Comments by Steven P. Rader | Eastern NC Now

Countrygirl, there are many parents who feel the way you do about indoctrination in our schools. Here in North Carolina, a poll by the Locke Foundation found that 71% of NC parents are concerned about political indoctrination in the public schools. A poll taken by the respected French polling firm IPSOS in 30 countries on all five continents on parents concerns about the education system found that the United States was the only country among those 30 where the top education concern of parents was political and ideological bias in the classroom.

In the Beaufort County schools, we have a new science curriculum that will be coming up soon. One extremely high profile issue that is under debate in both science and in government / politics is whether and to what extent CO2 may cause global warming / climate change. As a school board member, I am already speaking out that we need a curriculum that fairly and objectively covers all sides of this issue. Students need to be taught how to think, not what to think.

Commented: Wednesday, November 19th, 2025 @ 9:07 am By: Steven P. Rader

The Beaufort County School Board has recently amended our policies to ban all DEI in our curriculum. We are currently asking for proposals for a new science curriculum, and that policy has been communicated to the companies seeking to provide our new curriculum. As a board, we will probably have to hold their feet to the fire on this policy. A Locke Foundation poll found that 71% of North Carolina parents are concerned about political indoctrination in the classroom.

Commented: Sunday, November 16th, 2025 @ 1:05 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Stan, Republicans have been active in "non-partisan" elections as long as I can remember. When I was still registered to vote in Mecklenburg County in the early 1970s, the local Republican Party there noted that Charlotte was then voting Republican in elections where party labels were on the ballot, but elected Democrats to city office where party labels were not on the ballot. They started widely advertising who the Republicans on the ballot were and started winning most of the city races. Of course, Charlotte has now gone the other direction, and that has not worked in a number of years. I think McCrory as mayor was the last one who benefited before politics there shifted.

At one time, the same dynamics applied in Raleigh, and the Wake County GOP was heavily involved in getting Republican Tom Fetzer elected mayor in a nominally non-partisan race. Of course, partisan dynamics have changed there, too, since that time.

Back when judicial races were "non-partisan", the Republican Party was active statewide in working to elect the Republicans who were running for judgeships.

This year, the party on the congressional district level, and to a large degree on the state level pushed local parties getting involved in electing Republicans to city offices in officially "non-partisan" races. This is nothing new. It has been going on for some time, and Democrats also do it on their side of the fence many places.

Commented: Friday, November 7th, 2025 @ 4:29 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Stan, local officials are not excluded from conflict of interest statutes, but the way those statutes work in small counties is that the local official can bid and be awarded a contract BUT they must not take part in the decision making process to decide who gets the bid. If they take part in that decision making process, that can have criminal repercussions as a former county commissioner in Hyde County found out some years ago. As long as those guidelines are followed, a company owned by an elected official in a small county is elgible to bid and be awarded a contract.

Commented: Friday, October 31st, 2025 @ 12:58 pm By: Steven P. Rader

What also needs to be recognized are the significant changes in policy that were accomplished at the last school board meeting. The board unanimously adopted my proposal to amend our curriculum policy to prohibit the inclusion of the woke DEI ideology in our curriculum. My motion to remove "gender identity" and "sexual preference" as being part of "discrimination based on sex" both places it previously appeared in our policies was also passed unanimously. Now our Title IX policies are back to reflecting the way Congress wrote them, to protect women, not other groups whose interests are often contrary to those of women.

Success on issues like those reflects talking to and working with other board members. Some of them may not agree with me on every issue, but we agree on some issues, and by keeping open lines of communication, instead of throwing grenades, we can move forward on constructive policy that reflects the viewpoints of our citizens in Beaufort County.

On the issue of the school board attorney, there were two separate groups talking among themselves on trying to get a local attorney. When Daniel Hudson was the first to bring it up before the board, it offered an opportunity to put together a majority to do that. Indeed, our initial decision to put together a Request for Proposals (RFP) to do that was unanimous.

While I have not confirmed who actually wrote the RFP that was presented, it included a kink that divided the board. That was making the local attorney subservient to the out of town attorney, the reverse of the way most school boards and other local government bodies operate. Usually the local attorney is the primary attorney, and brings in specialized assistance from specialized attorneys as needed for lawsuits and some other matters.

I made a motion to rewrite the RFP to make the local attorney the primary attorney, consistent with the usual policy of local boards. The question was raised about Tharrington Smith being brought in as needed on specialized matters, something I had no problem with as it is the usual way legal representation for local government boards work. However, the member who seconded my motion clearly did not want Tharrington Smith involved at all and withdrew the second. Prior to that, I thought we had a reasonable chance of getting a majority to change the RFP. With the second withdrawn, another motion was made to approve the RFP as written, which then passed 5 to 4.

There is a reason why bringing in specialized counsel is sometimes necessary, and is often done by local attorneys for school boards, counties, and cities. Many legal matters are straightforward and have little of nothing to do with policy, but having an attorney familiar with the nuances of handling them makes the odds of success in the legal matter much better.

The example I used was a case I brought on behalf of a high school girl some years ago against Lenoir County Schools. The law and evidence were strongly in my clients favor and I was confident we would be granted the relief we asked for in our written pleadings. However, the local school board attorney, who clearly had no background in such proceedings bungled the school board's case so badly that in my oral argument, I asked for much more far reaching (and much more expensive for the school system) relief and the court granted it. The school system would have saved a lot of money if they had brought in someone specialized in such proceedings instead of having their local attorney try to wing it.

The reason it is important to have a local school board attorney who has similar policy stances to the local community and local board is that while many legal issues have no ideological, philosophical, or political aspects, there are also many issues that arise where law and policy are intertwined and the applicable law can be argued more than one way. When I attended the recent Law Conference put on by the NC School Boards Association, questions to presenters on such issues were always responded to with "ask your local board attorney". When such issues arise, it is best to have a local school board attorney who is in tune with prevailing local opinion of both the community and board.

Commented: Thursday, October 30th, 2025 @ 6:21 pm By: Steven P. Rader

North Carolina is likely worse on illegal aliens on our voter rolls. Republican-run Texas has been proactive, as much as it could be, to identify and stop such illegal voter registrations. With nine straight years of lax state level voter roll supervision by Democrats, North Carolina is in a much different situation. They have been thumbing their noses at federal law that required a partial social secutiry number that could be identified or a drivers license number, so that would make it much easier for a foreign citizen to register to vote. States that give illegal aliens drivers licenses would be the most problematic of all.

Commented: Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 @ 2:32 pm By: Steven P. Rader

States like North Carolina should look to the solution to this problem identified by Poland's populist right Law and Justice Party. They put forward a law that allowed any Polish citizen whose posts complied with Polish law but had them removed by a major internet platform to sue that platform in Polish courts for a million euros per incident. This made censorship of Poles potentially very expensive for those major internet platforms. North Carolina could do the same for posts of North Carolinians which comply with North Carolina law, letting anyone sue those major platforms in North Carolina courts for a large amount of damages.

Commented: Monday, October 6th, 2025 @ 11:08 am By: Steven P. Rader

I read where Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor to call this poll biased and got laughed at. If there is any bias in a New York Times poll it is toward the Democrats, so maybe it should have been 70 or 75% opposed to the shutdown instead of just 65%.

Commented: Thursday, October 2nd, 2025 @ 12:45 pm By: Steven P. Rader

NC Democrats just showed how weak they are on crime with their State Senate walkout over a crime bill yesterday. The majority of Democrat state senators walked out in protest of the tough-on-crime bill while those who remained all voted against it. The bill ended cashless bail in NC, ended the "racial justice" commission responsible for letting the Charlotte Light Rail murderer stay on the streets, and provided alternative methods of capital punishment if lethal injections become unavailabler.

Commented: Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025 @ 9:24 am By: Steven P. Rader

It is great to see this ruling upholding Title IX as it was written, which protects girls privacy in their school bathrooms and locker rooms. Schoolgirls should not be guinea pigs for woke social experiments of letting biological boys into their facilities. Any thinking person should comprehend why Title IX should be enforced as written. The very school districts in northern Virginia trying to defy that interpretation have already seen rapes as a result of their policies in school bathrooms.

From conversations with other board members, I believe there is strong sentiment on our own Board of Education for protecting our schoolchildren by enforcing Title IX as written.

This issue is certain to come before the US Supreme Court. While this judge in Virginia made a solid and common sense ruling, there is another case on the same issue working its way up from South Carolina, which has a state law that prohibits students of the opposite biological sex from restrooms and locker rooms. When sued by a leftwing activist, they drew a liberal judge in district court and have a liberal, Democrat-dominant Circuit Court of Appeals.

Commented: Tuesday, September 9th, 2025 @ 10:27 am By: Steven P. Rader

With a candidate of the caliber of Senator Hanig, we ought to be able to win this seat in 2026. Hopefully, the party will rally around him without a primary.

Commented: Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025 @ 7:04 pm By: Steven P. Rader

I have also seen the polling on "climate anxiety" among the younger generation, driven by dire warnings in the media and in the education system. Greta Thunberg is an example of what climate anxiety can produce. We do not need to terrify our young people with climate anxiety because there are scientists on both sides of this issue, and it needs to be presented in school and in the media in a more even handed manner. Dozens of the dire warnings of the climate activists have already passed the date by which they were supposed to happen, but not a one of them did or even come close. The climate activists are batting .000 on their dire warnings, so why should those dire warnings be part of an education curriculum?

Our Beaufort County Schools new science curriculum will soon be under study, and appropriately dealing with these issues is something that will need attention in that process.

Commented: Saturday, August 30th, 2025 @ 2:05 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Where this grand jury is impaneled will be the key. The jury pool in Washington, DC is extremely tilted to the Democrats and the left, which would make a fair prosecution of a major Democrat or even an indictment virtually impossible. But as a grand conspiracy, some of the acts happened other places, and if a proper venue could be found outside Washington, DC, justice might be served in these cases. Venue in criminal cases arises where the events happened.

Commented: Tuesday, August 5th, 2025 @ 12:44 pm By: Steven P. Rader

The House and Senate both overrode the governor's veto today, making this bill law. Rep. Keith Kidwell was one of the sponsors.

Commented: Tuesday, July 29th, 2025 @ 8:49 pm By: Steven P. Rader

The American public expects its judicial system to be impartial and objective. When Democrat federal judges continually play the political card, and this is by far the most extreme case as they fell in line with the demands of a major Democrat political leader, they are doing great damage to the reputation of our courts with the American people. That damage will not be easy to repair.

Commented: Friday, July 25th, 2025 @ 7:29 am By: Steven P. Rader

I wish some of these federal judges would just listen to the founding fathers of the Constitution, who clearly explained that the Judiciary was supposed to be the weakest branch of federal government. Some of them, particularly at the district court level are now trying to make themselves the most powerful branch of government and that would turn our Constitutional system of government on its head. The US Supreme Court has already jerked their chain, but it appears they need to jerk it harder.

Commented: Thursday, July 17th, 2025 @ 4:53 pm By: Steven P. Rader

According to the British media, the DOGE committees set up by the UK's Reform Party in the ten local governments it won absolute control of, they have already identified over 40 million pounds sterling of fraud and waste related to climate alarmism in local government budgets, and although the numbers haven't been totaled up yet, it appears they are likely to come up with just as much related to illegal immigration. They have found a lot of outrageous local government spending on illegal aliens.

Where Reform has to work with the Conservative Party for control of a number of other local governments, the process of setting up DOGE committees has been slower, but there is a lot of potential there, too.

Commented: Monday, July 14th, 2025 @ 9:08 pm By: Steven P. Rader