Roy Cooper – RESOLVE

Trump did it

The Left has furiously managed the decline of our nation, domestically and globally, for the better part of 15 years. The consequences are coming to the fore. In order to distract from the carnage now so visible in the wake of three Obama terms in power, Trump and the Make America Great Again majority must be falsely and persistently accused.

By Steve Woodward

Everything is Donald Trump’s fault. Everything deemed unpleasant, unexpected, uncomfortable and unbearable. Everything.

It’s a demonstrable falsehood, of course. But it is perpetuated by a surging, media-fueled blame culture. It is the Left’s last best hope.

Covid-19. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. January 6. October 7. These are among the large-scale events for which President Trump is to blame. (He was not even in office in some cases).

But there are more. Americans are cancelling summer travel because of Trump’s tariffs, reports The Wall Street Journal (the intent of which are purposely distorted by coordinated media talking points). A high death toll after recent Kentucky tornados? That’s on Trump, squeals The Washington Post. Even pop culture is in decline, concludes The Atlantic magazine. It interviewed art critic Dean Kissick, who scolds that we’re living in “the long 2017”, which an Atlantic writer describes as “a period in which anxieties related to Donald Trump and Brexit (Brexit?) have smothered culture with moralism, navel gazing, and conformity.” (Why is it that “critics” always try to get away with making statements devoid of substance or meaning? Morals are evil?)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is Trump’s “modern day Gestapo,” says Minnesota Marxist and Gov. Tim Walz, thus Trump and Trump alone must be blamed if even one potentially lethal illegal alien is temporarily jailed with a hoard of really lethal guys after their deportation to El Salvador. The “Maryland man”, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, became collateral damage in America’s long overdue war on mass illegal immigration, a war fought on two fronts — at the U.S.-Mexico border and through active arrests and deportations. Collateral damage is the price of war.

In the Left’s war on American sovereignty under the Obama/Biden regime of 2021-24, we witnessed repeated collateral damage — raped and murdered innocent citizens such as Laken Riley, Rachel Morin and Kaitlyn Weaver. Weaver was killed in July 2024, the victim of a high-speed auto collision. The driver of the speeding car was an illegal immigrant minor, 15, who just last week was sentenced to probation (emphasis added) and community service by a Trump hating Colorado judge.

No one on the Left, not presidents, not governors, not judges, is to blame in the aftermath of these one-off tragedies. The blame culture is real enough, and the media corrupt and pervasive enough, that any assignment of blame directed at Trump/MAGA can be justified, even legitimized.

They’ll probably get around to pinning Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis on Trump’s mean “Sleepy Joe” comments.

As obviously absurd as that would be, look more closely at the “doomed summer travel narrative”.

A couple told the Journal they are cancelling a bucket-list trip to France owed to Trump’s tariff re-balancing strategy. (The Left calls it a trade war, which is accurate if the context is that war is what other countries have waged against the United States for decades).

“We’ve been talking about Paris as long as we’ve been together, which is 54 years,” said Don Pratt, 75.

The Journal reports, “The couple sketched out a two-week itinerary that included England and Scotland, where his ancestors lived centuries ago. ‘Then the tariffs sort of got everybody around the world mad at us’,” Pratt said. “He worried about a chilly greeting if he showed up hoping to meet long-lost relatives. So instead, they recently booked a trip to take their adult son and his family to Walt Disney World … ”

This is a truly sorry side effect of Trump Derangement Syndrome. These mentally warped seniors traded reunions with relatives, memories of fabulous landmarks, and world-class cheese and wine for woke Disney drag queens and long lines of poorly dressed Americans swilling 32-ounce sodas. Are they devoid of any hint of national pride that once was presumed to be wired into the DNA of American citizens? Apparently, yes. They’re fine with high tariffs imposed by the French on products inbound from the U.S. and never contemplate why, for example, you’ll rarely see a Chevrolet Suburban navigating Parisian thoroughfare, or an award-winning Napa Cabernet Sauvignon on a Lyon wine list. The trip to visit the relatives would have been worth it just to explain how fair trade actually works.

Meanwhile, it’s tornado and hurricane season, and while many Americans delight at tracking and “modeling” potentially deadly systems and where they might be headed, media fear mongers are salivating, anxious to fire up the climate change narrative machine. Naturally, Trump’s fingerprints will be everywhere in the aftermath of high winds and surging water. (In stark contrast, the Left’s media slaves never raised similar concerns about Biden or North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper when thousands of the state’s citizens were abandoned after Hurricane Helene last September, and the devastation continues to roll off the back of Josh Stein, North Carolina’s latest Democrat governor.)

Severe tornadoes hammered parts of Kentucky on May 16, 2025. The Washington Post breathlessly reported that “Jackson, Kentucky, is four meteorologists short of what agency officials have deemed ideal staffing” and blamed that on sweeping, (overdue) audits of federal agency staffing and payrolls. Kentucky’s Lexington Herald Leader ran with an ominous headline — “Did staffing cuts at weather service affect Kentucky’s tornado response?” — but its reporter couldn’t find anyone on the scene who answered in the affirmative.

“As planned in advance, neighboring offices provided staffing support to the office in Jackson,” a spokesperson said. Read that closely. Resources, in this case human resources, were coordinated as needed under extreme circumstances. Is that not what taxpayers should expect from federally funded agencies and their field offices?

During his recent unhinged rants while “performing” in the United Kingdom, cranky, old Bruce Springsteen took blaming Trump to new depths, in once case decrying “residents” being taken “off American streets” and sent to “foreign detention centers”. These of course are dangerous illegals being returned to their countries of origin. In other words, definitely not “born in the USA”.

Springsteen finally calmed down and attempted poignancy, quoting writer James Baldwin, who observed, “In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.”

Is there enough? Where is the humanity in a nation overrun by illegal immigrants, mostly gang trained males, killing our citizens? Where is the humanity in gutting American manufacturing jobs in favor of cheap foreign labor? (Springsteen’s contemporary Billy Joel lyricized about “closing all the factories down [in Allentown]”, remember?) And where is the humanity in covering up Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis until even compliant media no longer could sustain the lie that he was mentally competent as a sitting President?

Nice try

By Steve Woodward

I was wrong. After Governor Roy Cooper issued a statewide restaurant lockdown order — without consent as required by the state’s constitution — on March 17, 2020, I was asked to articulate my greatest fear about what was to come.

The topic was local restaurants. All of them were shut down at 5 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day. Some immediately accommodated carry-out only. Others were not ready for an overnight transition.

My biggest fear was “that they won’t be here” in a few months. I feared many of our restaurants, both long established and newcomers, would go out of business. I was wrong. We lost very few in comparison to the nationwide averages; several reinvented themselves and soldiered on, adding delivery options, improving carry-out operations. A few new places opened despite the lockdowns and are thriving.

In early 2020, local restaurants battled to survive on take-out orders and gift cards.

They did so despite promises of federal support evaporating. They did so despite banks demonstrating they were ill prepared to keep up with demand for funds moving through the pipeline from Capitol Hill to Main Street. They did so even as fattened unemployment checks disincentivized staffs from returning to work as restrictions on dining eased.

Local government finally awakened to the dire circumstances after a few vocal elected leaders stood up and proposed expanded outdoor dining, using parking spaces that often are unoccupied during evening hours. Southern Pines led the way; Pinehurst soon followed.

My forecast was wrong because I did not give enough credit to living in Moore County. We were under the same tyrannical lockdowns as the other 99 counties, but, apparently, we are blessed to live in communities with fewer hysterical residents than those who bowed at Cooper’s feet in places like Mecklenburg and Wake. Our locals recognized that adhering to a stay-at-home “order” was not practical and, potentially, the first step toward economic suicide and sweeping malaise.

Many, not all, ventured out to visit restaurants they’d never tried before. They learned that carry-out dining is not such a bizarre alternative, and when local dining spots added delivery options using smartphone apps we all discovered ever more great places across our dining spectrum. Additionally, customers heeded the call to buy gift cards with every order, to infuse more cash into the restaurants. Our Moore Republican Party then collected stacks of those cards and delivered them to frontline healthcare professionals at FirstHealth. A classic win-win.

Restaurant owners and chefs rarely wear their ideological persuasions on their sleeves. But we staunch conservatives share in common with these now heroic figures qualities that surely brought us together during the slog that began one year ago this week. We are capitalists. We believe in and defend personal responsibility, loyalty and liberty as protection from the iron boot of government. We prefer to earn a living, rather than living to be bailed out.

This story does not have a feel-good happy ending. Not by a long shot. One owner told me his retirement plans were set back five years. Many of the charitable pursuits that bind our restaurants to the community have ground to a halt, which means those in need have been temporarily left wanting. Some restaurants that closed temporarily are now closed forever, taking jobs with them. And owners of dining establishments and other retail businesses now know how easy it is for government tyrants to lock us down without regard for consequences, immediate or long term. American resilience proved too much for the tyrants this time. Nice try.

Thankfully, that is not the only awakening trigged by China’s unleashing of a global virus. There is this: The pursuit of absolute safety is the enemy of freedom, and a futile pursuit, indeed.

Proactive patriots

By Steve Woodward

It is understandable that millions of Americans do not know that the Middle East’s sovereign nation of the United Arab Emirates in August established diplomatic, “normalized” relations with Israel. Bahrain followed earlier this month. Saudi Arabia’s royal family is debating a similar decision.

The United States is leading the discussions and brokering the historic breakthroughs. The New York Times, believe it or not, acknowledges that the Bahrain-Israel pact “leaves open the possibility that more Arab states will follow.”

For Americans who’ve followed closely the game changing achievements domestically and abroad during the Trump administration since 2017, re-electing President Donald Trump this November is a no-brainer.

But as the countdown to early voting dwindles to a matter of days (beginning Oct. 15) there is much to talk about beyond the realm of U.S. foreign policy and America’s fast recovering economy in the era of Wuhan Virus hysteria.

When we look over the two-page sample ballot now in circulation there are 31 other choices to make beyond President and Vice President. A ballot really is much more than a roster of names and multiple choices. It is a series of questions: How much does a strong economy matter to you? Do you demand choices in matters of health care, education for our children and energy consumption? Or, are you OK with higher taxes to punish capitalists, fewer thriving charter schools and severe environmental restrictions impacting daily life?

With the radical Left now firmly in control of a 21st Century Democrat party, these questions do not exaggerate the choices before us as Americans in Moore County, N.C. And the radical left is deeply embedded in our state. They came here for the quality of life, the moderate climate and the business friendly environment. But when the welcome mat was rolled up, they set about to transform and “re-imagine”, and here we are. Living in the American South but occupied by the Left.

Vote the ballot, all the way, from back to front. Or front to back. Please finish the ballot. In order to do this, you just might need to become a proactive patriot. You will need to “read up” on the candidates who, if elected, will protect North Carolina from a silent coup. We have a web site and a link therein that will introduce you to all of the fine men and women running to be re-elected or elected for the first time. Here it is: moore.nc.gop.

Silent coup? Marxist militants aligned with Black Lives Matter are not silent. In fact, they’re quite the opposite. But while their terrorism fills up our new cycles, their enablers quietly, silently, funnel millions of dollars into races for North Carolina Governor, U.S. House of Representatives, state Supreme Court, N.C. Secretary of State and Superintendent of Public Education. And they sit back and count on us to block out the “noise” of election ads, complain about yard signs and, worst of all, to fail to flip the ballot over and vote to the end.

Countless American patriots have risen to the challenges of their times. They’ve risked everything. They’ve sacrificed. They’ve taken up arms to oppose tyranny. They’ve died on desolate battlefields. Today, we are asked only to read, to be informed, to comprehend the magnitude of the choices before us. At the worst, this effort might subject you to a paper cut. Take that chance.

Let’s surprise these arrogant manipulators. Let’s make their heads explode on November 4, the morning after Election Day. Let’s not give them the ability to declare the races are “too close to call”.

Let’s celebrate as the virulent Left tears away its masks to scream to the heavens as defeat courses through its veins, at last. And, in that moment, the virus will disappear from our daily discourse.

Generational hypocrisy

By Steve Woodward

The Left rejects the United States of America as founded.

It would confiscate and ban firearms owned by law abiding citizens. But it does not reject the use of knives, bricks, rocks, flames fueled by chemical agents and spray paint in the hands of lawless citizens.

It is calling for police departments to be defunded by state governments. But it resists calls to defund Planned Parenthood abortion on demand, which annually culls the black population by the tens of thousands.

The Left is fine with killing and wounding law enforcement officers. The Left is unmoved by weekly deaths of young black and Hispanic men who are murdered openly, on the streets, by fellow young black and Hispanic men. The Left ignores white people who are improperly detained by law enforcement, white and black, and, sometimes, killed, deliberately or unintentionally.

The Left rejects school choice for children of impoverished black families, preferring they attend underperforming public schools, from which they are likely to drop out.

The Left decries “systemic racism” in 2020. Before that, it was 1964. 1968. 1992. 2008. 2014. Black Lives Matter. But they only matter, apparently, when a moment in time says they matter. The rest of the time, black lives are shackled by the soft tyranny of low expectations and social justice programs imposed on those lives by, guess who? The Left.

Few civil rights warriors possess stronger truth radar than North Carolina native Clarence Henderson. In 1960, he and other young black men sat down at a white-only lunch counter in Greensboro. They changed the world. Nothing was set on fire. Nobody died. They sat down. Before the end of the decade federal legislation passed to begin the slow unraveling of segregation. The Left is unimpressed. Why did it not happen in the 1600s when slaves arrived on the shores of a future land mass called America? Why did it take so long? Ask Democrats, who defended slavery in the 1860s, and formed the Ku Klux Klan around the same time to oppose Republican Reconstruction-era policies.

“As someone who made an impact during the (’60s) Civil Rights era, I know that strong, peaceful protests can make a difference,” writes Henderson. “We never damaged property or encouraged any type of riotous actions.”

The men who are complicit in the alleged murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis will remain, perhaps forever, a mystery to a majority of Americans because we go about our lives without a trace of contempt toward “people of color”. We worship together. We work together. We volunteer together. What is not mysterious is why one man’s senseless death has sparked violence, property destruction and orchestrated outrage which our streets have not see in more than a half century.

One, it is an election year and the Left despises President Donald Trump. So there is a strong exploitation motive. Two, widespread riots, mostly violent not mostly peaceful, carried out by Antifa and other global threats to civilization, conveniently divert attention from generational black poverty, lawlessness and unemployment.

Observe where the deepest unrest lies. In cities controlled by Democrats and the Left for decades. The worst kind of racism is subtle, and the Left owns it. A friend from college days who has devoted 20+ years serving Los Angeles homeless through a major organization should be angry at the neglect of California’s Democrat establishment which today finds areas overrun by homeless. But instead he laments in an email to donors “decades of generations being denied their basic rights, access to quality education, equal pay and opportunity.” But no mention of Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Brown or other long entrenched Democrats who have been quite content to let the crisis escalate knowing they’d be re-elected for life.

Where are we two weeks into this? The Left is calling for what President Barack Obama promised 12 years ago as the nation’s first president of color, a transformational change. It did not happen under our black president and his black Attorney General, Eric Holder. How will it happen now? Perhaps if we just allow property destruction to go on long enough. On our side of the “aisle”, pathetically, there is pandering. Hollow, boilerplate outrage.

A Republican N.C. congressman who I choose not to embarrass calls for “important and needed conversations regarding race and equality” without saying who is doing the talking. He says we should “learn from one another” and “bridge the divides”. And, the worst cliche of all: “Let’s get to work.”

Here’s an idea. Let’s denounce the Left for cheering our country toward anarchy. Let’s engage more National Guard and U.S. military in the streets to restore order. And let’s stop accepting false narratives. Let’s promote facts and reality in 21st century America.

Writes Hans Bader, a civil rights attorney, in a recent post to CNSNews.com: “Resist calls from prominent Democrats to ‘defund the police.’ Police save many lives in the black community by arresting dangerous people. Black people are much more likely to be killed by an ordinary criminal than by a police officer. Peter Kirsanow, a black civil-rights commissioner, says that in 2015, ‘a cop was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was likely to be killed by a cop’.”

In other words, let’s defund the Left, defund Antifa and heavily fund leaders like Clarence Henderson who are not invested in false narratives.

American Al Qaeda

By Steve Woodward

If we are expected to patiently observe a phasing in of a return to freely living our daily lives amid Wuhan Virus hysteria, should we not expect, demand, a phasing out of domestic terrorism overwhelming our urban streets? Government had all of the solutions for the former, issued as “emergency” orders, but suddenly is silent on how to combat the latter. No orders.

Radical left Democrat mayors and governors (including North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper) have repeatedly admonished us to “stay at home”, followed by guidance that we are “safer at home”. Now, it turns out they were right but for the wrong reason. Cooper expressed that he was “frustrated” by mounting unlawful riots in the state’s urban centers after an incident in Minnesota involving a white police officer and black man. But where was the executive order to call in the National Guard, where was the order declaring Antifa and its network of at-the-ready flamethrowers what they are, domestic terrorists? (President Trump took care of that on Sunday).

Political tyranny suddenly has yielded to political gamesmanship and anarchy in the streets not far from home, in Charlotte, Fayetteville and Raleigh. If states and municipalities were not prepared for the invisible Wuhan Virus, they certainly have been shown even more ill-prepared to combat highly visible and well orchestrated assaults on private businesses and innocent citizens.

Quite the one-two punch. The virus shatters small businesses’ finances; the street thugs shatter their windows and recent returns to semi-normalcy. If the left saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to allow virus hysteria to take down the U.S. economy, just imagine how their heads must be spinning at the thought of leveraging renewed racial tensions, largely staged and carried out with great precision. They mobilize suddenly and formidably in a way reminiscent of Al Qaeda and Isis, as if they have lingered in the shadows until the moment arrives. The big difference is that these terrorists are bred from within our society.

During Memorial Day weekend, my wife and I strolled the neighborhoods and streets of Charleston, S.C. As I write, King Street in the heart of Charleston was covered in glass fragments and debris when the sun came up on May 31. A week ago, no one would have suggested there was radical tension in the air. Maybe it was simmering, but Charleston was not a city that felt tense. It felt open and resilient.

A few years ago, I directed regional marketing for a restaurant chain that had one of its locations on Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh. On the evening of May 30, a brick took out a glass panel in the restaurant, and the carnage was far worse heading up the street toward the State Capitol and the Governor’s Mansion, according to photos and video posted to social media. I spent many days and nights in downtown Raleigh, famous for its recurring street fairs. Downtown Raleigh is an emerging and thriving place as more high rise apartments spring up and more jobs come to town (courtesy of new inhabitants such open-source software firm Red Hat). What Raleigh is not — until recent days — is a city brimming with overt racial tension. During Cooper’s unconstitutional lockdown, a series of #ReOpenNC Tuesday protests, attended by all races and ethnicities, were conducted peacefully with only a handful of symbolic arrests, no police showdowns and absolutely zero property damage.

The current violent uprisings have happened before, as recently as 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore. They are happening now. They are likely to happen again. Why? The left blames our society for refusing to have a “serious conversation” about racial prejudice in our country. Cooper insists the latest protests arose to address “real systemic racism”. This is entirely disingenuous. The nation’s most impoverished, racially divided (measured by economic prosperity gaps) metro areas have been controlled and manipulated by Democrat politicians for decades. Their government solutions, their social engineering policies and cyclical programs to ingrain welfare dependency are deliberate. Yet conservatives are the racists. Just ask any mainstream media organization.

Without a hint of irony, a Washington Post columnist makes this recent observation: “It’s also notable that the cities where we’ve seen the most social unrest following high-profile police abuse cases — Baltimore, Ferguson, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee and now Minneapolis — are cities with a well-documented history of police discrimination, abuse and violence. These are the cities where black people were probably more likely to have had their own bad experiences with police and, presumably, more likely to see themselves or someone they know in the shoes of Freddie Gray (Baltimore, 2015) or Laquan McDonald (Chicago, 2014) or Tamir Rice (Cleveland, 2014).”

And what else do these cities have in common? Democrat mayors appointing police chiefs who continue to preside over unethical, undisciplined forces comprised of cops who protect the bad actors in the department to uphold the fraternal code. (The Minneapolis cop charged with third-degree murder in the death of the apprehended George Floyd had 18 previous complaints about his conduct in uniform in his personnel file). This, rather than cleaning house, extracting the dangerous cops from the roster and finding ways to actually address racial tensions between law enforcement and young people caught in up in multi-generational hopelessness.

We’ve been told for two months to wash our hands. Turns out, Gov. Cooper and fellow Democrat governors, Democrat mayors and law enforcement leadership washed their collective hands and withdrew compassion for the most vulnerable long ago. The virus is not the worst blight on our society, after all.