Ever wonder what McCrory administration employees do on taxpayer time? Well, here’s an email from July in which a Trump-loving N.C. Department of Health and Human Services project manager named Janet Hensel sounded off on the Democratic National Convention … and a certain senator from Massachusetts, an allegedly insufficient quantity of American flags on the […]
Hillary Clinton
Posted inLetters to the Editor
Smug Revisionism
We’ve got lots more commentary on our November 16 special issue on Donald Trump’s election in the queue, so let’s blast through it, shake off this foreboding malaise, and welcome the final month of this godforsaken year with eggnog in hand and a smile on our faces. On Jeffrey C. Billman’s piece, [“I Got It […]
Posted inNews
The Morning Roundup: Leftovers Edition
Good morning, hope you had a good holiday.1. Governors’ race update. The North Carolina State Board of Elections held another emergency Sunday meeting. From the N&O: The State Board of Elections held an emergency meeting by phone on Sunday afternoon to consider a request for an expedited appeal of ballot tabulation concerns that the Durham […]
Posted inNews
What I Got Wrong: How I Misread an American Election
I underestimated Donald Trump. Actually, scratch that. I didn’t underestimate the man, who remains every bit the racist narcissist he’s shown himself to be over the years. I did, however, underestimate the tidal wave of white resentment that propelled him into the Oval Office, the burning desire to blow up the system, consequences be damned. […]
Posted inNews
The Eyes of a Child: A Twelve-Year-Old Comes to Grips with Trump
The last presidential election was in 2012, when I was eight years old. All I remember was it was between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. I thought that the winner was chosen by popular vote. Now I know about the primaries, conventions, and the debates. My dad and I watched the debates together. My brother […]
Posted inNews
A Story for My Little Girl: How to Tell Your Child the Country Is Not What She Thought
How do you tell your daughter that a meteor is barreling toward Earth and that all she can do is wait, clinging to the hope it doesn’t inflict catastrophic damage on the human race? That’s how it felt when I got home after covering the presidential election, an assignment that quickly became a nightmare that […]
Posted inNews
No Silver Lining: The Dems’ Apparent Defeat of Pat McCrory Is Cold Comfort
How do you reconcile a four-point Hillary Clinton loss in North Carolina with an apparent four-thousand-vote win by Roy Cooper? And who, exactly, is the Donald Trump, Richard Burr, Roy Cooper, Josh Stein, and Mike Morgan voter? These are questions that Democrats on the national, state, and local level will have to figure out, and […]
Posted inNews
To the Women Who Raised Us: You Abandoned Hillary Clinton When She Needed You Most
We wept on Tuesday night. We came to you for comfort, but many of you just blamed her. You blamed her for her past, for her husband’s indiscretions. We wept for our futures and came to you for comfort, only to be left wondering how the women who raised us to be strong and independent […]
Posted inNews
Where Do We Go from Here?
There’s no easy descriptor to capture the mood in the INDY‘s office last Wednesday. Shock? Yeah. Disbelief? Yep. Anger? Definitely. Despair? That too. An admixture of those things, leavened only by a bottle of whiskey and the knowledge that Pat McCrory would soon (probably) be sent home to Charlotte. Had a Donald Trump supporter happened […]
Posted inElections
We Broke the Machine: The 2016 Election and the Flailing American Experiment
As I write this, I don’t know how the election turned out, whether Hillary Clinton maintained her modest lead or Donald Trump rode a wave of white anxiety into the White House, whether Roy Cooper emerged victorious or Pat McCrory’s HB 2 sins went unpunished, whether Deborah Ross gave Democrats a majority in the U.S. […]