Before last week, I’d never heard of a man named Hung Cao. That all changed when his campaign put out an ad that made me wish I lived in Virginia just so that I could vote for him. The video his campaign created is a master class in making people aware of and interested in a conservative candidate.

Hung Cao was born in South Vietnam in 1971 while the Vietnam War was still raging. Both of his parents lost their fathers during the war, and they barely managed to escape. Like so many people who lived under the threat of actual communism (not the version taught in college in the “studies” department), Cao grew up as a patriot and a conservative. He eventually attended the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a degree in engineering, which he followed with an M.S. in Applied Physics at the Naval Postgraduate School.  

Image: Hung Cao. Twitter screen grab.

Cao had an impressive naval career. I’m quoting here from Wikipedia (hyperlinks omitted):

Following graduation from the Naval Academy in 1996, Cao served 25 years as a commissioned Navy officer. Trained in the Navy's Special Operations program, Cao salvaged planes and ships around the world. As operations officer on the USS Grasp, he oversaw the naval recovery operation following the John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash and personally dived to rig up the plane for retrieval. He made multiple deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia defusing bombs and conducting special operations missions. During the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, Cao deployed as a part of a humanitarian mission. As a Navy commander, he commanded the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center from 2013 to 2016. He was promoted to captain in 2018. Before his retirement from the Navy in 2021, he worked at the budget programming division of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and as a division chief at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Cao is now running to be the Republican candidate for Virginia’s seat in the Senate. His positions are solidly conservative: he calls events at the southern border a dangerous envision, is extremely opposed to DEI and CRT, wants energy independence, supports school choice, demands voter ID, opposes pollution but doesn’t support climate change madness, wants a strong military not a woke one, supports the Second Amendment, wants to cut America’s dependence on drugs manufactured in China and India, wants to bring competition to healthcare, and is pro-life. On paper, at least, what’s not to like if you’re a conservative?

But where Cao really stands out is that he and his team came out with one of the best campaign videos I’ve ever seen. Watch it and see if you don’t have the same response I did, which was to regret that I’m not living in Virginia because that means I can’t vote for Cao: