On Tuesday, North Carolina Senate committee members voted to advance a bill legalizing sports betting in the state. It is calendared for the Senate floor session scheduled to gavel in at 9:30 Wednesday morning. Filed in March, House Bill 347 legalizes online and in-person wagering on professional and college sports in North Carolina. According to...
The U.S. Supreme Court will review two cases next month with N.C. ties. Either case could return the Tar Heel State to national headlines when the nation’s highest court starts its next term in the fall. Justices have set June 15 as the date to consider whether to take up Quad Graphics v. N.C. Department of Revenue and Diaz-Tomas v. North Carolina.
A split 4th U.S. Circuit of Appeals panel has ruled that Darryl Howard can pursue a lawsuit against two additional Durham police officers. A jury already has awarded Howard $6 million from a third officer who helped keep Howard imprisoned for 21 years for two murders he didn’t commit.
On Tuesday, for the first time, a North Carolina House committee heard a bill (S.B. 3) to legalize marijuana use for certain medical reasons. The House Health Committee did not hold a vote on S.B. 3 but discussed the bill for about 30 minutes. Earlier this year, the bill passed the Senate by a vote...
The race for North Carolina’s next lieutenant governor just became a bit more crowded as another candidate threw his hat in the ring over the weekend.
A thought occurred to me as I was traveling through the North Carolina Piedmont last week. The notion didn’t have to do with my location but was instead prompted by the lecture I was listening to on the way. It was one of an excellent series on the world’s political hot spots issued by a...
The way progressives have reacted to a bill limiting controversial racial school lessons should tell us everything we need to know about how they view education. House Bill 187, called the Equality in Education Act, currently in the Senate, promises to effectively end the teaching of critical race theory within North Carolina schools. The bill,...
Gov. Roy Cooper and his ideological allies make off-base complaints about the state Senate's proposed rate cuts.
North Carolina Democrats are frustrated. It’s not hard to see why. Since 2008, when Barack Obama narrowly won the state and Kay Hagan beat Elizabeth Dole by a more comfortable margin, Democrats have fought hard but lost every subsequent presidential and Senate race in the Tar Heel State. In 2010, Republicans won their first majorities...
The former chair of the Wake County GOP announced his candidacy for North Carolina Secretary of State on the Republican ticket.
Over the weekend, former U.S. Rep. Mark Walker of Greensboro officially joined the race for the Republican nomination for N.C. governor. Walker’s announcement makes him the third candidate in the primary race, with Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and N.C. Treasurer Dale Folwell already in.
That means North Carolina’s lone 2024 state Supreme Court election will be an open race.
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson comes out swinging in a hypothetical primary GOP race for governor. In a Civitas poll done by Survey USA, Robinson blows away the competition with 43% of the vote, compared to former Congressman Mark Walker, who got 9%, followed by State Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler at 8%, and State Treasurer Dale Folwell coming in last place with 4%.
In a much-anticipated rally at Ace Speedway in Elon, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson declared his candidacy for governor of N.C., joining N.C. State Treasurer Dale Folwell in the Republican primary field.
John Locke Foundation President Donald Bryson discusses new Civitas Poll results focusing on North Carolina’s 2024 governor’s race. Bryson offered these comments for a May 25, 2023, report on WNCN (CBS17).
This week on The Debrief: The N.C. Senate kicked off the week presenting its version of the state budget and wrapped the week giving it bipartisan passage. The state legislature also voted to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of SB 20, a measure restricting abortion in the second and third trimester of pregnancy. Within minutes,...
Rep. Tricia Cotham, R-Mecklenburg, presents House Bill 823 to colleagues on the House floor. The bill is titled “Choose Your School, Choose Your Future.” Cotham offered these comments on May 17, 2023. Video courtesy of ncleg.gov.
Mitch Kokai, John Locke Foundation senior political analyst, discusses Gov. Roy Cooper’s campaign to convince Republican legislators to flip their votes on an abortion bill. Kokai offered these comments during the May 12, 2023, edition of PBS North Carolina’s “State Lines.”
This week on The Debrief: Gov. Roy Cooper launched a pressure campaign this week, targeting four Republican lawmakers in swing districts, but it does not seem to be going as planned. The NCGOP announced its speaker lineup for June’s party convention in Greensboro. Former President Donald Trump, former VP Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron...
A short film just released to the public depicts a particularly dark part of North Carolina’s extraordinary history. In 1898, the only successful coup d’état in American history took place in the Tar Heel state.
The suicide rate for youths between the ages of 10- and 17-years-old reached the highest in two decades in 2021 in North Carolina, according to a new report from the North Carolina Child Fatality Task Force.
On Tuesday, an ACLU North Carolina lobbyist, Kristie Puckett Williams, made graphic, sexually harassing comments to conservative radio host Pete Kaliner during a Twitter discussion regarding N.C. Senate Bill 49, the Parents' Bill of Rights. Puckett Williams, Deputy Director of Engagement at the ACLU of N.C., tweeted at Kaliner criticizing his support of the bill and used more graphic directions for performing sexual acts.
An anti-trust lawsuit was filed this week against legacy media giants and big tech companies for their collusive agreement to shut down anti-vaccine coverage during the height of the COVID pandemic. Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Washington Post, Meta, Microsoft, and Google censored coverage questioning the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines.
Mitch Kokai, John Locke Foundation senior political analyst, discusses the New York Times’ column warning about America’s “free-speech problem.” Kokai offered these comments during the March 25, 2022, edition of PBS North Carolina’s “Front Row with Marc Rotterman.”
Canadian professor, author, and psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson on Thursday offered a non-political and largely academic lecture on the psychology of beauty, dreams, and purpose. The reaction from city officials and activists to the address at the Durham Performing Arts Center was night-and-day from the one leading up to his appearance four years earlier. It...
As the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine continues to escalate, North Carolina’s local Ukrainian population is rallying to bring attention to the suffering of people in their homeland and to gather supplies to help them. Donna Goldstein, co-president of the Ukrainian Association of North Carolina, finds herself at the forefront of these efforts. Goldstein has...
The fourth estate, journalism, is racing to receivership unless we can rescue it from its rapacious self. The hubris hasn’t always been this bad, this blatant, or this biased, yet it worsens daily. In the town I grew up in, Nashville, Tennessee, there were two newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, one for the morning,...
One of the goals within our cultural wars is to push Christmas aside, to make even more room for divisive politicized agendas that tear us apart.