Reading the comments on Thomas’s Sunday post put me in a bad mood. It is hardly a secret that North Carolina contains a significant population of fringe right-wingers, which explains the rich history of shameful demagoguery in the state, but seeing so many of our website’s readers line up against basic science still left me in a mood of disgust. But that is par for the course in a state whose ruling establishment is deep into the fever swamps of “alternative facts” and hostility to scientific truth. We’ve been paying the price for a decade and there’s no respite on the horizon.

A little history. One of the most notorious pieces of legislation rammed through by the new Republican majority was a 2012 bill to prohibit state environmental regulators from planning for sea-level rise. Mother Nature was put on notice–don’t impede the developers’ lobby, sweetheart. The GOP’s assault on environmental science continued for years, with one-term Governor Pat McCrory’s top environmental enforcer claiming that oil was a renewable energy source and Senator Phil Berger imposing a “North Carolina Policy Collaboratory” on UNC to counteract real research with a steady stream of pro-industry junk.

The NCGOP’s distaste for reality, with the real world’s irritating liberal inclinations, extended from environmental policy to the realm of history. In a piece of legislation mandating that schools teach America’s “Founding Principles,” right-wing bulldog Jerry Tillman insisted that the Gold Standard was included in the country’s founding documents. In fact the Gold Standard was not adopted by any country until Great Britain tethered the Pound to the price of gold in 1819, and the U.S. wouldn’t join in until the presidency of William McKinley. Monetary policy was in its primordial state during the Founding era and its main representation in plans for our government was the establishment of the U.S. Mint. Gold Standard? Hell no.

Republicans later attempted to enshrine sectarian religious–read Christian nationalist–messages on every school building in North Carolina. “In God We Trust,” schoolhouse doors would read. The sponsor of this Christianist bill explained that students need to learn “our patriotic history.” Nationalist history is the preferred doctrine of the NCGOP, whose appointees to the Board of Education proferred that in lieu of hard truths good and bad, North Carolina’s students should learn that America is the Greatest Country in the World (TM). Such a message is normative, not historical, and requires the omission of four centuries of systemic oppression aimed at Black people.

The most disturbing thing is that the NCGOP’s War on Reality is not just a crusade emanating from the top down. It has the support of thousands of everyday North Carolinians whether we want to admit it or not. Polls have shown that solid majorities of North Carolina voters want to keep Rebel monuments in place, suggesting a continuing loyalty to the false history of the Confederate Lost Cause. With so many religious conservatives living in the state, one can only imagine how much Creationist codswallop gets circulated around dinner tables and on fundamentalist listservs. This is a state with great universities (though that is waning) and a great many people who despise the truths those institutions were founded to convey.

Now we are seeing the greatest polarization of understood truth in the history of the state. Progressive Congressional districts like Deborah Ross’s Wake County district have over 60% of residents vaccinated against COVID-19. In Richard Hudson’s conservative NC-08, the number is in the 30’s. Surprisingly, Madison Cawthorn represents a district with comparatively less disgraceful numbers, though if his constituents listen to the nonsense he spews in his regular appearances on OAN we can expect more of them to put their families in harm’s way.

This is the state of North Carolina in 2021: two polities, two cultures, two views of the truth. Only one of those conceptions of the truth happens to be true, and we will all suffer until the MAGA hardcore finally substitutes darkness for light.