On the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, we who opposed his election face a simple question: What is there left to do? It is perhaps easier to know what we will not do: We will not seek by violent insurrection to overturn a free and fair election. Nor will we disrupt the tradition of peacefully ..read more

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump — an act repugnant to anyone who honors and values the ideas, habits, and practices of democracy — cleanses nothing. Trump, a man of base character and a would-be authoritarian who disregards the norms of republican self-government while seeking to gain office by casting doubt on election results and promising to corruptly wield power against his perceived enemies, is the same person today that he was before someone tried to kill him. Within hours of the attempt on his life, Trump’s supporters sought to use the shooting as a justific ..read more

The huddled masses gathered at a nondescript Charlotte business park just before Independence Day to help renew America. Sixty people from three dozen countries, seemingly of every hue, color, age, and background, became flesh-and-blood representatives of e pluribus unum as they sat together on folding chairs in a fluorescent-lit conference room while a middling official from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services emceed a ceremony that would culminate in the oath of citizenship, a ceremony, he told us, that had created a million new Americans over the last year. It started with the nat ..read more

It’s difficult to overstate the contempt Charlotte’s government feels for its citizens. Though disdain for the people is widely distributed among our elected officials, high-ranking bureaucrats, and well-connected members of the governing class, perhaps no one personifies it like Assistant City Manager Tracy Dodson, whose duties as director of economic development require her to act as the in-house propagandist for powerful interests seeking to monetize our municipal government: Whenever businesses want to pad their pockets with public dollars or stop the adoption of policies that might eat in ..read more

A Hobbesian darkness animates the narrative that bolsters law enforcement’s political legitimacy. Danger lurks everywhere, we’re told, and each of us, at any moment, might find ourselves victimized in a menacing world where everyone, left to their own devices, will indulge their natural-born instinct to engage in the English philosopher’s “war of all against all” that renders life “nasty, brutish, and short.” Violence is nature’s decree, and we ought always to be afraid. Ushering men and women away from this state of nature and toward the reward of civilization is a “leviathan” that rescues us ..read more

No matter how hard he strives for celebrity, a politician shouldn’t be judged by the standards of a Tiger Beat cover boy. Jeff Jackson, a Democratic congressman from Charlotte who’s running for state attorney general, first entered public office in 2014 when party members named him to a vacant seat in the North Carolina Senate. Later that year, he earned some good publicity for a floor speech criticizing the GOP’s proposed state budget. His critique became a minor sensation among people of Jackson’s political ilk who were desperate for someone to vent their frustrations over the Republican Par ..read more

Charlotte cops beat the hell out of Christina Pierre, and now it’s time for the commonwealth to take a few blows. By now the story is well known: On November 17, Pierre and Anthony Lee, Pierre’s partner and co-worker, sat at a public bus stop in Steele Creek after their shifts ended at a nearby Bojangles. Two Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officers approached the pair — both of them Black and, given their place of employment and lack of personal transportation, neither of them seemingly in possession of wealth or the privilege and power that accompanies it — for suspicion of smoking m ..read more

Republican Tariq Bokhari, the self-styled tech bro with a history of using his public office to further his own private interests, narrowly won reelection to Charlotte City Council in last week’s municipal elections. In a rematch against Democrat Stephanie Hand for the District 6 seat on Council, Bokhari won by a 51%-49% margin. (Bokhari beat Hand by the same spread in the COVID-postponed July 2022 city elections. In the 2022 race, 357 votes separated the candidates. This year it was 352 votes, excluding provisional and absentee ballots. Turnout was about 12% in 2022 and around 15% this year ..read more

Nothing disappoints like the cowardice of fair-weather friends. In 2021, the North Carolina Bar Association — the premier professional organization for the state’s lawyers — touted its queer-friendly bona fides when then-President John Heyl announced the formation of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Committee, which pledged to work “to secure full equality for members of the LGBTQ+ community in the NCBA, the legal profession, and society” and to “work to oppose discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” At a time when far-right radicals ..read more

The call for help went out less than twenty-four hours before the march. C.L.E.V.E.R. (Creating Love & Equity through Voices Education & Reflection), an Iredell County non-profit committed to protecting and promoting the rights and dignity of LGBTQ young people, planned to mark International Transgender Visibility Day on March 31 with a rally in downtown Mooresville. Word got out the day before that the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, the Christo-fascists who hector school boards, seek to ban books, and accuse queer adults and drag queens of grooming children, intended to harass the ..read more