Robeson County is stuck at about 25% vaccinated:

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday more than 50% of adults 18 and older in the state have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, and more than 43% of the adult population is fully vaccinated against the virus.

In Robeson County, 25.6% of adults are vaccinated, according to Bill Smith, county Health Department director. The county has 101,622 residents who are 18 years old and older. Of that population segment, 26,033 have been vaccinated. For the entire Robeson County population of 130,620 people only 20% have been vaccinated. That takes into account that almost 26,000 Robesonians are too young to get vaccinated.

We're not talking about a slight deviation from the state average, that's half of it. And this attempt to focus on young people doesn't account for that huge gap either:

Grabbing a quote and running with it:

The Iredell County legislator ignored the overall point I was making about the challenges the pandemic has wrought for teachers and students, directing his tunnel vision at my opening words: “Not long ago I was leading a discussion about environmental pollution with my 7th grade English class…”

For McNeely, this line, which I “prominently displayed” in the state’s three largest newspapers, exposes a sinister plot to deviate from state standards in support of the leftist agenda.

I'm actually seeing this more and more with Conservatives these days. If they seem to be "listening intently" to what you are saying, don't make the mistake of assuming they're interested in the point you're driving at. They are simply waiting for some kind of "gotcha" element to pounce on, however trivial or out of context it is. It is intellectually weak to do this, and riddled with logical fallacies. But they don't care about stuff like that. Back to Justin's message about the proper approach to teaching:

Editorial busts Berger’s mythmaking about Apple’s decision to come to NC https://t.co/FNy7U15J95 via @ncpolicywatch #ncga #ncpol #ncgov #NCed

— NC Policy Watch (@NCPolicyWatch) May 4, 2021

This is SOP for the GOP: Take credit for stuff that is good, even if they actively worked against it. It's a never-ending spin-cycle that will make you dizzy just watching.

The cost of doing business in an unjust environment:

On Wednesday evening, about 60 people gathered in the Alamance County town’s Court Square to call for justice in the name of Andrew Brown, the Black man recently shot and killed by sheriff’s deputies in Elizabeth City.

A few minutes before 7 p.m., about a dozen protesters marched from the park in Court Square to Graham Soda Shop and Grill, a restaurant across from the courthouse owned by Jennifer Talley, a member of the city council. Inside, they sat and sang “Amazing Grace” to protest her support of the anti-protest ordinance.

An ordinance that makes it illegal to gather more than 10 people for a protest without obtaining a permit from notorious Sheriff Terry Johnson. Once the 11th person walks up, arrests can immediately follow. Of course the first protesters to be ejected from her restaurant were African-American:

All our progress could be at risk:

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy doesn’t line up with the H1N1 polling, nor with standard patterns of hesitancy—for example, crunchy left-wing opposition to childhood vaccinations. But the patterns do line up with resistance to mask wearing and stay-at-home orders.

In other words, the pattern of resistance to the coronavirus vaccines looks less like COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and more like COVID-19 denialism. While a significant chunk of Americans profess to be uneasy about getting shots to prevent COVID-19, most come from the swath of the population that has tended to downplay the disease’s severity and to resist other measures to fight it, rather than the swaths that have resisted vaccines for other diseases.

Bolding mine, because these people have literally painted themselves into a corner. They fought against masks, they fought against quarantine, they fought against closing businesses and schools, and now that a vaccine is available to them, their stubbornness is keeping them from getting it. They've been downplaying this thing so long, getting a shot would feel like admitting they've been a idiot all along. I got my second shot Tuesday (That's me in the pic above), and the place was desolate compared to a few weeks ago. Could just be a coincidence, but I don't think so. More from the idiocracy: