Hopeless Target: Moore County (Or Not)

 

Moore County (with its small towns of Carthage, Pinehurst, Southern Pines, and other white-shoe enclaves) does not vote for Democrats unless they're running unopposed (it's happened twice in the last dozen years), and according to records kept by the State Board of Elections, the last time straight-ticket voting was allowed in 2010, some 66.64% of Moore County voters voted straight Republican. Moore is also, incidentally, the home county for Brant Clifton and The Daily Haymaker, the epitome of hard-right Republican acid-bath.

Into such forbidding terrain comes last Monday Anderson Clayton, the 20-something new chair of the NC Democratic Party, in her quest to awaken progressive grassroots in all 100 counties, even the most discouraging ones. This was her reception on the early evening of July 18th in the courtyard next to the Pinehurst Village Hall, gathering the corps of what could become the 2024 ground troops all across the state.

We're constantly reminded of the courage of Howard Dean's "50-state strategy" when he was chair of the DNC, the courage it took and the results it showed. 2006 was the first year Democrats in Watauga County swept the county commission.

We also note that a coalition of progressive orgs is bringing next Monday, July 24, the #UniteNC "accountability tour town hall" to the county seat of Carthage. These town halls, sponsored by Common Cause, NAACP, League of Women Voters, and others, aim to rally opposition to the multitude of regressive and oppressive actions taken by the Republican General Assembly in Raleigh, from regressive court rulings, a new redistricting cycle, and all-important ballot-access,

There are a bunch of other deep-red counties like Moore, and may The Awakening continue.

What They DON'T Want Their Kids To Read in Pitt and Moore Counties

 

According to a report in the News and Observer, over the past two years, some very loud people have brought at least 189 book challenges across North Carolina’s 115 public school districts. As a result of those challenges, some 16 titles have been banned from specific North Carolina schools. Those include All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely in Pitt County Schools and Life is Funny by E.R. Frank in Moore County Schools. 

I went looking on Amazon. Here's what I found about All American Boys (which, from the title, I figgered had to be about a homosexual grooming operation. Why else would it be banned from Pitt County?):

In this Coretta Scott King Honor Award–winning novel, two teens—one black, one white—grapple with the repercussions of a single violent act that leaves their school, their community, and, ultimately, the country bitterly divided by racial tension.

A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galluzzo, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement?

There were witnesses: Quinn Collins—a varsity basketball player and Rashad’s classmate who has been raised by Paul since his own father died in Afghanistan—and a video camera. Soon the beating is all over the news and Paul is getting threatened with accusations of prejudice and racial brutality. Quinn refuses to believe that the man who has basically been his savior could possibly be guilty. But then Rashad is absent. And absent again. And again. And the basketball team—half of whom are Rashad’s best friends—start to take sides. As does the school. And the town. Simmering tensions threaten to explode as Rashad and Quinn are forced to face decisions and consequences they had never considered before.

Oh, okay, I get it. Too much ripped-from-the-headlines reality.

Amazon sums up the other banned title, Life Is Funny, this way:

E. R. Frank’s seminal first novel weaves together the stories of eleven teenagers in one city over seven years in this groundbreaking and “impressive debut” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Why does Gingerbread always have a smile on his face? “Because life is funny,” he tells Keisha. But for her—and almost everyone else in her Brooklyn neighborhood—there doesn’t seem to be much to laugh about.

China, Ebony, and Grace are best friends, but Grace’s mother isn’t crazy about her being friends with two girls who aren’t white, and each cut Ebony makes on her wrist seems to drive them even further apart.

Just across the schoolyard there’s Eric who has to raise his younger brother Mickey, even though no one expects him to amount to anything. Meanwhile, Sonia’s Muslim parents expect everything of her, and it may be more than she is able to give after she suffers a shattering loss.

When Drew brings his father’s Jaguar into Sam’s family’s auto body shop across town they seem to be from opposite sides of the tracks, but Drew’s the one hiding a dark family secret. And he’s not the only one.

Harder to figure what's so terrible about this one, but maybe it's the self-harm (cutting) that the white girl is inflicting on herself (all too common, I'm told) and surely not the fact that she has two Black friends and a mother who disapproves of them.

I'll have something to say in a subsequent post about the A-Number-1 best way to get kids into banned stuff -- ban it.

 

People in the Dark Put 40,000 Other People in the Dark

 

Moore County is east of Charlotte and is largely without electric power this morning because some people, so far unknown, used fire arms to shoot up a couple of Duke substations in a very targeted way -- “The persons who did this knew exactly what they were doing,” says the Moore County sheriff -- in the process knocking out power to most of the county and incidentally breaking a federal law that has brought in the FBI to investigate. And perhaps just incidentally, the outage happened as a drag show -- much hated and protested by Moore County rightwing activists -- was just getting started at a downtown theater in Southern Pines.

From the NandO coverage:

On her Facebook page, Emily Grace Rainey, an outspoken opponent of the drag show, posted an invitation to protest at the theater. After the lights went out, Rainey, who became known in Moore County during the pandemic for her opposition to mask mandates, posted on Facebook that, “The power is out in Moore County and I know why.” 

Later, she posted that the Moore County Sheriff’s Office had come to her house to ask about the outage. 

“I welcomed them to my home,” wrote Rainey, who organized a group of Moore County residents to travel to Washington on January 6, 2021. “Sorry they wasted their time. I told them that God works in mysterious ways and is responsible for the outage. I used the opportunity to tell them about the immoral drag show and the blasphemies screamed by its supporters.”

Rainey said, “I told them God is chastising Moore County, thanked them for coming, and wished them a good night...."

Emily Grace Rainey

So Emily Grace Rainey, who seemed to know something specific about the outage -- perhaps God told her about his mysterious ways with firearms -- got along swimmingly with the sheriff's office. Later, the sheriff himself, at a press conference yesterday, said flatly that Rainey's Facebook posts were "false." He said officers “had to go and interview this young lady and have a word of prayer with her, but it turned out to be nothing.”

Hmmm.

Rainey has earned a very high profile in Moore County. On January 6th, while she was still on active duty at Fort Bragg attached to 4th Psychological Operations Group (PSYOP), she helped organize a hundred Moore County Republicans into buses for the trip to D.C. to hear Trump rev up the crowd on the ellipse. The Moore County group subsequently said they were not part of the storming of the Capitol, but Rainey was investigated by the Army for her political activity and is no longer in the military.

She had previously in 2020 sparked a run-in with the police in Southern Pines when she filmed herself tearing down yellow tape cordoning off a playground after Gov. Roy Cooper closed parks to prevent the further spread of COVID.

Incidentally, training in PSYOP means that Rainey has a handle on how "to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals" (Wikipedia). Whether she has talent, I know not, but it's clear she has skills, courtesy of the US government.