“Real friends do not get offended when you insult them. They smile and call you something even more offensive.”
–The Tao Of Frank.
We who live in the Commonwealth are facing a bleak future. The Democrats in Northern Virginia and Richmond are imposing a radical Left-wing agenda on our population, relying on Democrat lies and mainstream media complicity to impose Abigail Spanberger on us. The Observations’ use of the phrase “California East” is not hyperbole. It is a frightening reality. Below is a column by David Catron which summarizes what Virginia faces in the next 4 years.
Below Mr. Catron’s column is an analysis of the situation in Canada, and how it compares to that in Venezuela. Will Barclay suggests that Canada under its recent leadership is a threat to the national security interests of the United States. Enjoy.
The Abigail Spanberger Bait-and-Switch
Virginia voted for a ‘moderate’ — and got a sanctuary state, tax-and-spend ideologue.
BY: David Catron, The American Spectator (February 1, 2026).
During the 2025 gubernatorial election the voters of Virginia believed they were choosing between pragmatic Democrat Rep. Abigail Spanberger and lackluster Republican Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. The former was well funded and portrayed favorably by the corporate “news” media as a centrist, while the latter struggled to raise money and was labeled an extremist because of her strong support of gun rights. In the end, Spanberger won by double digits, and most Virginians thought they were getting a slightly more liberal governor than her predecessor, Glenn Youngkin. Yet the moment she took office, it became obvious that Gov. Spanberger was no moderate.
This is something to remember as the 2026 midterms approach. Every Democrat who utters the word “affordability” must be regarded as a con artist.
Immediately upon assuming office, she signed an executive order that reversed her predecessor’s policy whereby state and local law enforcement were required to cooperate with federal immigration authorities to detain illegal aliens convicted of criminal offences. This order sent a clear message that Spanberger viewed immigration through the ideological lens of far-left Democrats like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz rather than the moderate perspective she espoused during the election. She didn’t deign to tell Virginia’s voters how limiting cooperation with DHS would protect them and their families from criminals who are in the country illegally. Instead, she recited the tired shibboleths echoed in every sanctuary state:
Ultimately, I am looking to every step forward that we can take as a commonwealth to ensure that our communities are safe and protected … Frankly, the fear and concern that we’ve seen in other places where people without any sort of designation — unannounced, wearing masks — are taking people off the streets, the level of fear that that’s created and the level of distrust and confusion is certainly not contributing to any strengthening of our communities, let alone keeping our communities safer.
Spanberger further revealed her far-left ideological governing philosophy when she moved to bring Virginia back into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). As the American Energy Alliance explains, “RGGI is a regional cap-and-trade program in the Northeast that requires power plants to buy “allowances” to emit carbon dioxide. These allowance costs are naturally passed on to the consumer, inevitably raising electricity prices.” Former Gov. Glenn Youngkin had pulled the Old Dominion out of RGGI. According to Youngkin, from the time the state originally joined RGGI until the time it finally pulled out in 2024, the Commonwealth’s residents paid $828 million in a regressive interstate tax imposed via their electricity bills.
Why would Spanberger, who yammered endlessly about “affordability,” rejoin RGGI knowing full well that it will increase the cost of living for everyone in Virginia? The obvious answer is that her desire to bring down the cost of living is far outweighed by her allegiance to the leftist ideology that is rapidly infiltrating the Democratic Party. Nowhere is this more obvious than the avalanche of new taxes under which the Old Dominion’s hapless residents will soon be smothered. As abc7 reports, “Virginia
Democrats have introduced more than fifty new tax proposals this legislative session.” Surely this is an exaggeration? Nope. The following is a partial list of new taxes Gov. Spanberger and her legislative accomplices are seriously considering:
- Additional local sales tax in all Virginia counties and cities
- New personal property tax on electric leaf blowers and electric landscaping equipment
- Large employer tax
- Gun and ammunition tax
- Delivery tax on Amazon, Uber Eats, FedEx, and UPS orders in Northern Virginia
- Investment income tax
- Event tax
- Storage facility tax
- Gym membership tax
- Dog walking tax
- Dog grooming tax
- Counseling tax
- Digital personal property tax
- New car taxes and highway use fees
- Increase in the hotel tax in Arlington
- Vehicle repair tax
- Home repair tax
- Dry cleaning tax
But wait, there’s more: “Virginia Democrats are also looking at proposing a 4.3% tax on rideshare trips and an additional 1.9% tax on top of that for trips in Northern Virginia.” One would expect that a governor who ran on “affordability” would veto almost all of this proposed theft — and that’s what it is — but Spanberger will sign any tax bill that her Democrat-dominated legislature slaps on her desk.
Why? She believes this money can be more efficiently spent by the state than by the people who earned it. Yet there is no small amount of poetic justice in all of this nonsense. Spanberger and her co-conspirators in the General Assembly were elected by the bureaucrats who colonized Northern Virginia. Now they pay — albeit with your tax money.
This is something to remember as the 2026 midterms approach. Every Democrat who utters the word “affordability” must be regarded as a con artist. Any Democrat described by the corporate media as a moderate will pick your pocket without hesitation. There is no such thing as a moderate Democrat.
Abigail Spanberger is not an outlier. She is all too typical of the party to which she belongs. They are all left-wing extremists and determined to “fundamentally transform” the U.S. into a dystopian hellhole if they are returned to power.
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Canada Looks an Awful Lot Like Venezuela. And Trump Has Noticed.
Canada’s liberal experiment has put it on the wrong side of Trump’s democratic revival.
BY: Will Barclay, The American Spectator (February 1, 2026).
Recently, the United States of America (USA) successfully completed Operation: Absolute Resolve and, thereby, liberated the Venezuelan people from Nicolás Maduro’s brutal socialist regime.
More importantly, it is readily apparent that Carney and other corrupt politicians do not have the luxury of delay, nor the time to bluff and posture.
More importantly, Maduro’s rapid dispatch and America’s open pursuit of democracy’s resurgence have now forced a bevy of corrupt leaders and nations to scurry out and confront their sins in the light of the new American epoch.
Unfortunately, it is clear that even the U.S’s historic ally, Canada, has been badly disfigured by its past decade of Liberal government and transformed into a fortress of hyper left-wing politics that now echoes many aspects of Maduro’s Venezuela.
And therefore, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, must now begin to abandon the Liberal government’s own corrupt, neo-socialist, politics, if Canada is to escape the ire of Trump’s America and survive the U.S.’s modern renaissance as democracy’s champion.
Firstly, throughout the modern era, Canada’s Liberal government has lapsed into fascism and forcibly imposed its own hyper left-wing ideology upon all of Canadian society.
For example, for over a decade, the Liberal government has consistently oppressed fundamental human rights, such as free speech and religious freedom. In fact, the Liberal government has transformed the CBC, as well as the RCMP, into enthusiastic orifices of left-wing propaganda. In 2022, the Liberal government openly violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms itself, in a vulgar effort to oppress every ideology outside its own left-wing dogma during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition, Canadian citizens have routinely been prevented from espousing right-wing political values at public forums,: “Nearly half of all Canadian university students are actively concealing their real opinions for fear of sanction or mistreatment,” due to the open climate of ideological oppression that his been cultivated within Canadian academia. Worse still, the Liberal government now seeks the power to punish any Canadian with a lifetime of imprisonment for a slew of vaguely defined hate-crimes that amount almost entirely to right-wing “wrongthink” and any values or ideology that are not utterly left-wing.
Moreover, the Liberal government’s neo-socialist politics and hyper left-wing ideology have collapsed the Canadian economy and severely eroded quality of life.
For instance, due to the fact that Canada has vainly sought to “[rely] on immigration to drive economic growth and plug labor gaps,” Canada’s GDP per capita has crumbled, and a slew of respected economic indicators have all concluded that the Canadian state is currently mired in “the longest decline in individual living standards of the last 40 years.” Even the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) itself has confirmed that Canada will actually boast “the single worst performing economy of all 38 OECD members” until 2060.
Sadly, Canada’s unemployment rate has now also “jump[ed] to a nine-year high, outside the pandemic” and youth unemployment has hit levels typically “seen during a recession,” as a result of Liberal initiatives such as the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFW). In fact, since 2019, food bank usage in Canada has increased by nearly 100 percent and over 25 percent of all Canadians currently suffer from food insecurity with “one third of food bank clients [now being] children.”
Furthermore, the past decade of Liberal government has transformed Canada into an urgent national security threat to the United States of America.
For example, the Rule of Law is collapsing in countless major cities across Canada and the Canadian state has started to become openly unsecure and unsafe. Astonishingly, Canada now displays the quintessential hallmarks of any failing or failed state, and the Liberal government’s shameful inability to secure Canada’s borders has permitted the violent insecurity that now menaces the Canadian people to bleed over into America and openly threaten the security of the America.
In addition, the Canadian state has become an outpost of Chinese influence in North America and utterly beholden to the national interests of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In fact, the Liberal Party itself has long been corrupted by the PRC’s influence and rendered unto the Chinese state. Even Prime Minister Carney himself recently lauded the “new strategic partnership” between the PRC and Canada, and openly declared that “the progress [Canada and the PRC] have made in the partnership sets us up well for the New World Order.”
Finally, Canada is itself a vital geo-strategic asset and home to vast reserves of oil, as well as countless other valuable resources.
For instance, the Canadian nation is a major global energy supplier, and Canada actually possesses “the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves,” ranking only behind Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela, whose oil is already, effectively, America’s property. In fact, oil, natural gas, and other refined products “are a critical component of Canada’s exports, making up about 20 percent of Canada’s balance of trade,” and Canada is currently one of the largest producers of crude oil on the world stage.
Canada is also an immense source of fresh water, as well as various Rare-Earth Elements (REE) and Critical Minerals, such as aluminum, that are all absolutely crucial to the American economy and industrial complex. In addition, any annexation of Canada and its northern territories will inevitably afford America with an immediate, invaluable, foothold in its current crusade to defend the international progress of Democracy and The West against the constant onslaught of communism and dictators, such as Putin and Xi.
In fact, President Trump himself has already articulated his own intent to annex Canada and transform the nation into America’s 51st state. The Liberal government in Canada has now openly antagonized President Trump for over a decade. Even Prime Minister Carney has glibly pilfered and mis-purposed the phrase “elbows up” in a bizarre effort to highlight his own attempts to undermine Canada’s historic relationship with the U.S. and leverage its collapse towards his own personal gain and profit.
In fact, Canada has been badly disfigured by its past decade of Liberal government and transformed into a grotesque fortress of hyper left-wing politics that now echoes many aspects of Maduro’s Venezuela.
And therefore, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, must now begin to abandon the Liberal government’s own corrupt, neo-socialist politics if Canada is to escape the ire of Trump’s America and survive the U.S.’s modern renaissance as democracy’s champion.
More importantly, it is readily apparent that Carney and other corrupt politicians do not have the luxury of delay, nor the time to bluff and posture.
Maduro’s rapid dispatch has confirmed that President Trump is utterly committed to re-establishing democracy worldwide and that the Trump Administration will immediately endeavor to eliminate any threat to America’s own national interests.
Even Canada.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 