The GOP’s new best friend
I’m so tired of the Critical Race Theory debate. I’ve been hearing a version of it all my life. It’s just more dog whistles designed to scare and motivate the GOP’s White, predominantly rural base. In the past, Black men were going to take White women. Then, they...
Berger Gaslights Racial-Justice Advocates with Yet Another Constitutional Amendment
For the first time in what felt like ages, state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger said something entirely reasonable. "Children must learn about our state's racial past and all its ugliness, including the cruelty of slavery to the 1898 Wilmington massacre to Jim...
The money race in North Carolina
The fundraising numbers are in for the second quarter and the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina is taking shape. That said, fundraising has changed dramatically in the past few election cycles and what would once have gotten an eye-popping response gets little more...
The Story of UNC’s Decline is the Story of America’s Decline
What did Donald Rumsfeld have in common with Randall Ramsey? Not much on the surface of things, one being a two-time Secretary of Defense and the other a provincial boat salesman who may need some introduction even to the well informed readers of this blog. But...
Schools are safe places. Counties that voted for Trump are not.
We are quickly getting past the midpoint of summer. Schools will re-open in just five or six weeks. It’s time to take the masks off our kids. With mitigation measures, COVID is not much of a risk them and they are not a risk to us. There is little scientific reason to...
New Report Explains How NC has Failed Its Workers
A new report from the research and advocacy group Carolina Forward shines a light on one of North Carolina's greatest failures: the failure to support hourly workers. In clear, fast-paced prose supplemented by graphics and charts, Carolina Forward runs through the...
The damage is real
Joe Killian is killin’ it. The Policy Watch reporter got most of the scoops in the Nikole Hannah-Jones debacle and he’s been documenting the damage that the GOP has done to the University of North Carolina. Snubbing Hannah-Jones certainly grabbed national attention,...
Billionaire Space Tourism Is A Tawdry Symbol of the New Gilded Age
At least Cornelius Vanderbilt endowed a university. The quintessential 19th-century robber baron otherwise concerned himself with sweet-talking congress for aid to his railroads and indulging in luxuries that would seem outlandish to the thousands living in tenements...
Indoctrination instead of information
During the last significant political alignment, conservative Democrats left their party to join the Reagan Revolution. Many had been supporting or voting with the increasingly conservative GOP on most issues for years. Southern Congressmen, a US Senator, and a...
NC’s Constitution is a Great Document. But Its Favoritism Toward the Legislature is Putting Our Democracy at Risk.
History's burden is particularly heavy in America's Southern states. You could even say that the Old Confederacy is haunted by what its white people have done to its Black people, by the legacy of a slave society never fully redeemed. The state of North Carolina is...
the war on knowledge
When the UNC Board of Trustees initially refused to consider tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones, they laid bare the GOP’s tendency to politicize our university system. They ignored historical precedent and they rejected the recommendations of the faculty and...
The U.S. Senate Race is Going well for Democrats
Things are rather dismal in the Tar Heel state right now. UNC supporters find themselves watching Chapel Hill implode to the gleeful satisfaction of a reactionary legislature. That same legislature stands poised to pass a budget which offers a trivial raise to...