Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
Fall is in the air, college football is back and I’ll be at Carter-Finley Stadium, pulling for the Wolfpack. In a couple of months, I’ll be in the Lenovo Center (or whatever it’s named now) hoping Will Wade can restore our basketball glory in the era of NIL (“Now It’s Legal”). I’ll learn the players’…
If the Democratic Party were a hospital patient, every monitor would be blaring emergency alarms. The party is bleeding voter registrations – nationally and in North Carolina. After the 2020 election, there were over 373,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans (2,620,162 to 2,246,540) in North Carolina. Today, there are just over 15,800 more registered Democrats…
After Watergate, puzzled, trying to figure out reams of new election laws, I started looking for a lawyer – but there wasn’t a single lawyer in North Carolina who practiced that kind of law. I called Stan Evans, head of the American Conservative Union in Washington, and he said one name: “John Bolton.” A week…
A big thing that people in politics don’t understand is how little attention people pay to politics. We politicos dive in and swim deep in the daily river of news – every Breaking News flash, every headline, every talking head, every twist and turn in every story. But most people take only an occasional dip…
Lying in a hospital bed, past ninety, face peaceful, eyes failing, J. I. Packer could hear his nurse’s footsteps but her face was a blur. Staring down at his hollow cheeks, rail-thin legs, the patch of skin stretched across the awkward dent on the side of his forehead, she asked a question, he didn’t answer,…
My friend Ron is cynical about government, and he couldn’t contain himself when he read that State Auditor Dave Boliek produced a 435-page report on fixing the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles. “435 pages!?” Ron sputtered. “How much time and taxpayer money did that take?” He raged on, “And Boliek’s big idea is to move…
When a jobs report showed the economy lagging, he fired the woman who wrote the report. Rolled on. Calling a press conference in the White House he ordered the National Guard to patrol the streets in Washington, DC to stop crime. The Epstein files sailed away over the horizon. A fading memory. Tariffs erupted again,…
My wife was chatting with a man as we waited for a table at a beachside restaurant. Suddenly she grabbed me, “You need to talk to him. He was a copy editor at The New York Times.” My first full-time job at The News & Observer was as a copy editor, so Andy and I…
In the days before anyone ever turned on a light bulb, sitting in a candle-lit room, practical but with a skeptical streak, puzzled, Thomas stared across the dinner table at the man talking, asked, We don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the road to take to follow you? The answer he got?…
A new nationwide poll shows that, if they could run against each other in 2028, Barack…
Senator Phil Berger was out of touch with voters in his district – and suffered the…
A reassuring lesson from our trip to Germany and Czechia is that dictators, despots and tyrants…