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John,
Last week, I introduced you to one of the Republican candidates running against me for state Senate this year and his anti-abortion and anti-trans platform. Here are some choice cuts from Robert Ruffolo's Twitter page, presented without commentary because, I mean...
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Yeah. So there's that.
Anyway, his competition for the nomination is MAGA Republican Bill Woolf, who worked as a senior fellow for a pro-Trump think tank called the "America First Policy Institute."
Just to give you a couple quick hits before getting into the main issue of gun violence prevention I want to write about today:
-Woolf is self-described as "pro-life" and is endorsed by the same governor calling for an abortion ban here in Virginia and by a now-former delegate who voted to define life as "beginning at conception" and for mandatory ultrasounds for anyone seeking abortion care.
-He's working to actively undermine voters' confidence in our elections, falsely saying drop boxes for voters to return their absentee ballots are "inherently set up for fraud" (even Republican voters in his own primary have used drop boxes).
-He's repeatedly made false claims about the environment, like saying the U.S. "has the lowest percent of CO2 emissions" ( PolitiFact noted in 2022, "the U.S. ranks fifth worldwide. On a per-person level, U.S. emissions remain twice that of China.") and blaming the Texas grid collapse in 2021 on renewable energy. ( Inside Climate News reported "the most consequential failures were in the natural gas industry and at gas-fired power plants.")
Donate and Help Me Stand Up to MAGA Extremists [[link removed]]
For this email though, I want to focus on gun violence prevention because I just wrote an op-ed last month about meeting a teacher in Haymarket who told me her primary concern is gun violence in schools, so it's been on my mind a lot lately.
Woolf's positions:
1) He opposed a Biden administration nominee for the ATF because of his support "for universal background checks." On May 23, 2022, he criticized Steve Dettelbach's nomination because he "previously retweeted a petition demanding action for gun control from the organization Sandy Hook Promise (Dettelbach, 2019)."
2) He advocated for the need to "arm teachers and staff with prior military and law enforcement training" -- though he also said at a recent Moms for Liberty debate, "we’re not attracting good teachers to be able to handle the classrooms that they’re working in."
3) He claimed the term "'assault-style' firearm” was “frivolously invented” by the media and adopted by “those advocating for government confiscation of firearms."
Our contrast on this couldn't be clearer.
From 2020-2021, I voted for every gun violence prevention bill that made it to the floor of the Virginia House of Delegates. That includes universal background checks, Substantial Risk Orders (aka red flag laws), and many other bills designed to actually do something to prevent mass shootings rather than make it easier for someone to become a mass shooter in the first place.
This year, I'm proud to be designated a Moms Demand Action "Gun Sense Candidate" and I'm grateful to have earned the endorsement of The VEA Fund for Children and Public Education. In short, I actually vote for the bills designed to keep students, teachers and staffers in schools safe from gun violence and I'll continue to do so if elected to represent the 30th District of the Virginia state Senate this fall.
I'm asking you to donate $10, $25, $50, $100 or whatever you can do today so we can get our message out and win this campaign Nov. 7 against either of the MAGA Republicans we end up facing. [[link removed]]
Regardless of their primary, our message stays the same: we're for fixing roads, feeding kids, preventing gun violence, raising teacher pay, protecting your reproductive rights, cutting emissions and making Virginia a more inclusive commonwealth.
So please donate today to help me promote that message and let's keep our Democratic majority in the Virginia state Senate. [[link removed]]
Warmly,
Danica
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Friends of Danica Roem
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Manassas, VA 20113
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