#NCSEN: When you can’t sell your ideas, scream “RACISM !!!!”
Well, that didn’t take long. Mother Jones, the vanguard of leftist journalism, has jumped into the fray with an insinuation that Thom Tillis is a racist:
[…] In 1898, furious that a mixed-race coalition had swept the city’s municipal elections, white supremacists burned down a black-owned newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina; overthrew the local government; and killed at least 25 black residents in a week of rioting. It was one of the worst single incidents of racially motivated violence in American history. But in 2007, when a nonpartisan commission recommended that the state legislature pass a resolution formally apologizing for the massacre, Republican Senate nominee Thom Tillis, then a first-term state representative, rose to block it.[…]
Ooooh. * Time to fit him for a Klan hood, eh?* (SMH)
Well, I’m sure the man from Cornelius Huntersville had a good explanation:
[…] “It is time to move on,” he wrote in a message to constituents. “In supporting the apology for slavery, most members felt it was an opportunity to recognize a past wrong and move on to pressing matters facing our State. HB 751 and others in the pipeline are redundant and they are consuming time and attention that should be dedicated to addressing education, transportation, and immigration problems plaguing this State.”
But at the time, Tillis—who showed up in Wilmington on Tuesday with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in tow—offered another explanation for opposing the measure: Not all whites had participated in the riots. So Tillis pushed for an amendment introduced by a fellow state representative that would have added language to the bill commemorating the heroic white Republican lawmakers who had opposed the violence. “The proposed amendment would have acknowledged the historical fact that the white Republican government joined with black citizens to oppose the rioters,” he argued. The amendment failed, and Tillis ended up voting no on the final version. […]
Any lefties upset about this historical tragedy and Thom Tillis’s level of remorse for it need to remember who history has confirmed as the main instigator of the massacre: The 
Raleigh News & Observer. Back then, the Democrat Party was the conservative party and it was backing racial segregation to the hilt. The paper was owned by Josephus Daniels — who served in the Woodrow Wilson administration — and his family at the time. (They sold the paper to McClatchy in the early to mid-1990s.) The Daniels clan were then — and are now — HUGE political and financial supporters of the Democrat Party. If ANYBODY needed to apologize for the tragedy, it needed to be the Danielses. (To my knowledge, the family has never apologized.) McClatchy HAS — and has won accolades for doing so.
If we want to talk about racial attitudes in the US Senate race, let’s move from the 19th century to the late 20th century. That’s when Kay Hagan and her husband were members in a no-blacks-allowed country club.
I have a lot of issues with Thom Tillis, but I don’t believe he’s a racist. The lefties have a lot more directly-connected evidence of racism in their own backyard without pointing fingers at Tillis or any other GOPer. This is all about tossing a bone to Bill Barber and his rabble to ensure a certain demographic shows up en masse and pissed off in November.
It’s time to stop talking about 1898 and 2007 and start seriously talking about what we’re going to do in 2014 and beyond to dig ourselves out of this godawful mess.
I am all for moving forward and the 1898 apology issue is a small (not insignificant) part of what candidate Tillis is. I do see troubling signs in what he has done recently as Speaker of the NC House. Primarily, his attack on voting rights. I am not against voter ID but to greatly reduce early voting, disallowing high school students who are about to turn 18 to pre-register to vote, and ending same day registration is an attack on certain voting groups including minorities. His cozy ruling on the Duke Coal Ash Spill also points to disregard to low and middle class citizens of this state – in favor of the wealthy elite. This corporate relationship is also evident in the fast tracking (against earlier promises not to fast track) of fracking in NC.
Same day voter registration is nothing but an invitation to vote fraud. With dishonest leftist groups on the prowl for fictitious registrations, like ACORN, this scam needed to be shut down and it was. Most democratic countries of the world do NOT have anything like early voting. It is certainly not a necessity. It is convenient for some regular voters, but it is a real boon to political machines, as it makes it easier for them to turn out political machine vote. That is why the lefties like it, because today’s political machines are almost all of the left. Political machines are not good for democracy, and it is better to inconvenience some regular voters in order to throw a spanner in the works of the political machines. Youth voter pre-registration is not a feature of democracy in most democratic countries of the world. It was a partisan devise to try to reach a partisan target group.
Sounds like you like very narrow participation in our political process. For Most of our history, it was patriotic to encourage more voters not less as Tillis has invoked. There was no widespread voter fraud that anyone can point to so your same day registration argument is moot. MANY low income citizens (including many minorities) have a hard time getting off work to get to the polls so the more early voting the better it is for more citizens. Young voters are important to involve early because it is their future that is greatly affected by elections. Both sides (Right & Left) have political machines.
“to greatly reduce early voting, disallowing high school students who are about to turn 18 to pre-register to vote,”
Except that is NOT true. Early voting was not greatly reduced. It was only reduced by a few days, but one still gets the same number of hours by other expansion. And anyone who is about to turn 18 CAN register to vote if they are eligible to vote for an election in the upcoming year. It’s called registration not “pre-registration.” My 17 year old had ZERO problem registering.
Mother Jones? That rag is so far out there in Marxist never-never land, that it is a big joke. No thinking person would ever give the crap it spews any credence whatsoever.
I am glad that there is an instance where Thom actually gave verbal support for others in his party.
No widespread voter fraud? Really? Just because Democrat administrations chose not to investigate it or prosecute it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. In fact:
“The North Carolina Board of Elections has found that there were 35,570 instances of “double voting” in the state in 2012…”
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/06/143835-voter-fraud-study-finds-35k-incidents-double-voting-north-carolina-2012/