GOP launches another unconscionable attack on UNC
Well, the cure is worse than the disease. Ever aggrieved at their supposed exclusion, right-wing conservatives launched another attack on academic freedom at UNC. Under pressure from Art Pope's henchmen the politically appointed UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees...
To protect and serve…and elect
For years, but especially since the George Floyd protests, Republicans have claimed to be the law-and-order party, while painting Democrats as soft on crime. They’ve tried to wrap Democrats around the Defund the Police crowd, despite Democrats’ long commitment to the...
Right-wing ALEC thinks right-wing legislature is doing a great job
When the NCGOP's house publication Carolina Journal trumpeted the news that our state was ranked fifth in a new index of state economic competitiveness, I made a bet with myself that the report had come from ALEC. I won that bet. The American Legislative Exchange...
The housing market is particularly tough on millennials
The housing market right now is insane and comedians are having a field day. A cartoon floating around Facebook has a man and woman looking over a fence at a dog in a doghouse saying, “ We’re prepared to make a very attractive offer for your house.” SNL did a skit...
Schools should teach critical thinking, not “Patriotic Education”
The bill passed by North Carolina legislators to ban the teaching of "critical race theory" represents the most overt effort at ideological indoctrination in the recent history of public education. Ideology is a system of thinking applied on a sustained basis to...
Can Democrats do the 2022 math?
North Carolina Democrats want to change the U.S. Senate math in 2022. But is their problem math or English? In 1990, Harvey Gantt lost the Senate race to Jesse Helms by 100,000 votes. Afterward, a Democratic consultant assured me: “North Carolina’s demographics are...
The natural selection phase of the pandemic
Yesterday, the Center for Disease Control announced that masks are unnecessary for fully vaccinated people. “If you’re fully vaccinated, you do not need to wear a mask – indoors or outdoors, in most settings. We’ve gotten this far. Whether you choose to get vaccinated...
Critical wedge issue
Republicans have found their latest racial bugaboo. They’ve elevated something called critical race theory to a threat to the country, another plot to indoctrinate our children in Marxist thought. The North Carolina house passed a bill to prevent it from being taught...
Roy Cooper: Transformational
If the 2010 Republican wave reoriented North Carolina politics in conservatives' favor, Roy Cooper's election in 2016 came as desperately needed relief for the progressive opposition. Progressives had experienced the intervening years as a natural disaster. After a...
Consolidating support
In the Democratic primary for U. S. Senate, Cheri Beasley is quickly moving to solidify her position as the frontrunner. Shortly after she announced her candidacy, she released a list of more than 70 North Carolina leaders who support her candidacy. Yesterday, EMILY’s...
There’s a problem with intellectual diversity on campus. But the cure is worse than the disease.
Happenings at the University of North Carolina have always been intertwined with the civic life of our state. Chapel Hill is not an ivory tower, as generations of critics have inadvertently recognized. In that spirit I condemn the vandalism targeted at Carolina...
Really?
An opinion piece in the Carolina Journal is so stupid that I cannot even get past the first two sentences. I have a hard time believing they printed it. Ken Raymond’s piece criticizes Winston-Salem’s resolution to study the possibility of reparations for descendants...