, Peace and Military Power

For Doug Ollivant:

You have considerably more national-security experience than most candidates for Congress and advocate “peace through strength.” What specifically should America’s objectives now be in Iran and Ukraine? How much more American money and military support are you prepared to commit to each, and under what circumstances would you vote to end that support or authorize U.S. forces to enter a conflict?

For Alaha Ahrar:

Given your background in Afghanistan and human rights, what should America’s objectives be in Iran and Ukraine? When should the United States provide military or financial assistance to another country, and what limits would you place on American involvement?

For Taner Lopez:

You argue that American tax dollars should primarily serve Americans and that our troops should not continually be sent into other countries’ wars. Would you therefore oppose further U.S. military assistance to Ukraine or involvement in Iran? Would you also oppose tariffs because they interfere with free trade and can raise prices for American consumers?

Congress has enormous responsibilities in matters of war and peace. It appropriates money, oversees the executive branch and holds the constitutional power to declare war. A candidate should be able to state clearly what American interests are at stake, what resources the nation should commit, what limits should apply and when Congress—not simply a president—must make the decision.

Democracy Requires Participation

UMW has assembled a valuable local civic event: candidates with different political affiliations and sharply different assumptions about government, the economy and America’s role in the world. The announced participants are Ollivant, Ahrar and Lopez.

Go. Listen carefully. Take notes. Pay attention not only to which candidate gives an answer you like, but also to which one answers the question actually asked. Notice who identifies tradeoffs, who relies on slogans and who is willing to acknowledge uncertainty or change course when facts warrant it.

Bring your own question—or borrow one of these. Submit it at the door before the debate begins.

Then practice democracy in action.

***

Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, federal civil servant and consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.

Share

I bought protein seltzer water the other day. So before anyone accuses me of standing outside the protein craze throwing stones, let the record show that I, too, have participated. Was I curious about what protein-infused sparkling water would taste like? Absolutely. Did carbonated water desperately need protein? I’m less convinced.

I say that as someone who takes protein seriously. I pay attention to it in my own diet.

I understand its importance for maintaining muscle and supporting recovery, and I think plenty of people could benefit from being a little more intentional about getting enough. But somewhere between Greek yogurt and protein seltzer, we seem to have decided that adding protein automatically makes a food healthier. It doesn’t.

Still, protein is having a moment. It’s in cereal. Chips. Pancakes. Ice cream. Cookies. Coffee. Water. If someone releases a high-protein breath mint, I’ll accept partial responsibility for manifesting it.

The obsession isn’t something only happening on grocery-store shelves. A 2025 survey from the International Food Information Council found that 70 percent of Americans said they were actively trying to consume protein. More than a third said they’d increased their protein intake during the previous year.

But here’s the funny part. About eight in ten people in a related survey said they either didn’t know or weren’t sure how much protein they actually needed.

That is an extraordinary business opportunity: We know we want more. we just don’t know how much. So food companies can put the word “PROTEIN” on the front of a package in enormous letters and let the health halo do the rest.

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Protein is important, but a nutrient can’t absolve a food of everything else happening inside it. A cookie with added protein is still a cookie. Protein chips can still contain a lot of sodium and saturated fat. A bar with 20 grams of protein can also contain enough calories or added sugar that whether it makes sense depends entirely on what you’re trying to get from it.

“High protein” and “healthy” aren’t the same.

That doesn’t make high-protein convenience foods useless. Quite the opposite. I understand their appeal because I don’t particularly want to drink all my protein either. There are only so many shakes a person wants to consume. Sometimes a Greek yogurt is easier. Sometimes it’s cottage cheese, jerky, roasted edamame, a protein bar, or something else you can grab without cooking. A convenient protein snack can solve a real problem, particularly if you’re active, trying to preserve or build muscle, or simply need something filling between meals. The question is whether the product is useful, or whether the protein number is doing all of your thinking for you.

Protein requirements also aren’t one-size-fits-all. The longstanding Recommended Dietary Allowance for adults is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. That’s intended as a baseline amount sufficient for most healthy adults, not necessarily an optimal target for every goal or life stage. Needs and useful targets can be higher depending on age, activity, overall calorie intake, health status and whether someone is trying to build or preserve muscle. That’s one reason simplistic protein advice gets messy quickly. A 150-pound sedentary adult and a 150-pound competitive athlete don’t necessarily need to approach protein the same way. But neither person benefits from assuming the food with the largest protein number on the package automatically wins. Nutrition doesn’t work like a scoreboard.

If I compare two snacks and one has 15 grams of protein while another has 8, I still want to know what else I’m eating. Does one have fiber? How much sodium is there? Is it mostly added sugar? How many calories does it provide? Will it actually keep me full? Do I even like it? And, occasionally, the most important question might be whether I wanted a snack, or accidentally bought a dietary supplement shaped like a brownie.

Protein has become especially good at overshadowing nutrients Americans could probably stand to think about more. Fiber would like a word. Fruits, vegetables, beans, lentils and whole grains may not always have “20 GRAMS OF PROTEIN” stamped across the package, but they provide things a protein-fortified cookie may not. That’s why I prefer thinking in terms of an overall diet rather than trying to make every individual food prove that it belongs.

I eat foods specifically because they’re good protein sources. I also eat foods because they taste good. Those categories are allowed to overlap, but they don’t have to. Sometimes I want a high-protein snack that keeps me full. Sometimes I just want a cookie. I don’t need the cookie to undergo a nutritional rebranding campaign before I’m allowed to enjoy it.

And that may be the part of the protein craze worth paying the most attention to. Nutrition marketing has become extremely good at giving foods moral upgrades. Add protein and suddenly a familiar snack feels responsible. Remove sugar and it becomes disciplined. Add a superfood, and apparently enlightenment is available in the snack aisle. But health isn’t determined by whether every item you eat can defend itself on LinkedIn. It’s the broader pattern that matters.

So I’m not telling anyone to stop buying protein products. I won’t. Some of them are genuinely convenient, and useful. Just remember that more protein doesn’t automatically mean healthier, and adding protein doesn’t erase whatever else is in the food.

And if you see me drinking a protein seltzer again, mind your own business.

I’m doing research.

***

Matthew Jeans lives in Fredericksburg with his miniature schnauzer, Mia. He grew up in Tennessee, and has spent most of his adult life bouncing around the country and between music, health, research, and education. He is usually overthinking something, drinking coffee, or being reminded by Mia that she needs attention You can contact him at Matthewjeans@aol.com. Or through his Linkedin account.

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Claire Marshall Watkins, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR

The Advocate

LGBTQ+ middle schoolers took a conservative Virginia school board to court to protect their rights — and won

King George County changed the rules after students tried to establish a GSA. Now it has changed them back, weeks before the dispute was headed to trial.

For nearly a year, LGBTQ+ students in one rural Virginia county watched the adults overseeing their education move the goalposts.

Students at King George Middle School followed the rules to establish a Gay-Straight Alliance. The principal approved it. Seventeen students expressed interest. Then conservative backlash erupted on Facebook, the club was suspended, and the King George County School Board changed its policy so middle school students could no longer form noncurricular organizations.

Now, after being sued in federal court, the board has changed the rules back.

Fredericksburg Free Press

Virginia rolls out more secure EBT cards to curb SNAP benefit theft

By Markus Schmidt (Virginia Mercury) 09/12/2026

Virginia is replacing traditional food-assistance benefit cards with chip-enabled versions designed to make it harder for thieves to steal SNAP benefits from families. About 749,000 state residents receive assistance through the program.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger announced Thursday that the state has begun mailing new Electronic Benefits Transfer cards equipped with chip-and-tap technology to households enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

With prototype complete, planning for Micah’s Jeremiah Community builds toward home stretch

By Adele Uphaus 09/12/2026

Last weekend, the small parcel of land at 404 Willis Street, across from the Oberle Academy in Fredericksburg, sat vacant.

This weekend, a cozy, red, fully-furnished house is settled on a permanent foundation on the parcel.

It’s a prototype home for Micah Ecumenical Ministries’ Jeremiah Community, a neighborhood of small homes with a community center and wrap-around support services for people experiencing chronic homelessness that will be built off Bragg Road in Fredericksburg.

Free Lance-Star

Eminent domain considered for new Stafford water system

By Scott Shenk 09/13/2026

Stafford County is struggling to acquire right-of-way on two dozen properties for the construction of reclaimed water infrastructure to cool data centers at two approved projects.

In an effort to acquire the property, the county is considering using eminent domain.

The Stafford Board of Supervisors will determine whether to hold a public hearing on the matter during Tuesday evening’s meeting.

Stafford trio among nation’s top 2027 merit semifinalists

By Pilar Davis 09/13/2026

The Stafford County School District is in celebration mode this week as three of its students have been named semifinalists in the 2027 National Merit® Scholarship Program (NMSP).

The program, an academic competition for high school students, is based on students taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) during their junior year in high school. Those who score in the top 1% qualify as semifinalists.

The three students recognized from Stafford Schools as 2027 National Merit Semifinalists are:

• Katelyn I. Knauth, Colonial Forge High School

• Vildan D. Soguktas, Mountain View High School

• Charles H. Hughes, North Stafford High School

Potomac Local News

Where readers said they smelled sulfur Saturday

By PLN News 09/13/2026

Readers across Prince William, Stafford and nearby towns told Potomac Local they smelled a sulfur, sewage or rotten-egg odor Saturday morning. Some said it faded by early afternoon. One Woodbridge reader said it came back Saturday evening.

Prince William Fire and Rescue took 21 “outside gas leak” calls between 7:20 a.m. and 1:18 p.m. Crews smelled sulfur. Four-gas meters read normal. Washington Gas reported no system issue. No source has been identified. No shelter-in-place order was issued.

FredNats season ends after playoff sweep; GM Perry heads to soccer

By PLN News 09/13/2026

The Fredericksburg Nationals’ 2026 season ended Thursday night at Virginia Credit Union Stadium.

Fayetteville completed a two-game sweep of the Carolina League North Division Series with an 8-1 win in Game 2, after taking Game 1 on the road Sept. 8, 4-2. The Woodpeckers advance to the league championship series against Charleston.

The loss closed a year in which the FredNats won the North Division first-half title in June, finished the regular season on a seven-game winning streak, and made the playoffs again. They swept Wilson in the final regular-season series, including a 24-2 win Sept. 4 that set a franchise high for runs scored since the team moved to Fredericksburg.

This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”

President Trump has promised that if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate, every adult U.S. citizen will receive a $5,000 “Trump dividend.”

That is a lot of money.

For a married couple, it is $10,000. For Washington, it is roughly $1.2 trillion to $1.35 trillion—before the first check is printed, the first direct deposit lands, or the first scam text arrives: “Click here to claim your Trump dividend.”

So, let’s play a game: Where are we going to find the money?

Not where will we borrow it. Borrowing is too easy. Washington has mastered that magic trick: spend money it does not have, put a patriotic ribbon around it, and send the bill to people who have not yet voted.

No, let us find the actual cash.

The president calls the payment a “dividend.” Fine. A dividend normally comes from profits. Apple pays dividends because it sells phones. A credit union may pay one because it earns money, pays its bills, and has something left over.

The federal government does not have profits. It has taxes, tariffs, obligations, and borrowing. It already spends more than it takes in. That is not a dividend. It is a bill with a ribbon on it.

But perhaps the money is out there. Let the scavenger hunt begin.

The Pentagon

Defense is a big number, and big numbers attract budget hunters the way porch lights attract June bugs.

Regular FY 2026 defense appropriations are roughly $839 billion. Count other defense-related funding and the total reaches much higher.

Aha. Cut defense, mail everyone $5,000, and call it a day.

Except that is not the president’s position. His administration wants higher defense spending, not lower. And if we turn the Pentagon into a cash register, voters deserve to know what gets cut: military pay, readiness, shipbuilding, intelligence, cybersecurity, ammunition, or veterans’ support?

The promise is not “choose between defense and checks.” It is higher defense spending, lower taxes, tougher border enforcement, and $5,000 checks. At some point, even a campaign brochure runs out of exclamation points.

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The Border

Maybe the money is at the border.

Congress has approved about $69.5 billion in recent funding for immigration and border-enforcement activities, including major sums for ICE and Border Patrol operations.

Fine. Cancel the beds, officers, transportation, surveillance, processing, equipment, and enforcement. Put it all into the dividend fund.

Except border enforcement is one of the administration’s central priorities. You cannot promise the biggest enforcement buildup in memory and then quietly treat it as a piggy bank.

Besides, $69.5 billion does not solve a $1.2 trillion problem. It is a huge number until you place it next to a trillion dollars. Then it is an appetizer.

That is the trouble with trillion-dollar promises. They make Washington-sized money look like pocket lint.

The Farm

Perhaps the cash is hiding on the farm.

The Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration appropriation is about $26.6 billion. That supports farm programs, food safety, rural investment, conservation, research, and more.

Excellent. End food-safety inspections. Cancel agricultural research. Forget rural development. Tell farmers to take up computer coding. Send everyone a check.

Except $26.6 billion is still a rounding error beside $1.2 trillion. You could eliminate it roughly 45 times and still be short.

Apparently, even the cows are not carrying enough cash.

And if we cut farm support, food safety, and rural investment to finance a one-time payout, the family might cash the check and then pay more for food later. That is a strange definition of kitchen-table relief.

Grandma and the Doctor

Now we get to the real money: Social Security and health care. This is where the game stops being funny.

Social Security is the government’s largest spending category. Medicare and Medicaid are also among the largest. Together, they provide retirement income, disability support, doctors’ visits, hospital care, prescription coverage, long-term care, and vital support for hospitals and nursing facilities.

So perhaps that is the answer. We pay for the “Trump dividend” by taking it from Grandma.

The campaign brochure might say: “Vote Republican: Get $5,000 now. Your parents can skip a few doctor visits later.”

Or: “A Trump dividend for you. A Medicare deductible for Nana.”

That is harsh because the arithmetic is harsh. If a president promises a $1.2 trillion to $1.35 trillion payout while ruling out higher taxes, spending cuts, and more borrowing, something must give. There is no secret fifth option.

Social Security is not casual “government spending.” Workers pay payroll taxes for decades with the expectation of retirement, disability, and survivor benefits. For many seniors, the monthly payment is the rent, groceries, heat, prescriptions, and car insurance.

Medicare is not decorative. It is cancer care, hospital care, rehabilitation, doctors’ visits, and prescription drugs. Medicaid supports low-income families, people with disabilities, long-term care for many older Americans, and hospitals with few alternatives.

No one has said this proposal would directly cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. No offsets were offered at all. That is exactly the problem. If politicians will not say where $1.2 trillion comes from, voters are entitled to ask what will eventually be squeezed.

Math does not care about applause lines.

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The Kitchen-Table Test

A $5,000 check is real money. For a family behind on bills, a veteran with credit-card debt, a retiree facing an auto repair, or a young couple building an emergency fund, it could provide real relief.

That is why the promise works. But voters should ask: What happens after the check is cashed?

During the COVID-era payments, households used direct checks differently. Some spent money quickly; many used it to build savings or pay down debt. Families living paycheck to paycheck spent more of it sooner.

A huge cash distribution could briefly boost local businesses. But it also puts more spending power into the economy faster than housing, doctors, mechanics, child-care slots, energy, and consumer goods can always expand. The result can be higher prices.

Tariffs can add pressure because importers pay them and may pass costs to American consumers and businesses. The family may receive $5,000 once, then pay more for groceries, appliances, repairs, rent, and borrowing for years.

That is not an argument against all direct help in all circumstances. It is an argument for a plan, an honest price tag, and a clear public purpose.

The Only Answers

So where does the money come from?

Not from “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Washington has been hunting that mythical creature since the invention of the photocopier. If someone has found $1.2 trillion in waste, he should identify the drawer.

Not from foreign aid, public broadcasting, museums, or a federal office with a funny name. You can cut a great many small programs and still be counting pennies beside a trillion-dollar promise.

There are only four honest answers: Higher taxes, lower spending elsewhere, new revenue large enough to cover the payment, or borrowing.

The first three require specifics: Who pays? What gets cut? Does the money come from defense, the border, farm programs, veterans’ care, health care, retirement programs, roads, disaster aid, research, or something else?

Borrowing is the answer that lets politicians avoid answering.

The federal deficit is already projected to exceed $2 trillion in FY 2026. The national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. Add $1.2 trillion or more without genuine offsets, and the country borrows more, pays more interest, and has less capacity when a real emergency arrives.

The interest payments do not go to a campaign rally. They go to bondholders.

The Grift Feeling

This proposal has the feel of a grift.

Keep our party in power, the pitch says, and you receive a $5,000 “Trump dividend.” Do not ask whether the money exists. Do not ask what will be cut. Do not ask whether rising prices will eat the check. Do not ask whether the pressure ultimately lands on Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ care, roads, schools, or defense.

Just look at the check.

The proposal may not meet the narrow legal definition of vote-buying. It reportedly would go to all adult citizens, not only to those who vote Republican. But criminal law is not the only standard. Democracies also depend on norms: public money is not a politician’s personal reward account, and elections are not auctions.

Once we accept this, where does it end?

One candidate offers $5,000. The next offers $7,500. The next offers $10,000, free gasoline, and a “Patriot Kitchen Appliance Package,” delivered after Election Day, subject to congressional approval, tariff revenue, and the availability of microwaves.

Meanwhile, Grandma is told Medicare needs “reform.” The working family is told health-insurance support costs too much. The veteran is told there is no money for clinic doctors. Young families are told the debt is regrettable but unavoidable.

Apparently, the only thing Washington cannot afford is the bill for the last campaign promise.

A serious president—of either party—should say: Here is the problem. Here is the solution. Here is who qualifies. Here is who pays. Here is the legal authority. Here are the tradeoffs.

Anything less is not a governing plan.

It is a campaign commercial with a trillion-dollar price tag—and the bill will still be on the kitchen table long after the applause dies down.

***

Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, federal civil servant and consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.

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By Steve Watkins

We live in a cookie-cutter neighborhood with a fascistic set of HOA covenants and restrictions mandating an oppressive uniformity of color, landscaping, and design. Barbie World (the one before the movie, anyway) could take a few lessons from the Idlewild subdivision. And yet here and there, as Jeff Goldblum playing Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park so famously observed, “Life, uh, finds a way.” I spent several months on my daily dog walks not long ago looking for evidence. Here’s some of what I found.

“No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.”
―R.A. Salvatore

“Just say a word and the boys will be right there

With claws at your back to send a chill through the night air.

Is it so frightening to have me at your shoulder?

Thunder and lightning couldn’t be bolder.

I’ll write on your tombstone, I thank you for dinner.

This game that we animals play is a winner….”

–Jethro Tull, “Bungle in the Jungle”

“Theories pass. The frog remains.” –Jean Rostand

“I am Rabbit. I can be anywhere. I can be everywhere. I am outside time. I am outside dimension. Do you want me? I am yours.” ―Mark Andrew Poe, Ending Easter

“YHLQMDLG” –Bad Bunny

“Of course you don’t believe in fairies. You’re fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn’t a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?” ―Neil Gaiman, The Sandman Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” ―Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

–Joyce Kilmore, “Trees”

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

​Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

​The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

​Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

​–Rumi, “The Guest House”

There once was a canine named Ben,

Who struggled to find peace within.

Then while you were gone

He crapped on your lawn,

And now he just sits there all Zen.

“If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ’em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.” –Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“All this damn mulch! There must be a tree buried under here somewhere.” –Dog

“As long as the hummingbird hadn’t abandoned the land, somewhere there were still flowers….” –Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

Cousin Itt

“If I had Words”

“If I had words to make a day for you,

I’d sing you a morning golden and new.

I would make this day last for all time,

Give you a night deep in moonshine.”

Music adapted from Symphony No. 3 by Camille Saint-Saens, 1886; lyrics by Ella Fitzgerald (possibly).

“Well I’m in love with a big blue frog,

A big blue frog loves me.

He’s not as bad as he appears,

He’s got rhythm and a PhD.”

From “I’m in Love With a Big Blue Frog” by Les Braunstein, Mary Travers, Peter Yarrow, and Paul Stookey

“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.” –George Bernard Shaw.

“Blue moon

You knew just what I was there for

You heard me saying a prayer for

Someone I really could care for.”

From “Blue Moon,” by Billie Holiday

From P.G. Wodehouse, Over Seventy: An Autobiography With Digressions

“I suppose the fundamental distinction between Shakespeare and myself is one of treatment. We get our effects differently. Take the familiar farcical situation of someone who suddenly discovers that something unpleasant is standing behind them. Here is how Shakespeare handles it in “The Winter’s Tale,” Act 3, Scene 3:

ANTIGONUS: Farewell! A lullaby too rough. I never saw the heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour! Well may I get aboard! This is the chase: I am gone for ever.

And then comes literature’s most famous stage direction, “Exit pursued by a bear.” All well and good, but here’s the way I would handle it:

BERTIE: Touch of indigestion, Jeeves?

JEEVES: No, Sir.

BERTIE: Then why is your tummy rumbling?

JEEVES: Pardon me, Sir, the noise to which you allude does not emanate from my interior but from that of that animal that has just joined us.

BERTIE: Animal? What animal?

JEEVES: A bear, Sir. If you will turn your head, you will observe that a bear is standing in your immediate rear inspecting you in a somewhat menacing manner.

BERTIE (as narrator): I pivoted the loaf. The honest fellow was perfectly correct. It was a bear. And not a small bear, either. One of the large economy size. Its eye was bleak and it gnashed a tooth or two, and I could see at a g. that it was going to be difficult for me to find a formula. “Advise me, Jeeves,” I yipped. “What do I do for the best?”

JEEVES: I fancy it might be judicious if you were to make an exit, Sir.

BERTIE (narrator): No sooner s. than d. I streaked for the horizon, closely followed across country by the dumb chum. And that, boys and girls, is how your grandfather clipped six seconds off Roger Bannister’s mile.

*

Who can say which method is superior?”

“Meditation is not evasion, it is a serene encounter with reality.” –Thich Nhat Hanh

“The lizard isn’t listening and the lizard doesn’t care.” –Seth Godin

“For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons….”

–T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“But where do you live mostly now?”

“With the lost boys.”

“Who are they?”

“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses.”

–J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

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By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST

This is a cautionary tale set in Newport News, home of Christopher Newport University—a reminder for an age group that gets most of its news from Tik Tok or Instagram that Big Brother is watching—now more than ever, though not always in the form you might expect.

By day, I am a mild-mannered claims adjuster, and one thing I’ve learned on the job is that there are cameras everywhere, so you would be foolish to lie to the police or your insurance carrier. George Costanza once noted, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”—unless of course there is clear video footage that proves it’s a lie no matter what you might believe.

Another thing I’ve learned on the job is that the great world does in fact spin in only six degrees of separation even if they can’t always be connected to Kevin Bacon. In this cautionary tale, the degrees of separation in Newport News are far fewer than six—and instead of surveillance cameras, sometimes what you have to watch out for is word of mouth, and who happens to know whom.

Here’s where the story begins:

My daughter recently moved into her dorm at Christopher Newport—a sentence I’m still unable to write without my seasonal allergies kicking in. She and her roommate are connected to their neighbors, also two young women, by a shared bathroom.

One night shortly after they moved in, my daughter and her roommate heard a male voice coming through the bathroom door—definitely a concern at 1 in the morning. My daughter has an older brother who graduated from CNU, however, and so she understands that bathrooms sometimes function differently in college dorms than they do in the real world.

Hearing the male voice in the shared bathroom would have been a minor anecdote, a small annoyance, soon to be forgotten, until the spoken word turned to retching that was at a volume much higher than that of the ear buds that my daughter and her roommate quickly plugged in. The retching continued for an impressive length of time.

Once it died down, my intrepid daughter went into the bathroom to inspect the carnage, and discovered that the visitor’s aim hadn’t been what might be called true. She knocked on her suite mates’ door, saw they had an inebriated male visitor wearing a CNU football t-shirt, and suggested the girls next door might want to think about having the guy clean up the bathroom. Or, if his wasted appearance was any indication, maybe the suite mates would prefer to address the matter themselves before anyone had to use the bathroom later that morning.

The vomitter appeared incapable of raising his eyelids, let alone a brush to scrub a toilet.

The key element in this cautionary tale is the CNU football t-shirt. It’s quite possible that the male student in this story doesn’t play football at CNU and was merely a fan of the team. While it may be possible, it is unlikely since this was only the second day that most athletes were on campus, and those shirts aren’t available in the campus bookstore.

What is more likely is that a first-year football player couldn’t handle his drink or weed, and yawned in technicolor all over my daughter’s shared bathroom which only a few hours earlier had smelled of apples, or so I’ve been told.

I have since learned that there is a medical term associated with this type of regurgitation if it is related to excessive marijuana smoking, and that word is “scromitting” which was reason enough to write this column.

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The suite mates cleaned up the bathroom, so all was well with the world, but not necessarily with the football player, who had failed to realize is that he’d puked all over the bathroom of the sister of CNU football royalty: My son B., the recent grad and first-team punter in the New Jersey Athletic Conference when CNU won the NJAC for the first time in school history three years ago.

I feel certain that the only ex-punter who would have more clout in the CNU football locker room than B. would be former NFL punter Pat McAfee only because McAfee is an ESPN personality who football players can watch on their phones.

Of course, as a former college football player, my son did not find the freshman player’s vomitorious actions as distasteful as I did, and also he would never intervene on his sister’s behalf in recognition that doing so could lead to more problems for her. Plus, he wouldn’t want his sister to ever know how much he actually likes her.

As such, the offending player skated because of the football locker room code. Or thought he’d skated, because there’s another level to his failure to handle his drink or smoke, and that is that we own a house in Newport News where my son lives with—wait for it—a CNU football coach.

We would of course never consider waiving the coach’s rent for a month just so he could exact some sort of revenge on the kid who befouled our daughter’s bathroom, but it certainly is fun to contemplate. My wife and I have even spent time over cocktails designing inventive ways to punish the transgression, but—just to be clear once again—we would never even consider actually doing such a thing, mostly because our son and daughter made us promise we wouldn’t.

So kids, as you make your way onto college or high school campuses this fall and think that hiding a vape in the thumb opening of your baseball glove is smart (as one high school kid did on a team I help coach), or that total strangers would love to hear you puke up your guts at 1 in the morning, remember that even if there aren’t cameras there are coaches everywhere.

And as the great philosopher Woodsy Owl so famously said back in the day: Give a hoot, don’t pollute… especially not all over my daughter’s shared bathroom.

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By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST

This is a cautionary tale set in Newport News, home of Christopher Newport University—a reminder for an age group that gets most of its news from Tik Tok or Instagram that Big Brother is watching—now more than ever, though not always in the form you might expect.

By day, I am a mild-mannered claims adjuster, and one thing I’ve learned on the job is that there are cameras everywhere, so you would be foolish to lie to the police or your insurance carrier. George Costanza once noted, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”—unless of course there is clear video footage that proves it’s a lie no matter what you might believe.

Another thing I’ve learned on the job is that the great world does in fact spin in only six degrees of separation even if they can’t always be connected to Kevin Bacon. In this cautionary tale, the degrees of separation in Newport News are far fewer than six—and instead of surveillance cameras, sometimes what you have to watch out for is word of mouth, and who happens to know whom.

Here’s where the story begins:

My daughter recently moved into her dorm at Christopher Newport—a sentence I’m still unable to write without my seasonal allergies kicking in. She and her roommate are connected to their neighbors, also two young women, by a shared bathroom.

One night shortly after they moved in, my daughter and her roommate heard a male voice coming through the bathroom door—definitely a concern at 1 in the morning. My daughter has an older brother who graduated from CNU, however, and so she understands that bathrooms sometimes function differently in college dorms than they do in the real world.

Hearing the male voice in the shared bathroom would have been a minor anecdote, a small annoyance, soon to be forgotten, until the spoken word turned to retching that was at a volume much higher than that of the ear buds that my daughter and her roommate quickly plugged in. The retching continued for an impressive length of time.

Once it died down, my intrepid daughter went into the bathroom to inspect the carnage, and discovered that the visitor’s aim hadn’t been what might be called true. She knocked on her suite mates’ door, saw they had an inebriated male visitor wearing a CNU football t-shirt, and suggested the girls next door might want to think about having the guy clean up the bathroom. Or, if his wasted appearance was any indication, maybe the suite mates would prefer to address the matter themselves before anyone had to use the bathroom later that morning.

The vomitter appeared incapable of raising his eyelids, let alone a brush to scrub a toilet.

The key element in this cautionary tale is the CNU football t-shirt. It’s quite possible that the male student in this story doesn’t play football at CNU and was merely a fan of the team. While it may be possible, it is unlikely since this was only the second day that most athletes were on campus, and those shirts aren’t available in the campus bookstore.

What is more likely is that a first-year football player couldn’t handle his drink or weed, and yawned in technicolor all over my daughter’s shared bathroom which only a few hours earlier had smelled of apples, or so I’ve been told.

I have since learned that there is a medical term associated with this type of regurgitation if it is related to excessive marijuana smoking, and that word is “scromitting” which was reason enough to write this column.

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The suite mates cleaned up the bathroom, so all was well with the world, but not necessarily with the football player, who had failed to realize is that he’d puked all over the bathroom of the sister of CNU football royalty: My son B., the recent grad and first-team punter in the New Jersey Athletic Conference when CNU won the NJAC for the first time in school history three years ago.

I feel certain that the only ex-punter who would have more clout in the CNU football locker room than B. would be former NFL punter Pat McAfee only because McAfee is an ESPN personality who football players can watch on their phones.

Of course, as a former college football player, my son did not find the freshman player’s vomitorious actions as distasteful as I did, and also he would never intervene on his sister’s behalf in recognition that doing so could lead to more problems for her. Plus, he wouldn’t want his sister to ever know how much he actually likes her.

As such, the offending player skated because of the football locker room code. Or thought he’d skated, because there’s another level to his failure to handle his drink or smoke, and that is that we own a house in Newport News where my son lives with—wait for it—a CNU football coach.

We would of course never consider waiving the coach’s rent for a month just so he could exact some sort of revenge on the kid who befouled our daughter’s bathroom, but it certainly is fun to contemplate. My wife and I have even spent time over cocktails designing inventive ways to punish the transgression, but—just to be clear once again—we would never even consider actually doing such a thing, mostly because our son and daughter made us promise we wouldn’t.

So kids, as you make your way onto college or high school campuses this fall and think that hiding a vape in the thumb opening of your baseball glove is smart (as one high school kid did on a team I help coach), or that total strangers would love to hear you puke up your guts at 1 in the morning, remember that even if there aren’t cameras there are coaches everywhere.

And as the great philosopher Woodsy Owl so famously said back in the day: Give a hoot, don’t pollute… especially not all over my daughter’s shared bathroom.

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Humans are the only animals that have to constantly balance to keep from falling down. Our feet are small, soft, and non-prehensile. By the standards of everything else that runs or walks or slithers or swims, we are untenably precarious. Cats and chimps and crocodiles maintain four points of contact with the ground, and a tail too, for something more than mere balance. Ants and beetles, six legs and two antennae. Spiders more. Fish and dolphins are immersed and don’t know the meaning of “falling over” (although they can get swept up in strong currents—literal ones, not metaphorical ones, which is another danger humans endure alone). Birds, our only two-footed brethren, have feet that lock into a gripping position when they are perched or asleep. Their feet are as much as a third of their height when birds are walking, and most have toes that point in both directions. It’s true that we humans can see further towards the horizon than most other animals, standing erect as we do, but is what we’re seeing so important? And what good does it do if we keep losing our balance?

***

Our four families have shared an early summer beach house for nearly 20 years. We were just babies back when we started. My wife and I had the first kid, then year by year, the others did too, until the first place was too small, and we had to splurge for the big house next door. Now it, too, is full, with someone invariably ending up on a hallway couch and a lizard in a plastic terrarium.

From its broad oceanfront porch, we tread our own private footpath over the dune to the beach. Is this the front porch or the rear? We’ve debated for years. From here, are we looking forwards or backwards? We carry tents and chairs and buckets and Frisbees back and forth in a practiced routine. We have a spreadsheet older than the kids with a detailed list of everything we need to bring, all the tangibles for the week. Coffee filters, a sharp knife, puzzles.

For the other 51 weeks of the year, we all live in the same town but rarely see each other, instead co-habiting an endless text thread where we share videos of houses falling into the ocean, hurricanes breaching the dunes, and shark attacks in proximity to our beach. On travel day, we set our phones to show our locations, and watch the four dots representing our minivans roll southward and oceanward. The dots start in a cluster in our home town, spread out along the highway, then re-cluster once we get here. The beach is always right where we left, everything is as it was.

Until this year.

This year our oldest child is off on a cross country road trip and college-bound in the fall. Her absence, this vacancy, is not on the spreadsheet, but the car and the house are filled with it.

Her trip had been plotted out on a large paper map on the living room coffee table for months, and is the culmination of a full year of wishful thinking and hopeful, resilient, planning. The first version included four classmates. One dropped out because her parents couldn’t stomach the idea of four inexperienced drivers covering 7,500 miles in an unsupervised month. Another dropped when she tore her ACL and had to get surgery. When the third lost her father to cancer, it looked as though the trip might not launch. But launch it did, just 36 hours after graduation. All smiles and tears. It is already the furthest and longest she’s been away, and a harbinger of things to come.

***

Check in at the beach house is 4 p.m., but we all make good time and find an unlocked window to climb through at 3. As much as we prefer to unload the car before any vacationing begins, it’s impossible not to hurry over the dune to the beach as soon as we arrive. This year, though, instead of whispering surf and smooth sand, we are greeted by four bulldozers, two pipe haulers, two floodlights on collapsible towers, a portable office on skids, three diesel tanks, a port-a-john, and a quarter mile of rusty pipe laid between our house and the ocean. Another quarter mile of pipe goes straight out from the beach to an offshore dredge. The break in the dunes where we access the beach, our private path, is blocked with a strand of yellow caution tape hung between two stakes pounded into the sand all askance.

As we survey the scene, the pipe, large enough to crawl through, small enough to leap over, gurgles and shakes and trembles and belches a slurry of dark sand and water out onto the beach. The bulldozers, beeping in endless reverse, shovel it this way and that. When they move their piles of sand too close to the surf, the sharp frothing edge of each wave carves off swaths and swallows them back into the water.

A woman with a neon orange safety vest and hardhat hurries over and tells upon us that the caution tape is a boundary not to be crossed. The good news, she says, is that since they work overnight, it won’t be too many days until they’re done. She calls it “Beach Rejuvenation.” They are adding a hundred feet of width to the eroding beach. Putting it back where it once was. Filling a vacancy.

We unpack the minivans, deposit bags in rooms and hallways, make a grocery list. What else is there to do? Someone clears off the dining table and pours out a puzzle. I’m not a puzzle person, but I’m in the minority here. I’m not even sure how everyone else decides what’s a good puzzle and what is not. Another longstanding debate we have every year is whether the jigsaw puzzle box should remain in view, with the final picture there for all to see, or whether we should work from just the pieces. The living room is full of overcast summer light, the kind that makes pillars and buttresses of dust motes visible when the room is still. Luckily, the dune blocks the view of the construction on the beach, but the beeping sounds infiltrate. Why do the bulldozers spend so much time going backwards?

There’s a reshuffling of sleeping spaces this year.

Since our daughter drove off, one thing I’ve noticed is that we still eat meals. We still wash the dishes. Some of the things that should seem different are the same. Some that should be the same are different.

The “Find My’” app is pre-installed in my phone and has been mostly an afterthought all these years. I use it on travel days, once or twice a year. But since our daughter drove off last month, it remains active and I remain attentive to it at all hours. Great Smoky Mountains. Crossing the Mississippi. The Choctaw Nation. Cadillac Ranch. We roughed out a dozen rules for the road. Stay off the highways as much as possible. Don’t drive after dark. Don’t camp where there’s no help in sight. Check in with us often. Bandelier, Mesa Verde, Zion. All, coincidentally, places where the “Find My” feature does not seem to work. Further and further west. Many nights, instead of a reassuring blue dot, it has shown only the message “cannot be found” beside her name. Or it will show some place where she recently was.

Before I go to sleep, I check the blue dot. Somewhere north of Taos, beside a reservoir.

***

Now that I’m in my 50s, a new time of day is emerging. I don’t know its name. It comes regularly and in the dark. I find myself no longer asleep, but not as awake as I think I am. This place, or time, feels expansive but not peaceful. I don’t know what summons me there. At first I thought it might be because I needed to go to the bathroom, and often I do. But that doesn’t explain it, or locate it, or make it disappear. Is it a dream-space? I’ve read about those in other people’s stories. But that phrase doesn’t mean anything to me. It is dark and featureless, never a remembered room or green. It is grounded and gravitational, not merely a non-space. It could be most any place, but unrecognizable in the dark. I recognize myself there, the dot of consciousness that I identify as me. I am free to explore thoughts and memories, though I usually haven’t, as yet. Mostly when I am there it is with a sense of vague unease. There are no reference points. I can make myself aware of the position that my actual body is in, separate from this place. I can take inventory. Where are my people? Where am I? Sometimes I linger there much longer than feels fruitful, or am stuck, neither awake nor asleep, not resting and not—what is the opposite of resting?—Alert? Processing? Acting?

I assume that other people have already been there, because everywhere else I’ve been, other people preceded me. Other people saw it fresher, saw it better, saw it more deliberately. If there ever were an Age of Discovery, a real one, not a colonial euro-centric one, surely it was eons ago.

I have no discoveries to my name. More often than not, I walk on paths. It’s enough to process my own experience without considering that I might be creating a record for all of time, or a path for someone else to follow. Sometimes, some rare fleeting times, I’ll realize that what I’m seeing is a unique convergence of creatures, light, geography and attention, arranged in some new and nameless constellation. Gone as quickly as it appears. The signature of wind on water. The presumption of non-discovery accompanies me in the dream space; that’s part of how I know it’s me. But what if I’m wrong?

My younger daughter says that I’m barely at the beach house, that I’m off birding all the time. But what she doesn’t understand is that I only go birding when everyone else is accounted for. If everyone is sleeping, I might sneak out. Or if everyone is happily working on the puzzle, or reading in a book. My freedom to slip away depends on everyone else being contentedly fixed in place.

***

Another phone app I have—the handy eBird app—knows where I am and notifies me if there are birds nearby that I haven’t seen before. Shortly after arriving at the beach, my phone chirps to tell me there’s Garganey in the vicinity. A Garganey is a small duck that spends its winters in sub-Saharan Africa and sub-Himalayan India and its summers on shallow, freshwater, ponds all across Asia and western Europe. Within that range, a goodly part of the globe when you consider it, they are relatively common. In North Carolina, they are not.

In the spring of 1957, a group of birders reported a Garganey on a pond 40 miles further south of our beach house. There was no question that it was a Garganey, but there was debate about whether it was a wild bird or an escaped pet. The sighting was recorded, but there was an asterisk beside it, as there are beside all unsettled things.

According to the field guide, the males are easily identifiable by a white crescent moon that curves along above each eye and down the sides of their chocolate colored heads and necks. In this summer plumage, their sides and wings are a silvery blend of white speckles and black streaks, like the sunlight bending on the calm water where they live their lives. Its wingspan is about twice as big as the shadow puppet you make by linking your thumbs and flapping your fingers. Just a little thing, as most birds are. It doesn’t do any good to scale them against familiar things, since they are untouchable.

The reports on eBird say the Garganey is at Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge. The north side of the South Pond. Or the south side of the North Pond. Either way, it’s only a short drive.

I head to the refuge headquarters first in the hopes that the staff there will know exactly where it the Garganey might be. It’s busy there. I listen to the volunteer at the information desk tell a family about black bears at nearby Alligator River. I listen to him recommend a shrimp shack to a sunburned couple. He has no idea at all about the Garganey. I think he thinks it’s a shell. He tells me that the shelling will be good on the ocean-side beaches following a super tide later this week. He tells the next group in line that the restrooms are out of service. Everyone is looking for something different.

There’s a long grassy causeway between the two ponds, north and south, with good views into both of them. With binoculars and telescope, I venture out alone. A brisk wind blows the mosquitoes off and scratches dynamic swirling lines onto the surface of the water. There are plenty of herons. Geese. Black backed stilts, which are thin and active waders, with long red legs and bills. I don’t see any ducks. Also, I don’t see any birders. Sometimes the trick to finding what you’re looking for is to find the other people looking for it, too.

The Pea Island ponds stretch further than I can see, although I can see some geographical features beyond them. Even from the observation tower, the edges of the ponds are implied by the presence of things on the other side. Tiny islands of brown grasses throughout offer nesting spots and hiding spots and shade.

After a couple hours, I pack up and head back to the house.

***

We have group photos from every year that we’ve done this together. All of us in a row, then a double row. Some years we stand in family groups and some years we’re all scrambled up. In these photographs, we’re all fixed in place. Whatever chaos went into getting the pose right is mostly forgotten. I can remember setting up the camera and seeing everyone looking at it. And I can remember pushing the shutter button and running into place, looking at the camera, and waiting.

The Beach Rejuvenation does indeed go on all night and all day and all night again. The “new” sand is really old sand, vacuumed up from the bottom of the ocean into the hold of a dredging ship, then brought to the far end of the rusty pipe out at sea. Huge pumps force it through underwater pipes to the beach, then through exposed pipes to wherever the bulldozers are waiting. It comes from the underwater shoals that have been causing shipwrecks for as long as there have been ships. It has never been exposed to the sun before. It might be full of pirate treasure or perfect shells. But from the safe side of the yellow caution tape, all we can know for sure is that it’s full of tire tracks.

The Outer Banks is more than 200 miles long, low dunes, scrubby trees, fragile houses, and sand. The winds and the tides have rearranged them for all of time. We’ve created fixed points by building houses and roads. And it’s only in relation to these fixed points that we have come to see the constant change. It’s nothing to the seagulls and sanderlings who inhabit these edges where sand and sea come together, irrespective of where the collision takes place. But we’ve called in the Federal Emergency Management Association so their various construction companies can move up and down the beach year after year, putting sand back where it was, protecting the houses, trying to make reality match what we think it ought to be. Or what we remember it as being.

One night, while the dredge ship is refilling and the bulldozers are refueling, we sneak down past the caution tape and can hear the surf and see the stars. None of us are astronomers or experts in the common night sky. Disconnected dots that we connect in our minds with animals and stories. A swan, a serpent, a scorpion. Identifying the constellations brings only a semi-satisfaction. That curve over there is Scorpio, we tell the kids. That little cluster is called the Pleidies. It’s made up of 7 stars. Or really 1,000 stars, but only 7 that you can see. Or 12 stars with binoculars. Or 9 stars if you don’t look straight at it. It’s the shoulder of the bull constellation. We tell them these things the same way we might gesture at a shelf of books we haven’t read or don’t remember, in the hopes that they’ll be more interested than we were when someone showed us.

It’s surprisingly hard to show them the few things we do remember, up there. They can’t follow the direction of a pointing finger all the way up into deep space, so we resort to words. “Do you see that one bright bluish star all alone? Go to the left of it until you see the three together. From there, come just just a bit. Connect all those. Can you see a bull? Can you see a scorpion rising up out of the sea?”

The lines last as long as it takes to describe them, then are gone.

I’ve always thought it was curious that the Big Dipper was part of a bear constellation for cultures that never met to share their stories.

***

Sometimes late at night, after checking my older daughter’s location on the app, I take some pleasure in seeing that she’s somewhere that I have been. Inspiration Point, The Narrows. If I have the energy and can escape the pull of social media, I will open the book of my own memory. I know I’ve been to Monument Valley, but what do I really remember? Who was I with? What did I eat? When was it? Where did I spend the night? Why was I there at all? It’s not until I try to revive the memory that I realize that the pages of that book are mostly blank. Only the label on the spine is clear. Grant Canyon Visit.

Is that a symptom of age as well? Does everyone in their 50’s carry a memory library with brightly labeled volumes, blank inside? Do even all my own memories need to be re-visited and stories re-told in order to keep from being sloughed back into the sea?

The spider has eight legs, but my points-of-contact analogy doesn’t work because most of them hoist themselves up off the ground instead of standing firm. They spin a web to support themselves, picking anchor points that they think are secure, criss-crossing silk strands, and then inhabiting the shape they make.

On the fourth morning, the caution tape is gone. The pipe is still there, but the machinery has moved down the beach. They’ve built a sand ramp for us so we can go over the pipe, down to the water. The new sand stretches so far from the house that our feet burn when we cross it. It takes several trips to get the tents and the chairs and the cooler and the towels and the rest of the ‘beach gear’ spreadsheet items across the scalding sand. The new sand is softer than the old. It’s hard to walk on. We liked the idea of new sand. We also like the idea that it is just old sand churned back up and made new. But it’s hard to walk on. Scalding hot, even in the morning.

Nevertheless, midday finds us all set up on the beach, just like we’ve always done. The water is cold, like we remember, but that doesn’t stop the kids from wading out to where the waves break. This year it only comes up to the waist, though. They used to have to hop and paddle to stay about the surface. Have they grown that much? Or is it not as deep as it used to be? A strong wave still tumbles them all into happy heaps, though.

The whole idea of having to maintain balance might sound ludicrous to anything not human.

At mealtimes, the table still feels full. We don’t leave a spot empty for our absent girl. She is both there and not there. There is a language commonly used for grief that I seek to avoid. I want to make sure I reserve that for real loss and irrevocable change. It’s just that she’s far from where she usually is.

Overnight, some part of me wakes up long before my body does. It knows my eyes are closed and where I am and who I am. There is nothing to see in this place. No landscape and no color and no words, though I feel certain that I would have the ability to discern them if there were.

I feel that I could wake all the way up, but for some reason I don’t. I am the blinking dot of a cursor on a blank screen.

Full sleep feels out of reach, from this place. I can’t go back to it.

One time when I was the age my daughter is now, I wanted to see how far into the day I could get without opening my eyes. It took many tries over many days to teach myself to wake up and turn off the alarm clock without opening them. Once I’d accomplished that, it was not so difficult to get out of bed, get to the shower, and dress. I didn’t keep a daily journal of how far I got as I practiced, because I assumed I’d remember forever. I had a big empty brain with lots of space in it. I do remember the frustrating feeling of having my eyes snap open on their own, ruining my experiment by the instinct to orient, realizing I’d have to wait until the next day to try again. It was annoying, but there were an endless number of days still ahead, then. I’d find my way downstairs, eat my breakfast, talk with my bewildered or bemused parents. On the most successful and final day of the project, I made it all the way out the front door, down the front steps, and to the corner of the block. I opened my eyes intentionally then, in order to cross the street.

***

Just at dawn, I bypass the refuge visitor center and drive further south for another viewpoint where the Garganey might be. At the southern end of Pea Island, the oceanside dune is encroaching on the road. The northbound lane has to swerve around it. The ocean has broken through the dunes below the refuge ponds, creating a new, shallow, connection between the ocean and the sound. There is a viewing platform on the southbound side of the road near this point. I can see from a considerable distance away that there are half a dozen birders already there, half a dozen telescopes on tripods. I pull over onto the low sandy shoulder and get my telescope out of the back.

I’ve been birding for most of my life, keeping a serious list for half that time. I’ve never seen a Garganey before. This is only the second sighting in North Carolina. I climb the dune with telescope balanced on my shoulder, the same shoulder that is sore from carrying the heavy beach tent yesterday. There is no room on the viewing platform itself, so I set up the tripod on the sand beside it. The other birders tell me that it’s still there, without my asking. One of them invites me over to her scope. “I’m on it,” she says. “Come look here first, just in case.”

With my naked eye, it’s too far away to see. Through the scope, I can make out two small ducks. One of them is a blue winged teal, with a white crescent between its bill and its eye. They’re common here in winter, quite rare in summer. But in this moment, I’m only interested in it for scale and comparison. The other duck, the Garganey, dabbles beside it, its own white crescent clear above the eye like a helmet. Or as clear as such a thing can be from half a mile, through the heat shimmer of early morning. Having seen it through the scope, I can make it out with naked eye now. I thank her and set up my own scope. I pick it out again.

It is unremarkable in so many ways. It is also thrilling. The pond spreads out for a hundred acres around it. The wind off the ocean skates across the surface of the water leaving arcs and dimples which in turn catch and reflect light. The Garganey is feeding on whatever is floating on the surface, whatever the wind is laying down or the current stirring up from below. Does it know that it’s 5,000 miles from where it should be?

It’s 2,000 miles as the crow flies from the Outer Banks to the Grand Canyon, the westernmost point on our daughter’s road trip. There was cell reception on the rim, but she went backcountry, over the edge, to a campsite halfway down to the river.

I remember being at the Grand Canyon when I was her age and reading the signs telling me how deep it was, how long it was, and how old it was. I remember standing at an overlook and trying to put things into some meaningful scale. I remember thinking that being at the Grand Canyon was something I’d remember my whole life. An anchor point. But I don’t remember where I parked the car or what I had for breakfast.

I remember some point in childhood—it must have been very early—when dot-to-dot activity books were a big part of my life. Not to brag, but I was very good at them. I took special pride in completing one flawlessly, going from dot to dot with deliberate care, and never assuming I knew where the next one was and mistakenly drawing a line where a line wasn’t supposed to be. I also remember the point where it began to bother me that it was too easy to tell what the finished picture was going to be. If I could already see that the dots were going to form a bear, why bother drawing the lines? I started experimenting with connecting the dots differently, in order to form a picture that wasn’t the “right” one. Eventually I switched from activity books to dot graph paper and connected those dots to draw whatever I wanted. Then I realized I could do that same thing, basically, on blank paper, and everything was suddenly, entirely, different.

While the Garganey dabbles for food, another car pulls off the highway behind mine. A woman with a floppy tan hat partially holding back her gray hair, with green pants tucked into her socks, leaves the driver’s door open and the motor running and she scrambles up the dune to us.

The woman with the nearest telescope tells her not to worry, it’s still there. Come look. Bucket Hat gets to the scope still out of breath. She says she’s been on the road for 7 hours. Her hands are shaking. While she gets a good first look, I scan the rest of the pond. The presence of the Garganey changes everything else. A flock of Canada Geese nearby. Little Terns keening overhead. A brown pelican and double crested cormorant fly over. Still scanning with the scope, across to a grassy cove where two greater yellowlegs, a semi-palmated plover and a semi-palmated sandpiper stand on bare mud. I plot them all in my mind, their locations in relation to each other and to me. Connect the dots. What shape do they make?

As the minutes pass, a conversation burbles up. How far have people come? Has anyone got a good photo? What else are people seeing? Who remembers the flamingo showed up here after the hurricane? We are birding not just in space but in time.

While I’m scanning, a deer emerges from the tall grasses and steps into the pond, a hundred yards away. The water covers its hooves but little more. It walks cautiously at first. Then casually. It crosses in front of the geese, the water never reaching its knees. It crosses in front of the distant Garganey. Until that moment, the silver streaked water had seemed as deep as it was broad, a water-filled Grand Canyon in my mind, the Garganey and all waterborne things pleasingly inaccessible. We all, more or less, look away while it passes. A few minutes later, things are back as they were, the presumption of depth restored.

***

Back at the beach house, everyone wants to know if I saw it. There are breakfast dishes in the sink. Evidence of fried eggs on toasted bagels, avocado peels, salsa jars. The puzzle is more than halfway done, and the perspective has shifted. Now the image is perfectly clear, and it’s just a matter of putting in the final pieces for sharp focus and completion.

The dot on “Find My” shows me that our daughter is back up out of the Canyon. It’s still an awfully long way away, but at least it’s there in real time.

This is the day that we take the group photo. All but one of us. In addition to the group photos, I always take individual close-ups of everyone. Contrasty black and white portraits so up-close that chins and hairlines get cropped out. A week of sun and wind makes laugh lines distinct, cheeks blotchy. A week of close contact makes expressions frank. When we get prints made, the group photo goes up on the fridge. The individual portraits get shuffled and scattered, dealt out on the tabletop like a puzzle to be arranged and rearranged in different patterns.

I text all the photos out west that evening, but get no reply.

To the north, home.

To the south, a Garganey on a shallow pond.

To the east, beach rejuvenation.

To the west, my girl.

Overhead, stars in the shapes of lost stories.

Below, shifting sands.

***

Paul Cymrot is the owner of Riverby Books in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

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FREDLINES

Claire Marshall Watkins, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR

Fredericksburg Free Press

King George School Board votes to permit non-curricular organizations at middle school level

By Adele Uphaus 09/11/2026

The King George County School Board approved updates to its policy governing student organizations and a regulation governing non-curriculum-related student organizations following a closed session that began at 8 a.m. Friday.

The updated policy allows secondary school students to organize and conduct meetings of non-curriculum-related groups — a change to language the board adopted last November that restricted such groups to high school students only.

With prototype complete, planning for Micah’s Jeremiah Community builds toward home stretch

By Adele Uphaus 09/11/2026

Last weekend, the small parcel of land at 404 Willis Street, across from the Oberle Academy in Fredericksburg, sat vacant.

This weekend, a cozy, red, fully-furnished house is settled on a permanent foundation on the parcel.

It’s a prototype home for Micah Ecumenical Ministries’ Jeremiah Community, a neighborhood of small homes with a community center and wrap-around support services for people experiencing chronic homelessness that will be built off Bragg Road in Fredericksburg.

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The Free Lance-Star

Spotsylvania man who tortured wife sentenced to 12 years

By Keith Epps 09/11/2026

A Spotsylvania man who “tortured and imprisoned” his wife over two months last year was ordered Friday to serve 12 years in prison.

Jason Louis Robbins, 42, was sentenced in Spotsylvania Circuit Court to a total of 62 years in prison with all but 12 years suspended. He had previously pleaded guilty to child endangerment and three counts of malicious wounding.

Judge Sarah Deneke called Robbins’ actions “horrendous” and added that “the cruelty goes beyond anything I’ve seen in recent years.” Deneke’s sentence exceeded the recommended state sentencing guidelines, which called for a maximum active prison term of just over seven years.

Court records show student sent sexual images to teacher

By Keith Epps 09/11/2026

The Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office is investigating a case involving sexually explicit images sent to a county high school teacher from a student at the school, court records show.

According to an affidavit for a search warrant filed in Spotsylvania Circuit Court, Detective M.L. Goosman began an investigation on Tuesday after getting a report from the school resource officer at Massaponax High School. The resource officer, Sgt. F. C. Belcher, told Goosman that the teacher claimed to have received inappropriate messages and images from a juvenile student.

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Potomac Local News

Stafford supervisors set Sept. 15 hearing on bringing back BPOL tax

By PLN News 09/11/2026

Stafford County is the largest locality in Virginia without a Business, Professional and Occupational License tax. On Tuesday, Sept. 15, supervisors will hold a public hearing on whether to bring BPOL back.

Listen to the audio version above, or watch the full Potomac Local News Podcast at the bottom of this story. The interviews with Commissioner of the Revenue Scott Mayausky and former supervisor Paul Milde are the source for what follows. The episode is also on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, RSS.com, and wherever you already get podcasts.

BPOL is a local tax on a business’s gross receipts — total revenue — not profit. A firm can lose money after rent, payroll, and inventory and still owe the tax. Stafford repealed its version around 2008 and has since collected a merchants’ capital tax on retailers’ inventory, which Mayausky said brings in about $1.1 million a year.

Dog Krazy leases downtown HQ; William Street store stays put

By PLNS News 09/11/2026

Dog Krazy has leased a second downtown Fredericksburg building for corporate headquarters and franchise training, founder Nancy Guinn said, while stressing that the William Street retail store is not moving.

The company is already in at 1600 Princess Anne St. Guinn said in an on-the-record email Sept. 6 that the space will house corporate offices, training for new franchise owners and their teams, product and vendor sessions, and systems used across Dog Krazy stores. It is not a retail shop.

Fredericksburg moves factory-built houses onto regular lots, with data-center and parking rules in the same vote (paywalled)

By PLN News 09/11/2026

Fredericksburg took a first step Tuesday toward letting factory-built manufactured homes sit on ordinary house lots, the same way a house framed on the site can.

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ADVANCE READS

Hank Silverberg, Phil Huber, Bruce Saller

9/11: A Reporter’s Journal

Hank Silverberg, ADVANCE CORRESPONDENT

At the radio station, calm chaos. Almost everyone had reported in or had headed to key points of the disaster. All commercials had been scratched, and it was full speed ahead.

Shortly after I arrived, I received a tip from a friend I knew in the Senate Press gallery on Capitol Hill. The entire complex was being evacuated. We learned later that was because they thought Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m., was headed for the Capitol. I believe we were the first to report it.

My assignment that day was to go on the air live every 20 minutes and give a summary of the latest information which was coming in fast. I did that for 15 hours straight. Many of my colleagues worked much longer hours.

READ ON

The Court They Built—and the Monster It Unleashed

Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST

Donald Trump did not create America’s constitutional crisis alone. He inherited a political system already weakened by leaders who treated constitutional duty as a partisan tool, then learned how to exploit every loose bolt, broken guardrail, and act of institutional cowardice.

Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans did not set out to create a Trump monster. They set out to create what they considered the perfect conservative Supreme Court: Ideologically reliable, durable, insulated from voters, hostile to regulation, and ready to reverse decades of legal precedent.

They succeeded.

READ ON

Second life for Electric Vehicle Batteries

Bruce Saller, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR

Large-scale battery storage facilities have been installed around the U.S. at a 70 percent annual growth rate since 2021. During the first half of 2026, 8.3 billion watts of battery storage were added. Besides providing backup power to solar and wind generation, batteries help stabilize the electric grid. A generator’s ramp rate measures how fast it can increase or decrease its power output. The ramp rate is measured in either millions of watts per minute, or percentage change per minute. Nuclear plants have the lowest ramp rate (1-3 percent), followed by coal (2-6 percent), natural gas (8-10 percent) and battery storage (100 percent).

The recent Dominion transmission-line fault resulted in a 3-billion-watt power reduction by data centers, causing significant voltage fluctuations in the eastern U.S. Data centers will continue to cause significant power swings as they switch their loads on and off for testing, peak demand reduction. and other reasons. So, adding battery storage to the grid will greatly reduce the voltage fluctuations.

READ ON

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STATE OF THE STATE

VaNews/VIRGINIA PUBLIC ACCESS PROJECT

In rare move, SCC orders three in-person hearings for NextEra-Dominion merger case

By SHANNON HECKT, Virginia Mercury

The State Corporation Commission has ordered additional chances for the public to officially testify in the case to approve or reject the proposed $67 billion NextEra-Dominion merger, Virginia regulators said Thursday. In addition to the three days for telephonic testimony already planned at the beginning of the case, the commissioners mandated three in-person hearings across Dominion’s Virginia coverage area. This will allow additional opportunities for residents to weigh in on the merger that could create the largest regulated utility in the world, as the public and state lawmakers heighten their scrutiny of the deal.

Virginia ponders lessons 25 years after Sept. 11 attacks

By MICHAEL MARTZ, Richmond Times-Dispatch (Subscription Required)

When Arlington County Fire Chief Ed Plaugher arrived at the burning Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, he made an unusual decision about who would take charge of the emergency response to a terrorist attack on the center of the United States military establishment. Deputy Fire Chief Jim Schwartz was already on the scene, along with a regional special agent for the FBI with whom he worked closely, minutes after Al-Qaida terrorists slammed a hijacked passenger plane into the massive, five-sided building, killing 184 employees, passengers and flight crew members.

Virginia nursing homes are short-staffed. So are the agencies tasked with watching them.

By YIQING WANG, WHRO

When Susan Fanning broke her ankle, she could no longer use the bathroom on her own. At her Chesapeake nursing home, she recalled waiting more than three hours in a wet incontinence brief for someone to change it. Other times, she said, medication she expected at 9 p.m. did not arrive until around midnight. Fanning has lived at Chesapeake Health and Rehabilitation Center for about a year. She said the employees in her unit and the facility’s physical therapists are great. But her concern is whether enough people are available to provide care. “There’s no loyalty here, so people come and go, come and go all the time,” Fanning said.

How trout fishers in Virginia are using FOIA to beat the competition

By ANDREW KERLEY, Cardinal News

Anglers are using the Freedom of Information Act to jump the gun on fishing trout as soon as they are released into Virginia’s many freshwater creeks, rivers and lakes. The exploit was brought up during a Department of Wildlife Resources meeting in August by Kent Sylvester, a retired Army aviator living in Virginia who enjoys fly-fishing. “I would talk to guys [in Bath County], and they’re like, ‘Yeah, the trout truck is going to come tomorrow,’” Sylvester recalled. “And I’m like, ‘How do you know about it tomorrow?’ … Well, it’s called FOIA.” Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, is often used by journalists. But it allows any citizen to request public records held by state or local officials. As it turns out, that includes the exact schedule for when the department plans to stock bodies of water with trout.

***

Articles from newspapers throughout the Commonwealth and Washington D.C. Firewalls will block you from reading some, but you’ll at least have some idea about what’s going on from the headlines and summaries. CLICK HERE.

This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”

Large-scale battery storage facilities have been installed around the U.S. at a 70 percent annual growth rate since 2021. During the first half of 2026, 8.3 billion watts of battery storage were added. Besides providing backup power to solar and wind generation, batteries help stabilize the electric grid. A generator’s ramp rate measures how fast it can increase or decrease its power output. The ramp rate is measured in either millions of watts per minute, or percentage change per minute. Nuclear plants have the lowest ramp rate (1-3 percent), followed by coal (2-6 percent), natural gas (8-10 percent) and battery storage (100 percent).

The recent Dominion transmission-line fault resulted in a 3-billion-watt power reduction by data centers, causing significant voltage fluctuations in the eastern U.S. Data centers will continue to cause significant power swings as they switch their loads on and off for testing, peak demand reduction. and other reasons. So, adding battery storage to the grid will greatly reduce the voltage fluctuations.

A less expensive alternative to using new batteries for storage is to repurpose used electrical-vehicle batteries. Battery capacity decreases about 1-3 percent a year for the average driver, and batteries are typically replaced after 15 years of use. At that point they still have 70-80 percent of their capacity left, and can be used in battery storage facilities for another 15 years before going off to be recycled.

Several companies in the U.S. are now modifying these batteries to be used in storage systems. Building a storage system with used batteries costs 30-50 percent less than using new batteries, and also has a much smaller environmental impact.

Utilities plan to install another 54 billion watts of battery storage by the end of 2028, so there will continue to be large demand for used electric vehicle batteries.

***

Bruce Saller is a retired systems engineer with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.

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Donald Trump did not create America’s constitutional crisis alone. He inherited a political system already weakened by leaders who treated constitutional duty as a partisan tool, then learned how to exploit every loose bolt, broken guardrail, and act of institutional cowardice.

Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans did not set out to create a Trump monster. They set out to create what they considered the perfect conservative Supreme Court: Ideologically reliable, durable, insulated from voters, hostile to regulation, and ready to reverse decades of legal precedent.

They succeeded.

Then they learned the oldest lesson in politics: When you build power without brakes, you eventually hand the keys to someone who does not believe in stopping.

Call it the Trump monster. Call it Frankenstein. The more accurate metaphor is this: Conservative leaders built the laboratory, assembled the parts, supplied the electricity, and were shocked when the creature began smashing through constitutional walls.

The story begins with a distinction that matters. Arguments about the Constitution’s text, history, and original meaning are not new. Lawyers and judges have long debated what the Framers intended and how much weight history should carry. But modern originalism—the highly organized judicial philosophy now associated with the conservative legal movement—was not the historic constitutional religion of the Republican Party.

It was developed as a modern political and legal project.

The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and even Richard Nixon was not united behind today’s version of originalism. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren and William Brennan, two justices who helped define the modern Court’s expansive reading of civil rights and individual liberty. Theodore Roosevelt criticized courts that blocked democratic responses to industrial inequality. Nixon spoke of “strict construction,” but that slogan was not the carefully organized, judge-vetting movement that followed.

The modern originalist revolution took shape in the 1970s and became a governing strategy during the Reagan administration. Attorney General Edwin Meese III announced in a 1985 American Bar Association speech that constitutional law should rest on a “Jurisprudence of Original Intention.” The Reagan Justice Department was not simply joining an academic debate. It was announcing an agenda: use the executive branch, federal courts, legal scholarship, and judicial nominations to redirect the Constitution toward conservative outcomes. (U.S. Department of Justice)

That was the beginning of an institutional project that went far beyond any one election.

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The Federalist Society, founded in 1982, helped build the infrastructure: Law-school chapters, professional networks, litigation support, judicial candidates, and a common language of limited government, originalism, and opposition to what conservatives called judicial activism. (Federalist Society) The point was not merely to win arguments. It was to place judges on the bench who could reshape the country for decades.

Donald Trump did not invent that project. He was its most useful vehicle.

McConnell understood this better than almost anyone in Washington. In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia died, President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy. McConnell did not merely oppose Garland. He announced that the Senate would not meet with him, hold hearings, or give him a vote. Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans publicly pledged not to move forward with any Obama nominee. (Politico)

That was a conscious choice to deny a sitting president his constitutional role so that a future Republican president could fill the seat.

Then, in 2020, McConnell’s Senate performed the opposite maneuver. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died shortly before the election, the Senate rushed Amy Coney Barrett through confirmation. Barrett was confirmed on October 26, 2020, by a 52–48 vote, even though millions of Americans had already cast ballots (U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote No. 224)

The rule was simple: There was no rule. There was only power.

Those two maneuvers, together with Trump’s appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, helped produce the 6–3 conservative majority that now dominates the Court. The Court’s own biographies identify Trump as the nominating president for Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett (Supreme Court of the United States)

On some issues, the Court has delivered precisely what its builders wanted.

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, declaring that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion. (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) This was not an accidental consequence. It was a central objective of the conservative legal and political movement for half a century.

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court overruled the Chevron doctrine, which had generally required courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous laws. The result is to shift more power from expert agencies to judges, making it harder for government to implement laws Congress itself wrote. (Congressional Research Service)

Again, that was no surprise. Weakening the administrative state has been a conservative objective for decades.

But then came the Frankenstein moment.

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In Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court held that a former president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct within his core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for official acts. (Trump v. United States) The majority said unofficial acts remain subject to prosecution. Yet the real-world effect is delay, uncertainty, and a powerful legal shield for a president willing to blur the line between official authority and personal political survival.

That is where the Court’s conservative project becomes something more alarming. A Court designed to restrain government agencies and overturn liberal precedents has also enlarged the room in which a president can evade accountability.

The justices may say they were protecting the presidency, not Trump. But constitutional rules must be judged by how they work when the least restrained person holds office—not when a careful, honorable president does.

Congress deserves no less blame.

For years, too many members of Congress have substituted press releases for oversight and partisan theater for governing. They complain after presidents stretch their authority but refuse to use the powers the Constitution gives them: Appropriations, investigations, subpoenas, legislation, impeachment, and the power to set the structure of the federal judiciary.

Congress is not helpless before the Supreme Court. The Constitution does not say there must be nine justices. Congress has changed the Court’s size before, and proposed legislation has called for increasing the number from nine to thirteen. (Judiciary Act of 2023) That should not be dismissed as heresy. It should be debated seriously.

Court expansion is not a magic wand, nor should it be revenge. It could trigger escalation whenever political power changes hands. But neither should Americans treat nine seats as sacred, lifetime appointments as beyond reform, or an ethics code without enforceable discipline as adequate protection for democracy.

Congress should enact binding ethics, disclosure, and recusal requirements. It should seriously consider term limits. It should restore meaningful oversight of presidential power. And it should openly debate whether a Court captured through procedural hardball deserves to remain structurally untouched.

The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act has proposed stronger ethical standards, financial disclosures, and recusal requirements for justices—basic protections that should not be controversial in a democracy. (Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act of 2023)

The most important point is this: McConnell and his allies did not necessarily intend to create a president who sees the law as optional. They intended to create a permanent conservative Court. But they pursued that goal through tactics that weakened constitutional norms, rewarded raw power, and taught future presidents that rules are merely obstacles to be routed around.

They built the laboratory. They assembled the Court. They weakened the guardrails. Trump merely showed them what their creation could do.

The public’s task now is not to admire the monster, excuse its creators, or wait for someone else to save us. It is to elect members of Congress willing to reclaim the powers they surrendered—and willing to put constitutional restraints ahead of partisan victory.

***

Phil Huber is a retired Army Reserve colonel, federal civil servant and consultant who writes on civic education. He lives in Fredericksburg.

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