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The results of the 2020 Census Count depict a nation that is diverse and segregating itself based on geography and race. There can be little doubt that is impacting the toxic political divide we see in America. The states located along the coast and in urban communities are seeing the largest population growth. Related to this expansion is the congregating of ethnic groups, with rural areas becoming whiter and more coastal and urban areas blacker and browner. The largest Asian population is in California, New York and Texas with large numbers in New Jersey and Washington. The African-American population continues to migrate to the Southeast, with the states of Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia accounting for 72 percent of the total population. Hispanics, the fastest growing ethnic group, have moved beyond the border towns in California, New Mexico, and Texas to locations throughout the nation, with significant population growth in Georgia, North Carolina and Florida. Keep in mind the Latinx growth is from Mexico, Cuba and other Central and South American countries. A comparison between the number of Democratic black and brown voters and the number of Republican black and brown voters makes it pretty easy to see why Republicans want to suppress their votes. Nonwhites make up forty percent of Democratic voters, but less than 20 percent of Republican voters. Voter suppression laws and gerrymandering (a redistricting tactic used to set electoral district boundaries to favor the party in power) already impact representation to the point that the minority of voters rules the majority of voters in many counties and some states. Both political parties have used redistricting strategy to their benefit. However, technological sophistication has turned an always nefarious and undemocratic practice into one that facilitates authoritarian rule. Equally ominous for democracy, voter suppression laws have been passed by at least 18 state legislatures including Georgia, Texas and Arizona. A great number of Republicans claim along with the former President and his allies that the election was stolen. They aim to influence future elections by suppressing the vote with myriad strategies that favor Republicans. Major change is coming our way if they are successful. In North Carolina, voter suppression is alive and well with Senate Republicans passing Senate bills 326, 724 and 725 all designed to suppress or limit voting rights. This includes limiting absentee ballots, requiring IDs to vote in person and prohibiting county board of elections from using donations to support local elections. North Carolina judges struck down the voter ID law writing that it “was motivated at least in part by an unconstitutional intent to target African American voters.” In Georgia SB 202 has limited the Secretary of State’s role on the Board of Elections, taking away monitoring and oversight of state and local elections. What can be done to stop this onslaught on voting rights? Obviously, it will not be done by members of the Republican party who support former President Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. This is about unabashed power and control over the nation for potentially decades. The most promising answer lies in the Freedom to Vote Act introduced in the Senate by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Joe Manchin and several of their colleagues after they spent the summer meeting with voters and election officials in states around the country to fin d out what they need from a federal level election overhaul. According to Klobuchar’s office the legislation “…elevates the voices of Americ an voters by ending partisan gerrymandering and helping to eliminate the undue influence of secret money in our elections.” The bill would establish nationwide standards for ballot access and would mandate that states follow specific criteria when drawing new district lines to reduce partisan gerrymandering. And it requires the disclosure of donors to so-called “dark money” groups. To become law, ten Republican senators will have to support the bill. We can only hope there are ten honorable Republicans in that august chamber who will abandon their party’s authoritarian impulse and vote to preserve the most fundamental right on which our nation was founded, the right of the people to choose those who will govern them. With a country torn by partisan politics and growing more diverse by region every year, if we are to preserve our democracy, we need fair elections that include all eligible voters. Our future weighs in the balance. Virgil L. Smith formerly served as president and publisher of the Asheville Citizen-Times and Vice President for Human Resources for the Gannett Company. He is the principal for the Smith Edwards Group and writes for Carolina Commentary.

Here’s a little tale of our times: On July 5 in East Hartford, Conn., the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team took the field for a match against Mexico. Before the game started, Pete DuPré, a WWII veteran, played the national anthem on a harmonica. Some members of the U.S. squad turned their backs on DuPré while he played. The outrage meter cranked up to 11 almost immediately, with videos posted to YouTube and various sites condemning the action, led by a Facebook page called Hold the Line, which captioned the scene as “A DISGRACE TO AMERICA! … Who agrees we need to keep the woke OUT of the Olympics??? #HoldTheLine.” Cable TV picked it up, and it was soon a story almost impossible to avoid across social media. Until it turned out to not be true. What actually happened is the soccer squad already had a deep and warm relationship with DuPré. Some had met him on a trip to Normandy beaches in 2019; he’d played the anthem for them that year before the final World Cup game, and after the incident in July of this year, they signed a game ball for him and individually thanked him. The reason some turned their backs on him was so they could face the flag, which is what one is supposed to do during the anthem. There was a tidal wave of outrage for a day, a few fact-checkers weighed in with the real story, and a few of the places pushing the wrong story backed off, sort of. The prize-winning comment on cable was the sentiment that it was sad people would believe the tale to be true but understandable since such tales were so widespread. Wonder who’s spreading such misinformation in the first place? where you’d get such a presumption in the first place? It’s a real head-scratcher. There’s a tale like this Every. Single. Day. Some are annoying, some are downright dangerous, such as the deluge of COVID misinformation we’ve seen since we first heard that word. Some narratives say it’s a hoax, some dwell on where it started, some say the pandemic really isn’t that severe, a lot of those folks would’ve died anyway, some dismiss the death rate as really not very high. Four or five million dead worldwide doesn’t look that serious when you realize there are 7 billion people on the planet. Heck, there were 97 people on the Hindenburg and only 35 died, so what’s all the fuss? Well, here’s part of the deal: Somebody has to clean up after all that manure, and it’s usually a reporter. Reporters are busy people. Checking this stuff out is time-consuming, and every minute spent figuring out Bat Boy doesn’t really exist is a minute spent not covering city hall or Congress or the next war we appear to be blundering into. Further, the correction isn’t what most people hear. It’s the initial accusation that burrows into the mind. Some of this misinformation is innocent. Some is plain old mean-spiritedness. And some is sinister, sown by actors intent on turning us against one another and destabilizing our very democracy. We don’t appear to have any good solutions here in the U.S. It might not hurt to turn to Finland for a helpful strategy. While we’re mud-wrestling over what to teach in public schools, there’s a lesson we could learn from that Nordic country, which has been teaching children for more than a decade how to spot misinformation and propaganda from kindergarten on up. There’s a reason Finland did this. Its people were overwhelmed with online trolls raising hysteria about the real Finland being destroyed by immigrants, its heritage in peril, that it should exit the EU, etc. etc. Divisive stuff, that did its job of dividing. As with our social media, a lot of the trolling online originated in Russia, as does a lot of the trolling in the United States. Unlike the United States, Finland shares 832 miles of border with Russia, and Russia has a habit of destabilizing neighbors and driving tanks across those borders. Thus, the response to educate its citizens, which seems to be working well. It’s an example we should at least study. The amount of effort debunking malicious nonsense is wildly disproportional to the effort needed to spread the lies in the first place. Reporters can’t do it alone. They need help. And America can only work if it has an informed citizenry. As the saying goes, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” Incidentally, look that up and you’ll see it attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no proof he ever said it. Pays to do a little research. Jim Buchanan is a longtime mountain journalist

Even though Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed legislation that would have killed additional federal pandemic unemployment insurance (UI)—legislators claimed the extra money would have given unemployed people incentive to avoid work—that doesn’t mean the fight is over. The legislation would have punished workers, but, more importantly, would have cut $72 million — $300 multiplied by 240,000, the number of people receiving UI—every week in federal funds that would have further stimulated North Carolina’s economy. Carolina Commentary has covered, in a previous editorial, the benefits of unemployment insurance, which exceed costs by nearly a 2:1 ratio. As the labor market transitions from extreme disruption to a post-pandemic jobs rebound, we should strap in for a bumpy ride. A fraction of the unemployed may opt out of work hoping to find better jobs: higher wages and benefits, a location near transportation and affordable housing, or safer working environments. Unemployment insurance allows those without jobs to explore certifications, education, or training to improve productivity. Public health risks and worry about caregiving responsibilities, especially among women, are rampant and real. They’re stumbling blocks to economic recovery. Child care has constricted the return of mothers to the labor market. Childcare centers are struggling to find workers. Many have closed. The money people receive doesn’t sit in a bank account. People spend it. The money fuels aggregate demand, which plummeted during the pandemic. The “moral hazard” effects of unemployment insurance are well studied. The term moral hazard describes a public policy that encourages risky behavior; the risk in this case was presumably about failing to take a job because of a short-term cash cushion of $300. Researchers, however, have found unemployed workers in general value re-employment even with more generous UI benefits. Some employers, especially in hospitality, as restaurants reopen and business booms, have reported labor shortages, but some find ways to attract workers. The 5th Street Group, a N.C. restaurant firm, raised its minimum wage to $15 per hour, and offers a “Tip the Kitchen” plan by which customers tip kitchen staff. The firm matches those gratuities up to $500 a day, according to news accounts. The firm says it isn’t raising menu prices: Anticipated savings from reduced turnover and training will offset costs. Other businesses could consider hiking pay. The “disincentivizing” amount of $300 in expanded benefits that some policymakers think is generous enough to restrain labor market recovery has had only slight effects. Economists, most recently from the San Francisco Fed, have studied this moral hazard. Using data from the Current Population Survey, their analysis found only a small fraction of UI recipients would refuse an offer to return to work at their previous pay. The CARES Act’s original $600 weekly UI supplement expired in July 2020; since late December, federal legislation has added $300 per week in payments, through Sept. 6, 2021. Based on prior research, the $300 supplement likely reduces job-finding rates by no more than 3.5 percentage points (0.035), write San Francisco Fed economists Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau and Robert G. Valletta. They offer perspective: “One straightforward way to think about that number is that each month in early 2021, about seven out of 28 unemployed individuals receive job offers that they would normally accept, but one of the seven decides to decline the offer due to the availability of the extra $300 per week in UI payments. This implies a small but likely noticeable contribution to expanded UI generosity to job-finding rates and employers’ perceptions of worker availability in early 2021.” In other research, economists have found that post-pandemic workers are re-evaluating their lives. They may need to change jobs, for example, to find safer working conditions. North Carolina’s jobless rate was 5% in April compared to a pandemic high of 13.9% in March 2020. Economist John Connaughton of UNC-Charlotte’s Belk College of Business forecasts the state will add nearly 200,000 jobs in 2021, an inflation-adjusted increase of 5.3 percent over 2020. If there’s any moral hazard going on, it’s among lawmakers who feel overly cushioned by power and influence enough to rob others of opportunity. The legislation would have punished workers, but, more importantly, would have cut $72 million — $300 multiplied by 240,000, the number of people receiving UI—every week in federal funds that would have further stimulated North Carolina’s economy. Carolina Commentary has covered, in a previous editorial, the benefits of unemployment insurance, which exceed costs by nearly a 2:1 ratio. As the labor market transitions from extreme disruption to a post-pandemic jobs rebound, we should strap in for a bumpy ride. A fraction of the unemployed may opt out of work hoping to find better jobs: higher wages and benefits, a location near transportation and affordable housing, or safer working environments. Unemployment insurance allows those without jobs to explore certifications, education, or training to improve productivity. Public health risks and worry about caregiving responsibilities, especially among women, are rampant and real. They’re stumbling blocks to economic recovery. Child care has constricted the return of mothers to the labor market. Childcare centers are struggling to find workers. Many have closed. The money people receive doesn’t sit in a bank account. People spend it. The money fuels aggregate demand, which plummeted during the pandemic. The “moral hazard” effects of unemployment insurance are well studied. The term moral hazard describes a public policy that encourages risky behavior; the risk in this case was presumably about failing to take a job because of a short-term cash cushion of $300. Researchers, however, have found unemployed workers in general value re-employment even with more generous UI benefits. Some employers, especially in hospitality, as restaurants reopen and business booms, have reported labor shortages, but some find ways to attract workers. The 5th Street Group, a N.C. restaurant firm, raised its minimum wage to $15 per hour, and offers a “Tip the Kitchen” plan by which customers tip kitchen staff. The firm matches those gratuities up to $500 a day, according to news accounts. The firm says it isn’t raising menu prices: Anticipated savings from reduced turnover and training will offset costs. Other businesses could consider hiking pay. The “disincentivizing” amount of $300 in expanded benefits that some policymakers think is generous enough to restrain labor market recovery has had only slight effects. Economists, most recently from the San Francisco Fed, have studied this moral hazard. Using data from the Current Population Survey, their analysis found only a small fraction of UI recipients would refuse an offer to return to work at their previous pay. The CARES Act’s original $600 weekly UI supplement expired in July 2020; since late December, federal legislation has added $300 per week in payments, through Sept. 6, 2021. Based on prior research, the $300 supplement likely reduces job-finding rates by no more than 3.5 percentage points (0.035), write San Francisco Fed economists Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau and Robert G. Valletta. They offer perspective: “One straightforward way to think about that number is that each month in early 2021, about seven out of 28 unemployed individuals receive job offers that they would normally accept, but one of the seven decides to decline the offer due to the availability of the extra $300 per week in UI payments. This implies a small but likely noticeable contribution to expanded UI generosity to job-finding rates and employers’ perceptions of worker availability in early 2021.” In other research, economists have found that post-pandemic workers are re-evaluating their lives. They may need to change jobs, for example, to find safer working conditions. North Carolina’s jobless rate was 5% in April compared to a pandemic high of 13.9% in March 2020. Economist John Connaughton of UNC-Charlotte’s Belk College of Business forecasts the state will add nearly 200,000 jobs in 2021, an inflation-adjusted increase of 5.3 percent over 2020. If there’s any moral hazard going on, it’s among lawmakers who feel overly cushioned by power and influence enough to rob others of opportunity. Betty Joyce Nash reported for the Hendersonville Times-News and the Greensboro News & Record before moving to Virginia where she worked as an economics writer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. She co-edited Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, published in 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press; the anthology probes Americans’ complicated relationship to firearms. Betty Joyce Nash writes for Carolina Commentary. For more information, see www.bettyjoycenash.com

The world’s two leading economic nations are moving toward a potentially devastating confrontation over the Island of Taiwan. China considers Taiwan to be part of China, whereas Taiwan sees itself to be an independent nation. The United States has a military commitment to defend Taiwan based on the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which provides a legal basis for the unofficial relationship between the two countries, and commits the U.S. to assist Taiwan in maintaining its defensive capability. On May 10th, Rep. Ken Buck, (R-Colo.) introduced a resolution to reaffirm U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s continued peace and their mutual strategic interests. “We cannot allow China’s dangerous threats against the people of Taiwan to go unnoticed… and the U.S. must hold the Chinese government accountable,” Buck said. A recent Pew Research Centre survey this year found nine in 10 Americans viewed China as a competitor or an enemy while a majority were in favor of pressuring Beijing on human rights and economic issues. Meanwhile, a growing number of Chinese have expressed dissatisfaction over what they perceive as US efforts to prevent China’s rise as an economic, military and technological powerhouse, according to Maria Siow of the South China Morning Post. For 20 years, the Department of Defense (DoD) has provided Congress with an annual report on military and security developments involving the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These reports have assessed the contours of China’s national strategy, its approach to security and military affairs, and potential changes in the PRC’s armed forces over the next 20 years, among other matters. The most recent report says that China’s strategy aims to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” by 2049. The goal is framed as a strategy to place China in a position of strength, prosperity and leadership on the world stage. The strategy has three key prongs; to advance overall development and economic growth, to strengthen its armed forces and to take a more active role in global affairs. This sounds much like the historical strategy of the United States. North Carolina is a significant contributor to America’s defense strategy according to The North Carolina Military Affairs Commission (NCM AC). With Air Force, Coast Guard, Marine and Army bases in the state. The largest base is Fort Bragg, with over 65,000 service members and civilian employees. It is the largest U.S. Army installation in terms of population in the nation and it is home to the Army’s Rapid Response Force, consisting of Special Operations and Airborne Forces, Joint Special Operations Command and U.S. Army Special Operations Command, the U.S. Army Forces Command and the U.S. Army Reserve Command. The United States has maintained a stellar military operation, which many have called the best military in history. With an all-volunteer military and state of the art technology, the United States has led the world with a motto of “Peace Through Strength” coined by then President Ronald Reagan. Former President Reagan’s foreign policy, known as the Reagan Doctrine was the support of freedom for people around the world. During his tenure, Reagan’s administration grew the U.S. Army by two divisions in addition to developing new weapon systems including the Strategic Defense Initiative, branded as “Star Wars” to defend against nuclear attack. The United States has for the most part maintained an effective and mobile military that has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and has American soldiers positioned in countries around the world. In January 2020, former President Trump’s military budget was $740 billion, an increase of $100 billion over former President Obama’s 2017 budget. Approximately 15% of America’s discretionary spending goes to defense. The United States spends more than the top 10 nations in the world on its military. Those nations include China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korean and Brazil combined, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. There is nothing we Americans value more than our freedom and we are willing to pay for it, with treasure and lives if necessary. As we look to the future, Americans must keep in mind the ever growing economic and military power of China. The Chinese are known for playing the long game and are projected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2028, according to a report published by CNBC. As tensions rise between China and the United States, North Carolinians will be at the forefront for military readiness as the competition between the two superpowers intensifies in the coming years. Virgil L. Smith formerly served as president and publisher of the Asheville Citizen-Times and Vice President for Human Resources for the Gannett Company. He is the principal for the Smith Edwards Group and writes for Carolina Commentary.

In late March, lawmakers in the North Carolina Senate began debating a bill that would move up absentee ballot deadlines, forbid elections boards from accepting private donations for certain purposes and establish a fund to identify and assist voters needing a photo ID. This bill, introduced by state Sen. Paul Newton, a Cabarrus County Republican, seems relatively benign compared to the new election law Georgia just passed or to many being promoted by Republicans around the nation. More than 250 bills have been introduced in 43 states to restrict access to voting, according to a tally by the Brennan Center. The controversial new Georgia law imposes new identification requirements for mail-in ballots, curtails the use of drop boxes, blocks the use of mobile voting vans, allows electors to challenge an unlimited number of voters and makes it a crime for third-party groups to hand out water of food to voters standing in line. In fact, no bill that limits the ability of qualified voters to cast their ballots can be considered benign, unless it addresses an obvious source of voter fraud. And there’s no evidence of voter fraud in North Carolina’s 2020 election or anywhere in the nation. State and federal elections officials and experts in the private sect or declared the election “the most secure in American History,” despite claims to the contrary by defeated former President Donald Trump. North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger, a Rockingham Republican, told an interviewer in March that he expected “you’ll see some legislation” related to voting before the legislative session’s filing deadline. Berger wouldn’t give details, according to a WFAE report, except to say Republicans would try to limit the State Board of Elections’ ability to change voting rules. But it seems unlikely that the Republican-controlled legislature will propose voter suppression bills as aggressive as some that have been introduced this year. One reason is that they don’t have enough votes to override a veto by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. The second is that it turns out their own voters were some of the biggest beneficiaries of reforms that make voting easier adopted in North Carolina over the past two decades—and from emergency measures added because of COVID-19. In a joint commentary, Bob Hall and Rick Henderson wrote: “We are liberal and conservative leaders with decades of experience at policy organizations. We often disagree, but after looking at data from the 2020 election, we agree on this: North Carolina’s unique mix of procedures made voting easy and cheating hard, and helped produce a record turnout despite a deadly pandemic.” Hall is the former executive director of Democracy North Carolina. Henderson is former editor of the John Locke Foundation’s Carolina Journal. They determined that more Republicans than Democrats used same-day registration, more Republicans than Democrats successfully used provisional ballots because they were in the wrong precinct or had not updated their registration, and a bigger share of registered Republicans than Democrats voted on the last Saturday of early voting (a day legislators had cut but restored in 2020 with extra hours). They also found that expanded recruitment of poll workers and federal funding allowed counties to open larger voting places and helped Republicans vote safely in person and vastly outnumber Democrats. Democrats dominated mail-in balloting, they determined, largely because President Trump vilified the practice. Still, 200,000 N.C. Republicans voted by mail, thanks in part to a “cure” process that let voters submit missing information to validate their eligibility. That would suggest, in North Carolina at least, the restrictive bills Republicans are pushing around the nation would do as much harm their own party as to the Democratic Party, which makes it a risky and potentially counterproductive enterprise if the goal is to win elections. That argument is bolstered by a recent poll by Carolina Forward, a grassroots policy organization, that shows majority support for automatic voter registration and for ending gerrymandering, the practice of gaining unfair advantage by manipulating the boundaries of election districts. The poll, published April 5, found 56 percent of North Carolinians strongly or somewhat support automatic voter registration for all eligible voters, 4 percent are unsure and 40 percent oppose it. When it comes to ending gerrymandering, 65 percent agree and only 11 percent oppose. The remainder said they were unsure. The nation just held the most secure election in its history, despite a raging pandemic. Republicans are being disingenuous when they claim that the new l aws they’re pushing are intended to make elections more secure. They are, instead, the latest iteration of poll taxes and litera cy tests intended to disenfranchise Black and minority voters. As New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie has pointed out, reducing the number of polling places and forcing voters to stand in long lines functions as a poll tax. But this time, such laws could backfire. Joy Franklin is a journalist and writer who served as editorial page editor of the Asheville Citizen-Times for 10 years. Prior to that she served as executive editor of the Times-News in Hendersonville., N.C. Franklin writes for Carolina Commentary.

Richard Burr gave North Carolinians reason to be proud of its senior U.S. Senator when he voted to convict in the impeachment of Donald Trump because he chose to vote his conscience rather than toe the party line. By doing so, he represented the state with integrity. For his vote, the N.C. Republican Party, his party, chose to censure him. They censured him not for some moral or ethical transgression, but for doing what he believed was right despite enormous pressure to do otherwise. Republican representatives and senators from other states who defied party orthodoxy suffered the same fate. Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who voted to impeach Trump, not only got censured by his state party, members of his family wrote a letter calling him a member of the “’devil’s army,’ (Democrats and the fake news media).” The vitriol contained in the family letter Kinzinger received from cousins and other unnamed family members is an appalling display of the fracture in many families across the nation. Because he could not countenance an armed insurrection, incited by Trump, against a co-equal branch of government, his cousins, Greg and Karen Otto, accused him of betraying his Christian values. “How do you call yourself a Christian when you join the ‘devil’s army’ believing in abortion!” they demand to know. And then there’s Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, one of several Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the results of the 2 020 election. Six of his nine siblings appeared in an ad for his opponent in the election and since the insurrection, they’ve called for his removal from Congress. Countless books and commentaries by social scientists and pundits have attempted to explain how we got to this place with such passionate feelings and irreconcilable differences that members of families have turned against one another or simply no longer discuss politics for fear of creating unbridgeable estrangements. One of those books is Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized.” Klein is a columnist, editor, cofounder of Vox (an explanatory news organization) and a self-described liberal. He points out that both the Democratic and Republican parties were more ideologically diverse until the 1960s, and that acted as a moderating influence on pol arization. But when the Democratic Party embraced Civil Rights, it alienated Southern Democrats, the Dixiecrats who had been part of the party since Reconstruction. “Still, at the moment of rupture, the parties remained blurred. It is remarkable, from our current vantage point where everything cuts red from blue, to see a debate that polarizes the country without splitting the parties. But that was the case with the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Klein writes. The Democrats held majorities in both houses and the presidency, but 80 percent of House Republicans supported the bill while only 60 percent of House Democrats did. In the Senate, rather than go through the normal committee process, where powerful Southern Democrats would have killed it, President Lyndon Johnson worked out the legislation with then Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen, an Illinois Republican. Southern Democrats filibustered the bill, but Dirksen corralled 27 of the 33 Republicans to break the filibuster. The bill could never have passed without Republican support, but Democrats get the credit, in part because Barry Goldwater, who became their 1964 presidential nominee, voted against it and proceeded to run on a state’s rights platform. The Democrats, who needed the Southerners to pass the New Deal and other national legislation, had accommodated their opposition to anti-lynching and other civil rights legislation. But the Civil Rights Act changed that. In 1964, South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party. North Carolina’s Jesse Helms followed in 1970. Klein writes that Bill Moyers, who served as a special assistant to Johnson, recalls Johnson saying, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” the night he signed the Civil Rights Act. The realignment resulted in parties where there are no longer Republicans who are more liberal than some Democrats or Democrats who are more conservative than some Republicans. Because that ideological diversity within parties no longer exists, party identification becomes stronger. Our political identities are polarizing our other identities and becoming mega-identities, Klein says. He quotes Lilliana Mason who, in her book “Uncivil Agreement,” wrote: “The American political parties are growing socially polarized. Religion and race, as well as class, geography, and culture are dividing the parties in such a way that the effect of party identity is magnified… A single vote can now indicate a person’s partisan preference as well as his or her religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, and favorite grocery store… Partisanship can now be thought of as a mega-identity, with all the psychological and behavioral magnifications that implies.” Klein uses the title of Will Blythe’s 2006 book “To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever” about the rivalry between Duke and the University of North Carolina basketball teams to illustrate the power of the emotional rivalry between groups. “Human beings evolved to exist in groups,” Klein writes. “To be part of a group, and to see that group thrive, meant survival. To be exiled from a group, o r to see your group crushed by its enemies, could mean death…” As Sen. Burr and other Republicans have learned, breaking with the group by undermining its message brings your loyalty into question and carries the risk of ostracism. What’s most distressing about this is that the very thing about American life that should be one of our greatest strengths is becoming one of our greatest threats. We are not participating in politics to solve problems but to express who we are. And in expressing the mega-identities we’ve come to inhabit – conservative, gun rights, pr o-life Republicans vs. liberal, gun-control, pro-choice Democrats – we’ve forgotten the man y things we have in common and the ways in which we are part of overlapping groups – teachers, parents, volunteers, firefighters, musicians, football fans, neighbors, siblings. Most importantly, we’ve forgotten our most important mega-identity. We are all Americans. If we could but overcome the threat we feel from our fellow citizens – in many cases our own friends and families – we might recognize the strength to be found in the differences we all bring to the table and learn to use that rich resource to solve problems. Joy Franklin is a journalist and writer who served as editorial page editor of the Asheville Citizen-Times for 10 years. Prior to that she served as executive editor of the Times-News in Hendersonville., N.C. Franklin writes for Carolina Commentary.

Bob Smith kicks puppies. There, you heard it once. Believe it? No? How about if you heard it 20 times? OK, you tell yourself, that’s 20 times from one source. You ask yourself if the source is trustworthy. Then it’s repeated from 20 other sources, say via a retweet or Facebook share. Maybe a couple of news outlets pick it up and repeat it, using the lazy but legally defensible practice of “we don’t necessarily believe Bob’s a puppy-kicked, we’re just sharing what was said.” Suddenly you’re seeing it all over the place; it’s only natural to think maybe there’s something to it. It burrows into your head that this Bob Smith fellow is a practiced and enthusiastic puppy-kicker and thus an irredeemably horrible human being. And you probably have questions. Why would he do such a thing? Why doesn’t anybody stop him? Who’s Bob Smith? He’s a fiction, an example, of how disinformation spreads. There are plenty more examples, sadly, in real life. How’d we get here? Part of the problem is that, once upon a time, major news outlets served as gatekeepers, filtering out nonsense stories before they reached readers. With the end of the Fairness Doctrine, rise of cable news and then the flood of social media, that gat e has been breached. Part of the problem can be found by looking in the mirror. It’s said that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can put its shoes on. (Ironically, that quote is often misattributed to Mark Twain or Winston Churchill, but in fact was apparently around well before either were born). Research published in Science magazine back in 2018 bore this out by looking at rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. It found false news reached between 1,000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth lagged behind, being diffused to around 1,000 people. It is convenient to think robots repeating false information are to blame, but the writers found “contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.” Thing is, it doesn’t take much source material to spread falsehoods. The top falsehood in quite some time is “The Big Lie,’’ repeated almost daily or hourly by former President Donald Trump, claiming the 2020 election was rigged and stolen (even before it h appened). After Trump’s Twitter account, and some accounts of key allies, were suspended, online misinformation dropped by a whopping 73% in a week, according to the research firm Zignal Labs. But the misinformation mill is quite robust, and new claims sprout daily, particularly regarding the election. One meme that has taken hold is that the there was evidence of fraud, but 60-some judges refused to hear it. In fact, the cases usually dealt with sta nding or harm; to keep with the puppy analogy, Trump was filing suit because someone kicked his puppy. The judges, in essence, said “you don’t own a puppy, hit the road.’’ Still, editors and political scientists across North Carolina are doubtlessly having to grapple with the “refused to be heard’’ argument. It’s a classic piece if misinformation, containing a kernel of truth wrapped in layers of falsehoods. Misinformation is a more critical issue than ever before. After all, we’re in a raging pandemic. Misinformation can literally kill you. That fact is more trouble in a time when powerful tech companies have no w, reluctantly, been forced into the role of gatekeeper. The far preferable option is that we choose to be better consumers of information. Regarding COVID-19, that information can be confusing and hard to find. That’s understandable, as it’s an entirely new dragon we’re trying to slay, and while we’ve learned a lot, there are still an awful lot of questions. Regarding politics, not so much. A grain of salt is the order of the day when you hear Bob Smith kicks puppies, one time or 200. As Georgia Elections Director Chris Harvey, a former homicide detective, put it after state officials were swamped with death threats regarding the “stolen’’ election there, put it to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Bill Torpy: “People ask the difference between working homicides and elections. “In homicide, you occasionally come across remorse.”

Protracted effects of the pandemic are laying waste to larders in households reeling from job loss and eviction threats and, possibly, illness. State lawmakers should plow more money into providing food through federal block grants known as Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF.) Here’s another idea: Go on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) diet. Feed the family on $396 per month, the average 2019 monthly benefit for N.C. households with children. Some 29 million of all adults in the U.S., 14 percent; 18 percent in households with children, reported that households lacked sufficient food in the past seve n days, according to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. (Real-time data were collected December 9–21, 2020.) In North Carolina, food insecurity gnawed at 13.9 percent of adults, well above the pre-pandemic rate of 3.4 percent over the 12 months of 2019. Eighty-fo ur percent of respondents blamed money, not worries about safety or lack of transportation. Black, Latino, and Indigenous adults were twice as likely to report food worries, 24 percent and 21 percent, respectively, compared to 10 percent of White adults,. Hunger costs individuals and society. Providing resources in utero and early childhood influences health and economic outcomes later in life. Inadequate nutrition puts people at higher risk of hypertension, heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, kidney disease, and hepatitis. These problems increase the risk of mortality from COVID-19. And, food-insecure adults are 50 percent more likely to show up in the ER; if admit ted they stay in the hospital longer. Our best hunger stabilizing policy, our only universal welfare program, is SNAP. Benefits far exceed costs: https://www.cbpp.org/research/snap-is-effective-and-efficient finds that every spent SNAP dollar feeds $1.70 into the economy. N.C. SNAP participant numbers grew by 20 percent between February (pre-pandemic) and July/August 2020. Thirty-five percent are working families, typically earning low wages in restaurants and stores. This amounts to we-the-taxpayers subsidizing private, often highly profitable, firms that pay lower-than-living wages that include no benefits. Right now, SNAP isn’t enough. Food banks are running out of food. Feeding America estimates a shortage of 6 billion to 8 billion meals over the coming year. Time to re-think TANF’s allocations to basic assistance. North Carolina in 2019 spent $564 million federal and state TANF dollars; six percent went to provide cash assistance. (Most states spent about 20 percent of TANF funds on basic assistance for families with children; funds sometimes went to unrelated budget areas.) Funds als o can support work-related services, including child care, administration, child welfare, and pre-K. When people are forced to skip medications, rent, mortgage, car, or other payments in order to buy food, more people will need Medicaid. More people will lan d in hospitals. Poorly-nourished children suffer later in life. Hunger hit me especially hard one day when a man showed up o n my doorstep and asked for a loaf of bread. “Anything,” he said. My mom grew up on a tobacco farm in South Carolina and ate oatmeal three times a day during the Great Depression, she told me, after I asked why we never ate Quaker Oats. She’d puked oatmeal too many times. That week, I put my family on the ‘poverty diet’ and wrote about the experience, donating my https://m.styleweekly.com/richmond/sharing-the-pain/Content?oid=1373441 honorarium to the food bank. My children called it the starvation diet. For us it was temporary. Hunger terrifies me, not only because of its effects, but because if we can’t fix this, who are we-the-people? Betty Joyce Nash reported for the Hendersonville Times-News and the Greensboro News & Record before moving to Virginia where she worked as an economics writer. She co-edited Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, published in 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press; the anthology probes Americans’ complicated relationship to firearms. She writes for Carolina Commentary. For more information, see www.bettyjoycenash.com

We approach a most joyous time of year, filled with festivities, family reunions and religious significance. But this year we will need to find creative ways to celebrate gratefulness, love and family. As the holidays loom, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken an ominous turn for the worse. During the first week of November, there were 17,759 new cases of the coronavirus in North Carolina. On Wednesday, Nov. 11, the state set a new daily record of 3,119 lab-confirmed cases, breaking the previous record of 2,908 cases set on Nov. 6. “This is not the milestone we want to be hitting, particularly as we head into holidays where people want to come together. I am asking North Carolinians to do what they do best, look out for each other,” North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mandy K. Cohen said during a briefing. As of Nov. 12, a total of 303,931 North Carolinians had contracted COVID-19 and 4,730 had died from it. Nationwide, epidemiologists, scientists and public health officials are warning that the worst days of the virus are ahead. The upcoming holidays create the potential for innumerable super-spreading events and set the country up for a “COVID hell” in the words of epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who was recently named to President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force. On Nov. 9, Pfizer announced a vaccine that is more than 90 percent effective in preventing COVID-19. But it appears unlikely that large numbers of people will be able to get it until the spring of 2021, too late to save us from a potentially deadly winter. Doctors have gotten better at treating the virus, but vulnerable people still die from it. On Tuesday, Nov. 10, Gov. Roy Cooper issued an order reducing the number of people allowed at indoor gatherings from 25 to 10. The order took effect on Friday, Nov. 13, and lasts until Dec. 4. But no executive order will keep us safe . Only by taking personal responsibility for following the guidelines that have proven effective in reducing the spread of COVID-19 can we hope to get through the next few months without losing hundreds or even thousands more North Carolinians to the virus. While the threat may seem abstract unless you or someone you love has contracted COVID-19, failing to adhere to those safety protocols is akin to playing Russian roulette with your own and others’ lives. The best way to reduce the risk of viral transmission is to limit travel and limit physical contact with people who do not live in your household, according to the NCD HHS. Instead of visiting in person, this is a good year to take advantage of virtual platforms to send greetings and to stay in touch with loved ones and neighbors. But if you have grown weary of prohibitions against gathering with friends and family, consider holding an outdoor celebration. For instance, throughout North Carolina there are brilliant winter lights displays where families and friends can rendezvous and share a bit of outdoor magic. You’ll find some of them listed below. Keep in mind that any gathering with people outside your own home poses a risk for COVID-19 transmission. But if you do choose to host a gathering, NCDHHS offers guidelines for hosting lower and moderate risk activities. Most importantly, if you do gath er with people outside your household, follow the advice of NDHHS Secretary Cohen to wear a mask, wait six feet apart and wash your hands often. “We’ve had more time to learn about this devastating virus and study after study shows that these three simple actions can help keep our family, friends and neighbors from getting sick,” Cohen said. With the announcement from Pfizer of a promising vaccine, we can begin to see our way out of this valley of despair. That gives us much to be thankful for this holiday season. But for now, doing all we can to keep our family and friends safe from a potentially deadly virus is the best gift we can give them.

Evaluating policy costs and benefits not only confuses voters, but also the policymakers who craft those policies. Well-meaning elected officials often champion what seem like prudent actions, though unintended consequences may cost taxpayers and society much more. North Carolina’s failure to expand Medicaid and restore decent unemployment benefits are useful examples. Voters should carefully weigh the full benefits and costs when marking ballots on Nov. 3. (Another good example is Trump’s 2017 co rporate tax cuts that purported to “pay for themselves” but failed to create promised growth, driving up fiscal deficits.) In considering, and rejecting, Medicaid expansion, N.C.’s legislators perhaps did not know they were indirectly causing deaths. The poor and uninsured forgo preventive care, which may worsen chronic conditions such as cardiovascular problems or dia betes. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a D.C.-based research center, estimates that 1,400 North Carolinians between the ages of 55 and 65 died due to unaffordable care between 2014 and 2017. At the polls, think about those deaths. Evidence from the 39 states and the District of Columbia that have widened eligibility demonstrates the benefits of improved access to care. Positive effects also include greater financial security and employment gains. Add to those benefits the taxpayer dollars saved through reduced costs for uncompensated care and the expansion looks like a spending win. It would also help rural hospitals, which are closing at alarming rates. Health Affairs reports that the expansion covers childless adults earning less than $17,236, and helped cut rural hospitals’ uncompensated care costs. That stabilizes finances. The federal government pays 67 percent of N.C. Medicaid costs now; after expansion the share would rise to 90 percent. The federal match offsets much of the cost, according to the N.C. Justice Center’s Budget and Tax Center. A healthier population with better financial and job prospects means that taxpayer-funded state agencies will save money. Higher reimbursement rates, fewer uncompensated mental health services, and direct payments for service and treatment for the incarcerated are a few of those savings. When people lack insurance, they forgo medical care, which drives up treatment costs because it sends them to emergency rooms and possibly hospital beds, more expensive than getting regular checkups. In North Carolina, the General Assembly has rejected federal dollars for expansion since 2013, according to the N.C. Justice Center. Some 194,000 state residents make too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to receive a subsidy. Seven rural hospitals have closed since 2013; others struggle financially. Uninsurance disproportionately burdens people of color. Another interesting benefit: In Medicaid expansion states, private insurance premium rates are 7 percent lower, on average. North Carolina is practicing a false economy in failing to expan d Medicaid and bolster unemployment benefits (see our September 20 Commentary.) Both policies would deliver benefits. There’s more. At the federal level, the U.S. economy would recover more quickly under a “blue wave,” according to Moody’s Analytics, because the plan front-loads investments in people—spending on infrastructure, education, healthcare, and other social programs, which brings full employment back more quickly, post-pandemic; it also channels money to those who need money at a time when we need spending. Spending makes up 70 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. In a recession, increased personal spending lifts all boats. “Trump’s economic policy, such as it is, improves the lot of rich people , who have a low ‘propensity to consume,’” says Greensboro-based economist Andy Br od. “There’s nothing wrong with saving, but spending is what drives the economy.” One more consideration: Economic recessions over the past 50 years have fallen under Republican administrations, though President Obama inherited the financial-crisis fallout, the 2007-2009 recession. Republicans spend as freely as Democrats do, notes economist Nouriel Roubini, but won’t raise taxes to pay for it. Betty Joyce Nash reported for the Hendersonville Times-News and the Greensboro News & Record before moving to Virginia where she worked as an economics writer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. She co-edited Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, published in 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press; the anthology probes Americans’ complicated relationship to firearms. Betty Joyce Nash writes for Carolina Commentary. For more information, see www.bettyjoycenash.com

Over the past decade, there’s been a growing militarization of hate groups that call themselves “militias.” These are people driven largely by white-extremists views. Many policy experts believe these people are very distraught about the growing demographic diversity of the United States. William H. Frey, Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution, confirms the trend: “The nation is diversifying even faster than predicted, according to new center data.” Militias date back to 1792, when the U.S. Congress provided for their organization and empowered the President of the United States to take command of the state militias in times of imminent invasion or insurrection. The original Militia Act was repealed and replaced in 1795, 1808 and 1862 during the Civil War. The Militia Act of 1903 repealed and superseded the Militia Act of 1795 and established the U.S. National Guard as the nation’s chief body of primary organized military reserves in the country. “Militia” generally refers to a group of able-bodied residents between certain ages who may be, at some point, called up by the government to defend the United States or an individual state. I cannot think of any American, male or female, who would not rise to the occasion to defend the homeland against foreign or domestic invaders or terrorists. Our nation may be diversifying faster than predicted, but that fails to explain the global growth of far-right extremists. A study of German society’s biggest fears, released earlier this year by the Berlin Social Science Center, showed that one in three respondents feared “foreign infiltration” because of the immigrant influx. In Germany, militias say they patrol in locations where the police do not. This has caused many Germans to worry, as militias seek to bar immigrants from entering the country and receiving jobs and social benefits in Germany. In the United States, militias have a recent record of violence nationwide. FBI Director Christopher Wray in his statement before the House Homeland Security Committee in September, said: “The greatest threat we face in the homeland is that posed by lone actors radicalized online who look to attack soft targets with easily accessible weapons. We see this lone actor threat manifested both within domestic violent extremists and homegrown violent extremists.” Wray went on to say that domestic violent extremists are individuals who commit violent criminal acts to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as racial bias and anti-government sentiment. “The top threat we face from domestic violent extremists stems from those we identify as racially/ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVE). RMVEs were the primary source of ideologically m otivated lethal incidents and violence in 2018 and 2019 and have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremists since 2001.” Will Carless and Michael Corey, writers for Reveal, of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Journalism, surmise the broader militia movement has been a breeding ground for racist domestic terrorism. The Southern Poverty Law Center followed 940 hate groups across the United States in 2019. In North Carolina, the SPLC tracked at least forty (40) hate groups, according to Keegan Hankes, a researcher who says the number is growing. You can follow SPLC updated information on twitter @hatewatch. The critical question is: What do you do about militia s and hate groups in America that conspire to take the law into their own hands, such as the would-be kidnappers in Michigan and Virginia who plotted to kidnap and possibly take the life of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia. Their goal was to instigate a civil war. What drove these men in Michigan to think that this is okay to kidnap and threaten American governors? Why are they anti-government and plotting for social unrest? Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab and Professor of Education and Sociology School of Education at American University, has studied the issue. “The goal of the extreme right is to establish white-ethnocentric status, deportation of nonwhites or non-Europeans, and the reduction of the rights for ethnic minorities,” she writes in her book; Hate in the Homeland, The New Global Right. The political polarization and the silence from our governmental and political leaders, who continue to wink and nod at the behavior of these anti-American groups is troubling, to say the least. For America to turn the tables on what the FBI director call s our greatest threat. We need the collective resolve of the people to change the hearts and minds of those who diminish nonwhite people and seek to destroy our government and our democracy. The road ahead will challenge us to reclaim who we are as Americans. Virgil L. Smith formerly served as president and publisher of the Asheville Citizen-Times and Vice President for Human Resources for the Gannett Company. He is the principal for the Smith Edwards Group and writes for Carolina Commentary.

Misguided and shortsighted political sparring and foot-dragging over expanded unemployment insurance (UI) will continue as long as elected officials fail to recognize the hidden costs of joblessness, which far exceed payouts. One dollar of unemployment compensation returns $1.90 to the economy because it gooses demand for goods and services at times when consumer spending plunges. People who live paycheck to paycheck, as half of American workers do, spend more of their pay than wealthy people do. Voters should choose candidates who recognize and acknowledge the devastation joblessness brings to workers and families, candidates who are willing to strengthen UI benefits, one of the few benefits available to workers in non-union states. Unemployment compensation was established by the Social Security Act of 1935, as the U.S. crawled out of the debilitating Great Depression. It’s designed to give people without paychecks time to find new jobs without starving or going broke. Boosted by stimulus checks and expanded UI, consumer spending jumped from minus 12.9 percent in April 2020 to 8.2 percent in May; in June and July, as benefits dwindled or expired, spending dropped to 6.2 percent and 1.9 percent respectively. North Carolina’s July 2020 unemployment rate was 8.5 percent. Some jobs, especially in the service sector, won’t bounce back. Especially if Covid rates spike again. During the Great Recession, from 2008 to 2012, unemployment compensation fended off approximately 1.4 million foreclosures, and an additional 18 percent shortfall in gross domestic product (GDP), according to the Center for American Progress. Economic research into joblessness reveals less obvious but equally troubling costs to individuals and society. Unemployment affects physical and psychological health; it can even take years off your life. People without paychecks may need Supplemental Nutritional Assistance well beyond the federal SNAP benefit levels; the jobless may lose health insurance, and forgo medical care. This swells Medicaid rolls, even as North Carolina legislators refuse to expand eligibility, forcing more patients to seek emergency care. As unemployment drags on, workers stop saving or raid retirement funds. This robs their future spending ability. Their skills deteriorate. This hurts not only future employment, but also re-employment wages, which may be 5 to 15 percent less than workers who did not lose their jobs. Unemployment demoralizes people and affects future planning. Workers may fail to invest in training or education that might improve prospects. They may forgo investments in children’s education, which deprives the next generation of talents and skills necessary to maintain a strong stable economy. And some unemployment compensation ends up as taxes, contributing to state revenues, which states desperately need, since they must balance budgets. The Economic Policy Institute reports that despite August gains of 1.4 million jobs, the U.S. is still 11.9 million jobs shy of February 2020 employment levels. Without additional federal aid to avoid layoffs, North Carolina could lose another 156,500 state and local government jobs. N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper’s buy-in to Trump’s offer of $300 per week of unemployment compensation, for three weeks, may be better than nothing, but by the time you read this, it’s probably run out. Likewise, the General Assembly recently ratified a $50 per week increase in UI, but did not approve Cooper’s proposal to extend benefits to 24 weeks and raise the maximum benefit to $500 per week. Unable to weather months without income, or pay rent, many businesses, especially small ones, will close for good. Meanwhile, mortgage delinquencies and evictions are rising. Despite an eviction moratorium, payments will eventually come due. The money is still owed. And by mid-August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 46 percent of North Carolina’s unemployed had been without work for 15 to 26 weeks. Support candidates who will advocate for increases in N.C.’s weekly benefit calculation, allowable maximum benefits, and duration. Without adequate compensation for those who are out of work, through no fault of their own, people without paychecks impose future costs on everyone. Note: At press time, additional virus aid had failed to pass the U.S. Senate. Betty Joyce Nash reported for the Hendersonville Times-News and the Greensboro News & Record before moving to Virginia where she worked as an economics writer. She co-edited Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, published in 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press; the anthology probes Americans’ complicated relationship to firearms. She writes for Carolina Commentary. For more information, see www.bettyjoycenash.com.