Comments by Steven P. Rader | Eastern NC Now

There was a Democrat judge in Massachusetts who did essentially the same thing back during the first Trump administration, who was also arrested on federal felony charges, and suspended for three years by the state court system. However, her federal criminal case was still pending when Biden took over, and the Biden DOJ dismissed it.

Commented: Friday, April 25th, 2025 @ 4:54 pm By: Steven P. Rader

There is clear Supreme Court precedent on the Alien Enemy Act. It is a case decided in 1948 by the SCOTUS entitled Ludecke v. Watkins that that involved deportation of a German citizen who had been a legal resident alien of the US, with a Green Card, for many years, and had been imprisoned in a concentration camp in Germany when he had visited in 1933 and escaped. The Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that the discretion of the president in using this act was exclusive and that courts had no jurisdiction to question it or even hold hearings on it. supreme.justia.com

The Alien Enemy Act applies under its clear statutory language not only in wartime but also when there is a "predatory incursion" which is exactly what we have now from the illegal aliens. In Ludecke, the Supreme Court specifically held that the Act was NOT limited to wartime, and in fact it was enforced in that case three years AFTER the end of World War II.

It is disturbing that our Supreme Court is waffling instead of enforcing this very clear precedent.

Commented: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025 @ 9:12 am By: Steven P. Rader

Stan, I am reminded of a comment on school boards by a former Florida State Senator. According to the late State Senator Dick Deeb (R-Pinellas), he observed that "too many school board members think the superintendent is their boss, when he is really their employee".

I was in law school at the time and attending a meeting of the Pinellas County chapter of the Florida Conservative Union. Senator Deeb was explaining his local bill in the Florida senate to make the office of superintendent of the Pinellas County Schools an elected office by the voters of Pinellas County. He and others were frustrated at the fact that even with electing mostly Republicans to the local school board, they were unable to muster a majority of them with enough backbone to stand up to a liberal power bully school superintendent.

Senate Deeb's bill passed the state senate with flying colors, but when it got to the House, legislators there who had similar superintendent problems back home in their own counties started amending the bill to include quite a few other counties. Unfortunately that got the bill bogged down where it failed in the House.

Power bully superintendents are hardly unique to Beaufort County.

Commented: Friday, April 18th, 2025 @ 2:05 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Great bill and badly needed, but it is going to be difficult to get through the Senate due to filibuster.

Commented: Thursday, April 10th, 2025 @ 12:44 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Judicial ethics rules prohibit the official campaign committees of judges from raising most of the issues that other campaigns would. That is why Riggs had out of state leftist dark money funding her attack postcards on Griffin so her own campaign would not be held responsible. The NCGOP set up a Judicial Campaign Fund several cycles ago, which could have done the same thing to get the word out on Riggs and her radicalism. Being able to raise such issues that official judges campaign were barred from doing was one of the reasons that fund was set up. But for some reason in the 2024 Judicial campaign, that money was just turned over to the official judicial campaigns whose hands were tied on being able to use it to expose Riggs. That made absolutely no sense to me.

Commented: Saturday, April 5th, 2025 @ 6:07 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Confrontation over things past is NOT what is needed. Our country faces an exitential threat from the woke Democrats, and we must do all we can to push conservative policies and solutions at all levels, such as those President Trump is so energetically leading on, and use all of our experience to push those in the most effective manner possible. If something did not go the way we wanted in the past, the objective should be to work constructively do see that it goes a better way in the future.

Commented: Saturday, April 5th, 2025 @ 8:05 am By: Steven P. Rader

There is a reason that folks in Hungary call the EU the "EUSSR". There is a lot of Soviet mentality in the anti-democratic structure of the EU. More countries need to follow the Brexit route.

Commented: Monday, March 31st, 2025 @ 1:44 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Getting back to curriculum, it is my understanding that Dr. Parker said they were now working on science curicula. This is an area, too, that needs to be closely watched to avoid "woke" indoctrination. Climate alarmism is a big part of the "woke" agenda as well as of the globalist ideology.

The CO2 theory of climate is controversal both scientifically and politically. A curriculum that presents that theory as fact and ignores scientific viewpoints that disagree is nothing but political indoctrination of students. That is the very thing that the Civitas poll showed 71% of North Carolina parents oppose.

When a lawsuit was brpught against British public schools for showing Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth", the British High Court ruled that the movie is a "propaganda film" that contains multiple mistatements of fact and ordered that it could not be shown to school children unless there were disclaimers given of those things. We do not need a school curriculum that spews the same sort of one sided propaganda.

What students need to hear is both sides of the argument. A good counter to Gore's movie is a British TV documentary, "The Great Global Warming Swindle" broadcast nationally on the UK's Channel 4. That documentarey interviews many prominent scientists from around the world who debunk the CO2 global warming theory. It is available on the internet: www.youtube.com

A number of scientists have also written books debunking the CO2 global warming theory. They would also be resources for the schools to show that side of the debate.

In addition to the scientific debate on this subject, there is also a political debate on it both here and in Europe. For the last few years, there have been mass protests by farmers against the EU's climate agenda, which the farmers denounce as "Climate Communism". In the last EU election, parties that oppose the EU climate agenda made major gains across the continental while the "green" parties suffered major losses. Dr. Vaclav Klaus, twice elected prime minister and twice president of the Czech Republic, a member of the mainstream right Civic Democrats, has openly called climate alarmism "a budding totalitarian ideology that is the greatest threat to freedom, democracy, and prosperity in the world today."

Here in the US, President Trump has withdrawn our country from the Paris Climate Accords. His EPA appointees have also announced that they plan to withdraw the Obama EPA's "finding" that CO2 is a hazard.

When a subject is highly debated in both science and politics, it is only fair that both sides be presented to students in our schools so that they have all the information to make up their own minds.

Commented: Thursday, March 27th, 2025 @ 1:08 pm By: Steven P. Rader

I have been around the Beaufort County Republican conventions longer than anyone now active, having attended my first one as a delegate in 1979 and participated in all of them since that time except fot the five years I was working in eastern Europe advising pro-western political parties there. I guess that made me the oldest rat in the barn on Saturday for the 2025 county convention.

The result of that convention is an opportunity to rebulid working relationships between various groups in the party. Two outgoing leaders who held strong personality disagreements with certain groups did not run again. All four people nominated for those positions were people willing to work with all factions. That changes the chemistry within the party in a very major way. On top of that, we now have all groups being able to participate on the county executive committee. The reelected chairwoman, Carolyn Garris has demonstrated an ability and willingness to work with all groups, as well as strong campaign and fundraising abilities.

The doors are now open for everyone to work together to promote the Trump agenda. Personality conflicts do not advance the conservative cause, and hopefully we are now in a position that we can build a party that works cooperatively. We need to be looking forward, not backward. It is critical that President Trump succeed and we need to be able to give him all the help we can.

Commented: Monday, March 24th, 2025 @ 2:17 pm By: Steven P. Rader

You can be sure that they are teaching something in those classes. The question is what?

The fundamental issue is who has the final say in what curriculum is chosen. The education establishment says it is DPI. State law says it is the local school board and that DPI has no control and no veto over what the local school board decides. Superintendants always side with the education esbablishment becuase their career path is to move on to a bigger and better paying district and they think anything conservative in their record will be harmful to such career moves.

The legal staff at the NC General Assembly told Rep. Kidwell that the local school board had the absolute power to choose whatever curriculum they judged best and that DPI had no control and no veto over their decision. That legal opinion came about when Kidwell introduced a bill to allow the Beaufort County Board of Education to use the Hillsdale curriculum if they chose. The legislature's legal staff advised Kidwell that his bill was unnecessary because local school boards already had that authority under existing state law.

The state education establishment tries to cobble together some other statutes to claim otherwise, but their argument is a real stretch and totally bogus. The lawyers at the General Assembly are correct on this issue.

DPI is like any bureaucracy, always grasping for power. Local school boards need a local attorney who will stand up for their interests and their rights. Unfortunately, in Beaufort County, the superintendant conned the School Board into hiring an out of town school board attorney who has his tenacles deep into the state education establsihment, and who thus will sing their tune instead of looking our for local perogatives. This is the same out of town attorney who was MIA when the superintendant badly bungled so much of the process on his new elementary school. He is good for looking out for the positions of the sate education establishment, but less so for the interests of the local school board.

DPI is controlled totally by the left. Their bureaucracy has always tilted that way. The state school board, appointed mostly by Cooper is hard left, and the new superintendant of DPI has been a kingpin in the far left political / ideological network in N, leading one of their major funding organizations for the leftC. Their positions on anything should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Commented: Wednesday, March 19th, 2025 @ 1:53 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Judge Boasberg is flagrantly disregarding US Surpreme Court predecent on the Alien Enemies Act, which was used during and after World War II to deport nationals of countries we fought in that war. The SCOTUS specifcally ruled that alien enemies were not entitled to normal due process. Does this one district court judge think he can overrule the SCOTUS? The law may have been passed more than two centuries ago but it has been used much more recently, with US Supreme Court approval.

Every time a partisan judge puts his party politics ahead of the law, he is undermining faith in our judicial system.

Commented: Sunday, March 16th, 2025 @ 4:50 pm By: Steven P. Rader

If a Republican fundraising operation was run like Act Blue, they would have been in prison a long time ago. It is embarassing to our system that this was allowed to go on for as long as it has.

Commented: Sunday, March 9th, 2025 @ 12:16 pm By: Steven P. Rader

There is an old saying in politics that "you do not piss on your base" and the German CDU seems likely to find that out the hard way if Merz persists in abandoning his most important campaign promise on illegal immigration. Exit polls showed that cracking down on illegal migration was the number one issue of German voters, outstripping the economy and inflation and far outstripping "climate change". In votes actually cast over 60^ of German voters cast their votes for parties pledging a hard line on immigration.

The CDU only has to look at the implosion of its frequent ally, the Free Democrats due to their abandonment of their hard line on immigration. In the previous German election, the Free Democrats had run on a hard line against immigration, not quite as hard as AfD but much harder than the CDU, and received almost 12% of the vote. After joining an open borders coalitino with the Social Democrats and Greens, they started getting totally wiped out in state election after state election. Although they tried to regain their footing in this national election by again taking a hard line on immigration, their voters no longer trusted them and they got a bit over 4%, crashing out of the national parliament altogether. Merz may well bring the same fate down on the CDU with the same arrogance toward German voters.

Commented: Wednesday, February 26th, 2025 @ 8:50 am By: Steven P. Rader

That is a great sign for the mid-term elections.

Commented: Friday, February 21st, 2025 @ 8:59 pm By: Steven P. Rader

Bob seems to be ignorant of Republican Party history. Unlike Europe where parties on the traditional right and populist right almost always organize as seperate parties, in America, the GOP has always had its populist and traditional conservative wings, as well as a moderate faction. Only once has the populist faction gone off as a third party, which was Teddy Roosevelt's ill-fated Bull Moose Party. The Democrats have also had their populist factions from time to time, with two instances where they broke away and formed third parties, the Populist Party in the south at the turn of the 20th century which allied with Republicans and ousted Democrats in some southern states including North Carolina, and George Wallace's short-lived American Independent Party in 1968.

President Trump is doing a good job keeping the Republican Party united and governing effectively. Yes, we may have primaries, but we will close ranks afterward to defeat the left. IN general, I think there has been a better working relationship between populist conservatives and traditional conservatives than between either of them and the moderates, although at most levels things have been worked out there, too, although that historically has been the biggest point of strain within the party.

Commented: Friday, February 21st, 2025 @ 11:37 am By: Steven P. Rader

Totalitarians all operate the same way, whether they be communists, nazis, or globalists. J.D. Vance is standing up against totalitarianism by fighting for free speech and free elections. The new nazis are those who want to supress free speech and ban media, censor both voters and the media, and talk openly about banning their political opponents. In the German election, the new nazis would be the Greens and Social Democrats. Josef Goebbels and the current Social Democrats and Greens think the same way on censorship of their political opponents.

Commented: Saturday, February 15th, 2025 @ 10:16 am By: Steven P. Rader

Stan, not every judge who is a Democrat and/or a Democrat political appointee will abuse their office for political reasons. Many Republican appointees are strict constructionists and that philosophy mitigates against going rogue for political purposes. I don't think there is any way to calculate percentages.

However, one red flag is to look at whether they are Democrat political contributors. Judges who have been Democrat political contributors seem more prone to using the position to advance their political agenda. A good example is the Colorado Supreme Court voting 4 to 3 to kick Trump off the ballot, which the SCOTUS overturned on a unanious vote. The three who voted against kicking Trump off the ballot were Democrats and also Democrat political appointees, but they were not Democrat political contributors. The fours who voted to kick Trump off the ballot all had a history of being Democrat political contributors.

In the current Democrat lawfare cases against the Trump agenda, several of the judges who have entered highly questionable orders have had histories of being Democrat political contributors, one who was a mega-donor, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrat candidates.

Commented: Thursday, February 13th, 2025 @ 2:40 pm By: Steven P. Rader