{"id":25355,"date":"2026-05-09T05:08:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T05:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/?p=25355"},"modified":"2026-05-09T05:13:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T05:13:07","slug":"fithve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/2026\/05\/09\/fithve\/","title":{"rendered":"Fever in the Heartland \u2014 Virginia Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Some Thoughts from the Asylum Between My Ears<\/h3><\/div>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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https:\/\/www.nbcwashington.com\/news\/local\/virginia-supreme-court-strikes-down-democrats-redistricting-plan-dimming-partys-midterm-hopes\/4101927\/<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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There\u2019s a fever in the heartland, and Virginia has been running its own version of it for a long time. People keep saying SCOVA \u201cgot it right.\u201d No. The court didn\u2019t deliver clarity. It delivered continuity. It reaffirmed a procedural precedent with a long memory \u2014 the kind that keeps old alliances warm even when the language changes. (Ruling centered on procedural compliance, not political substance \u2014 NBC Washington; Ballotpedia)<\/span><\/p>

Anyone who\u2019s lived in Virginia knows this pattern. I lived in Prince Edward County \u2014 where the Fuqua name still sits on the legacy of shutting down public schools and privatizing rather than integrate after Brown v. Board. That wasn\u2019t a legal nuance. That was a structural choice. Procedure as armor. Legality as a detour around justice. (Prince Edward County closed public schools 1959\u20131964 to avoid integration \u2014 Moton Museum; Virginia Museum of History & Culture; PBS)<\/span><\/p>

Tim Egan\u2019s Fever in the Heartland lays out the national version of this story: how extremism doesn\u2019t always march in with torches \u2014 sometimes it walks in through the courthouse door, wrapped in process, paperwork, and \u201ccommunity standards.\u201d Respectability as camouflage. Procedure as the delivery system. Virginia didn\u2019t invent that playbook, but it ran it with precision.<\/span><\/p>

And the residue is still here. In the street grid. In the school lines. In the quiet choreography of who stands where in a grocery aisle. Virginia doesn\u2019t erase its past. It repurposes it. The scaffolding stays. The paint changes.<\/span><\/p>

So when people outside the state treat this ruling like a clean civic moment, they\u2019re reading the brochure, not the building. In Virginia, process is the battleground. The vote tries to expose that. The court reinforces it. Different century, same architecture. Same fever. Just a lower-grade burn.<\/span><\/p>

This isn\u2019t just paperwork. It\u2019s the old machinery doing what it was designed to do.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some Thoughts from the Asylum Between My Ears https:\/\/www.nbcwashington.com\/news\/local\/virginia-supreme-court-strikes-down-democrats-redistricting-plan-dimming-partys-midterm-hopes\/4101927\/ There\u2019s a fever in the heartland, and Virginia has been running its own version of it for a long time. People keep saying SCOVA \u201cgot it right.\u201d No. The court didn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_eb_attr":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","rs_blank_template":"","rs_page_bg_color":"","slide_template_v7":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[814],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ads"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25355"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25363,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25355\/revisions\/25363"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/happyinthehills.com\/zentriathlete\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}