(Daily Signal)—Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is fighting against what he calls a “criminal-first, victim-last mindset” that has swept through the commonwealth’s justice system under previous Democrat administrations.
As he campaigns for reelection, Miyares is armed with alarming statistics: Over 9,600 inmates were released early in fiscal year 2023 alone, with roughly 50% being rearrested—resulting in more than 4,500 new victims of crime.
In our candid interview, Miyares pulls no punches as he dissects the policy decisions that have undermined Virginia’s once-impressive public safety record. We also discussed local police chiefs who refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and Miyares’ defense of parents’ rights in schools.
As Virginians turn their attention to this November’s election, Miyares argues that voters face a clear choice between the “social justice reforms” championed by his opponent and the proven policies that could make Virginia one of the safest states in the nation.
Listen to the full interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast” or read a lightly edited transcript below.
Joe Thomas: The attorney general of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Jason Miyares, taking a little time out from trying to keep the laws enforced in Virginia and then run for reelection as well. Talk about your role as the guy who’s been through this now as summer begins, and all the fairs and all the sweaty door knocking.
Jason Miyares: I get the great joy for the next couple months of asking Virginians to rehire me … to protect them as attorney general.
I like to say, “We’re the people’s protector.” We’ve had an incredible record of protecting Virginians, not just from criminal misconduct but corporate misconduct as well.
We’re proud of the work that we’ve done. Where we were in Virginia when we took office versus where we are today is really night and day. So, we’re proud of our record and it’s a great joy now to just be able to share that with Virginians.
Thomas: Talk about why people need to understand that it is important for criminals to serve out their term in prison for crimes they committed.
Miyares: Let me tell your listeners where Virginia was before we got into truth in sentencing.
Prior to George Allen, a great governor of Virginia in the 1990s, taking office, you had a revolving door in our criminal justice system where on average you served about one fourth or one fifth of your sentence.
So, if you were sentenced to 20 years for rape, you would actually be getting out in four or five years. That’s the world Virginia was in prior to him taking office.
A lot of hard lessons were learned, and he implemented truth in the sentencing, which says if you get 20 years, you have to serve at least 85% of that sentence.
In other words, if you do the crime, then you’re going to do the time. Our public safety record showed that, at the time, the crime rate plummeted.
Then they say, “The only thing you learn from history is nobody learns from history.”
You had a lot of these social justice warriors that got power under the previous governor, Ralph Northam, and they decided—even though Virginia was, at the time, one of the safest states of its size in the country—they wanted to change a lot of the hard progress we had made in keeping Virginia safe.
They decided they wanted to get rid of truth in sentencing and they brought back something called the Enhanced Earned Sentence Credit—I just call it the early-release program under Ralph Northam—and essentially allowed you to get up to 50% off your sentence depending on the category of crime.
It became what Virginia was before, where people were getting out with years upon years on their sentence. The worse the crime is, the more time potentially you could get off your sentence.
We opposed it, we warned them. This bill got passed in 2021 and went into effect in 2022. Now we’re starting to see the data of the Northam early release program, which my opponent Jay Jones was a champion of.
This is what we’ve seen: Just in fiscal year 2023, over 9,600 inmates were released early and roughly 50% of them were rearrested.
That’s over 4,500 new victims in Virginia that would not be victims of crime but for the foolish policies of this criminal-first, victim-last mindset that decided to ignore the victims and to care more about felons than about the safety of Virginians.
They put them back on the street where they promptly had to be rearrested. And we’re seeing similar disturbing numbers of coming up in 2024.
Thomas: It seems like it’s closely related to what [former Virginia governor] Terry McAuliffe did when he gave mass restoration of voting rights to some people who were on the FBI’s most-wanted list, some people who were back in jail when he did it because there was no due process to it. Nobody looked and said, “Hey, has this guy earned early release or not?”
Miyares: In the case of McAuliffe, you had somebody who was literally arrested for capital murder [who was] sitting in a prison in West Virginia [when he] was notified that his rights had been restored to vote in the Commonwealth of Virginia. That’s how absurd it was.
They never even bothered to see if these people were actually incarcerated. Again, this is a criminal-first, victim-last mindset.
The great irony of all this is that there is nothing new under the sun, as Scripture says. There’s not a single “social justice reform” they’re advocating for that was not already tried with disastrous results in the 1970s: cashless bail, early release of violent offenders, no truth in sentencing.
That was all part of the so-called enlightened reforms of the 1970s that had grappled so many people’s minds in the criminal justice system. They implemented it and the result was a crime explosion in the 1980s.
In the 1990s, we pushed back, brought back truth in sentencing, brought back common sense, and these people have all forgotten those hard lessons.
That’s part of my frustration: This is not new or novel. These reforms have already been tried. They don’t work, but these individuals are in a left-wing, ideological straitjacket they cannot get out of.
When we pointed out at a press conference the number of Virginians that have been hurt by these people getting out early, including a mom whose daughter was killed. Somebody got out early and he turned his car into a two-ton weapon and had tragically taken her daughter’s life, the Democratic leader in the state Senate just said, “Well, that’s just a one-off.”
Fifty percent rearrest means there are thousands of Virginians that have been revictimized by this dishonest, lenient early-release program that’s hurting Virginians.
Thomas: Gov. Youngkin just was in Chesterfield with state police talking about working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I really wanted to ask you about this as Virginia’s lawyer and the “top cop” in Virginia, but also as the child of an immigrant. Your mom immigrated here from Cuba, escaping Castro, but you are out here saying, “No, we need to have the rule of law.” Explain all that for folks who don’t see the difference.
Miyares: America’s an incredibly generous country. We allow 1 million legal immigrants a year, but what we don’t like is to feel like we’re being taken advantage of.
Prior to [my mother] being allowed to get her green card, she had to produce an affidavit that she would not be a ward of the state. She would not cost taxpayers money. She had to do a full medical and criminal background check.
That is very different than the individuals that decide to cut in line and decide to basically break the law when they come here. That’s why you’ve seen the greatest shift toward the GOP on illegal immigration are new Americans, those that have done it the right way.
I know the folks at CNN are always shocked at these numbers, but not if you actually talk to those in so many of our different immigrant communities that have come here legally.
When you do that citizenship oath, that is a moment where you take an oath of allegiance to the United States, to our Constitution and you swear off any foreign allegiance to another prince or king or government. It is an incredibly powerful, moving moment.
Those that have come here illegally never do that. They never do a background check. They never do a medical history. They never have to supply an affidavit saying they’re not going to be a ward of the state, and they sure don’t take that oath of allegiance to this country.
There is an absolutely Grand Canyon difference between those that have done it the right way and played by the rules and those that decide to come over our border in a lawless manner and come to this country.
Under Joe Biden, you had 8.2 million illegal immigrants that crossed that southern border while he was president. That is larger than the population of 32 U.S. states. That is not sustainable. It was absolutely a foreign invasion that had happened in our country.
Thomas: What do you say to the Charlottesville police chief who, all of a sudden, takes all the camera data and secures it so … only Charlottesville police can access it so that no illegal [alien] winds up getting caught in Charlottesville on a surveillance camera?
Miyares: It shows misplaced priorities and horrible judgment. Your first job as a public servant is to make sure your citizens are safe. The actions you described do not make your citizens any safer. It makes them less safe.
When you decide that you’re not going to cooperate with federal authorities for particularly those that are violent offenders that are here illegally that commit another crime, you are making your citizens less safe. The idea that they are less concerned about their citizens’ safety than those that have broken the law by coming here illegally, I think says a lot more about them and their misplaced priorities.
Thomas: I also want to see if we have an update on the Loudoun school situation. Can this school division just be more of a mess or is this the best thing that could happen leading into another gubernatorial election?
Miyares: Tragically, when we ran in 2021, our theme was parents’ matter. Virginia kind of became the epicenter of the parents’ matter movement because so many parents are told either through their school principals or through their school boards to sit down, be quiet, and you shouldn’t have a voice.
That was never our attitude here. We have fought for parents’ rights. One of our first lawsuits in Virginia that we had to litigate—and won—was simply this idea that parents could decide whether their child has to wear a mask in school, not an unelected bureaucracy.
We had to fight that all the way through the court system to be able to win that. We are proud of our work on the Parents Matter movement. We’re proud to stand with parents and the fight is never ending.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.