Former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax murdered his wife this week before turning the gun on himself at their home. We’re not going to dance on a grave here — a woman is dead and children lost both parents in one afternoon. But we are going to talk about the people who put Justin Fairfax on a pedestal, kept him there when every alarm bell in the building was screaming, and then walked away whistling when it all went quiet.

Because Democrats had a chance to take this man seriously as a threat. Two women — two — came forward in 2019 and said Justin Fairfax sexually assaulted them. One was a fellow Democrat. The party looked at those women, looked at the political math, and chose the math. Every single time. And now the Virginia Democratic establishment gets to sit with that decision for the rest of their careers. Hope the seat was worth it.

Let’s rewind, because the younger folks in the audience might not remember how spectacularly Virginia Democrats embarrassed themselves in early 2019. Governor Ralph Northam got caught with a yearbook photo that was either him in blackface or him in a Klan hood — pick your favorite, he couldn’t decide either. The entire Democratic Party demanded he resign. For about forty-eight hours, it looked like Fairfax would slide right into the governor’s mansion as the next in line.

Then Vanessa Tyson, a political science professor at Scripps College, came forward and said Fairfax had forced himself on her at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Days later, Meredith Watson, a fellow Duke University classmate, said Fairfax had assaulted her in college. Two women. Two separate incidents. Two decades apart. The kind of corroborating pattern that would have ended any Republican’s career before lunch.

And what did Virginia Democrats do? They did what Virginia Democrats always do when the accused has the right letter next to his name — they slow-walked it into oblivion. There were no hearings. There was no investigation. The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus circled the wagons. Fairfax held a press conference, compared himself to Lynching victims — yes, really — and the party collectively decided that maybe those two women were just a little too inconvenient to believe right now.

Remember, this was happening in real time alongside the Northam blackface scandal AND Attorney General Mark Herring admitting he’d also worn blackface. Virginia’s top three Democrats were all drowning in scandal simultaneously, and the party made a calculated decision: if we take all three of them down, a Republican becomes governor. So they kept all three. Northam stayed. Herring stayed. Fairfax stayed. And Vanessa Tyson and Meredith Watson got to watch the man they accused smile for cameras at the State Capitol for the remainder of his term.

We were told — lectured, actually, by every blue-check journalist and Democratic strategist with a Twitter account — that the Kavanaugh hearings proved Democrats were the party that “believes women.” That was September 2018. By February 2019, believing women had an asterisk next to it: *unless the accused is a Black Democrat in a state where the line of succession matters.

Fairfax wasn’t just protected. He was enabled. He ran for governor in 2021. Let that sink in. A man accused of sexual assault by two women ran for the highest office in the state, and the Democratic Party didn’t lift a finger to stop him. He lost — badly — but not because his party intervened. He lost because voters had more sense than party leadership.

Now look. We need to be honest about something. We don’t know what was happening inside that house. We don’t know what led to this week’s horror. Murder-suicide cases are dark, complicated tragedies, and the people who suffer most are the ones left behind — especially the children. Nothing we say here changes what happened to his wife, and nothing should be twisted to minimize that a woman lost her life at the hands of someone who was supposed to protect her.

But here’s what we do know: patterns matter. When two women tell you a man is dangerous and you ignore them because the political calendar says it’s inconvenient, you own a piece of what comes next. Not the act itself — that belongs to the man who committed it. But you own the silence. You own the shrug. You own the decision to look at two credible accusers and say, “Not right now, ladies, we’ve got a governor’s mansion to protect.”

The Washington Post ran a story this week calling Fairfax a “once-rising Democratic star.” That’s how they frame it. Not “the man two women accused of assault whom Democrats refused to investigate.” A rising star. As if his trajectory was interrupted by bad luck rather than bad character that everyone around him chose to ignore.

Virginia Democrats will put out statements. They’ll say they’re “shocked” and “heartbroken.” They’ll call it a “tragedy.” And they’ll very carefully avoid mentioning that in 2019, they had every reason to take a harder look at this man and they chose political survival instead.

We on the right aren’t going to use a woman’s death as a campaign prop. That’s not what this is. But we are going to remember this the next time some Democrat stands at a podium and lectures us about protecting women. We’re going to remember that they had their chance with Justin Fairfax. They had two women standing right in front of them, asking to be heard.

And Virginia Democrats told them to sit down.

Pray for the family. Pray for the children. And never let the people who enabled this man pretend they didn’t know.