I'm actually writing a lot. Just not about current politics. None of it ever likely to see the light. So I've neglected WataugaWatch, even though I spend every morning trying to get a hold on the political world and find something to write about. My looking inevitably turns into doom-scrolling, and I end up retreating to the garden to pull weeds. Red Hornet asks when I'm coming back from the beach.
I'm not good company right now. Hasn't Trump 2.0 exhausted you? Even when it's all hilarious. Especially when it's all hilarious. Like Trump's staying up all night to throw turd balls at his grudges on Truth Social and then falling asleep in the Oval in front of guests and dignitaries pleading their cases. Trump even stages those White House events deliberately, and in the strangest (most hilarious) way: Trump arrays himself in front, seated, with only his drooping head and about half of his chest showing, with the experts and his loyal supporters arrayed behind him who are orating on various topics supposedly of great interest to Trump, while Trump closes eyes, loses consciousness. You can't miss it, because Trump puts himself in the forefront.
Why is that not the common laughing-stock of the country?
I took a vow back in his first term that I wasn't going to focus on him, and I've kept myself mainly aloof from the chaos because there are plenty of commentators memorializing and analyzing every aspect of Trump's lack of ethics or morals. Not only am I and my written opinions not needed, they would be wholly irrelevant anyway. What does it even matter to share a strong opinion at this peculiar moment? We are in the hands of a Fate that will play out in waves -- convulsions might be the better word -- starting in just six months and ending God knows when or how.
I'm too exhausted to do anything much more than wait.
BTW what does he dream about, that man? Does he relive his greatest moments of grandiosity? The roar of his crowd? Hear again the great and famous stroking his ego? Does he dream of planting a new Trump property in a place he can corrupt and bully?
I see a lot of ink today amazed at yesterday's Indiana Republican primaries for General Assembly seats. Trump endorsed seven of his dogs against seven stubborn state senate Republican incumbents, and the incumbents got chewed the hell up. Fox News was thrilled to report that Trump Is Still Lord. Others couldn't help but notice the Mafia vibes in the sudden death of politicians who had refused to kiss the ring (re-jigger the state's congressional maps). Many reporters noticed the severed horsehead in the bed. Don't cross boss Trump.
I say "good!" to those Republican primaries. I'm counting on the cult's keeping its politicians firmly in the trumpy mold, under the trumpy thumb, because it will be an ever more convenient target for the Blue Wave, as the opposition to Trump picks up more independents and disgusted lifelong Republicans. There are actually very good conservatives who don't like mob bosses and wide-open corruption. To have a clear and unitary enemy with a brand name and a history is a pure-dee gift for the goddamned Democratic Party.
Otherwise reasonable, logical men and women who hold office as elected Republicans have weighed their choices, and they've consciously chosen to throw in with whatever Trump says or demands or does, because that's the way politics works, at least politics in a democracy that demands votes. We join parties, and even when we can plainly see our party's alienating the majority, or that our leader is fucking wrong, we stick with our party. 'Tis better to die together than hang separately. 'Tis actually better to die for someone's stupidity than never to have taken a side at all and declared our values. (We would have made excellent soldiers in Pickett's frontal attack at Gettysburg, and would probably have considered it both right and fitting pro patria mori.)
Lord knows how many masts I've lashed myself to over the last 60 years of political advocacy and community organizing, only to see the whole ship go down and me with it. I get the psychology of staying with the sinking ship. It's considered noble -- in a fashion that Falstaff would have mocked as folly, but still. What's the alternative to embracing defeat when it's inevitable? Disengagement? And the blissful aloofness of independents who always piously claim, "I vote for the man, not the party"? That kind of cynical detachment is unthinkable for the likes of us, the eternally engaged and outraged. We are known for the fiber of our spines because we have experienced political death and have returned, often transformed by death, not quite like the phoenix but maybe more like stinkweeds that develop rhizomes.
So I applaud the wholly owned Trump Party, once known as the GOP. Keep the faith, babies, but don't park your beach chairs on the sand.
Look who came to the teachers protest march on Friday in Raleigh:
Rockingham County Sheriff and NC "Senator Elect" Sam Page seemed only too happy to associate himself with the protesting teachers in Raleigh last Friday. He was there to shake hands, give interviews, and ingratiate himself with a voting bloc not any other Republican General Assembly member would associate with. But Sam Page was there to share the message: Damnit, there's no state budget, and teacher pay has sunk to 46th lowest in the nation. Page was overheard telling Christina Cole, president-elect of the NC Assoc. of Educators (NCAE), and others that "teacher pay needs
to be raised to highest in the Southeast." Cardinal and Pine had video of him saying forthrightly that raising teacher pay was his top priority, that and public safety. Several pics of him posing with individual NCAE members appeared on social media. He created something of a stir.
Of course he was wearing one of his cowboy hats, a sensible straw. The hat's a sigil -- "NOTICE ME" --and the name "Sheriff Sam Page" is already well known to people who follow North Carolina politics, which would include a sizable number of public school teachers. Especially the ones who know he beat Senate President Phil Berger who was no friend to teachers. As far as anyone has testified, Page was the only Republican politician to show his face on Friday. Cool move, partly because it is causing agita among fierce MAGAs, who go rigid when reminded that May Day protests were once a vehicle for the International Communist Party.
I'd like to think that Sam Page showed up -- if even for a little while (I doubt he marched) -- because he's a good guy on the need to pay our public school teachers a living wage. He didn't have to do that for votes. It's quite certain that he will beat the Democrat running against him in November. It's an R+9 district. He doesn't need the teachers' votes but he's embracing a message that will cause the gnashing of teeth for the man who Page beat and who has been the chief block against treating teachers right.
Have not seen an attack on Congresswoman Virginia Foxx before that's quite as hard as this one
This popped up on Facebook -- no indication of who produced it. It has the earmarks of an independent expenditure, but it might also be a purely homegrown expression of contempt for Virginia Foxx. Doubt it. The level of professional polish here suggests money. First time I've seen this. If it's showing up in other venues, with or without a "Paid for by" declaration, I'd like to hear about it. Anybody?
The attack does not even mention Democrat Chuck Hubbard, nor does it say anything about an election. The display is meant to lower Foxx's favorables, not explicitly boost Hubbard's.
Is the attack effective? It's all about her age, which is fair, and tying her to Trump policies, which notoriously can cut both ways in the 5th District. She's done what she can to make sure there's no air between her arms and Donald Jethro Trump, and this attack supports that. Many people in the 5th like her precisely for that. The strangest call-out: "She was 26 years old when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon." A strange slap again at her advanced age, but baroquely obscure compared to the visual trainwreck of the photograph.
Greeted this a.m. with news that Sen. Elizabeth Warren would be making campaign appearances on behalf of Zach Wahls in the Iowa Democratic senatorial primary coming up on June 2nd. That Iowa Senate primary is another hot Democratic contest of left insurgency vs. establishmentarian moderation, by which I mean Chuck Schumer's preferred (safe) candidate -- Josh Turek, a 46-year-old Gold Medalist in wheelchair basketball -- is clearly losing to a younger (dangerous) Wahls, who is polling well ahead of Turek. Wahls also wins hypothetical matchups with the Republican candidate he'll face in the fall. It's an open seat because Joni Ernst had had enough.
So I needed to refresh my memory about Zach Wahls: Way back in 2011, as the 19-year-old straight man and former Eagle Scout raised by married lesbians, Wahls stood up during public comment in an Iowa House hearing about a bill to ban gay marriage in the state's constitution and delivered a clear and impassioned defense of his own family. That speech went viral online, quickly garnering a half-million views on YouTube which eventually climbed into the millions. Here is it again, if you have a hankering for persuasion and the language arts:
Wahls was a new student at the University of Iowa, studying engineering, when he made that 3-minute speech. He became instantly famous, an unapologetically heterosexual young man who was raised (very well, as it turns out) by two lesbians. No one could speak more powerfully for gay rights. He dropped out of the engineering program to write a book that was published in 2012, My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family. He became a public speaker willing to challenge orthodoxy. A Catholic college felt compelled to cancel not one but two scheduled appearances by Wahls, sponsored by the Gay-Straight Alliance and the College Democrats, after his book came out. That September of 2012 Wahls was given a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in which he thanked President Obama for the courage to support same-sex marriage.
Wahls went back to the University of Iowa and got his degree but kept active in Democratic Party politics. He became a Hillary Clinton delegate to the National Convention in 2016, the same year he earned his degree. In 2018 he ran for a safe Democratic state Senate seat, and in 2021 he was voted Senate Minority Leader by his colleagues.
Wahls's rise has been steady and deliberate. But the articulation of difficult topics by a surprisingly mature 19-year-old in 2011 has matured (hardened in a sense) into accomplished politician-speak. He's so prepared and so damn articulate that he can begin to sound rote. He and Graham Platner may end up being sworn into the same Senate, and would be political allies (we assume), but in manner they are very different. Graham Platner's economic populism smacks of lived experience which doesn't do weak nibbling around the edges. Platner's populism is plain-spoken and tough minded. Wahls's seems more rehearsed. He talks in paragraphs. His attachment to the Democratic establishment message about "affordability" doesn't have the smell of sweat about it. Here is Wahls recently on Morning Joe:
BREAKING NEWS: Governor Janet Mills drops out of the Maine Democratic senatorial primary. She had once been considered a front-runner to take on Sen. Susan Collins this November.
Something of a political bombshell. Mills had been "aggressively recuited" to run by Chuck Schumer. She was supported by Emily's List and other prominent liberal groups. As governor she was well known in Maine, had a life in politics behind her (attorney general and member of the Maine House) which came with all the money connections she'd ever need (we thought). Plus she was famous for one bit of video. She had been the lone woman who stood up to Trump at the White House when she defied him about trans rights. But what was super cool about a female governor willing to say to Trump's face on that occasion, "see you in court!" curiously did not translate into any groundswell of support, and she said forthrightly today that she was ending her campaign because she was out of money and had poor prospects for raising more.
Renegade Democratic candidate Graham Platner was polling well ahead of her -- by over a whopping 30 points. Platner has been running away with the primary as someone so authentic and so obviously logical that all the mainstream branding as "left-wing radical," compounded by liberals' clutching their hearts over three very old Reddit posts, had not blunted his rise as a progressive hero. Platner incidentally and willingly owns the hotheaded stupidity of those posts, admitting that he had been an angry young man, back from his 4th combat deployment in Afghanistan, alone, and isolated. Those words do not represent who he was deep down even then and certainly not who he is now. Listening to him talk sense, clearly enunciating a philosophy based on a deep historical understanding of how best to wield power for equity and fairness, I see a winner.
I recommend the interview with Platner that John Stewart did for his podcast (YouTube). Stewart prods Platner a little on why someone with his populist and sometimes libertarian instincts, coming out of the Marine Corps with its hyper-masculine warrior culture, why he wasn't attracted to or "captured" by the Alt Right. Platner's response is humbling: "I read a lot of history books." If he's something of a roughneck, he's an intellectual roughneck who has the right understanding that the failures of the Democratic Party are failures of courage and nerve.
Platner was recruited by a group of labor activists looking for other working people to run in key races. They came to Platner -- who was prominent as a Bernie Sanders fan and a local official on the Eastern Shore of Maine as well as a working oyster farmer who knew the lives and needs of working people -- and they offered him an immediate three things to jump-start a senate campaign: a professionally produced "launch" video, access to small-dollar fundraising, and exposure in the press. The launch video alone in August 2025 got over 2 million views in 24 hours (one of those viewers was me), raised a million dollars, and incited almost 3,000 volunteers willing to hit the streets and the phones for Graham Platner. I immediately wrote enthusiastically about what I was seeing.
"The enemy is the oligarchy!" Graham Platner's launch video:
Graham Platner scares at least one of the NC Democratic strategists that I listen to, whose opinion I respect, who is more moderate than I in his enthusiasms, and who has already predicted that Platner can't ultimately beat Collins because his "radical" grassroots intellectualism will end up doing him in. That analysis is based on past history of liberal forces getting way out over their skies and ending up massively disappointed. I'm actually more worried, especially after watching the Jon Stewart podcast, about what establishment grinding Graham Platner will undergo as a senator in Mugstomp-on-the-Potomac. I'm a little shy about unpolished surfaces ever since John Fetterman made an unconventional pitch for support and promptly got coopted.
On the other hand, perhaps when Platner gets to the Senate he can lead Fetterman gently back to the light. Platner has that kind of serious pastor aura about him, signaling that he would always try to rescue the perishing and care for the dying. He's got true Marine purpose.
Former 3-term Congressman Mark Walker couldn't even hang onto the sinecure (job with no duties) that Trump invented for him as a consolation prize after he ended Walker's political career by endorsing Ted Budd instead of him for the US Senate in 2022 and then squeak-toy Addison McDowell instead of him for Congress in the 2024 Republican primary in the 6th Congressional District. Walker had even trudged to Mar-a-Lago like a good little supplicant and begged Trump to endorse him instead of Ted Budd for Senate and reportedly agreed to drop out and run for a congressional seat if only Trump would endorse him for that. Kissing the ring sucks when it's both fruitless and the boss stinks.
So because of whatever sympathy Trump felt for the man, he invented a title specially for Walker: Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, to be attached to the State Department, a completely made-up job with no defined duties. But appointment to ambassador required Senate approval, and for whatever reasons, both senators Thom Tillis and Ted Budd wouldn't support him. The nomination died, and Trump went another route, appointed Walker as "Principal Advisor on Global Religious Freedom" in a wholly invented new position at the State Department. Walker lasted just 90 days. On April 21 (just last week!), the State Department made the terse announcement that Mark Walker no longer worked at the State Department -- no explanation given.
Walker used to be a pastor of a church and casts a mild aura, though he was tough enough to beat Phil Berger Jr. in his very first Republican primary -- and the subsequent runoff -- for the 6th CD in 2014. The entire Berger Family Machine had been in full gear for Junior, and Berger did indeed beat Walker in the first round: 34.27% to 25.20% (in a very crowded field of seven other candidates). But by the runoff between Berger and Walker in July 2014, Walker had turned it around and he beat young Berger by 20 points -- 59.85% to Berger's 40%. Walker won that runoff by hitting every church picnic and community rag-pulling across the 6th, showing the people what a mild-mannered and approachable Christian he was, a defender of God and American rural values. He was better at grassroots campaigning than Berger, and he sharpened his attack on Berger, implying he was essentially a bought-and-paid for arm of a machine that feathered its own nest -- thus reminding voters of the Berger Family reputation for shady power moves (a reputation that would ultimately end Phil Berger Senior's career after he became a failed promoter of gambling casinos). I suspect Walker beat Phil Berger Jr. at the cost of making an eternal enemy out of Daddy, and I have to wonder if Berger animosity is behind the downward trajectory of Walker's career.
Anyway, apparently the Trump State Department no longer needs the services of an advisor on global religious freedom.
The following paragraph appeared on a MAGA blog and could have been headlined, "Leftist Soldiers Already Operating in Rural NC!" but was actually (and ominously enough) titled "GOP dawdles, radical left making inroads into small-town NC":
While establishment Republicans gaze at their navels and pontificate on nonsense, leftists are moving their soldiers into our communities. They are organizing within our communities. They are taking advantage of low-turnout and *non-partisan* local races to get their people into positions of influence. It’s similar to the strategy behind the flood of illegals streaming across the southern border: move in, out-breed and out-vote the natives. [bolding in the original post]
What got this writer so exercised? Why, an immediate threat to the world as it ought to be -- a very large No Kings protest march back in March, organized by "Soros-connected" Indivisible in Southern Pines, the second-largest city in "bright-RED Moore County, where Democrats are usually lucky to get 25 to 35 percent of the vote." In 2024, Kamala Harris eked out 34.69% of the presidential vote. But now, after more than a full year of corruption and incompetence (Trump 2.0), there are a lot of unhappy people in Moore County. Local reports focused on the "large turnout" both marching up and down the sidewalks on Morganton Road in Southern Pines, with even more people lining the sidewalks and cheering on the marchers.
To the author of the MAGA blog, those people are analogous to a plague of brown-skinned workers who move in, out-breed and out-vote the natives.
This moment of comedy brought to you by paranoia and panic. (When a tsunami is coming, grab your beach chair and RUN.)
In May 2024, investigative reporter Bryan Anderson named Watauga Rep. Ray Pickett as among the North Carolina General Assembly Republicans who spent a wild time visiting distilleries around Frankfort, Ky., all expenses paid (which were considerable), but paid by whom? (The trip itself was outed on Reddit by a disgruntled employee at one distillery who described the visiting legislators as a bunch of swaggering Southern yahoos disturbing the peace and vomiting in sinks.)
The answer to who paid and was it legal came yesterday when a Wake County grand jury handed down four indictments of Raleigh lobbyists who induced companies they represented to underwrite the entire trip, thus violating the gift ban in North Carolina law that's supposed to keep our legislators from being wined and dined for legislative favors. (Or "Bourbon-ed and boiled" might be the better phrase.)
After all, the pious, stated excuse for the whole trip to Kentucky was to celebrate "conservative business values," which (we've heard said by many people) are easier to celebrate in an alcoholic haze.
The charges against the lobbyists are mere misdemeanors, showing just how seriously our laws take gifting and grifting elected representatives, all of whom are scot-free in the affair. No NC lawmakers have been charged with anything, though some of them may have some 'splaining to do for not reporting everything on their disclosure forms.
J.W. Williamson was the founding editor in 1972 of the Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, which he edited until July of 2000. He has taught college classes in Appalachian history, cultural politics, and literature, and he has lectured widely on the pop-culture history of "Appalachia" in the American consciousness. His books include Interviewing Appalachia, Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films, and Hillbillyland: What the Mountains Did to the Movies and What the Movies Did to the Mountains. He has won the Thomas Wolfe Award given by the Western North Carolina Historical Society, the Laurel Leaves Award given by the Appalachian Consortium, a special Weatherford Award given by Berea College, and the Cratis Williams-James Brown Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association.
The views expressed on WataugaWatch are solely those of J.W. Williamson or individual contributors and are not necessarily shared nor endorsed by the Watauga County Democratic Party nor by any other adults of sound mind in this or any other universe.
