Comments for Phil Berger machine decimated in his home county of Rockingham | Eastern NC Now

The primary race at the top of the ticket was a huge disappointment for conservatives too. Don Brown was a good candidate. A worthy candidate. Michael Whatley and Thom Tillis have done more than any I can think of to turn North Carolina blue. The corrupt North Carolina GOP has worked hard to give us this crap.

Locally, we can see the same thing with the corrupt Beaufort County Republican Party. With party leadership embracing ultra-liberals and shunning conservative officeholders, we are witnessing a recipe for party disaster. It's time for conservatives to recognize the situation and react on our own. This party is a long way from representing anything remotely connected to Jesse Helms, John East, or Lauch Faircloth. The party platform has been thrown out the window. The party plan of organization has been flushed. We can't be nice to these horrible, incompetent, corrupt people any longer. It's not like they are nice to us. They are destroying our community.

If conservatives do not organize and react to this situation, we will be a blue state for a long, long time and our community will be too corrupt to fix.

Berger may be on the way out, but we still have a lot of work to do.

Commented: Sunday, March 8th, 2026 @ 11:12 pm By: Van Zant

I missed one important primary race in my earlier comment. The loss of the only conservative, and the only real shot at beating Roy Cooper, namely Don Brown, in the US Senate primary is a huge loss for our state. Tillis-acolyte Whatley, I'm afraid, does not have what it takes to beat Cooper.

VZ, from watching the meetings on TV, I would put the dominant liberals as Carolyn Walker and T.W. Allen. Eltha Booth votes with them but she usually just sits and votes. Williams is definite a swing vote, and sometimes, so is Hudson.

Stan, we do not need any more splitting votes. All conservatives need to vote for you. That is what all of my family did in the first round and we will in November. Anyone else who we cannot get to do that, we need to try to push to Woolard if we can. Issues-wise, I think Woolard will work with the conservative team much more so than Edwards.

Commented: Sunday, March 8th, 2026 @ 1:21 pm By: Conservative Voter

These are truly "bizarro" times for the Common Sense Conservative. The treatment of Brian McGinnis, who is a patriot and Marine Corps veteran, is eerily similar to how knowledgeable patriots within our County are/have been treated, on several occasions, by those who've been trying to turn the GOP into a Neo-Con echo chamber.

The Republicans who made this particular cut need to be cautious of who and what they align with; things could further go to hell for the GOP if Uncle Donnie keeps silencing questioning of the US Military being the muscle for Israel.

To sum it all up, people like Commissioner Deatherage aren't Neo-Cons or local bizarro libtards; they give a damn and are trying to wake folks up while there's still time. If the community doesn't come together and call out the bad actors, we're going to be in a very bad way and surrounded on all sides.

If everybody's got money on the line, people tend to pay attention.

Commented: Saturday, March 7th, 2026 @ 6:18 pm By: John Valley

Stan, you are the Top Choice for conservative voters. Others can talk about cutting taxes, but your record is the proven deal. In twenty some years, you have never voted for a tax increase, and often made motions to reduce spending and taxes. That record needs to get out to voters in November more than it got out in the primary. If it does, you can easily be top votegetter. But to get tax cuts and a real Republican majority, you need Ashley Woolard running second, not John Edwards. I am certain Woolard will back you up on those things but I question whether Edwards would. I know you have got to run your own race, but others need to pass the word that Edwards is the weak link on taxes and spending.

Commented: Saturday, March 7th, 2026 @ 8:04 pm By: Conservative Voter

Conservative losses in Beaufort County are substantial. Lets start at the bottom on what we lost.

Our School Board went into the election with four solid conservative seats, three liberals, and two swing votes. Conservatives had a path to achieve policy goals. Now it will be five liberals, two conservatives and two swing votes. The two incoming members replacing the conservatives are both retired school teachers who have been members of the very leftwing teachers union, the very LAST thing we need on the school board. They will be all-in on the liberalism and wokeness coming down from the public school establishment.

The county commission also looks like the chance to get out of the center-left coalition is less certain, as is the chance to take a meat ax to our taxes. Conservative stalwart Stan Deatherage was in third place and therefore in danger in November. Ashley Woolard would be a big improvement over liberal RINO Frankie Waters on the issues, but the top votegetter was a Chamber of Commerce style moderate who harps on economic development. Tilting at that windmill has produced little in several decades (ironically the defeat of Kidwell probably screws the pooch on the one promising thing locally on economic development, the interest of the drone industry in coming here which Kidwell largely drove). Conservatives can still come out of this if we work hard to get Deatherage and Woolard as the two top votegetters in the Fall, but that will be a hard slog. Edwards has done little or nothing to express interest in cutting taxes, but he came out on top in the primary.

Our biggest loss was in the State House, where we had the top conservative leader there and he has been replaced by a water boy for the special interests, whose only policy interest himself seems to be things that involve Big Ag. We will be replacing a legislator who got an A+ on gun rights issues from the NRA with one who got an F from the NRA. Our new legislator will owe his soul to the dark money special interests who dropped over half a million dollars into our district to promote him and attack Kidwell. It is shameful that our voters fell for it. Instead of a totally engaged legislator who read every bill, and caught the nonsense that was too often slipped in, we will have a legislator who turned down running for count commissioner because he did not have time for it. How in the heck will he have time to be a legislator?

Even for Congress, we got the least desirable of the choices whose strange connections with the DC swamp raises eyebrows. A seasoned local conservative like Asa Buck or Bobby Hanig would have been so much better for conservatives.

Commented: Saturday, March 7th, 2026 @ 8:52 am By: Conservative Voter