Comments for Kidwell stripped of his leadership role for making inappropriate comments | Eastern North Carolina Now

John Bell is definitely an enemy of free speech as is his buddy Jason Saine whose fingerprintes are also on this hatchet job. Both need primaries from conservatives in this home districts. Bell is also a mouthpiece for the leftwing environmentalist group Coastal Conservation Associaiton, whose goal is putting our commenrcial fishemen out of business. He needs to be replaced in his primary.

Commented: Tuesday, May 30th, 2023 @ 5:11 pm By: John Steed

Sometimes it is hard to tell if our "leaders" in the state legislature are Demaocrat or Republican and this is just the latest one of them, and what they have done is indeed an attack on free speech. Have Bell and company gone "woke" on us?

Commented: Monday, May 29th, 2023 @ 12:58 pm By: borderhawk

What this really shows is that Republicans need leaders with a full set of vertebrae in the General Assembly, not weak sisters like Tim Moore and John Bell who get their panties in a twist when Democrats go into cry baby mode.

Commented: Monday, May 29th, 2023 @ 10:13 am By: Conservative Voter

This is making a mountain our of a molehill, and was a dirty trick by John Bell in his campaign to be the next House Speaker. Bell is a squishy establishment RINO who does the bidding of the special interests and who colludes with the Democrats, in the mold of current Speaker Moore and former Speaker Thom Tillis. Moore is expected to draw himself a congressional seat to run for next election and Bell wants to follow him as Speaker. Bell sees Kidwell as his major potential challenger on the right. He wants to damage Kidwell's prospects and that is what this massive overkill of a response is all about, a political dirty trick by Bell. McNeely is just collateral damage to try to obscure that the target was Kidwell.

This is very much a move that Lix Cheney used to be known for in the US Congress. She liked to make a mountain out of a molehill in response to Democrat whining to damage conservatives from her position as House Conference Chair. John Bell has now made himself North Carolina's Liz Cheney, but he did it for a very self-serving reason.

While Moore undoubtedly would have given his okay to this, the main actor in it was Bell., who is trying to damage a potential rival for the Speakership. In doing so, however, he has just encouraged the Demcorats to keep playing the victim card on Republicans, and they will probably do so. There was nothing wrong with anything either of these legislators said and they should NOT have been punished for it. This is all about John Bell and his personal ambitions.

I emailed a couple of people who follow the General Assembly closer than I do and their take on this dog and pony show was the same as mine. And, of course the extreme left WRAL piled on as they would rather see a squishy RINO like Bell as Speaker than a conservative like Kidwell.

Commented: Sunday, May 28th, 2023 @ 7:59 am By: Rino Hunter

This is an attack on the freedom of elected officials to debate the issues, going down the same slippery slope as Europe. For a functioning democracy, our elected officials as well as citizens need full ability to debate issues. The statements complained of were clearly made in debate and in response to remarks of the thin-skinned Democrats who complained. They are presented by the ultra-leftwing WRAL article above totally stripped of context.

What we have are whiny thin-skinned Democrats with a victim mentality and a grievance mentality. This is something new in politics and Democrats a couple of decades ago would not have been so whiny. Unfortunately, the GOP leadership was wimpy themselves to even respond at all to the Democrat nothingburger. As George Orwell wrote, "freedom of speech is your right to say what I don't want to hear".

The British House of Commons is considered the "mother of parliaments" and a role model for how a democratsic legislative body should function. Throughout the history of that august body, comments about other members have been part of the process, and at periods even quite common. One famous such exchange involved Sir Winston Churchill when he was First Lord of the Admiralty in a Conservative cabinet and was speaking on the floor of the House of Commons. A female Liberal MP interrupted Churchill and exclaimed "Mr. Churchill, you're drunk" to which he replied "Madame, you're ugly, but tommorrow I will be sober".

There were no consequneces when a former Beaufort County legislator, Zeno Edwards made sexually suggestive comments toward a colleague in a House committee meeting. The meeting was in session considering a bill, and a female Democrat legislator who was a chiroprator by profession had just finished substative remarks on the bill when Edwards obtained the floor and rather than discussing anything about the bill, he decided to discuss the prior speaker, saying "I don't like to think of her as a back doctor because her front is not too shabby either." That was a totally graituitous remark that did not have anything to do with the bill or with the other legislators comments on the bill, but there were no consequences for it.

Politics is a rough sport and politicians as thin-skinned as these two whiny Democrats are just pathetic. It is also sad for the functioning of our elected legislators that the GOP House leadership caved in to their whining. That is starting down a slippery slope of restricting the freedom of debate of our elected legislators.

This brings us to the threats to freedom of debate now happening in Europe. In France, a French Senator was charged criminally a couple of months ago with "hate speech" over a social media post that "immigration kills" after an illegal alien migrant brutally murdered a young French woman. Then leftwing members of the EU parliament filed complaints seeking penalties against three conservative colleagues from three different parties from three different countries for remarks in debate on the floor of the parliament. The "offnese" of a Romanian MEP was to say that the safety of women should take precedence over gender ideology. An Italian MEP was targeted over her discussing an "honor killing" in a Muslim migrant family of a young woman who refused an arranged marriage. A Danish MEP was complained over because he mentioned official Danish government statistics on migrants and sex crimes in Denmark.

The left around the world is at war with free speech, and Speaker Tim Moore has just knuckled under to that attack here in our own General Assembly, which is shameful.
L
I wish the BO would seek sources other than a notorious far left propaganda organ like WRAL.

Commented: Friday, May 26th, 2023 @ 10:01 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Nice to see there are SOME limits.

Commented: Thursday, May 25th, 2023 @ 3:18 pm By: Big Bob