Had to leave — didn’t finish editing. Thanks — Julie
Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax of Virginia, who has refused to resign despite two credible accusations of sex assault, now says he is the victim of a political lynching of the type that would have occurred in the 1960s had he been accused “without evidence” five decades ago.
The speech prompted a second offer from Vanessa Tyson, the professor at Stanford University, to testify publicly about her allegation that Fairfax forced her to perform oral sex.
Amazingly, despite the allegations against Fairfax, and the revelations that Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring wore blackface in their younger days, all three Democrats still hold power.
Fairfax Speech
Fairfax spoke from the dais in Virginia’s Senate, where he presides as president, after GOP Senator Tommy Norment thanked him for his steadfast “professionalism and the manner in which you have presided over the Senate during these times that were stressful for you and your family.”
“God is good” and the “truth is on my side,” Fairfax replied.
“We are at an intersection of history,” he continued, noting that the first slaves landed in Virginia in 1619.
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
Fairfax warned that the state must not “go backwards and rush to judgment and allow political lynchings” by eliminating due process guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the federal Constitution, which, he noted, passed just after the War Between the States.
“If we go backwards in a rush to judgment, and we allow for political lynchings without any due process, any facts, any evidence being heard, then I think we do a disservice to this very body in which we all serve,” he stated, adding, “I will stand very firm and very strong. I am very confident in the truth. I want a full investigation because I am confident in the truth and because everyone deserves due process.”
Nothing that he has “lived 40 years accusation free,” Fairfax said “none of this is a coincidence, but we have to decide who we are.”
Fairfax said Virginians must “rise to the better angels of our nature, or go back down a very dark political road where 50 years ago had fingers been pointed at me in the exact same way, it would be a very different outcome. I would not be standing up here on the dais. A very different outcome would have happened with no facts, no due process, no evidence, no nothing.”
Noting that 100 blacks had suffered terror lynchings in Virginia, Fairfax said, “we stand here in a rush to judgment with nothing but accusations and no facts and we decide we are willing to do the same thing.”
House Majority Leader Todd Gilbert, who exposed a Democratic delegate’s plan to legalize what amounts to infanticide, told the Associated Press that Fairfax’s speech “is the worst, most disgusting type of rhetoric he could have invoked.”
Others noted that Fairfax reprised Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s claims that accusations from Anita Hill and the Senate hearings that followed were a “high-tech lynching.”
Thomas, however, did not face a rape accusation.
As well, Fairfax bungled history with his suggestion that he would have been lynched in Virginia “50 years ago” in 1969, well after the civil rights movement had overturned segregation. The last lynching in Virginia occured in either 1926 or 1932, depending on the source cited.
Accusers Ready to Testify
After Fairfax spoke, Debra Katz, the leftist lawyer representing Tyson, reiterated that Tyson is ready to testify publicly. “Dr. Tyson has also made it clear that she does not want to be embroiled in a highly charged political environment,” her lawyers wrote. “It is the duty of the leaders on both sides of the aisle in Virginia to establish a bi-partisan path forward…. If the Legislature truly believes that all sides deserve to be heard and taken seriously, its leaders will come together and determine an appropriate process.”
Katz also represented Christine Blasey Ford, who leveled the unsubstantiated charge of sexual assault against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which her own witnesses refuted and failed to corroborate.
On Friday, Meredith Watson, who accuses Fairfax of raping her when they were at Duke University together, wrote in the Washington Post that she is prepared to testify publicly as well. “Fairfax denied that he raped me, and he denied Tyson’s account as well,” she wrote. “And for many in the public, the media and the Virginia General Assembly, that was that. In one week, they moved on.”
Indeed they did. As Powerline’s Scott Johnson observed, Fairfax is “an insurance policy against demands for Northam’s removal from office.”
If Northam would resign because of his shenanigans in blackface, a man accused of rape and assault would take his place.
Photo: AP Images
