Archives for December 2022

2022 End Of Year Local News Roundup

In our End of Year Local News Roundup, we gather our team of local journalists to go through the top local and regional stories they’ve covered in 2022.

SEGMENT 1:
We cover education and the environment. From book bans to a payroll issue in Gaston County, to this year’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board race, safety issues, a revolving door of superintendents and more stories, education has frequently had top billing on the roundup this year. We’ll be joined by our education reporters to remind us about the year in education and what’s ahead for 2023. We’ll also be joined by environmental reporter David Boraks to cover energy reform, electric vehicles, lithium mining and those beach houses falling into the ocean this year.

Guests:

David Boraks, WFAE reporter
Ann Doss Helms, WFAE education reporter
Shamarria Morrison, WCNC reporter
Jonathan Lowe, WSOC-TV education reporter
SEGMENT 2:
Politics is always at the top of the list of topics we discuss on the local news roundup, whether it’s about Charlotte Area Transit System and the loss of bus ridership with CATS, North Carolina Republicans missing the supermajority in the General Assembly, city council and county commission dramas, or the idea of the independent state legislature theory. We’ve spent time this year on the Unified Development Ordinance, on voting maps, transparency, ethics and, of course, elections. Politics in our area in 2022 could be the focus of several hour-long shows, but we’ll distill down the stories we’ve told this year with our political reporters.

Guests:

Mary C. Curtis, columnist for Rollcall.com, host of the Rollcall podcast “Equal Time”
Steve Harrison, WFAE’s political reporter
Joe Bruno, WSOC-TV reporter
Nick Ochsner, WBTV’s executive producer for investigations & chief investigative reporter
SEGMENT 3:
We’ll dive into topics that help shape the city and region we live in, from the health of our sports teams (and who was fired and hired) to aborted business deals between the owners of some of our sports teams and local governments. We’ll get an update on crime in the Charlotte and talk about how we’re weathering another year of the coronavirus pandemic along with flu and RSV thrown in and more for the remainder of the hour.

Guests:

Katie Peralta Soloff, reporter for Axios Charlotte
Hunter Saenz, WSOC-TV reporter
Danielle Chemtob, investigative reporter with Axios Charlotte
Erik Spanberg, managing editor for the Charlotte Business Journal

Why a lost election left Adam Frisch (and his son) optimistic

The announcement this week that Republican Lauren Boebert had won her race, and would be heading back to Washington to represent Colorado’s 3rd District in the House, hardly came as a surprise to her Democratic opponent. The surprise is the optimism of Adam Frisch — about Colorado, America and politics — after coming so close (a 546-vote margin close) to upending predictions and winning the seat.

“We’re all very proud of how well we ran and the way that we did it,” he said when I spoke with him on a Zoom call last week. “We took the high road throughout the whole journey, and that resonated with a lot of people.”

Frisch had already conceded before the recount, citing Colorado’s “very, very strong election laws” and “very high level of election integrity” and finding comfort in that. Based on her well-documented mistrust of government, I doubt Boebert would have accepted defeat quite so easily.

He is human, so “as great as the moral victory is or was,” Frisch said, “it certainly would have been better to have a victory victory.” But I believe Frisch when he says the 20,000-plus miles he traveled during his campaign were more than worthwhile. That’s because I had already met the other person on our call, his frequent companion in his trips throughout the district, the candidate’s 16-year-old son, Felix Frisch.

That any journalist covering politics, culture and race might occasionally succumb to cynicism will come as a revelation to exactly no one. One remedy for me turned out to be teaching a group of high school juniors and seniors and incoming college freshmen for two weeks, as I did this past summer, in a School of The New York Times Summer Academy course in political commentary. Felix was one of the students.

We explored Washington, D.C., including stops at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and, on an early excursion, the memorial to third president Thomas Jefferson, where we had a chance to consider the complicated legacy of one of America’s Founding Fathers.

On the walk back to the Metro on what must have been one of the hottest days of the summer, Felix told me he had been campaigning for and with his father, traveling the Colorado district to convince voters that Adam Frisch would represent their needs better than incumbent Lauren Boebert would.

I listened as he spoke excitedly of meeting voters in corners of the district few candidates had taken note of, and I thought to myself, “Too bad your dad doesn’t have a chance.”

But though it’s natural for any son to think his dad can do anything, Felix was on to something.

The Boebert I covered at the North Carolina Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Salt & Light Conference in September was ripe for a challenge, with her emphasis on grievance as she cast herself as victim in a kind of holy war.

Adam Frisch thought so too.

Georgia voters spoke. Is the GOP listening?

One of South Carolina’s senators must have an incredibly low opinion of Black Americans, their intelligence and judgment. The evidence? His sad, almost laughable closing argument as he barnstormed for Herschel Walker, who lost his runoff race challenging Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock and won’t be joining Lindsey Graham as a Republican colleague in Washington, D.C.

Graham did not talk about Walker’s proposals or plans for the people he would represent in the state of Georgia. He never mentioned Walker’s experience, which consisted of long-past football glory and running some businesses with a debated degree of success. In fact, Walker’s buddy barely let the candidate speak in TV appearances where Graham tried for “sidekick” but instead came off as “handler.”

No, Graham’s final arguments for the Donald Trump-endorsed Walker went something like this absurd statement he yelled more than stated on Fox News: “They’re trying to destroy Herschel to deter young men and women of color from being Republicans.”

Graham said, “If Herschel wins, he’s going to inspire people all over Georgia of color to become Republicans and, I say, all over the United States.”

No, senator. In fact, the reality turned out to be quite the opposite.

Best Podcast: ‘Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis’

Honored that my CQ Roll Call podcast ‘Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis’ was picked ‘Best in the Nest’ by critics at Charlotte’s essential alternative newspaper, Queen City Nerve: ‘It’s been cool to hear veteran Charlotte journalist Mary C. Curtis make her mark in the podcast game over the last year, filling in as guest host for Mary Harris on Slate’s daily What Next pod, but she’s in her element when she’s chasing down the stories she’s most passionate about in her monthly episodes of Equal Time. As listed in the show description: “Curtis tackles policies and politics through the lens of social justice, illuminating the issues that have been, and still are, dividing the country.”‘

It’s about more than one dinner and a man named Trump

A now 19-year-old white man who targeted shoppers in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in May simply because they were Black, according to authorities, this week pleaded guilty to murder charges and one charge of domestic terrorism motivated by hate. In his not even 20 years on this earth, this gunman, who casts serious doubt on the onetime hope of optimists that young people would save us, was nurtured by racist lies and fueled by conspiracies of “replacement.”

The white supremacist (and I won’t say his name), who murdered 10 human beings and wounded three others, was on a mission, and he seemed proud to livestream his heinous actions. He can live his life, something he denied his victims, and if spared the death penalty on federal charges, he will spend the rest of it in prison.

His beliefs, however, are not going anywhere. In fact, they are having a moment.

White supremacy, antisemitism, misogyny and all kinds of hate are being lifted up by some of those who want to lead the country and ignored or dismissed by others who, at the very least, are afraid of alienating the haters — people who would destroy everything America is supposed to stand for. After all, they could be voters.

It’s not a shock that former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump welcomed Kanye West, Nick Fuentes and a dude named Jamal to his Mar-a-Lago dinner table. Nor is it surprising that the few Republicans who have spoken out, at times tepidly, against Trump’s supper are being praised as heroes, proving the definition of that word has diminished over time.

In a dreary reminder that there is no bottom to GOP delusions, the usual suspects have continued to infantilize a 76-year-old man, blaming those around Trump rather than the man himself, as though what transpired at his Florida compound was a lapse in judgment, just a faux pas.

I know white guys are given the benefit of the doubt well past their sell-by date; they pretty much originated the term “youthful indiscretion” as a ready-made excuse. But to ask anyone to ignore Trump’s well-documented history, his both-sides wink at the deadly Charlottesville, Va., “Unite the Right” rally and his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol (both of which were graced with Fuentes’ presence), should be a step too far, even for the former president’s No. 1 apologist, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Remember, once upon a time, Trump also claimed he didn’t know who former Klan grand wizard David Duke was.

Knowing all that, it’s not that hard to imagine the conversation at Trump’s dinner from hell.