VA police academy official signs graduate certificates with Chinese characters; pushback

According to a Fox News report out yesterday, a Virginia county criminal justice training academy recently cut ties with a local municipality after its police chief pushed back on the academy’s director signing graduate certificates with Chinese language characters.

The county is Fairfax, one of the top 25 wealthiest counties in the U.S., and nestled right in the belly of the Washington D.C. beast; here are the details:

Herndon Police Chief Maggie DeBoard complained that the academy director, Maj. Wilson Lee, used Chinese characters to sign the certificates that graduates receive when they complete training at the Fairfax County Criminal Justice Academy.

In an email sent last month and obtained by The Associated Press, DeBoard told Lee, ‘I just found out that the academy graduation certificates were signed by you in some other language, not in English. This is unacceptable for my agency. I don’t want our Herndon officers to receive these and I am requesting that they are issued certificates signed in English, the language that they are expected to use as an officer.’

If you’re wondering what Lee looks like, here you go:

Why is this Virginia police academy director signing officer graduate certificates with Chinese characters? pic.twitter.com/5VTOgcXtWF

— Olivia Murray (@americaliv1) April 5, 2024

In response to DeBoard’s complaint, and her request that Director Lee reissue the graduation certificates using only the official language of the United States, the county academy terminated its relationship with the town of Herndon, banning the DeBoard’s recruits from participating in future classes; and, here’s what the Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said in an email to his department in the wake of the debacle:

‘For 16 years of an impeccable career, memorializing a legal name given at birth with a signature that exudes heritage pride has not garnered a single criticism. Nor should it.’

It was a veiled refutation of DeBoard’s complaint and request for remedy, and a defense of Lee’s actions.

So what’s going on? Is this just a case of wokism? This is America after all, but apparently that’s extremely controversial for the leftists who hate the moral foundations of the West, and nowadays, anything goes for government documents.

Or, is it plausible deniability for something more sinister?

Allow me to draw your attention to a big story from last year, which was covered by AT’s Monica Showalter. In an April 2023 essay, Showalter wrote on the disturbing revelations that the Chinese Communist Party had been quietly establishing police stations and networks within the U.S., to force political dissidents back to the motherland to face the wrath of the CCP. In Showalter’s words:

They [CCP operatives] set up what were essentially NKVD operations to hunt down Chinese dissidents here on legitimate asylum in the U.S. in order to force them back to the communist hellhole they’d fled, apparently with quite a bit of success….

(News had recently broken that the FBI had raided and shuttered a “station” that had been operating in south Manhattan.)

So, here’s what stood out to me about this Virginia story: police chief Davis, a presumed ally of Lee, alleged that Lee’s signature was an ode to “a legal name given at birth” — therefore, I can only assume that Lee was, at birth, a Chinese citizen. (For all I know, maybe he still is?) A number of states (at least half), Virginia included, have laws on the books that established English as the official language, which means foreign characters and diacritical marks can’t be used on official government identification documents issued by those states.

Now maybe Lee is just a typical narcissist leftist, thinking he’s entitled to usurp someone’s professional achievement and use it to promote his cultural heritage—but I mean, Chinese communist flags did line American streets to welcome Xi Jinping to San Francisco (while the American flag was conspicuously absent); high-profile New York Democrats were caught sporting Chinese communist garb (on more than one occasion), while also waving the CCP’s flag… in New York; and, Mayor Eric Adams has taken luxury political trips to China, and one of his top aides is embroiled in a corruption scandal involving CCP cash….

I can’t help but wonder, is Lee just another piece of the puzzle?

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.