More than 125 Virginia pastors have signed an open letter urging voters to reject two proposed constitutional amendments on abortion and marriage. The letter adds a broad coalition of Protestant voices to the growing faith-based opposition ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

“We believe these two amendments must be rejected for the Commonwealth of Virginia because they will harm our state as they are opposed to human flourishing and contrary to the Word of God,” the pastors write.

The signers are from congregations across the commonwealth, from Arlington and Alexandria to Lynchburg, Roanoke, Virginia Beach, and Tazewell. They include Jesse Johnson of Immanuel Bible Church in Springfield, Ryan Helfenbein of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Brian Autry of Grove Avenue Baptist Church in Henrico, Benjamin Purves of Occoquan Bible Church in Woodbridge, and Courtney McBath of Calvary Alliance of Churches in Norfolk.

Virginia Pastors Unite

A pastor who helped coordinate the letter told the Daily Signal that about 90 churches are currently represented, reaching an estimated 50,000 parishioners across Virginia.

Early voting began Sept. 18. The ballot measures reached voters after winning approval in two consecutive sessions of the Democrat-controlled General Assembly, as Virginia requires for constitutional amendments.

The pastors’ letter follows a high-profile “Catholics Vote No” campaign by Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington. He had priests in 70 parishes across Northern Virginia read a letter at Mass opposing the amendments. That effort built on a joint statement he issued in August with Richmond Bishop Barry Knestout.

‘Let Your Baby Live’

Ballot Question 1 would amend Virginia’s constitution to expand abortion access throughout pregnancy and eliminate the need for parental consent. The pastors expressed strong opposition to the amendment and its fatal consequences for the unborn.

“Abortion is the killing of a pre-born child in the womb,” they write. “It is moral distortion to present this violation of the sixth commandment as a moral good or as a fundamental right, and it is deceptive framing to present abortion’s destruction of life as healthcare.”

The letter speaks directly to women facing an unexpected pregnancy: “To the mother considering abortion, we implore you, let your baby live.”

It also rejects the idea of abortion as a parental right. “There is never a parental right to take the life of a child,” the pastors write.

‘What God Has Defined’

Question 2 would strike the constitution’s 2006 definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and replace it with language guaranteeing two adults the right to marry regardless of sex.

The pastors argue that marriage “has only one meaning: the uniting of one man and one woman into a single, exclusive union.” They cite Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:6: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

“It is likewise true to say what God has defined, let not man seek to redefine,” the letter says.

The pastors also warn that the amendment carries other implications.

“Denying reality only brings a ripple effect of harm to society that is acutely felt by individuals, families, schools, and sports teams,” they write.

‘We Disagree With You for Your Good’

Like the letter from Burbidge to Catholics, the Protestant pastors speak directly to Virginians and implore them to vote against the amendments.

“If you support these amendments, know that we disagree with you for your good, and for the good of Virginia,” they write. “Love will communicate truth and speak for the good of others, and it does not go silent when the need is great.”

The pastors also “repudiate hateful and harassing behavior or attitudes directed toward any individual.” They close by inviting readers to pick up a Bible, read the Gospel of John, and visit one of the signers’ churches on a Sunday.

The pastor who spoke to the Daily Signal said additional signatures are still being added. Any Virginia pastor who affirms the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Five Solas of the Protestant Reformation may sign the letter. Organizers review names before posting them, and they encourage pastors to share the letter with their congregations.

Read the full letter at VirginiaPastors.org.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears on Sunday Morning Futures now hosted by Larry Kudlow who has replaced Maria Bartiromo.  The primary topic of the conversation is the current state of the economy. Secretary Bessent notes we have entered the phase of prior policy implementation where the economy now accelerates growth based on former policy changes […]

The post Sunday Talks – Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Explains “Acceleration Phase” of MAGAnomic Policy appeared first on The Last Refuge.

SHIPPINGPORT, Pa.—The last time that I stood on these grounds along the Ohio River in Beaver County was 1976, 19 years after the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States opened here.

My Perry High School physics teacher, David Burrows, had loaded a handful of us into a van for a field trip to the atomic station and to the coal-fired Bruce Mansfield plant next door.

What Burrows and I both still remember is the climb—20 flights up metal bar-grating stairs to the top of a cavernous industrial cathedral built to house Mansfield’s multistory steam boilers—and the black mountains of coal heaped along the riverbank, waiting to be fed into them.

We were all working-class kids. Our fathers were firefighters, cops, steelworkers, and mechanical engineers. When Burrows took us there, he told us we could be anyone who worked there: a welder, electrician, engineer, chemist, plumber, or programmer.

“That was the point,” he said in a conversation this week. “I wanted you to see your possibilities.”

Today I’m back on the same ground, a few days after Aligned Data Centers officially broke ground on a 2-gigawatt artificial intelligence campus called Project Phoenix, and built on the footprint where part of Bruce Mansfield used to stand.

The name is not subtle, and neither is the transformation. A 660-acre industrial site that once held Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant, the 2,490-megawatt FirstEnergy behemoth that went dark in 2019, is now being rebuilt as a three-building, $10 billion complex designed to feed the country’s insatiable appetite for AI.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, Shippingport was where America came to figure out how to make electricity at an industrial scale. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the world’s first full-scale commercial nuclear plant, went online in 1957 and operated until 1982 as part of Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, which was designed to pivot the perception of nuclear technology away from military might to civilian development.

Bruce Mansfield came online a decade later. At its peak, it was the largest coal plant in the commonwealth, moving barges of coal up the Ohio and shipping electrons out to the PJM grid that keeps the eastern seaboard lit.

When Mansfield closed in 2019, it left behind exactly what Burrows had walked us through in 1976: 660 acres of riverfront, 6,000 feet of developed waterfront, barge terminals, CSX rail, and the skeletons of buildings sized for a different century.

Frontier Group of Companies bought the site in 2022 and renamed it the Shippingport Industrial Park, betting that the lonely sentinels of an old power plant would be worth more than the plant itself.

It also left behind a borough that had been quietly hollowing out for a generation. Shippingport counted 441 residents in 1950, 235 as recently as 2000, and just 154 today; roughly a third smaller than at the turn of the century and closer to half its mid-century peak.

That is what a decommissioned nuclear plant and a shuttered coal plant look like on a census sheet: fewer paychecks, fewer children in the school, higher property taxes, and fewer lights on at night along the same river that once powered the region.

Recently, Aligned, a Dallas-based operator of hyperscale data centers, announced that Project Phoenix will rise on the Mansfield footprint as a three-facility, 2-gigawatt campus. Just to understand the enormity of it, 2 gigawatts is roughly the output of the coal plant it replaces, now dedicated entirely to running the graphics processors and cooling systems that train and serve modern AI models.

The company projects 3,000 construction jobs, 640 permanent operations careers, and thousands more in the regional supply chain.

Case in point: The local mom-and-pop gas station on the way to the development entrance, at the corner of Green Garden and Frankfort roads, had a brisk flow of construction workers heading into the convenience store.

The data center will not draw its power from the local grid. Rather, a dedicated on-site generation source at the neighboring former Shippingport Power Station is now being rebuilt as a natural gas energy campus. It will feed the servers directly and eventually send surplus electricity back to PJM, Aligned says.

Cooling will run on a closed-loop system that recycles deionized water, giving the campus a water footprint the company compares to that of a standard commercial office building.

Shippingport Mayor John Erickson framed the moment in the language of continuity rather than disruption.

“For decades, Shippingport has been defined by powering the country as the birthplace of commercial nuclear energy,” he said. “Project Phoenix honors that legacy, opening a new chapter by taking a historic site and rebuilding it into a modern engine of innovation.”

Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap called it “a legacy reimagined” in the same statement.

None of this is landing in a neutral country. It is landing in one where the debate over AI has turned political, cultural, and increasingly fearful.

A Quinnipiac University poll released this past March found that 55% of Americans now believe AI will do more harm than good in their daily lives, up 11 points in a single year. Eighty percent said that they were concerned about AI. Seventy percent believed it would cut the number of jobs available to human beings. And the number most relevant to places such as Appalachian Pennsylvania: Sixty-five percent said they would oppose the construction of an AI data center in their own community.

That opposition is not theoretical. In Archbald, in Conshohocken, in Wilkes-Barre, in Hampden Township outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvanians have packed municipal meeting rooms to fight data center proposals over noise, water, air quality, property values, and the fear that their power bills will subsidize somebody else’s chatbot.

A statewide Quinnipiac survey found 68% of Pennsylvanians would oppose a data center in their community, including 81% of Democrats, 67% of independents, and, notably, 53% of Republicans. This is one of the few things that polls the same way across the aisle right now.

And yet Shippingport, a borough of 154 people that has watched its tax base evaporate twice in one lifetime, is not Archbald. The mayor is on the podium. The building trades are counting jobs. The county is counting revenue. When your town has already lost the nuclear plant and the coal plant, a 2-gigawatt anything looks less like an imposition and more like a lifeline.

Both of those reactions are real. And people—actual complicated people and not the caricatures that the loudest voices on either side reduce them to—are perfectly capable of holding both views at once.

A pipefitter can be grateful for six years of union work on the Mansfield site and still worry, on the drive home, about what happens to his nephew’s first job if the models keep getting better.

A grandmother in Shippingport can welcome the tax revenue that keeps her borough solvent and still ask hard questions about the hum of a gas turbine three blocks from her kitchen window. No subject this big can be flattened into a slogan.

This one demands nuance, and nuance is precisely what our political vocabulary has spent two decades unlearning how to speak.

That is the harder story sitting on top of the groundbreaking. The infrastructure being poured here is going to arrive faster than the political infrastructure meant to govern it.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has responded with a voluntary GRID framework and a Ratepayer Protection Pledge. State Sen. Katie Muth has introduced a three-year moratorium on hyperscale builds. PJM is trying to figure out in real time how to keep the grid stable while data center load doubles.

Municipalities—most of them running on part-time councils and volunteer solicitors—are being asked to referee zoning fights with multibillion-dollar counterparties whose lawyers know the ordinances better than the councils do.

Our political structure is atrophied for exactly this kind of work. It is built for two speeds: campaign season and gridlock. And for two settings: for and against.

It is not built for a decadelong negotiation between a small borough and a hyperscaler over water, noise, transmission lines, tax abatements, workforce agreements, and what “community benefit” actually means when the community is 154 people.

It is not built for a citizenry that is, correctly, both hopeful and skeptical at the same time.

Three generations of American energy history have now been staged on this same stretch of riverbank: atoms in the 1950s, coal from the 1970s through the 2010s, and now gas turbines feeding silicon in the 2020s.

Each time, the same argument was made that this was the future, that the jobs would come, that the river and the rail and the workforce were what made it possible. Each time, the argument was partly right and partly wrong, and the town lived with both.

Burrows walked us up those 20 flights of stairs in 1976 to make a point about scale. He encouraged us to go into the trades. He encouraged us to go into the sciences. He pushed us to imagine the possibilities. Whatever gets built here next will be measured in a different unit. But the climb, if there still is one, will start from the same ground, and it will demand more of us, not less, than the politics we currently have.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Trump White House is pointing to data compiled by transgender advocacy groups as evidence against the claim that Republican transgender policies contribute to violence against transgender people.

“The data proves the president’s law-and-order policies have benefited all Americans,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told the Daily Signal in a statement Thursday. “President [Donald] Trump delivered the largest decrease in violent crime in American history.” 

She was referring to reports from the Human Rights Campaign and Advocates for Trans Equality.

The Human Rights Campaign tracks the violent deaths of transgender people each year, starting on Nov. 21. For the period ending Nov. 20, 2023, the group counted 33 deaths. In the period ending Nov. 20, 2024, it counted 36 deaths. Yet in the most recent year, the group only counted 27 deaths.

Advocates for Trans Equality also tracks the violent deaths of transgender people over the same time period. In the period ending Nov. 20, 2023, the group counted 53 deaths. In the following year, it counted 43 deaths. In the most recent period, it counted 27 deaths.

This decline took place while the Human Rights Campaign kept warning that anti-transgender rhetoric and policy contribute to violence against transgender people.

In its 2024 report “Dismantling a Culture of Violence,” the Human Rights Campaign claimed, “Transgender and gender-expansive people continue to be marginalized, ostracized and excluded from full participation in communities across the country, in ways that contribute to a culture of transphobia, anti-trans stigma, and, ultimately, discrimination and violence against transgender and non-binary people.”

Yet throughout the first year of his second administration, Trump reversed a number of Biden-era transgender policies, such as executive branch recognition of gender identity over biological sex and support for transgender medical procedures.

The decline in reported violent deaths among transgender people roughly coincides with a 9.3% decrease in the nation’s violent crime rate in 2025, according to the FBI. The estimated number of murders and nonnegligent manslaughters decreased 18.1%.

“Radical Democrats want sex-change surgeries for children, cashless bail, and to abolish our prisons,” Bis, the White House spokeswoman, added. “President Trump and commonsense Republicans will continue to restore law and order and take strong action to protect children from these dangerous, life-altering medical practices.”

LGBTQ+ groups maintain that violent-death counts only capture one measure of anti-LGBTQ+ violence. GLAAD’s ALERT Desk project reported more than 1,000 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents in 2025, including assaults, vandalism, threats, and other incidents, claiming that 2025 was “one of the most dangerous years on record” for LGBTQ+ Americans.

Yet the GLAAD report counts “both criminal and non-criminal expressions of hate,” including protests, in addition to concrete acts. This makes its report less concrete than the fatal-violence databases.

Jay Richards, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, suggested that claims about increasing violence against transgender people seemed part of a “marketing campaign.”

“It should have been obvious to critical thinkers that it was unlikely that murders of people who identify as transgender, nonbinary, etc. would be increasing as such individuals become more common and commonplace,” he told the Daily Signal. “It always struck me as a marketing campaign by the Human Rights Campaign, and their media stenographers.”

He called it “absurd” for the Human Rights Campaign to suggest that “Americans who oppose harmful medical procedures on children” are “more inclined to violence” or that they “would even encourage such violence against people with gender dysphoria.”

“This is a slanderous stereotype, and the media should have treated it with skepticism,” he concluded.

The Human Rights Campaign did not respond to questions asking whether it views the decline as evidence of a real reduction in violence. Advocates for Trans Equality likewise did not respond to requests seeking comment on the trend.

Fairfax County Public Schools Chief Equity Officer Nardos King makes $288,064 this year—more than every single member of the president’s Cabinet—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, all of them—each of whom earns $253,100 to run a federal department.

King’s job is to oversee equity initiatives for one county’s school system. Virginia’s largest public school district holds “equity” at the center of its strategic plan, and King is just one of ten district “chiefs” whose salaries clear that bar. A public records request revealed that 13 Fairfax County Public School employees earn more than the U.S. Secretary of Education.

By comparison, Virginia’s Secretary of Education, Jeffery Smith, makes $229,136. In other words, it is more lucrative to be an assistant superintendent overseeing a small region of one Virginia county than to run the Virginia Department of Education.

At the top of the heap, Michelle Reid, Fairfax schools’ superintendent, is paid $469,936 a year—nearly $70,000 more than the President of the United States makes to run the executive branch, command the armed forces, and set foreign policy for 340 million people. Reid, by contrast, runs a declining school district with about 180,000 students.

Reid is the visible peak of a payroll structure that taxpayers have been quietly bankrolling for years—one that a batch of FOIA-obtained salary records shows has ballooned well past anything resembling fiscal restraint.

Indeed, the district doesn’t have just one highly paid executive, it has a small army of them. A Chief Information Technology Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and a Division Counsel each earn $305,694. A Chief of Schools and a Chief Human Resources Officer each earn $293,824. Four more chiefs—of Facilities, Operations, Academics, and Safety and Security—make $288,064, alongside King. And ten assistant superintendents earn between $241,475 and $251,231. 

Add it up, and the 71 Fairfax County positions captured in these records carry a combined annual payroll of just over $17 million—an average salary of $239,693 per position. Every single one of the 71 clears $200,000.

To put that in perspective: the top 10 highest-paid Fairfax County Public School employees alone collect $3.13 million a year in combined salary—more than the entire cost of Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s 12-member cabinet, which totals $2.78 million for the officials running education, health, transportation, agriculture, labor, and public safety for the entire Commonwealth of Virginia.

And it’s not just the schools.

Cross the street to Fairfax County’s general government, and it gets even worse. Payroll records show 42 county officials earning six figures at the top of the org chart, with a combined payroll north of $10.7 million and an average salary of $256,943—even higher than the average Fairfax County Public School salary and more than what the federal government pays its own Cabinet secretaries.

Fairfax County Government’s 10 Highest-Paid Employees (Fiscal Year 2027)

Source: Fairfax County payroll records obtained via FOIA.

Twenty-four of those 42 county officials earn more than the members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. Six of them clear $300,000 outright, including four separate deputy county executives, a redundancy of executive layers few private employers would tolerate. The Fire Chief and the Chief of Police each earn more than $301,000—more than the salaries of Virginia’s governor and lieutenant governor put together, $175,000 and $36,321, respectively.

County officials have a ready defense: Fairfax is big, Fairfax is complex, you have to pay competitively in the D.C. metro area to attract talent.

Fine. But “competitive” cannot mean that administrators overseeing one county consistently earn more than the officials constitutionally responsible for the entire state and, in some cases, the entire country. Virginia’s Secretary of Education sets policy for every school division in the Commonwealth and is paid less than the person managing curriculum for one region of Fairfax County. That’s not a competitive labor market. That’s an inverted org chart, where the farther an administrator sits from an actual classroom, the more likely they are to be sitting on top of the pay scale.

And the headcount problem compounds the pay problem. These are just the positions that surfaced in one FOIA request—executive directors of “strategy and planning,” an “administrative hearing officer,” a “chief experience and engagement officer.” Central-office titles multiply every budget cycle, even as parents are told there’s no room to shrink class sizes.

None of this happened by accident. Every one of these salaries was approved by a school board or a board of supervisors that Fairfax County voters elected—and can unelect in November 2027. Every salary line is public record, available through FOIA, that most taxpayers never think to request because they assume someone, somewhere, is watching the budget.

Few people are watching. That’s the point.

Fairfax County and its school system have built a compensation structure that rewards layers of administration over frontline service, in a jurisdiction wealthy and complacent enough that almost no one checks the math. Before the next tax rate hearing, before the next budget vote, Fairfax County taxpayers deserve one plain answer: Why does it pay better to manage one county’s bureaucracy than to run the entire country?

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal. 

According to a report, tough guy actor and one-time Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is coming to the aid of socialist L.A. mayoral candidate Nithya Raman by helping her connect with some of the city's top private sector leaders.

The post Arnold Schwarzenegger Jumps In to Help Socialist L.A. Mayor Candidate Nithya Raman appeared first on Breitbart.

Royal Airforce base Fairford, is a U.K-owned base operated by the United States under an agreement that goes back to the 1950’s cold war era. However, recently Airbase Fairford has been used by American strategic bombers for strikes against Iranian missile sites under an agreement with former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Overnight, at 12:45 […]

The post British Police Intercept Five Suspected Islamic Terrorists Targeting U.S. Airbase Fairford appeared first on The Last Refuge.

A panel of Heritage Foundation scholars explained to Heritage Action’s Orlando Sentinel Summit attendees on Saturday how faith fuels the organization’s public advocacy mission.

“This constitution will NOT work without a faith-filled people,” E.J. Antoni, Heritage Foundation chief economist, said on Saturday. “Faith builds our four cornerstones, then all of our public policy stems from our four cornerstones.”

Matt Crouch, vice president of operations at Heritage Action, added that faith is “interwoven in every single element” of the organization’s mission. The scholars’ remarks came after an attendee at the event asked the speaker panel, which included Antoni and Crouch, why there is no cornerstone for faith, given that “it touches on everything” Heritage stands for.

The Heritage Foundation’s cornerstones are the dignity of work and free enterprise, national security, the American heritage and citizenship, and the American family.

The event featured speakers who showcased how their Biblical commitment and understanding have fueled their legislative efforts, championed by Heritage Action and The Heritage Foundation, in advocating against political wrongdoing.

Some of those speakers included Anne Fundner, an Angel Mom and fentanyl-awareness advocate. Fundner’s son, Weston, died at age 15 in 2022 from an accidental fentanyl overdose. 

She has since used her experience to advocate against the widespread fentanyl crisis that consumes America’s cities when politicians are allowed to champion their amnesty and open-border policies.

“They called it an overdose, I don’t,” Fundner said. “Calling an overdose excuses it, it was criminal.”

Despite all the pain that came after, Fundner added, she found the courage to realize that there was a God-given purpose in Weston’s death and has raised awareness since.

“An open border did not protect the vulnerable,” she stated. “That is not compassion for illegal immigration, that is recklessness. That is negligence, and that negligence has a body count.”

Drug overdoses are now at a historic low in the United States.

Her God-given courage, she said, led to President Donald Trump’s signing of the HALT Fentanyl Act in 2025, which her testimony and advocacy helped pass.

Vanessa Sivadge, another speaker at the summit, said that her faith in God has taught her to always do the next right thing.

In recent years, while working as a nurse at Texas Children’s Hospital, Sivadge was motivated by her biblical understanding and committed to blow the whistle on widespread healthcare fraud while advocating for the Bible’s understanding of gender and sexuality. She was fired by the hospital in 2024 for raising concerns about what she alleged was the improper use of Medicaid funds for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors in violation of Texas law. The hospital reached a settlement with the state in August, which includes the creation of the country’s first “detransition clinic.”