Political correctness

Walk in light

By Steve Woodward

Which is more frustrating? The sense we are getting that Duke Energy thinks power grid security should be turned over to government solutions? Or, that the Raleigh drag queens who infiltrated Southern Pines on December 3 are doubling down, promising to perform here in Moore County frequently next year?

Take your pick. As a practical matter, I guess I’d rather have lights shining on the continued decline of American culture. In which case, confidence that proactive measures will be identified and implemented to secure electric stations, close to home and nationwide, deserves priority over delusional dragsters and their rainbow protest mobs.

What is whistling down the alleys is word that law enforcement at all levels, while undeterred from trying to find the source of attacks on two Moore County sub-stations, are left holding a bag full of firearm shell casings and little else. (Some have surmised that the perps must have been less than sophisticated terror merchants for having failed to collect their shell casing. But does anyone really believe that Antifa- trained ninjas walk around with registered firearms? The casings are about as useful as discarded granola bar wrappers).

Meanwhile, local and state elected officials are said to be underwhelmed by Duke Energy’s upper management and support staff. Apparently, the Dukies feel comfortable restoring power but are less than inclined to restore confidence. Duke certainly dares not complain that security is unaffordable. In November, Duke announced it would be selling its commercial renewable energy assets for $4 billion — only five percent of its operations.

Duke Energy on December 1 bragged about giving away $1 million in social justice and racial equity grants to 40 organizations across North Carolina. Yet another investment that does everything but keep the lights on.

Rep. Richard Hudson, who soon will be sworn in as the NC-9 U.S. congressman (and will once again represent Moore County after a two-year break), is right to suggest that the federal government is long overdue in launching a nationwide initiative to protect America’s antiquated power infrastructure. But it’s hard to believe it’s going to happen in a nation that can’t/won’t secure it’s Southern border, and has willfully farmed out all of it’s manufacturing, textiles, prescriptions drugs and energy producing equipment to China.

Yet we are learning that the attack on Moore’s grid was not as random or isolated as first believed As reported by Wired.com, ”Duke Energy, reported gunfire at another facility, a hydroelectric power plant in South Carolina. And combined with two more incidents of hands-on sabotage of U.S. power facilities that occurred in Oregon and Washington in October and November, the vulnerability of the U.S. grid to old-fashioned physical harm has begun to seem like a serious threat.”

Meanwhile, Triangle-area drag “celebrity” Naomi Dix says she, too, is worried about attacks on power: on the power of LGBTQ deviants to attack the moral fabric of small-town communities. During a December 8 forum in Durham, Dix said that suspicions that the Moore power outage targeted her cast’s performance at The Sunrise Theater inspires her to bring additional shows here in 2023.

While Dix claims that drag shows are under attack — in Southern Pines the “attackers” read scriptures and prayed for the community at large — these so-called threats do not seem to be much of a deterrent to the hijacking of more and more community events. A December 10 “Christmas parade” in Shallotte, N.C., reports independent journalist A.P. Dillon, was interrupted by a leotard clad dance team led by a transgender coach who donned gay apparel that was merely a thong.

In Taylor, Texas, 35 miles northeast of Austin, Taylor Pride hoodwinked Christmas parade organizers when registering for a spot in the 2021 event. “The Taylor Area Ministerial Alliance … naively thought a group calling itself Taylor Pride was simply proud to be from Taylor,” wrote Taylor resident and political science professor Kevin Stuart in a December 9, 2022, op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

So what happened this year? A new parade was created by a woke city management staff, acting without Taylor’s city council’s input. The 2022 parade ”ran right behind the traditional parade on December 3. It featured even more drag performers than last year, including one called Sedonya Face.“

Stuart concludes, “civic and cultural battles are sure to become more frequent and more intense” as social norms dissolve. “For those who simply want to work, worship God and raise their families in peace, this news is unwelcome.”

When darkness visits our towns we have no choice but to walk in the light.

On the tee, hypocrisy

By Steve Woodward

Let me get this straight. The United States sends billions of dollars to the human rights wasteland of Saudi Arabia to import its oil, but an American professional golfer is disgraced after expressing an interest in leveraging the Saudi economy by way of a proposed Super League featuring the world’s elite golfers?

American golf legend Phil Mickelson is being canceled as if he had been caught on video beating his wife and abusing the family pet because he suggested a certain attraction to this as yet still conceptual Saudi league, and amid his reasonable dissatisfaction with the lords of the PGA Tour. Why the indignation? Because Mickelson also acknowledged that the Saudis routinely violate human rights and murder innocent people.

Among his most vocal critics — after Mickelson’s remarks were released by the author of a forthcoming Mickelson biography — was Rory McIlroy of Ireland, a PGA Tour veteran who resides in the U.S. McIlory lashed out at his fellow competitor’s supposed nonchalance about Saudi authorities who routinely kill gay people as exposing Mickelson as “naive, selfish, egotistical and ignorant.” That about covers the character assassination spectrum.

Undoubtedly, negative reactions by McIlory and other players emboldened sponsors to drop Mickelson as if he had been exposing himself to children on a playground. KPMG. Callaway. Workday. See ya, Phil.

But who has called out McIlroy’s blatant hypocrisy? No one, apparently. In January McIlroy finished third in the Dubai Desert Classic in the United Arab Emirates, taking home north of $500,000 (excluding a hefty appearance fee, no doubt). It’s a wonder he was even willing to show up. Human Rights Watch identifies the UAE as a serial human rights abuser. The UAE has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to criticizing government officials. Homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. Against this backdrop, tour professionals nonetheless typically include a stop at the Dubai Classic on their annual schedules.

Within the ladies’ ranks, LPGAers frequently play in the annual Shanghai Classic in China, a nation ruled under the iron fist of the Chinese Communist Party. The tournament was cancelled the past two years due to health concerns in a country where the Wuhan Virus was unleashed out of a lab that exists under the guise of research. In recent weeks, Beijing played host to the Olympic Winter Games, which went on without a hint of protest by American sponsors and TV rights holder NBC. Everyone who seeks to profit from turning their backs to China’s brutality toward dissidents and rural slaves seems to rationalize the tenuous relationships with ease.

In China’s Xinjiang province, an estimated one million Turkic Muslims are detained in interment camps. This genocide has been ongoing since 2014.

Meanwhile, how many PGA Tour millionaires strut around wearing Nike golf attire and shoes made in China in partnership with a ruthless authoritarian government that manufactures the iconic “swoosh”-branded garb using what amounts to slave labor?

It bears repeating that Nike athletes are paid millions of dollars to wear the brand before stepping foot on a golf course, or a basketball or tennis court. On the PGA Tour alone, there are numerous top players who are not perplexed by the Nike-China conundrum. Tiger Woods, of course, was Nike’s first golf star. But today, the roster includes elite players such as Brooks Koepka, Tony Finau, Francisco Molinari and Jason Day.

Oh, and Rory “The Pious” McIlroy. A few years ago he signed a 10-year Nike contract that will pay out around $200 million.

Adorable pawns

Unmasking the failure of public education

By Steve Woodward

Parents have begun to accept that their kids can’t breathe in school. Turns out there are a lot of things they can’t do.

They can’t read. They can’t add and subtract. They can’t stop thinking about sex. They can’t reason. They can’t wait for Thanksgiving Day to be over.

In a world turned upside down, educators demand (pretend) that students will be absolutely safe but are not concerned, apparently, that they know absolutely nothing. The dirty little secret has been unmasked. School performance across Moore County for 2020-21, an academic year sacrificed at the hands of hysterical lockdowns, unreliable “virtual” learning and cancellations of everything, went from lackluster to alarming. Thank God, administrators say, consoling themselves, there were fewer runny noses and scraped knees.

The problem, laments longtime Board of Education member Ed Dennison, is that parts of Moore County are occupied by too many “disadvantaged families”. And how does the Moore County school system show it’s compassion? Let us count the ways.

It allocates tens of millions of dollars drawn from a bond referendum to build Taj Mahal schools in Aberdeen, Pinehurst and Southern Pines for the same reason dogs lick their privates — because it can.

(Case in point, courtesy of fiscally focused board member David Hensley, who reported via Facebook last September: The Moore County Board of Education spent $37,875 per student building the new Aberdeen Elementary School. Contrast that with The Academy of Moore County, a charter school and Moore County’s only “A” rated school, (which) spent only $8,333 per student to build (its) new school. Phrased another way, the Moore County Board of Education spent almost FIVE TIMES building a new school (more) than what the county’s only “A” rated school spent.)

(Another Hensley Facebook nugget from last June: At $47,500 per student seat, Pinehurst Elementary is, by far, the most expensive elementary school ever built in the state of North Carolina. Had the previous Board of Education spent the state average of $26,278.43 per student seat for new public school elementary school construction, Moore County could have FIVE new, 800-seat elementary schools, not three.)

Meanwhile, schools in “disadvantaged” north Moore County remain decrepit and in need of innumerable repairs. But even after blowing its wad on south Moore school construction, the school board’s four disciples of Superintendent Bob Grimesey had a chance to do the right thing and take a fiscally sound vote. This could have happened September 22, just last month, when the board decided the time had come, once and for all, to decide what to do with 17 acres formerly occupied by the old Southern Pines Elementary School.

The back and forth on this debate is well known to those who pay attention (never enough, by the way). The board finally voted 4-3 (chair Libby Carter and her three sock puppets) to “sell” the land to a fly-by-night Southern Pines Land Trust for an apprised value of $685,000. The other board members exercised common sense and backed selling the land to a commercial developer at a fair-market price that was projected to come in around $1.5 million .

Never mind that the Land Trust, in collaboration with the Left wing Southern Pines Town Council, stole the land to build a park that will keep west Southern Pines effectively racially segregated. The real gut punch here is the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Moore County schools left on the table to pander to a racially charged cabal without regard for how the additional funds from a private sale would have benefited students across the board. The land belonged to the school system. The board was obligated to sell it to the highest bidder. It betrayed the community.

Carter lamented that she wanted to separate the board from endless forays into the “real estate business” under the false pretense that it is laser-focused on quality education. But that does not square with:

A board that twice has voted 4-3 to force kids to be masked all day in classrooms despite overwhelming bodies of evidence that masks are not effective and more than likely pose a mental health threat. Elementary school children especially are distracted and despairing of their filthy masks.
A board that is hell bent on ramming down the throats of students so-called Social Emotional Learning and Climate surveys to learn as much as possible about their sexual proclivities, gender insecurities and emotional states. Currently, Moore County schools are surveying parents about the implementation of surveys by a third party, Panorama, a data mining operation backed by Tech tyrant Mark Zuckerberg. What could possibly go wrong?
A board on which three members refused to condemn the inclusion of Critical Race Theory in history and social studies curricula. CRT would, for example, condemn Thanksgiving Day as a celebration of the disenfranchisement of native Americans. In other words, “Tell granny you’re sitting out next Thanksgiving.”
A board that has refused in recent years to deny Superintendent Grimesey a contract extension amid a downward spiral in school wide performance numbers.

A local sage wisely observed that the Moore County school performance stats are so categorically disappointing that it is impossible to cherry pick them. But three categories shine light on the big picture staring county educators in the face.

55% of third graders are not reading at grade level across Moore County public schools.
49% of all eighth graders are not proficient in reading. (In other words, they probably can not pronounce “proficient” or tell you what it means).
In grades three through eight, only 46% of students are performing at grade level in math.

The third rail of public education is the teachers themselves. In Moore County, the time seems ripe to re-evaluate both who is teaching our students and why they’re forsaking them. Let’s not repeat the mistake made in allocating new school funding. Let’s spread the blame around.

Dangerous nationalism

By Steve Woodward

The history of disingenuous editorials published by The Pilot‘s editorial board (which can fit in a golf cart) is a long and checkered one. Note we did not elude to a SmartCar.

A recent July 24 screed dismissing the war on hijacking public education — particularly in the realm of American history — seems to have sunk the paper’s editorial standards to new depths. The intensity of wrist-ringing must have a necessitated calling on a team of physical therapists.

“If you’ve fallen behind the ‘radical leftists’ or the ‘racist right wing nuts,’ you’ve left no room for a rational and critically important discussion about race, American history and how it should be taught to our children,” scolds the author.

The editorial addresses a recent 6-1 Moore County school board vote to reject race-based curricula. The Pilot says it’s fine with this outcome because it never quite understood what all the fuss was about. You know, because … racism! It’s systemic. Who doesn’t know that?

In fact, this probably explains why the editorial crescendos with a cautionary note suggesting too much objectivity in the classroom might send this debate back to square one someday. There is, after all, “danger” if the citizenry holds (or, clings to, to quote the unifier Barack Obama) a presumption of American exceptionalism. Can’t be teaching that to kids.

If, however, the board’s policy is “used to sanitize, gag or in any other way hinder teachers from presenting a fair, honest and sober assessment of this nation’s history with race, then we will be one step closer to a dangerous nationalism (emphasis added) and an agenda that cultivates an unnatural exceptionalism (emphasis added).”

In other words, you racist right wing nuts have been given fair warning by the radical leftists, who reside down the middle in the Pilot’s newsroom.

Liberty first

By Steve Woodward
As we say so long to 2019, just off the top of my head …

Wage increases within the workforce rising at their fastest rate in more than a decade, faster than for supervisors (bosses).
Record or near-record setting gains for the Nasdaq (35%) and S&P 500 (28%).
Dramatic declines in illegal US-Mexico border crossings. The mayor of Yuma, Ariz., recently lifted a state of emergency declared last April because “the release of migrant families into the Yuma area has ceased.”
Wages rose 4.5% year-over-year in November among bottom 25% of earners.
Record low unemployment among black and Hispanic populations.
Lowest unemployment overall since 1969.
Energy independence from foreign sources.
Trade deal set with Canada and Mexico.
Pending trade deal with China that will end decades of trade abuse by the Chinese.
Record federal judicial confirmations of Trump nominees (48 in three years).

I’m beginning to think it might be safe, finally, to retrieve the gold, cash and firearms I buried in anticipation of Y2K!

Conservative bulldog Sean Hannity repeatedly urges, “Let not your hearts be troubled.” Many of us are not there yet. Democrats present much about which to be perpetually troubled. (The drums of impeachment will awaken us from our New Year’s hangovers soon enough). But, consider more positive awakenings such as two I discovered with pleasant shock in The Wall Street Journal‘s December 28 letters to the editor.

They are letters written by residents of California and Illinois, no less, where the radical lefts reigns. They are direct smackdowns of columnist Peggy Noonan, a Never Trumper and out-of-touch Upper East Side New Yorker. Noonan is all for impeaching President Donald Trump if for no other reason than he is an objectionable character.

From Evanston, Ill.: “Ms. Noonan writes that many ‘serious’ witnesses of ‘obvious stature’ in the House impeachment hearings said the president abused his power. I don’t see it that way. Those bureaucrats said they disagreed with Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, which they think they (emphasis added), rather than the president, get to determine. Ms. Noonan should not mistake their arrogance for seriousness.”

From Mill Valley, Calif.: “We want the craziness of the left highlighted plainly. We want the corruption of elected politicians, permanent bureaucracy, intelligence services, judiciary and media exposed and cornered. We are tired of the politically correct speech codes and the protected classes for whom there can be no consequences. We prefer liberty.”

That is as powerful a mantra as I can think of to sustain us in the battles ahead in 2020. Republicans prefer liberty.