by Julian Sereno

Look who’s turning out to be the real snowflakes. The ones traumatized by ideas that challenge their beliefs. It’s North Carolina Republicans. They are doing their best to cancel ideas of which they disapprove, as well as anyone who espouses them.

One such issue is Critical Race Theory (CRT), until recently an obscure legal and academic theory that provides a framework for examining the role race plays American society. Republicans don’t like the conclusions – that Black people in the US have been getting a raw deal for almost all of the past 402 years. They fear it might make White people feel bad.

Fox News gave CRT its current fame and/or notoriety by denouncing it as political correctness run amok that was undermining patriotism and sabotaging inter-racial harmony.

Then-President Trump seized upon the issue and banned racial sensitivity training workshops for federal employees.

In May, NC House Speaker Tim Moore rammed through a bill that banned any line of study or discussion that could hurt anyone’s (read White students’) feelings in NC Public Schools. It doesn’t matter that it’s true. It was a straight party-line vote.

I can’t really imagine how it is going to work. Are they going to ignore the 246 years that Black people were enslaved? The lynchings of the Jim Crow era?

Sen. Thom Tillis, (R-NC) took the rhetoric one step farther when he demanded federal funds be denied any institution that taught CRT. It was only rhetoric; with national Republicans currently out of power, Tillis was just whistling “Dixie.”

Speaking of Dixie, it should be no surprise that Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, have become born-again Confederates. The Tea Party’s entire raison d’etre is racist – rage and loathing about the election of President Barack Hussein Obama. That he was socialist. That he was born in Kenya. That he was Muslim. Never mind that he was no more socialist than President Eisenhower. That he displayed his Hawaiian birth certificate. That he quit the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago because its pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was a radical firebrand.

Giving life to lies about Obama was reality TV star Donald Trump. Spreading them was the Tea Party, which took control of the NC Republican Party in 2010 when it won control of North Carolina’s legislature, and gerrymandered itself into power ever since. It has done its best to disenfranchise and suppress the votes of Black people. It passed a law protecting Confederate monuments.

When Trump was elected President in 2016, the Tea Party was and still is the base. Then as now, they swallow and spread his lies. At the same time that North Carolina Republicans are suppressing historical truths which make them uncomfortable, they are promoting and spreading the Big Lie – that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

They went so far as to censure Tillis and fellow Republican Senator Richard Burr for following the law and confirming Biden’s victory rather than dedicating their lives to Trump’s lie. What a pack of treasonous liars.

North Carolina Republicans are just not to be believed.

Julian Sereno is editor and publisher emeritus of Chatham County Line