MAGA State Sen. Mark Obenshain isn’t happy that Democrats are rightly sabre-rattling over the shady appointment of pretend centrist Scott Beardsley to be the new president at the University of Virginia, so he took aim at the messenger: Augusta Free Press.
“I’m quite familiar with that blog, and the opinions of the author,” Obenshain, political nepo baby, albeit now with quite gray hair, because he’s still trading on the family name to make a partial living in politics at the ripe age of 63, said during a public hearing of the Senate Finance Committee Education Committee on Monday, in which Beardsley and Rachel Sheridan, the rector of the UVA Board of Visitors, were front and center.
Obenshain, who’s been able to get elected as a hardcore MAGA Republican in hardcore MAGA Republican-lovin’ Rockingham County and Augusta County for the past two decades, but came up short in his one run for statewide office, in 2013, was shooting on AFP not actually for “the opinions of the author,” but rather, a guest column co-authored by Judith Wilde and Jim Finkelstein that we published on Sunday.
ICYMI
Wilde and Finklestein, a pair of professors at George Mason University, noted in their piece that changes they found had been made to Beardsley’s resume suggest “not a handful of cosmetic edits, but a pattern of strategic self-presentation that should have prompted basic follow-up questions in any serious presidential search.”
From their article:
A broadly constituted search committee with meaningful faculty authority would have surfaced these issues early and demanded answers: Why were DEI accomplishments removed as federal pressure on UVA intensified? What explains the dissertation authorship listing? Why was the publication record pushed into an appendix? Why were corporate documents presented under “peer-reviewed” categories? And, given the search firm’s prior public endorsement of the candidate’s work, what safeguards were in place to ensure the vetting was truly independent? These questions go to judgment, transparency, and integrity — the core predicates of presidential leadership.
Instead, UVA’s board ran a tightly controlled, secret process that treated faculty input as ceremonial. The result is a president whose materials raise questions that the selection process should have resolved before the appointment.
It was State Sen. Creigh Deeds, a Charlottesville Democrat, who brought attention to the article in the subcommittee hearing.
By the way, Deeds didn’t go out of his way to make friends with us today, making it a point to say, rather dismissively, that he doesn’t “normally read that publication, either” – dude, for several years, we ran your General Assembly session dispatches as a weekly column, back when you were still Creigh Deeds, D-Bath County, before you carpetbagged yourself over the mountain ranges to keep your name in elected politics, so, whatever.
Also not a fan: Sheridan, a MAGA appointed to the BOV by the outgoing MAGA governor, Glenn Youngkin.
Sheridan went out of her way to make a public show of laughing at the suggestion that she would ever consider reducing herself to even knowing what an Augusta Free Press is.
She definitely knows what an Augusta Free Press is.
I mean, Bert Ellis, recent former BOV member and billionaire double-‘Hoo, knows who we are, and talked to us, openly, at length, over the course of several months starting in late 2024 about the scheme of the MAGAs on the Board of Visitors to get rid of Jim Ryan, to get their pound of flesh from Ryan over DEI, but they all pretend now that Bert Ellis doesn’t exist, like they pretend that we don’t exist.
ICYMI
I at least know who Mark Obenshain and Creigh Deeds are; the only way I’d be able to pick Rachel Sheridan out of a police lineup would be the unfortunate tradwife MAGA personal style she seems to favor.
Back to Deeds at today’s subcommittee hearing: he tried to get Beardsley to address the questions raised by the professors in their article, noting that the reported piece “indicates that over the course of just the past few years, the word ‘diversity,’ from being mentioned seven, eight, nine times in your CV, your resume, has disappeared.”
Beardsley’s answer: “Whatever my resume has on it now is what it says. But, as I’ve mentioned, I believe in the diversity of the whole world. I think we should have the best of that.”
Deeds: “And certainly at one point, you championed DEI at Darden, is that correct?”
Beardsley: “We had a global diversity officer at Darden, and we had initiatives to improve the quality of our students from all walks of life.”
Deeds: “I’d ask you to take a look at this article. … It asks some pretty important questions, I think.”
It asks a helluva lot more than Deeds brought up in the subcommittee hearing, that much is clear.
That the piece hit close to home for the MAGA side in this was made clear by how the MAGAs couldn’t leave well enough alone.
The hearing couldn’t conclude without Obenshain getting one more dig in at AFP, which, there’s an old saying about not picking a fight with somebody who buys ink by the barrel, which I’ve updated to, don’t pick a fight with somebody with a thorough command of SEO.
“I want to point out that I am very familiar with the publication that Senator Deeds referred to, and I don’t know what’s the matter here, but, but I would point out that it is a blog, it is an ideologically-oriented publication,” Obenshain said.
That hurts, I tell ya, coming from a guy who pays his bills taking taxpayer money in salary and per diems to be a supposed advocate for “limited government,” and makes up the difference chasing ambulances, literally – the Obenshain Law Group lists as its specialties “Virginia Will Contest, Nursing Home Neglect & Personal Injury.”
I might be the editor of a “blog,” but at least that “blog” makes enough money for me to pay my bills without me having to dip my fingers into the pockets of Virginia taxpayers, or waiting for people to die or get seriously injured, so that I can make my ends meet.
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Chris Graham
