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Welcome back to another edition of Virginia Capital, Dogwood’s economic policy newsletter where workers come first. 

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Today, we explore why the Republican nominee for governor doesn’t want to talk about federal job cuts, and our Virginia Capital editor drops in with his takes on the hilarity of the latest installment in The Naked Gun movies. 

(AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Thousands of Virginia-based federal employees have lost their jobs, but the Republican candidate for governor doesn’t want to talk about it because it will upset President Donald Trump. 

That appears to be the ongoing thinking of Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears as she campaigns to become Virginia’s next governor. The strategy has struck some as a questionable one. 

The top comment in a Reddit post linking to our coverage of Earle-Sears’ recent comments in an interview with CNN concludes, “Not sure what the Virginia GOP was thinking with this one.”  

In the interview, CNN anchor Manu Raju asked Earle-Sears whether she supports President Donald Trump’s “purge of the federal workforce.” But instead of responding directly (to be fair, many politicians don’t always answer questions directly) Earle-Sears took issue with the question and insisted Democrats were to blame for any issues with Virginia’s job market.

“I’m glad you asked this question because your side — I’m assuming your side of the aisle — they keep talking about this,” Earle-Sears said in the interview. 

The interview devolved from there into a testy back-and-forth between Raju and Earle-Sears. Raju pressed Earle-Sears for a simple “yes or no” regarding her support for Trump’s federal job cuts, but Earle-Sears seemed to think Raju was being unfair. Later, Earle-Sears would claim she had been ambushed. Her campaign did not respond to my request for comment on Monday. 

Stepping back from the interview, it’s worth considering the context. 

As mentioned above, thousands of Virginians working for the federal government have lost their jobs and many more are at risk. It’s a crisis — one we don’t yet fully understand the scope of. The General Assembly has taken steps to at least monitor the situation. But Earle-Sears and current Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin have largely downplayed the costs of so many Virginians losing their jobs. 

Meanwhile, unemployment in Virginia has been on the rise, and there are growing signs the US economy is on shakier ground than previously thought. 

On Friday, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released revised employment figures for May and June, showing a much weaker jobs market than was previously understood. (Virginia Tech’s Jadrian Wooten has an explainer on the ins and outs of labor market data revisions). 

The revised jobs numbers were so bad that President Trump claimed on social media that the cloudier view of the economy was “RIGGED” and “CONCOCTED,” and then took the unprecedented step of firing the head of the BLS. 

Given all this, it’s not hard to imagine the economy playing a big role for voters heading to the ballot box this fall. Time will tell if Earle-Sears rolls out any policies to try to address the situation.

• Speaking of Reddit: someone in r/Virginia asked how people feel about “right-to-work.” The top response: “It’s popular because the name doesn’t really represent what it is.”                                                                                

• Anastasiia Carrier at Charlottesville Tomorrow delves into uncertainty surrounding state implementation of the Trump administration’s new rules for food assistance.

                                           

• Virginia Business magazine’s Josh Janney has a dispatch on the ongoing concerns about the impacts of federal jobs cuts on the state.  

Ben Curtis/AP

This year, all eyes are on Virginia’s governor’s race. 

Next year, many eyes will be on Virginia’s competitive 2nd congressional district race in Hampton Roads. 

The seat is held by Republican US Rep. Jen Kiggans. The US Navy veteran flipped the district in 2022 and won it again last year.

Kiggans’ success at the ballot box has not scared off Democrats looking to challenge her: at least three have already jumped into the race. 

One line of attack that is already being used against Kiggans is her support for Trump’s massive tax and spending bill that cuts the social safety net to line the pockets of America’s wealthiest individuals.

The legislation threatens the health care of over 320,000 Virginians and food assistance for thousands. One of Kiggans’ would-be Democratic challengers, Mike Williamson, calls out Kiggans’ support for the bill in an ad that leans into a message of economic populism.  

“Kiggans voted to cut billions from veterans care and blow up our deficit to give handouts to her rich donors,” Williamson says in the ad. 

Over the weekend, Fair Share America, a political advocacy group, held an event in Kiggans’ district to highlight her support for Trump’s bill. The political advocacy organization noted that Trump’s bill gives the top 1% an average tax cut of $77,780. 

Meanwhile, the average Virginia teacher is in the same top state income tax bracket as a millionaire CEO, according to Rodrigo Soto, the legislative and campaign director for The Commonwealth Institute, a research nonprofit. 

“The recently passed reconciliation bill will actually do more for said millionaire CEO than for our hard-working teachers across Virginia,” Soto said at the Fair Share America event.

Michael O’Connor/Dogwood

The movie industry is undergoing a lot of changes that are cause for concern. The ongoing decline of movie theaters. The rise of AI. The overreliance on existing IP and built-in fan bases. The list goes on. 

But the movie gods have seen fit to address one glaring issue with the industry – at least for movie fans. And that is the lack of the good, old fashioned comedy.

The drought is over with the release of Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson. Sure it’s a reboot, but it’s one that does something original with its source material.

I saw it over the weekend (along with five other people in the theater) and The Naked Gun made me laugh out loud in a way I haven’t for a long time at the cinema.

Below is a conversation with my editor, Keya Vakil, who also saw the movie. We discuss what made us laugh and what we thought of this refreshing comedy.

Michael: So, Keya, what did you think of The Naked Gun? 

Keya: I thought it was honestly just a very funny movie. It’s a Naked Gun movie. It’s very much in the spirit of the first couple. It’s just an overwhelmingly silly movie with five jokes a minute, most of which are funny. I just don’t know the last big Hollywood comedy that was as self-assured as this was. There’s a story here. There are characters here who we do end up caring about. But overwhelmingly, it’s a vehicle to just tell a lot of really funny jokes. And it works. I appreciate that, because I feel like that’s incredibly rare nowadays.

M: Yeah, it feels like a throwback to another time, like when we were growing up [Editor’s note: Michael was born in 1989] it was much more common to have comedies in theaters that you could pick from. Obviously, it’s a comedy. So at the risk of missing the point: do you think The Naked Gun has anything to say? 

K: It’s definitely poking fun at these absurd tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who want a society without a state and want to live in outer space and think  Earth is lost, even though they’re the reason Earth could be lost. So yeah, it has a little bit to say, but that doesn’t ever override the tone of the movie, which is just fun and silly. I think it gets at the point that these guys are, if they weren’t so dangerous, they’d also be funny, because they’re so out of touch and delusional.

M: That’s a great point. It reminds me of this review of Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead that makes this point about how the way technology has been folded into pop culture has changed over time. Whereas before tech CEOs and entrepreneurs were seen as vaguely liberal figures who were going to change society for the good, these figures now occupy a pretty evil space in our collective imagination. The promises they’ve made to us have not panned out in the utopian ways they have wanted us to believe. 

K: Yeah. But I don’t know that the film has that much depth or meaning to it. It’s a lot of fart jokes.  

M: So many fart jokes!

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