Letter: It’s time to defund Edwards

[Regarding Chuck Edwards, 48th District, N.C. Senate]: It’s time to defund Chuck Edwards, remove his whining arrogance from Raleigh and send him back to Hendersonville to try to make an honest living. Edwards has always been about posturing, never about solutions to the issues facing North Carolina and its people. His current signature bleat is to defund Asheville government because it is trying to make policing more accountable, transparent and effective.

Edwards’ rigid ideology yearns to unleash unaccountable corporations to be “free” to bring back the 19th century dominion of America by robber barons. Back when people “knew their places” and when the American labor movement faced Edwards’ preferred tools of billy clubs and bullets, alongside falsifying anti-labor consultants. He imagines that police doing their jobs means acting as an occupying force, crushing all opposition, such as during the eras of Jim Crow and widespread lynchings. People of color are invisible to Edwards. The only people he can see are his big donors and people who look like and think like him.

He “backs the blue,” but his first allegiance is to the Washington Republicans who now starve state and local governments. Layoffs lay waste to our schools, parks, public health — and soon enough law enforcement, at which point Edwards will no longer back the blue because he’s a “fiscal conservative.” Edwards and his buddies Moffitt and Cawthorn are perverse, almost cartoonish, reactionaries, tying North Carolina’s people to railroad tracks while shouting, “You must pay the rent!” Yet we cannot and should not pay the unaffordable cost any longer for their extremist pursuit of power in Raleigh and Washington.

— Paul Weichselbaum
Hendersonville

Editor’s note: The writer reports that he is volunteering with get-out-the-vote efforts for Brian Caskey in the 48th Senate District race and other Democrats. Xpress contacted Edwards for a response to the writer’s points, but he declined to provide one.