Carter Wrenn
Gary Pearce
I went to Berkeley last weekend for football. I got an unexpected lesson in free speech – and a reminder that freedom is on the ballot this year. Because wannabe dictator Donald Trump would terminate the First Amendment in a minute. My son James and I were exploring the University of California’s beautiful, hilly campus…
Read More
North Carolina Democrats have reason to be optimistic about this election. But the ghosts of 2016 and 2020 keep us scared. Both years, our hopes were high. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was so optimistic about North Carolina that she held an election-night rally in Raleigh’s Reynolds Coliseum. Notwithstanding performances by Lady Gaga and Jon…
Read More
Imagine walking down a road, getting blinded by a flash of light, falling down, hearing a voice say your name. That happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. What if today, after a flash of light, the voice of God said, Don’t lie. Would people listen? Would politicians? At lunch, stirring a bowl of…
Read More
My memoir – The Trail of the Serpent – is going to be published next Tuesday, on October 22nd. The title comes from a line by Irish poet Thomas Moore: “Some flow’rets of Eden ye still inherit, but the trail of the Serpent is over them all.” Telling stories I follow the trail of the…
Read More
Mark Robinson should get an Emmy for Most Appearances in Other Campaigns’ TV Ads. For months, he has starred in Josh Stein’s ads, admonishing women who didn’t “keep your skirt down” and warning that “some folks need killing.” Stein’s ads drove Robinson’s negative ratings so high that every Democrat from Kamala Harris down is linking…
Read More
Republicans usually are better than Democrats at closing out elections, because they’re better at scaring voters. This year, what Republicans will do if they win should scare voters. As they do every election, Trump and MAGA are stoking fears about non-existent crime waves and fictitious immigrant invasions. And now there’s “tax-paid sex-change operations for prison…
Read More
Ethel Kennedy’s death recalls a time when hope and idealism triumphed over hate and fear. Robert and Ethel Kennedy were noisy, passionate and boisterous, a contrast to cool, stylish and sophisticated Jack and Jackie. But the two very different brothers became “the Kennedys” who stood down the Soviet Union in Cuba and stood up for…
Read More
First came cataclysmic floods. Then came the cascade of lies. The lies – and the lying liars who tell them – compound the suffering in Western North Carolina and complicate the recovery. Like supercharged hurricanes fueled by superheated ocean waters, the lies explode in today’s social-media ecosystem. Elon Musk has turned X/Twitter into a breeding…
Read More
As a boy growing up in Virginia my grandmother told me, Be polite…to dowager aunts, grandmothers, rudeness was taboo. Courtesy was an old southern habit. In college I sat down in the bleachers to watch a football game – students poured whiskey into paper cups, guzzled, faces flushed screamed, cheered – but politeness still held.…
Read More
Watergate sunk Nixon. Jimmy Carter was elected. Two years later Jesse Helms ran for reelection. In…
Read More
We Americans are angry this Christmas. 77 million voters were so angry they elected Trump. 75…
Read More
‘You tell a lot of good stories about Reagan, like his saying a prayer for the…
Read More