ANOTHER sex offender ???
Geeeeeeeeeeeeeezzzzzzzzzzzzz.
This year’s US Senate race has sadly evolved into a morbid, disturbing game of ‘Sex Offender poker.’ The game got rolling with a whole lot of publicity about Mike Whatley and his ties to one Harvey West.
Republicans countered with seeing the Dems’ bid of Harvey, and raising it with a Chad Severance- Turner.
Now, it appears, Democrats have seen the Republican bet and are raising it with one Daimon L. King:
A pastor kicked off a recent campaign stop for Michael Whatley, the Republican nominee for Senate, with a prayer that asked God to bestow “integrity and honesty” upon the event and to right wrongs “hammered down on the conservative movement.”
The prayer was hardly unusual by North Carolina political standards. What was surprising was the man who delivered it. Pastor Daimon L. King is a registered sex offender, twice sentenced to prison for convictions involving children, according to state and court records.
The episode occurred with two months to go in a marquee Senate race that could help decide which party controls the chamber after the November elections. It risks undermining one of Whatley’s central campaign arguments — that his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Roy Cooper, is soft on crime.And it could feed into an advertising blitz by Democrats that has targeted the Republican candidate’s association with another convicted sex offender, a former GOP official.
King did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Whatley’s campaign declined to make him available for an interview. In a statement, campaign spokesman DJ Griffin said Whatley did not know King and the event “was NOT planned nor organized by the Whatley campaign nor did the campaign invite any of the guests.”
He emphasized that King had been “invited by the hosts,” which he identified as the Craven County Republican Party.
Officials with the county party could not be reached for comment.
Whatley served as chairman of the North Carolina GOP from 2019 until Trump elevated him in 2024 to lead the Republican National Committee, a post he stepped down from to pursue the Senate seat at the president’s urging.
King’s prayer and Whatley’s association with the former GOP official Harvey L. West Jr., the other convicted sex offender, could prove particularly problematic as the Republican Senate candidate seeks to shore up support from hard-right conservatives, said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University who is not related to the former governor.
Anger in Trump’s base over the government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case pressured the president to sign legislation to release the records.
The documents, which detailed the deceased sex offender’s interactions with prominent figures in politics and business, pushed suspicions about powerful people and institutions that had circulated for years on the political right into a much broader public debate.
“The far right has not coalesced behind (Whatley) and these kinds of revelations will make that problem even greater,” Cooper said. […]
Okay. Switching gears for a minute. I am SICK SICK SICK SICK of the morons in the drive-by media and on college faculties describing folks like me – whose beliefs are right in line with the GOP platform – as ‘far right’.
I know it’s to put images in people’s heads of Hitler and the Nazis – who were, for what it’s worth, socialists. Socialists are what we in the sane world call leftists. The full name of the Nazis was Nationalist Socialist Worker’s Party. Doesn’t sound like a bunch of Milton Friedman fans to me.
And isn’t academia more than 95 percent leftist AND Democrat? That’s not exactly in-line with mainstream North Carolina or America.
It’s disappointing to see and hear this kind of crap from people who claim to be champions of The First Amendment and transparency and the guardians of our kids’ higher education.
But back to ‘Sex Offender poker’:
[…] King, 60, is the leader of New Beginnings Celebration church in New Bern, a town near the North Carolina coast where the rally was held on Aug. 28. The pastor has taken on an increasingly visible role in Republican politics in recent years. He presents himself as a pro-Trump Black conservative and has served as a precinct chairman for the Craven County GOP. He has praised Trump and decried “fake news” in sermons uploaded to YouTube, delivering what he calls the “pure, uncut word of God.”
The event at the Craven County GOP headquarters featured Whatley and Dr. Mehmet Oz, a former daytime TV personality who is Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
King can be seen in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, by Whatley’s campaign following?the event. While Whatley and Oz took turns?railing against fraud in the medical system, King positioned himself conspicuously in the background, nodded along in agreement and flashed a double thumbs-up.
King took?to his church’s Facebook group the next day to offer a glowing assessment of the event.
“The atmosphere was charged with prayer and patriotism through the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of THE United States of America!!!” King wrote, adding that he and his church “fully support and are behind” Whatley.
Some 30 years ago, King?was a marching band assistant at a high school outside Raleigh when he?was charged with statutory rape and indecent liberties with a 15-year-old student, The News & Observer reported at the time. King, then 31, was convicted in 1998 and served nearly five years in prison before being paroled, according to state department of corrections records.
In 2010, he pleaded guilty to having sex with an underage female relative and served close to three years in prison, state records show.
King is required under North Carolina law to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.[…]
The state sex offender registry DOES indeed include a listing for one Damion L. King of New Bern.
Meanwhile, grocery shopping and filling up the car still requires you to haul an armored car loaded with cash along with you. Here’s the brilliant Milton Friedman explaining inflation and how we get it. It starts with politicians in Washington. And it won’t be made better in the long-run by more spending or more government subsidies or tax-bracket shifts or other sleight-of-hand regulation changes.
Fixing it requires brutal (DOGE-like) cuts in government spending and government growth. Sadly, neither Mike Whatley, nor Roy Cooper have the guts to give us any of that.
