I believe it is the biggest unfunny joke in Virginia right now that the State Central Committee (SCC) has wasted 20 hours and four majority votes over three meetings on the issue of whether to nominate our statewide candidates by convention or primary. There are so many other things that SCC should have been focused on, but some people would rather niggle about decisions already made rather than get on with the important business of the Party.

Much of the discussion was a battle between a minority of SCC members who were trying to change the method of nomination – for who knows what reasons – and the majority who were fending off the assaults on the decision. Chairman Rich Anderson was, I am sure, trying to let us work out our differences and reach an equilibrium, but it eventually became more than evident that such a result was not going to happen. In response, Chairman Anderson sent a letter to the SCC membership. I quote it here in part:

Saturday’s meeting (7.5 hours long) resulted in the same impasse that confronted us at our meetings on December 5^th (8 hours long) and January 16^th(4.5 hours long). Collectively, these three meetings produced four majority votes by the SCC to proceed with a traditional assembled RPV State Convention for selecting our candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general.

As most have acknowledged, the current COVID-19 restrictions in Virginia preclude an assembled convention, and a majority of SCC members (but not the required 75% threshold) want to approve amendments to the State Party Plan (SPP) for an unassembled drive-through convention. At present, this is unachievable and not likely forthcoming. That is the current situation in which we find ourselves, and we now stand at an impasse with no apparent way forward.

As State Party Chair, I now find myself at a place where I have been instructed by the SCC through four successive votes—across three meetings and over a two-month period—that we will proceed with a convention. From my perspective, the clock is ticking, time is fleeing, the media has been reporting since December 5^th that we have opted for a convention, and our 126 local Republican units and rank-and-file Republicans have been told four times by an SCC majority that we are moving with a convention. Likewise, many of our candidates for all three statewide offices have been proceeding since December 5^th with engineering their campaigns for a convention.

In the interim and in the coming week, I have no choice but to form the various convention committees that are mandated by the SPP [State Party Plan] for convention planning, which is consistent with what I have previously said to the SCC. With our present impasse, I will direct the RPV staff to initiate contingency planning for both convention options (i.e., assembled and unassembled conventions). While I prefer to plan for an unassembled convention only, I do not have that option and would be negligent if I were to defer planning to a future date.

At the close of Saturday’s SCC meeting, a motion passed to fix our next official meeting to 10am on Saturday, February 27^th. I believe that we now need a cooling off period as a result of our present impasse, passions running at elevated levels in full view of the public, adverse publicity, and the need for Congressional District Republican Committee chairs to research potential district venues for unassembled conventions.

Without approved SPP amendments for an unassembled convention, we are now on a trajectory that will preclude an assembled convention, an unassembled convention, and a primary. That will require that our three statewide nominees be selected by the SCC, which will take on the perception of party bosses huddled in a smoke-filled back room. To the best of my knowledge, the last statewide nominee designated by the SCC was in 1978 under extraordinary circumstances when Senator John W. Warner III was selected after the death of our convention-nominated candidate, Richard D. Obenshain. Four decades later, I don’t wish to employ this method.

I do not believe that any member of the SCC wants SCC to choose our nominee. If any member does, that member should resign immediately so that someone else can be elected to that position who has the best interests of Republican voters at heart – rather than those of a favored candidate. As you read this, many people are working quickly to provide a quality event. Their goal – as is mine – is to allow Republican voters, and only Republican voters to select our nominees. It is a shame that a few SCC members wasted so much of our time. But we will get this right, for you.

Cordially,
Steve “Doc” Troxel, Ph.D,

Last Saturday’s State Central Committee (SCC) started out okay, but then the meeting became a zoo. Those of us who just want to get on with the business of winning elections found it frustrating.

The meeting started with prayer, pledge, and creed – as do all Republican meetings. Travis Witt was asked to pray, Melvin Adams led the pledge, and I was asked to read the Republican Creed. That is the first time in the nearly five years I have served on the SCC that I can recall grassroots conservatives being asked to lead those events. It is a small thing, but it is a testament to Chairman Anderson’s desire to get us all to work together.

After roll call and proxy report, Mike Ginsberg moved to approve the agenda but with New Business item 10 C – Setting the Terms of the State Convention Call – ahead of the other two new items: “Consideration of [six] Party Plan Amendments” and “Motion to Reconsider the Method of Nomination.” The motion passed 42 to 35.

Under Old Business we continued hearing an appeal by Sandra Brindley. Because twenty more ballots were cast at the Seventh District Convention than there were delegates registered (out of 1681 ballots cast) and because she missed winning one of three SCC seats by a slim margin, Ms. Brindley asked that the Seventh District be made to hold a limited convention with the same delegates attending to vote between herself and the third-place finisher. The chances of those twenty ballots making a difference was miniscule, but the SCC voted 39 to 32 to accept the appeal. However, because the appeal and the remedy were considered separately, the SCC also voted 31 to 42 NOT to accept the requested remedy. Instead, by a 53 to 23 vote we determined that the seat would be declared vacant at the end of the meeting, and, as per the Party Plan, the Seventh District Committee would fill the vacancy. We chose to vacate the seat at the end of the meeting rather than when the appeal was accepted in order to provide the Seventh District with their full complement of votes during the rest of the meeting.

After a twenty-minute lunch break, we began deliberations on “New Business.” That’s when things got… interesting.

In order to have an “unassembled convention” similar to the one we held last August, we have to remove the word “Quadrennial” from Article XII, paragraph 3, which is the emergency article we put in the Party Plan last year so we could continue to do business during the governor’s shutdown of the Commonwealth. “Quadrennial” refers to the convention held every four years to determine Virginia Republicans’ presidential nominee. It would be a simple matter except Party Plan amendments require a 3/4ths majority. The vote was 44 in favor and 30 against with two persons abstaining due to conflicts of interest.

Then one of the members who had voted against the motion moved to reconsider the motion (as is allowed under Robert’s Rules). That’s when things got heated. Voices were raised. Profanity slipped out over unmuted microphones. Things began to go downhill fast.

Then Fifth District Chairman Melvin Adams moved to adjourn the meeting. In an email two-days later, he explained his reasoning:

1. The meeting was becoming increasingly undisciplined with tempers rising and frequent outcries, even the use of profanity and vulgar language
2. I knew that further discussion would only further escalate a bad meeting as it was clear we were divided and unlikely to move on agenda
3. We were making fools of ourselves to the world through our FB feed
4. An adjournment would allow us to converse off-line, let tempers cool, try to find consensus and come back ready to do business in a civil and proper manner.

The ensuing debate over adjournment validated his concerns. I was embarrassed that members of the ruling body of the Republican Party of Virginia would stoop to the level of yelling and personal insults that came with the vote – and that it was being live-streamed on Facebook for all the world to see. We voted 39 to 38 to adjourn. We have our next meeting on January 23. I hope this time, SCC members will stop looking at their own myopic perspectives and will instead move ahead with our main job of electing candidates who will steer Virginia back to health and economic prosperity.

Cordially,
Steve “Doc” Troxel, Ph.D.

Certain members of the State Central Committee want us to change the method of nomination of state-wide candidates from an unassembled convention to a primary. Changing our method of nomination at this point would be a huge mistake. I frankly am more than fed up with political big shots putting their personal considerations ahead of the greater good. I sent the following letter to every voting member of SCC. We will see what comes of it.

To my fellow members of SCC:

As I was running errands on Monday, I came up behind a car with a Virginia “Don’t Tread on Me” license plate that read “FIX GOP.” I was unable to get in a position to flag him down and ask him what about the GOP he thought needed to be fixed. But based on my conversations with other conservatives, most of whom have emotions that range from anger to despair to disgust, I can imagine.

I first ran for Party office in 2012 when I was elected as a unit chair. I learned all too quickly that the people most likely to lie to me, lie about me, and stab me in the back were Republicans with whom I had a difference of opinion. It continues to this day. Somehow, in the Party of free speech, different opinions are, apparently, not appreciated.

In the years since I was first elected to State Central (2016) I have seen the best of Republican leadership and what we can accomplish if we are all working together toward the same goal. I have also seen the worst of Republican leadership and how ineffective we can be when we are bogged down in intra-party bloodletting. Let’s face it; our worst enemy is ourselves.

I want to fight against Democrat attacks on our country, on our liberties, and on us as individuals. I’ve seen a Facebook post attacking an official with the Waynesboro unit because she went to the rally in Washington, D.C. I’ve learned of threats against a former Staunton chair, not because he went to the rally, but because he told others about the bus to get there.

Make no mistake. Every one of our freedoms, every one of us, is under attack – across the country and in our own General Assembly. It is our job as leaders of the Virginia Republican Party to develop strategies and prepare resources to fight back for our country, our commonwealth, our freedoms, and ourselves. Chairman Anderson has received a number of suggestions and proposals to that end, which he has told me have great potential.

But the SCC is not discussing them. Instead, we are fighting among ourselves again. Why are we wasting time on the 16^th trying to rehash a decision that was made at our meeting last month? We need to get past it and get on with the process of winning. We can’t do that if people in our own Party continue to refuse to work with the majority and move on to the important things. We have selected our nomination process. Let’s enable it and get on with the real work of SCC, which is to defeat Democrats.

Back when Ken Cuccinelli became our nominee for governor instead of Bill Bolling, a number of Bolling supporters got miffed and decided that they would do nothing to help Cuccinelli get elected. The loss of their support was a major contributor to Cuccinelli’s loss and the start of a string of three disastrous Democratic governorships.

From where I stand, it appears that the same “if I don’t get my way, I’m going to take my cookies and go home” attitude still exists in the RPV today. Until we get rid of that attitude, I don’t see us ever winning a state-wide election or retaking control of the General Assembly. We cannot win if we are always fighting each other. “And if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” (Mark 3:25 – NKJV)

So please, I implore you, for the sake of this country and this commonwealth that we all claim to love, let’s not do what some of our members are planning for Saturday. Let us go with the decision the SCC has already made. Let’s work together (for a change), and let’s win again (for a change).

It does no good to win a fight over the best deckchair on a ship if the ship is sinking. Our ship of state is sinking. (If you don’t believe that, you are turning a blind eye to the truth.) Let’s quit fighting each other and instead fight together to save the ship. If we don’t, we are only engaged in silly games that are meaningless in the overall scheme of things.

Cordially,
Steve “Doc” Troxel, Ph.D.

Each congressional district in Virginia gets to elect three individuals to represent them on the Republican State Central Committee (SCC). In addition, the chairman of each district’s Republican committee serves on both the SCC and the SCC executive committee. The individuals elected as representatives are elected for four-year terms in presidential election years. The chairman serves for the two years of his/her elected term.

Additionally, each district in Virginia that has elected a Republican Congressman gets an “congressional seat” representative to the SCC. That term runs concurrent with the congressman’s term. Also, each district in which the Republican presidential candidate got the most votes gets a “presidential seat” representative to the SCC. Virginia’s First, Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Districts each have both congressional and presidential seats on SCC giving each of them a total of six SCC votes. No other Virginia district earned an additional seat in 2020.

In the Sixth, our congressional seat representative, Jeff Adams, decided not to seek reappointment by the district committee. He has been a huge asset to our team with his fine legal mind and attention to detail. You may remember his name as the lead lawyer in the Sixth District’s lawsuit that once and for all got rid of Virginia’s unconstitutional Incumbent Protection Act. At our December district committee meeting, we elected former Augusta County Chair Curt Lily to fill the role of congressional representative going forward. Curt is an engineer by profession. He is well known around the district and is highly regarded by his peers.

The Sixth’s presidential seat representative, Anne Fitzgerald, also decide not to seek reappointment. We will miss her fourteen years of experience in Republican party politics, which was preceded by tenure as a legislative aide in the General Assembly. The District Committee appointed Karen Kwiatkowski to fill that seat. Karen is a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and a farmer. She also serves as Secretary of the Sixth District Republican Committee.

Moving on to a much different subject, Fifth District Chairman Melvin Adams made me aware of a “dangerous policy” under consideration by the State Department of Education (VDOE). The Family Foundation memo that Melvin forwarded to me reads in part: “The VDOE has prepared draft model policies for the treatment of transgender students that are pretty outrageous. The public comment period runs through February 3, 2021. These model policies are meant for local school divisions to either adopt as approved or use as the basis for even more expansive (and dangerous) ‘transgender’ policies.”

The memo adds: “Click HERE to enter a comment on the townhall.gov website, and tell VDOE you do not approve of their proposed guidelines based on radical theories that eradicate all distinctions between male and female and indoctrinate our school children. You can read The Family Foundation’s blogs on the topic here and here.”

And as my final topic for this week, I ran across a saying that I kept posted in my office when I was teaching college. It seems appropriate for this coming year, so I present it here for you:

Risking

To laugh is to risk appearing a fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love, live.
Chained by his own fears, he is a slave.
He has forfeited freedom.
Only a person who risks is free!

We have a lot coming at us this new year as Americans – much of it will be bad, considering the recent elections, but we cannot afford to pull in our heads and risk nothing. We have to consider which risks we are or are not willing to take in order to preserve our faith, our freedoms, and our country – and which risks we have no choice but to take.

Cordially,
Steve “Doc” Troxel, Ph.D.

“Real socialists,” for the sake of this article, means those who have lived under socialism and know what it really is. That is different from ‘wanna-be’ socialists who have some untested, idealized, utopic dream of what socialism can do for them, yet who have no idea what it means in real life.

Victoria Spatz was born in 1978 in Nosivka, a city in the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Ms. Spatz is now the Congresswoman-elect from Indiana’s Fifth District. A December 28, 2020, article in the “New York Post” reports several quotes Ms. Spatz gave in a recent television interview. “It’s just strange to me,” she says “how quickly these ideas can [take hold] especially for young people…. A lot of those kids [say], ‘I’m Marxist.’ I’m like, “Are you kidding me? Do you even know what it means?”

Ms. Spatz knows what it means. She lived in a Soviet puppet state until the Soviet Union collapsed when she was 13 years old. Ukraine remains socialistic, so the former Victoria Kul’heyko continued to live under socialism until she married a U.S. citizen in 2000 and left Ukraine with only one suitcase of possessions. Ms. Spatz says, “It’s unbelievable for me. Of all of the countries in the world, our country fought so much against this utopic socialistic idea that it’s crazy for me to see how quickly we made the turn to the left.”

When I visited Kiev, Ukraine, in 1996, no one had hot water heaters in their homes. The city piped hot water to each home from a central boiler. Because the economy was so bad – government workers had not been paid in three months – no one paid their water bills. The government tried to force people to pay by shutting off the hot water. I know from experience that a cold water bath in Kiev (which has a more northern latitude than Montreal) is no fun. But this is and example of just one of many inconveniences and hardships that come with socialism.

Matthew Truong, who ran for Congress in Virginia’s Tenth Congressional District, fled to the U.S. at age 12 with “two pairs of clothes and two words of English.” Because of the opportunity of the American economic system, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and is now the director of business development for a multi-billion dollar tech company. Matt, who lived under communist socialism in Vietnam, deplores the very idea of America becoming socialistic. “People don’t run to socialistic countries to get away from capitalism. They run to capitalistic countries to get away from socialism.”

Socialism is basically “Communism-light.” My friend Emanuel escaped from Communist Romania in 1982, when it was still an Iron Curtain country. He wrote “45 Years in Darkness,” an as yet unpublished book. He was successful compared to the average worker in Romania, but he gave it all up when he ran from socialism to reach the freedom and opportunity of capitalist America. He agonizes over “these socialists who want to take over America. How can the people vote for this?”

Emanuel knows what socialism becomes. He lived under its rule for over 40 years before he escaped. He writes in his manuscript, “It is unnatural to be a Communist. Even a dog wishes to have his own bone.” Immediately following that statement is this one: “The main target of the Communist system was the abolition of private property…. Through countless series of injustices and abuse that started in 1949, estates, forests, farms, hotels, hospitals, pharmacies, medical offices, cinemas, private enterprises (industrial, mining, banking, insurance and transportation, representing 90% of the country’s production), etc., were nationalized one by one.”

He adds, “The population no longer had a say in politics and the natural function of the State to protect its citizens changed into the system’s battle against its own population.” And then, “Under Communism, education was entirely centralized, free and mandatory. The Government founded many schools, as they would be the ideal place for indoctrinating the new generations.”

He also observed that “The restrictions of rights continued with the prohibition of group forming on the streets, banning kissing in public, or carrying a Bible anywhere outdoors.” That sounds amazingly similar to King Ralph Northam’s executive orders.

I, too, am amazed at how anyone can think that type of life is better than what America has had for the first 240 years of our existence. Those who think that apparently are not real socialists.

Cordially,
Steve “Doc” Troxel, Ph.D.