Tell you what, if Lorie Jean Akanbi, the first Black female vice mayor of Waynesboro, doesn’t have room under the local Democratic Party tent, well, there’s a reason Democrats haven’t won the congressional seat out this way in 36 years.
“You never had to write the sentence, ‘Lorie supports City Elders.’ You put my name into a context that implied something about why I was there and what I took from that room. And you were wrong. Dead wrong,” Akanbi wrote in a lengthy Facebook post on Saturday, responding to local blogger Alondra Gonzalez, who, yes, was at her nonsense again.
Gonzalez writes a Substack that she calls “Luna’s Mutual Aid,” which has, at this writing, 176 subscribers – the low number, significantly, includes the Sixth District Democratic Party nominee, Beth Macy, and one of Macy’s campaign staffers, Pete Barlow, so, you could say she has influence above her vitals.
Akanbi seemed taken aback at being called out by Gonzalez online for attending an event featuring the Republican nominee for governor in the 2025 cycle, Winsome Earle-Sears, as the featured speaker, that was held on Friday in Fishersville.
“If you gonna clock me, clock it right. You said you were disappointed to see me at the City Elders event. You wrote about people ‘taking falsehood and extremes at face value’ and sharing ‘extremes to fearmonger, misinform, and divide our communities.’ And then you named me. So, I’m asking you directly. What did I write that was false?”
Akanbi asked this in her post, in which she defended another lengthy post made a day earlier, in which she laid out, in granular detail, what she’s come to learn about the three state constitutional amendments that are on the Nov. 3 ballot.
The City Elders are, absolutely, out there, as we’ve written in the past, but I’d say here, Akanbi going to one of their meetings doesn’t make her one of them – particularly when she makes it clear, she’s not one of them.
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If going to an event sponsored by a Republican group automatically makes you a Republican, well, let me plead guilty now and get it over with – in my 30-plus years as a journalist, guess what, I’ve broken bread with practically every Republican of note in the Valley and in the Commonwealth.
George Allen and Jerry Kilgore will occasionally email me about UVA Football; I still have long-time local GOP state senator Emmett Hanger’s mobile number committed to memory.
The best career advice I’ve ever gotten came from: former local GOP state delegate Chris Saxman.
The other side is not the enemy, except to the extremists – which is why it’s hard to find common ground with the hardest of the hardcore MAGAs, and also hard to find common ground with the likes of people supposedly on our side like Ms. Gonzalez.
To get Lorie Akanbi to even think an untoward thought about somebody, man.
She’s such the saint that she won’t even say bad things about me.
Just to be clear, Akanbi isn’t the first local Dem to feel the sting of Ms. Gonzalez.
I wrote here a few days ago about a local blogger who tried to whip up her group to take me on because she wasn’t happy about a column that we wrote on AFP on local MAGAs pushing for a library Pride event to be canceled.
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I didn’t address her by name, because I was well aware what she was up to – trying to goad me into a dumb feud with her so that she could grow her tiny base of followers.
I understand the instinct that’s there when you’re just starting out in politics blogging, that one might feel the need to punch up to get attention – so, you punch up at the guy who runs a news website with 8 million pageviews a year, with 98,000 social media followers; or, you punch up at an elected member of a local City Council, whose platform is a city of 24,000 taxpaying residents.
And to her credit, the strategy there appears to be working – Gonzalez will be one of the featured speakers at a local Democratic Party rally on Sunday, alongside not only Beth Macy, the congressional candidate, but the sitting governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, which, wow, what a coup, right?
The event is being organized by the Augusta County Democratic Committee, which is dooming itself, yet again, to getting our Democrat on the ballot in the vicinity of 25 to 30 percent of the vote in the county, on her way to a blowout loss district-wide – and this frustrates me to no end.
What had excited me about Beth Macy as a candidate in our district was, I’ve been writing for years about how we need a candidate who can have crossover appeal, and can raise money, since Richmond and DC eternally ignore us out this way, because our candidates have a hard time cracking 40 percent.
Macy has raised gobs of money, though I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s being spent well to try to emphasize that she has crossover appeal – seriously, that commercial with the bluegrass jingle was bad advice from whatever consultant got a six-figure payout to recommend it.
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The bad idea there is that bluegrass isn’t just something that people who listen to NPR think is music that appeals to mainstream Republican voters, but, you know, it’s, you know, authentic.
News flash: the Macy campaign already had the 2 percent of the electorate that listens to bluegrass.
For a Democrat to have a prayer in the Sixth District, we can’t just have disaffected Republican voters who prefer Jason Aldean to bluegrass saying, Maybe I’ll sit this one out – because there still aren’t nearly enough Democrats to beat the hardest of the hardcores up and down the I-81 corridor straight up.
We need the ones on the fence to, not just skip, but to flip – which means …
You’re going to need some folks who’ve been to City Elders meetings under your tent.
Having a Lorie Jean Akanbi at a City Elders meeting because she wants to try to understand what the group is about isn’t a sin in need of repentance.
We need Democrats like Akanbi who don’t view the other side as the enemy on our side, and then on top of that, we need a ton of Republicans who are starting to see the light to also decide to come under the tent with us.
Giving a prominent speaking spot to somebody who demands 100 percent ideological purity to be allowed under the tent is the sin here.
It comes across to me as, the Beth Macy campaign isn’t serious – about winning, anyway.
They’re serious about raising the gobs of money; I’ll give them credit for being good at that part of running a campaign.
Using the campaign apparatus that other people paid to build to elevate somebody who goes out of her way to make enemies of other Democrats is a curious way to try to build a winning coalition, but, hey, people didn’t give that million-plus to me to do as I see fit.
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Chris Graham
