PoliticsNC Book Club: North Carolina, A History
With so many subdivisions and shopping malls sprouting up across North Carolina, it can be hard to appreciate just how old this state is. People first began inhabiting the future North Carolina 12,000 years ago. Europeans first made contact with the state nearly 500...
Echoing the Reagan re-alignment
Dr. Michael Bitzer has an interesting post on Twitter this weekend. He’s watching who switched parties and where they went after the election. While the numbers are small, they indicate Republicans are leaving their party at a significantly greater pace than Democrats...
Something to complain about
Since the beginning of the pandemic, conservatives have been demanding that we re-open schools. Teachers and school personnel have been demanding a vaccine before they go back into the classroom. Finally, we have the vaccine so both sides can get their way. Last...
Dispatches from The GOP civil war
The North Carolina Republican Party unanimously voted to censure Senator Richard Burr for voting to convict Donald Trump in his impeachment trial. Senator Ben Sasse faces censure from the Nebraska GOP and Utah Republicans are circulating a petition to censure Mitt...
We are failing our children
Here’s my latest unpopular opinion, at least among people who generally agree with me. We should be reopening schools and our reaction and response to the coronavirus has been driven more by hysteria than reality. The damage we are doing to our children is unknown,...
Real talk about a Lara Trump senate candidacy
The New York Times ran a largely speculative piece this morning that explored whether Lara Trump, political novice and daughter-in-law of disgraced, defeated former President Donald J. Trump, will descend upon North Carolina for a Senate campaign. The dilettante has...
The Patriot and the Coward
The Senate voted to acquit Donald Trump for the second time, telling the world that the United States will not hold its elected leaders accountable for criminal behavior. We are in a shameful period in our history. The Republican Party has degenerated into...
Dorothea Dix and the tortuous ironies of American history
The Victorian era is remembered, with justification, as a time of stringent patriarchy. Men went to work in the growing industrial world while women were kept, strictly and under the dominion of their husbands, in the "second sphere" of family and homemaking. Male...
A more honest history
Last week, the State School Board passed new standards for teaching social studies to include information about racism, discrimination, and identity. Republicans, including Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, opposed the changes, claiming they are anti-American. I did...
NC Republicans’ false mandate
When Governor Bev Perdue took office after winning election by about three points, observers widely considered her to have a "weak mandate." Never mind that she had outperformed Barack Obama, the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry North Carolina in 32...
How the coronavirus brought down the gop
Of all the failures of the Republican Party over the past few decades, their response to the coronavirus will be seen as the catalyst that led to the party’s demise. A little over a year after the first person succumbed to COVID, we now have more than 450,000 dead....
The bull horns have replaced the dog whistles
An article in the Atlantic this morning points out that most of the people who stormed the Capitol were not affiliated with white nationalist gangs like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. Instead, they were predominantly middle-aged and middle-income Trump supporters who...