Ralph Northam, Virginia’s Democratic governor, declared a public emergency despite knowing there were no grounds for doing so. The governor, who recently overcame his history of racism to hang on to his current elected office, did this in his typically cynical fashion. He invoked the 2017 Charlottesville rally organized by neo-Nazis and suggested that a gathering by law-abiding gun owners in opposition to his gun control proposals would turn out similarly.

In asserting that militia and hate groups had threatened violent acts at the rally, Northam was deliberately stoking irrational fears about what would happen Monday when gun owners converged on Richmond to protest his anti-Second Amendment agenda. When nothing bad happened at the rally, of course, Northam even had the gall to pat himself on the back for it. Such are the delusions of a man whose main goal at this point is to build a legacy comprising something other than the racist costumes on his yearbook page and the racist nickname he went by during the 1980s when he was already a full-grown adult.