​​The Virginia General Assembly is considering the partial restoration of HIV funding that the state’s Department of Health cut last year.

The Department of Health in 2025 cut $20 million — or 67 percent of total funding — from the Ryan White Part B program. 

The funding cuts started with the Trump-Vance administration passing budget cuts to federal HIV screening and protection programs. Rebate issues between the Virginia Department of Health and the company that provides HIV medications began.

Advocates say the funding cuts have disproportionately impacted lower-income people.

The Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, a federal program started in 1990, provides medical services, public education, and essential services. Part B offers 21 services, seven of which remained funded after the budget cuts. 

Equality Virginia notes “in 2025, a 67 percent reduction severely destabilized HIV services across the commonwealth.” 

Virginia lawmakers have approved two bills — House Bill 30 and Senate Bill 30 — that would partially restore the funding. The Ryan White cuts remain a concern among community members. 

Both chambers of the General Assembly must review their proposed changes before lawmakers can adopt the bills.

“While these amendments aren’t a full restoration of what community-based organizations lost, this marks a critical step toward stabilizing care for thousands of Virginians living with HIV,” said Equality Virginia Executive Director Narissa Rahaman. “Equality Virginia plans to continue their contact with lawmakers and delegates through the conference and up until the passing of the budget.” 

“We appreciate lawmakers from both sides of the aisle who recognized the urgency of this moment and will work to ensure funding remains in the final version signed by the governor,” added Rahaman.

I recently lost my dog, Argo.

He was a pit bull, big, sweet, endlessly cuddly, and for 15 years he was my constant. The kind of presence you stop consciously noticing until they’re gone and the quiet hits you all at once. Pit bulls have a reputation. Argo never got the memo. He just loved people, completely and without condition, from the moment he met them until his last day.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

My phone filled up. Instagram lit up. Texts came in from people I hadn’t heard from in months, in some cases years. Hugs from neighbors. Messages from colleagues. Condolences from people I’d lost touch with, some through nothing more than the slow drift of busy lives in a busy city, and some honestly through small tiffs and misunderstandings that neither of us ever bothered to resolve.

And sitting with all of that love pouring in, I found myself asking a question I wasn’t expecting: Why has it taken this long?

We do this in D.C. We get caught in our heads, our calendars, our ambitions. We let weeks turn into months. We let a small misunderstanding calcify into distance because nobody wants to be the first one to reach out, nobody wants to seem like they need something. We perform resilience so well that sometimes the people who care about us most don’t know we need them.

And then something breaks open, a loss, a moment of real vulnerability, and suddenly people show up. And you realize the connection was always there. It just needed permission.

Argo gave people permission. Even in dying, he did what he always did when he was alive. He brought people together.

I’ll be honest with you about where I’ve been lately. As I’ve climbed the entrepreneurial ladder, something quietly shifted. People stopped seeing Gerard. They started seeing a title, a resource, someone who could give them something or who owed them something. A character. Not a person. And when most of your day is spent inside other people’s problems and crises, you can start to feel it, a slow creep of cynicism that you don’t even notice until one day you realize you’ve gone numb.

And I’m not alone in that. Look around. We just watched innocent people die while those in power looked us in the face and called it something else. We watched people erupt over a 10-minute halftime performance like it was the greatest threat to our country. Everywhere you look there is something designed to make you angry, or exhausted, or both. Anger and numbness have become survival strategies. I understand it. I’ve lived it.

But here is what Argo reminded me.

The world is not what the loudest voices say it is. The world is what shows up when something real happens. And what showed up for me, after losing my sweet boy, was people. Caring, loving, present people who put down whatever they were doing to reach out to a friend. Some of them I hadn’t spoken to in too long. Some of them I’d had friction with. All of them showed up anyway.

That is the world. That is what it actually is underneath all the noise.

I think we’ve forgotten that. Or maybe we haven’t forgotten it, maybe we’re just so tired and overstimulated and battle-worn that we’ve stopped letting ourselves feel it. Because feeling it requires vulnerability, and vulnerability feels dangerous right now. It’s easier to scroll. It’s easier to stay mad. It’s easier to keep a wall up and call it wisdom.

Argo spent 15 years showing me a different way. He never met a stranger. He never held a grudge. He never saved his love for people who deserved it on paper. He just gave it, freely, every single time. Not a reward. Not a transaction. Just the most natural thing in the world.

Grief burns off everything that isn’t essential and leaves only what matters. What’s left for me is this: the world is full of good people. You may be surrounded by more of them than you know. And if you’ve gone numb, or angry, or so busy surviving that you’ve stopped connecting, I want you to know that the feeling can come back. It came back for me.

Reach out to someone today. Close a distance you’ve let grow. Tell someone they matter. Not because everything is perfect, but because connection is how we survive when it isn’t. Living disconnected, mad and closed off isn’t living at all. It’s a slower kind of dying.

Death came to teach me how to live. I hope this saves you some time.

Gerard Burley, also known as Coach G, is founder and CEO of Sweat DC.

There are few figures in modern politics whose reach extends across Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington, D.C., as Peter Thiel’s.

A billionaire venture capitalist, Thiel built his fortune at the dawn of the internet age and has since positioned himself at the highest levels of U.S. technology, finance, and national defense infrastructure. He is best known as a co-founder of PayPal, an early investor in Facebook, and the co-founder of Palantir Technologies — a data analytics firm that maintains significant contracts with U.S., U.K., and Israeli defense and intelligence agencies.

Over the last two decades, Thiel has also built an interconnected network of investment vehicles — Clarium Capital, Founders Fund, Thiel Capital, Valar Ventures, and Mithril Capital — giving him influence over emerging technologies, political candidates, and ideological movements aligned with his worldview. Through these firms, Thiel has backed companies in artificial intelligence, defense technology, biotech, cryptocurrency, and financial services, often positioning himself early in sectors that later became central to public policy debates.

Born in Frankfurt, West Germany, in 1967, Thiel immigrated to the United States as an infant. He later attended Stanford University, earning a degree in philosophy before graduating from Stanford Law School in 1992. As an undergraduate, he founded The Stanford Review, a conservative student publication that opposed what it described as campus “political correctness.” The paper became a platform for combative and contrarian arguments that previewed themes Thiel would revisit in later essays and speeches about elite institutions, democracy, and technological stagnation.

Thiel’s professional ascent coincided with the explosive growth of the dot-com era. In 1998, he co-founded PayPal, helping pioneer digital payment systems that would become foundational to online commerce. When the company was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, Thiel emerged a multimillionaire and part of what would later be known as the “PayPal Mafia” — a loose but influential network of founders and early employees who went on to launch or invest in some of Silicon Valley’s most dominant firms.

In 2004, Thiel made one of the most consequential investments of his career, providing $500,000 in seed funding to Facebook, then a fledgling social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. He became the company’s first outside investor and later served on its board. That early bet proved extraordinarily lucrative and cemented Thiel’s status as a major venture capitalist with a reputation for identifying transformative platforms before they reached scale.

The same year, he co-founded Palantir Technologies. Initially backed in part by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, Palantir developed software — including its Gotham platform — designed to help defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies integrate and analyze massive datasets. The company’s tools allow users to map relationships, identify patterns, and visualize complex networks across financial records, communications data, and other digital trails.

Over time, Palantir secured billions of dollars in public-sector contracts. It has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and allied governments abroad. Public reporting has documented that its global government contracts exceed $1.9 billion, including agreements with Israeli defense entities — relationships that reportedly expanded following the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. Critics have raised concerns about civil liberties and surveillance, while supporters argue the company provides essential national security tools.

By the mid-2000s, Thiel was no longer simply a wealthy entrepreneur. He was a financier operating at the intersection of capital, advanced technology, and government — with investments embedded in some of the country’s most sensitive security systems. His political giving would later extend that influence further, including support for candidates aligned with his populist and nationalist leanings– notably Donald Trump in 2016.

As his wealth and influence expanded, so too did his proximity to other powerful — and, in some cases, controversial — figures in global finance.

Among them was Jeffrey Epstein.

Thiel’s name appears more than 2,200 times in documents released so far by the U.S. Department of Justice related to Epstein. A name appearing in legal filings does not, by itself, indicate wrongdoing. However, the extensive references illustrate that Epstein’s social and financial network intersected with elite figures in technology, academia, politics, and finance — including individuals connected to Thiel’s business and philanthropic circles.

Epstein’s legal troubles became public in 2005, when police in Palm Beach, Fla., investigated allegations that he had sexually abused a minor. In 2008, he pleaded guilty in state court to soliciting prostitution from a minor under a plea agreement that was widely criticized as unusually lenient. He served 13 months in county jail with work-release privileges and was required to register as a sex offender. Comparable federal charges can carry significantly longer sentences.

Despite that conviction, Epstein continued to maintain relationships with prominent business and political figures for years. The extent to which members of elite networks remained in contact with him after his guilty plea has been the subject of extensive scrutiny.

Documents released by the Justice Department indicate that individuals connected to Thiel’s philanthropic and investment circles communicated with Epstein after his conviction. One document shows an invitation, sent on behalf of the Thiel Foundation, for Epstein to attend a technology event in San Francisco. Additional financial records and reporting indicate that between 2015 and 2016, Epstein invested approximately $40 million in funds managed by Valar Ventures, one of Thiel’s firms. Other records reflect meetings and correspondence, at times arranged through intermediaries. Epstein also extended invitations to his Caribbean residence.

There is no evidence that Thiel was involved in Epstein’s criminal conduct. The documented interactions do, however, show numerous planned meetings between the two both in the Caribbean (where Epstein’s infamous island is located) and across the world, while also raising questions about why business relationships continued after Epstein had pleaded guilty to a sex offense involving a minor and was a registered sex offender. For critics, that continued engagement speaks to the insular nature of elite finance, where access to capital and networks can override reputational risk.

Palantir represents another overlap. In emails made public through Justice Department releases, Epstein referenced Palantir in correspondence with Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister who also maintained ties to Epstein. The emails do not indicate that Epstein had operational involvement in Palantir or access to its systems, however, they show that he discussed one of Thiel’s most strategically significant companies — a firm deeply integrated into Western defense and intelligence systems — with senior political figures abroad.

Separately, Thiel’s long-running dispute with Gawker Media offers additional insight into how he has exercised power outside traditional political channels.

After Gawker published an article in 2007 that publicly identified Thiel as gay, he later secretly funded litigation brought by professional wrestler Hulk Hogan over the outlet’s publication of a sex tape. The lawsuit resulted in a $140 million judgment against Gawker, which ultimately filed for bankruptcy. Thiel later confirmed his financial backing of the case, framing it as a defense of privacy and a response to what he considered reckless media behavior.

The episode demonstrated Thiel’s willingness to deploy substantial financial resources strategically and, at times, discreetly. It also illustrated how wealth can be used to influence institutions — whether through venture capital, political donations, or litigation.

Taken together, the record does not establish criminal liability for Thiel in connection with Epstein. It does, however, situate him within a dense web of elite finance, national security contracting, political influence, and reputation management. As additional documents related to Epstein continue to emerge, that web — and the decisions made within it — remains a subject of public interest and ongoing scrutiny.