The woke fever from 2020 back.
This time, Democrats don’t want anyone to notice.
And now those statues are gone, and the story of how it happened tells you everything about how the Left operates when it can’t win a fair fight.
The Bill That Died — and Then Didn’t
Former state Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria) introduced SB636 during the 2026 General Assembly session with one goal: remove three Confederate monuments from Capitol Square in Richmond.
The bill cleared the Senate on a party-line vote. Then it died in the House Appropriations Committee.
That should have been the end of it. Bills fail all the time. The process worked. Except Virginia Democrats weren’t finished.
Rather than accept the outcome, lawmakers folded the removal directive into the state budget — Budget Item 71 #1C in the fiscal 2027-28 spending plan — and attached $1.8 million to fund the work. The budget took effect July 1.
The Department of General Services confirmed the arrangement plainly: “In accordance with Budget Item 71 #1C, passed by the General Assembly, the Department of General Services (DGS) has been directed to facilitate the removal of all Confederate monuments and memorials from Capitol Square.”
So a policy that couldn’t survive a standalone vote got laundered through appropriations language and signed into law anyway. That’s the move. That’s the whole play.
What Came Down — and Where It Stood for Over a Century
The statues depict Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Confederate General and two-time Virginia Governor William “Extra Billy” Smith, and Confederate Army surgeon Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire.
Capitol Square has displayed Jackson’s statue since 1875, McGuire’s since 1904, and Smith’s since 1906. These weren’t recent installations. They had been fixtures of Virginia’s civic landscape for well over a hundred years.
The monuments will be preserved by the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, which said the statues will be relocated to battlefield sites within the Shenandoah Valley. The Department of General Services added that the three pedestals could take up to a week to remove and that no replacements are planned.
Ebbin, who left the legislature to join Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s administration, offered a predictable defense of the removal. “This doesn’t change the history of the Civil War,” the Alexandria Democrat said. “It changes who we choose to venerate on the Capitol lawn.”
The question isn’t whether Virginia has the power to remove statues. The question is whether Democrats should get to do it by hiding the policy inside a budget document after the direct route failed.
The Part That Should Bother Every Voter Regardless of Party
Democrats want to tear down Confederate statues in Virginia because demolishing America’s history puts the left one step closer to erasing America’s shared culture, the goal they must achieve if they want to transform America into a third-world socialist state.
Here’s what actually happened in sequence: Democrats introduced a bill. The bill passed one chamber and stalled in the other. Instead of accepting that result, they resurrected the identical policy during budget negotiations and attached taxpayer money to it. The statues came down weeks later.
This is how the modern Left governs when the democratic process produces the wrong answer. They don’t go back to the voters. They find a procedural side door and walk through it quietly.
Budget line items exist to fund government operations. They’re not supposed to serve as a second-chance mechanism for legislation that couldn’t survive a committee vote. But that’s exactly what happened here, and the people who did it aren’t apologizing for it.
And this isn’t unique to Virginia. The same pattern plays out at the federal level constantly — policy that can’t get a clean vote gets buried in omnibus spending bills, continuing resolutions, or reconciliation packages where it’s harder to see and harder to stop. Virginia Democrats just ran the same play at the state level.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) offered some context for the political mood driving all of this. Pressley said recently at a Boston campaign event that “the Confederacy is still alive and well” and that “that’s all MAGA is.” So there’s the framing. Anyone who questions the method of removal — or the idea of erasing 150-year-old civic monuments without a clean legislative mandate — gets lumped in with Confederate sympathizers.
That’s not an argument. That’s a smear designed to shut down debate before it starts.
The statues themselves are now headed to battlefield sites managed by the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, which at least means they won’t be destroyed. But the precedent set here has nothing to do with where the statues end up. It has everything to do with how the decision was made.
When a bill fails in committee, that’s supposed to mean something. In Virginia in 2026, it meant Democrats went back to the drawing board, found a different vehicle, and got it done anyway — on the taxpayer’s dime, with $1.8 million attached to make sure there was no going back.
The process worked right up until it didn’t produce the result Democrats wanted. Then the process became optional.
That’s worth remembering the next time Virginia Democrats talk about protecting democratic norms.
Sources: Breitbart, 29News/WWBT, Daily Wire, YourNews