The tears of a RINO
Longtime Carolina basketball scribe Art Chansky has a piece up giving us all real insight into exactly what kind of weak sister Republicans get appointed to stuff by Jones Street these days:
UNC Trustee Chuck Duckett is far from a racist.
The only reason this qualifies as a sports story is Duckett, the trustee who has been under fire lately, was a manager on the 1982 NCAA champion basketball team. A very fond memory for him.
Duckett is completing eight years on the UNC Board of Trustees, and he is going out with a lot of noise surrounding him and his part in the controversy over Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose prolonged and explosive tenure appointment led to her taking another job.
Duckett is a Republican, and that means different things to different people. Just as being a Democrat can mean liberal, progressive or neither. But Duckett leaves with some Hussman J-school faculty calling the Trustees “racist” in an open letter.
Duckett acknowledges his part in delaying the process for Hannah-Jones but told the Assembly website, “I didn’t know how the Knight Foundation chairs [at the journalism school] work. I had all these questions. It didn’t have anything to do with the 1619 Project (the contentious racial history series created by Hannah-Jones).
Swept up in the ensuing controversy, Duckett said he was stung by the criticism. “Race and gender never had anything to do with my questions,” he said. “Never. Anyone who knows me knows that isn’t me.” In fact, Duckett has been on the liberal, progressive side of similar controversies at UNC.[…]
Oh, goody. *THAT is exactly what we were looking for from our ‘Republican Revolution’ in Raleigh. *
MORE:
[…] In 2014, he and fellow Trustee Alston Gardner researched and filled a 400-page notebook with information from more than 200 interviews (including Desmond Tutu, the late civil rights leader John Lewis and Hubert Davis, UNC’s first black head basketball coach) about whether the name of a prominent alumnus should be scrubbed off (William) Saunders Hall because he was a Confederate colonel and long known as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.[…]
“Long known,” eh? That’s interesting. At its founding, the KKK was a secret society. Even in the 1960s, the FBI had to struggle to ID members. (Anyone see Mississippi Burning?).
Clint Fuller, the late chief of staff to the late US senator Jesse Helms, was once a reporter and editor of The Franklin County Times here in NC. He and the paper got quite a bit of acclaim for one of Fuller’s pieces. Fuller found out where the Klan would be holding one of its patented cross-burning in-the-woods meetings. Fuller hid near where the bedsheet boys had parked their cars. As they departed the meeting, they took their pointy hats off. Fuller snapped a photo of each face. He printed the photos — with names — on the front page of his paper. And so the decline and fall of the KKK in NC began.
And the Confederate colonel, thing? I thought the whole idea of Reconstruction was to reunite the nation. That’s what Lincoln spoke of, and it was a topic of discussion at the surrender talks at Appamattox.
MORE:
[…]“I couldn’t believe it,” Duckett said. “When you say someone is head of the KKK and that’s an attribute, then the trustees of 1920 erred. I said that’s unacceptable. The name has to come down.”[…]
DID the man’s alleged KKK membership REALLY qualify him to get his name on a building? Seriously?
You have to ask: “Why are the lefties just now hollering about something from 100 years ago? There have been a lot of Democrat governors and Democrat legislative majorities since then. The lefties have had a stranglehold on Orange County since at least the late 1960s. Why is it suddenly so important to act, when it would have been easier for them under Democrat control?
MORE:
[…]And it did. What people don’t know about Chuck Duckett is whose name he wanted to put on another such building. He pushed for it to be renamed for Charles Scott, the first black scholarship athlete at Carolina. That was too much, too soon for some of his colleagues.[…]
There’s no need to apologize for opposing Nikole Hannah-Jones. She was unqualified any way you looked at it. There is a violent hateful mob that truly owns the streets and classrooms of Chapel Hill. They call the shots. They’ll gladly take the money from rich, white, conservative alums — all while spitting venomous epithets like RACIST at them.
Getting called racist is a part of being conservative. That is the leftist go-to epithet much like the “subversive” and “communist” labels they decried in the 1950s and 1960s. (Of course, the labels slapped on the lefties actually had some truth to them.)
Is there more to this building naming brouhaha than meets the eye? UNC was originally funded by donations from wealthy white people in the 1700s and 1800s. If you were a wealthy white person in that era, you likely had slaves. Most of us thought we moved on from that slavery thing in the 1860s. But some people want to keep the fire lit, and keep certain people angry.
I have a friend whose great-grandfather was slandered as part of this building renaming putsch. (Obviously, grandpa is not here to defend himself.) His grandpa donated a lot of money to the construction of the school. (*There was no deal that the buildings HAD to be segregated or serviced by slaves in order to get the money.*) My friend’s great-grandpa also funded various charities that aided poor minorities all over North Carolina and the country. That apparently didn’t matter. Nevertheless, he was labeled a racist and his name was ripped off a building.
I asked my friend if his family would continue to contribute to an institution that has been so hateful to his late family member. He tells me that is still a topic of discussion. I told him there ought to be a demand the school pay a refund of all the money his family has ever given the school WITH interest. If you give in to the loudmouths in the streets, a price has got to be paid.
The Raleigh Republicans need to stop trying to get the rabble in the street, and their enablers in the drive-by media, to like them. It will never happen. Republicans will just keep getting rolled and taxpayers will keep getting screwed.
Some people need to be reminded that it’s the tax-paying hard-working people who ultimately call the shots at UNC, and not the vandalism-happy, screaming, slobbering, cursing mobs in the street.
Worry about keeping Republican voters happy. They voted for the “Republican Revolution” because they liked the party platform and the tough, common-sense rhetoric that came with it. Your voters will have your back if you make an effort to have THEIRS.
Will someone please give poor Chuck Duckett a box of tissues—the liberals have called him a racist and his feelings are hurt. Not true, he says. Actually, he claims to be a liberal Republican who has tried his best to do the liberals’ bidding on the UNC campus and now he has been rewarded by being called a racist, if not outright klansman. Well, at least we now have more evidence of the type of RINO nitwits the GOP legislature has been appointing to the UNC trustee board and UNC Board of Governors. The snowflake Republican appointees like Duckett have been made fools of over and over again. Will Jones Street ever learn? Do Moore and Berger even care?
It is whining RINOs like this that are the problem. We need conservatives with backbone to turn our Marxist cesspools of the UNC system back into real universities with diversity of thought.
If they take the name of a university financial contributor off of a building, then the least they could do, if they are at all honorable people, is to return the money he / she contributed to their heirs, and with interest. Keeping the money but taking the name off of a building is a completely dishonest thing to do.
And I do not see the progs doing a thing about the name of Yale University, whose namesake, Elihu Yale, was not only a slave owner but a large scale slave trader, and as a British colonial official, had a law changed to end a previous prohibition against export of slaves.
Actually, the ONLY time you hear from DC GOP is when they are condemning a fellow GOP, most likely 99% of the time, a Conservative fellow GOP member. IF GOPe, RINO, likely not a peep.
The ENTIRE Party, NC and National, are worthless. I get 7-8-10 emails everyday soliciting $$$…Topic/headline ranges from help stop illegal immigration, support Trump, stop the Dems, restore the republic and on and on…and from every Republican known to man….as the sender….
My giving to any GOP cause, person, entity, campaign stopped. WHY give, WHY support, WHY work…we are ignored, rebuked. ONLY the donor $$$, lobbyists $$$ talk any longer.
Reading this post should make any conservative sick. How could this happen? Duckett simply personifies the pathetic RINO mindset that has wrecked any conservative reform of our university system. Ultimately, you have to blame the Republican legislature for appointing such people to the UNC Board of Governors and UNC trustees. Duckett and his clueless RINO squishes should never have been appointed to these positions in the first place. I have watched them in action for years. These men have no backbone, no courage, no principles, and no vision. And where is the new Republican UNC system president, Peter Hans, in all of this? Nobody has heard a peep from him. Not a peep from Hans on the hiring of Hannah Jones. Not a peep from Hans when the radical faculty at UNCW drove conservative professor Mike Adams to suicide. Nothing from Hans whenever a professor calls Republicans Nazis, or advocates their destruction. No one knows where Peter Hans’s hideout is in Chapel Hill, but he has been invisible except when he pops us to tell us how wonderful our university system is and why we should keep pouring our tax dollars into it so the Radical Left can grease the skids for more indoctrination of our young people. Tragically, this must be the way Berger and Moore want it, because they refuse to appoint reform-minded conservatives to these university boards. We have been betrayed.
(a) Yes, it’s disgusting that UNC would try to employ Nikole Hannah-Jones at all. She’s not a “journalist”, she’s an activist and more importantly, a vile racist. That people are willing to take her seriously at all is a disturbing trend. That the NC GOP is scared of stepping up isnt surprising. They were playing Lucy and the football with their voters a decade ago when the Tea Party was a thing, and they’re still doing it.
(b) I was curious about the Saunders story and looked it up. The UNC Board of Trustees meeting minutes are available online. In the “January 1917-January 18, 1924” section, for 06-15-1920, scan 234, Saunders name is put forward by the Committee on the Development of University Property. They provide the board with a list of about 12 qualifications, and the 4th line is, “Head of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina”.
(c) Also, “hi”. It’s been awhile 🙂
Isn’t it about time we saw the tears of UNC Leftists instead of RINOs?