“Local” protesters @ NCGA have NY-based PR rep

McClatchy, WRAL and the rest of the legacy media are trying to tell us that this “Moral Monday” stuff is a homegrown, spontaneous grassroots movement.  Just like the *evil* Tea Party movement of 2009-2010, these folks are just sooooooo upset about what their government is up to.  Yeah.

Spittle is flying from Gary Pearce’s mouth.  Chris Fitzsimon’s blinking has hit warp speed.  Those guys are beside themselves  about claims that “Moral Monday” is merely astroturfing orchestrated by the national left in response to the Tar Heel state leaving the Obama fold in 2012.

We’re told these “Moral Monday” folks are bi-partisan.  Civitas did a survey of those protesters who were arrested.  98 percent of them are Democrat (77%)  or Unaffiliated (21%).  TWO PERCENT call themselves Republican (1%) or Libertarian (1%).  The group’s research found that the typical “Moral Monday” protester is white, 55 or older, a current or former college professor, a Democrat, and a resident of The Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill).  

On NC Spin today, Chris Fitzsimon kept trumpeting the story by WRAL’s Mark Binker purporting to show that 98 percent of the arrested protesters were from North Carolina.  PROBLEM:  The police were allowing protesters to PICK who gets arrested. Conveniently, conservative-looking white folks from North Carolina all get ziptied and paraded in front of the cameras.

I am STILL waiting on the mainstream media to report on Dana Cope’s tweets about Moral Monday, as well as the involvement of Occupy Wall Street veterans and SEIU operatives.

A local North Carolina paper gave us insight into how the protesters’ publicity game works:

Received the following email from Cynthia Gordy of Advancement Project from New York City about Thom Goolsby’s piece (Moron Monday shows radical Left just doesn’t get it). Advancement Project is located at 1220 L Street NW, Suite 850 Washington, DC 20005

Weren’t we told that the Moral Monday protests were North Carolina driven?

Hello,

My name is Cynthia Gordy. I’m with Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization that works with local communities and is currently providing support for the NC NAACP’s Forward Together Movement. In response to a recent op-ed by criticizing Moral Mondays, written by Senator Thom Goolsby (“Moron Mondays shows radical left just doesn’t get it”), I submit a Letter to the Editor from Chatham County resident Lenore Yarger. As a young minister and participant who was arrested in one of the Moral Monday protests, she counters Sen. Goolsby’s mischaracterization.

I’ve attached Lenore Yarger’s Letter to the Editor for your consideration, and copied and pasted it below. Thank you, and I hope to speak with you soon.

Cynthia Gordy
Senior Communications Associate
Advancement Project
718-755-4340

Responding to Sen. Goolsby

It was with great difficulty that I read Senator Thom Goolsby’s piece (Moron Monday shows radical Left just doesn’t get it, June 7). Goolsby and his colleagues are the ones who don’t get it. First, he generalizes a multiracial group of thousands of North Carolinians as “white, angry, aged former hippies” – omitting the esteemed ministers, doctors, lawyers, historians, college professors and students who make up the movement.

Then Goolsby unleashes an ill-informed rant around this question: Where were these protests back when Democrats controlled North Carolina? Well, if the Democratic-led General Assembly had used their 140 years of power to viciously attack the poor, civil liberties and voting rights, then you’d better believe there would have been protests. Yet in only six months, this Republican-led legislature has cut the earned income tax credit for over 900,000 North Carolinians and rejected federal funding to expand Medicaid for 500,000 without health insurance. They want to crush the ability of poor families to enroll in pre-kindergarten, and increase the sales tax on groceries, haircuts, and prescription medicine – all while hatching plans to give an estate tax break to North Carolina’s 23 wealthiest families. Goolsby himself introduced a bill to repeal the Racial Justice Act and speed up executions. This is shameful.

Goolsby did, however, get one thing right – we are angry.

Lenore Yarger, Siler City

Yeah.  Just a “young minister”?  Well, Google tells me something more interesting about Ms. Yarger:

Central as they are to the Quaker House mission, Steve & Lenore don’t live here. Modern telecommunications make it unnecessary. But their lives are also about more than this ringing phone. They live at the Silk Hope Catholic Worker, about 60-plus miles away. There they offer hospitality to homeless women and children, grow a large garden, and are active in various peace protests.

The radical pacifist Catholic Worker (CW) movement has been important to them since their college days in the late 1980s.  […]

While in Durham, though, they often attended the Friends Meeting there. “We’re Catholics,” Steve notes, “but with a fondness for the Quaker way of worship.” Lenore adds, “We’ve met lots of Quakers through various peace actions.” In one such action Lenore got arrested at Ft. Bragg. And maybe, she muses, it was this that moved Durham Meeting to ask her to be their representative on the Quaker House board.

Lenore was drawn to Quaker House, but found GI counseling more compelling than Board work. “Usually I was on the other side of the fence from the GIs, at protests,” Lenore says, “but I wanted to have a positive form of contact too. So many GIs are victims of military culture, and they’re desperate for helpful contact with someone on the outside.”

Hmmm.  The “radical pacifist Catholic worker movement is important” to Ms. Yarger and her husband.  Not my language. THAT is this left-wing website talking. 

Ms. Yarger and her husband are also active in an organization devoted to “shutting down oppressive U.S. foreign policy.”  Hubby provides graphic design services to a publication called “The Southern Radical.”

Oh, and this Advancement Project crowd is not exactly a mainstream, moderate bunch.  Their board includes the singer Harry Belafonte — who has bent over backwards to embrace Every Marxist dictator and enemy of the United States in the last several decades.