They’re Coming for the Books–And the Truth
In the mid-19th century with chattel slavery at its zenith, an African American man named David Walker wrote a pamphlet called the Appeal. A clarion call to his fellow Blacks, the Appeal sought "to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering...
THE DEMOCRATS’ COUNTRYPOLITAN PROBLEM IN NORTH CAROLINA
By: Mac McCorkle and Rachel Salzberg The 2022 election year looks to be a challenging one for North Carolina Democrats. A major part of that challenge stems from what we call their “Countrypolitan” problem. Extremely gerrymandered Republican maps could put Democratic...
Notes on the #NCSEN Republicans
For all his disappointment at a Senate campaign gone bust, Mark Walker must derive a bit of satisfaction from having Pat McCrory's fate in his hands. Former Congressman Walker has announced that, tomorrow, he will declare his political intentions for the remainder of...
A Perfect Storm of Right-Wing Authoritarianism
For all the maddening blizzard of destructive policies they have inflicted upon the state, the North Carolina Republican Legislature consolidated power with a simple two-step plan. First, gerrymander themselves into a voter-proof majority. Second, ensure that that...
Democrats Still Need the Working Class
Between the year 2000 and 2020, the percentage of Americans with a college degree nearly doubled. At the turn of the millennium, a college degree was still a relative rarity in many American communities, with only 20% of the country's population holding a Bachelor's...
Race and deaths of despair
The star of the Trump era was the White working class. In particular, the media focused on the crisis of White working class men. They were dying at alarming rates, so much so that their life expectancy decreased. They were dying from what became dubbed “deaths of...
Propaganda and Republican hypocrisy
Republican Twitter pundits are all aghast at WRAL owner Jim Goodmon’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speech in Rocky Mount. Goodmon criticized Republicans for failing our schools, extreme gerrymandering, and leaving so many North Carolinians without medical coverage in...
A Fundamental Failure of Governance Thanks to Manchin and Sinema
The Democratic Party is the only major political party in the United States that still believes representative democracy should prevail in a multi-racial society. Democrats represent communities that have long suffered exclusion from the democratic process and have a...
Moving Primary target
Republicans in the Senate are voting today to delay the primary yet again. They’re making plans to ensure that they can redraw legislative and Congressional districts in the event that the Supreme Court finds their districts unconstitutional. The current schedule...
Dispatches from the Endangered Southern Democracy
Six decades after Jim Crow crumbled, a significant portion of the South's white population has not accepted racial equality. In fact, these reactionaries are in the midst of an effort to restore an ersatz version of the White Man's Republic by handicapping Black...
The GOP’s War on the Independent Judiciary is Part of Their Authoritarian Push
The North Carolina Republican Legislature did not expand the state Supreme Court in order to nullify the results of the 2016 judicial elections. That's about the only attack on the independent judiciary that they have restrained themselves from pursuing. In almost...
Just move on
On the eve of the Martin Luther King Holiday, Virginia’s new governor, Glenn Youngkin, signed an executive order banning schools from teaching Critical Race Theory. He told Fox News, "But to actually teach our children that one group is advantaged and the...