Tag: thomas jefferson
Tucker Carlson's Notes On The State Of Whiteness

Tucker Carlson's Notes On The State Of Whiteness

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has, with the recent exposure of an unredacted text message to one of his producers, done the American people a grand favor. He has unleashed for all to see the truth behind his, and racists’ like him, devotion to white supremacy.

You have probably read about the brouhaha Carlson caused. His text was first seen by Fox executives and board members on the eve of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit. Their discovery set off a rapid-fire chain of events. Apparently concerned that if the lawsuit went forward, the text would be revealed in court and expose the support of Fox News for Carlson’s racism. The very next day, the network fired their most popular and lucrative host and agreed to settle the lawsuit.

Those kinds of decisions at Fox are made by one man, Rupert Murdoch. He can’t have been happy about the consequence of either decision he had to make, because both cost him hundreds of millions of dollars. The lawsuit settlement alone cost $787.5 million. Because Fox News accounts for 70 percent of the parent company’s profits, and Tucker Carlson dominated cable ratings in his hour and supported the shows on either side of him, Carlson’s firing is likely to be even more expensive for the network. Ratings during the 9 o’clock hour fell by half the day after Carlson’s show was canceled and have stayed in the tank in the days since.

What set it all off was a single sentence in the Carlson text: “It’s not how white people fight.” I’m not going to bore you by reprinting more of Carlson’s disgusting racist jeremiad, but some context is useful here. The text was sent on Jan. 7, 2021, the day after a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building, assaulting police officers so badly that 140 of them had to be treated for their injuries, with some hospitalized. Five officers died as a result of the insurrection.

Carlson clearly watched the coverage of the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but that wasn’t what he wrote to his producer about. Instead, he recounted having seen footage of three men he described as “Trump supporters” savagely attacking “an antifa kid” at a street demonstration two weeks previously. He went on to describe how he hoped the three-man mob would “hit him harder, kill him.” He then spasmed into a moment of what for him must have been uncomfortable self-reflection, lamenting that “I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering, I should be bothered by it…. if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?”

Commentators, largely on the left, launched into insta-psychological analysis of Carlson, focusing on what they saw as a mini-crisis of conscience as he appeared to identify with the plight of the antifa kid.

But look at his concluding sentence more closely: the “he” Carlson refers to is the antifa kid, not the Trump supporters who attacked him, so it’s not the attackers he’s comparing himself to, it’s the victim. The key word in Carlson’s statement here is “better.” He’s worried that if he condones such a brutal beating, how can he be “better” than the kid, who as the victim of the attack, hasn’t done anything more than absorb the beating. As for the vicious Trump supporters, well, you can’t do any better than them.

The clear implication of Carlson’s overtly racist observation, “It’s not how white people fight,” is that Carlson believes that white men, because of their whiteness, fight better or more nobly than non-white men. Carlson is clearly implying that those to whom he is comparing White men are Black men, given Carlson’s obsession on his show with attacking not only Black Lives Matter demonstrations after the death of a Black man, George Floyd, but the sentiment and belief of the slogan itself. In Carlson’s political world, Black lives do not matter. White lives matter in his world because white people are better than Black people, especially the White men Carlson appears so worried about.

This is the essence of white supremacy. Where do these ignorant, ignoble, execrable notions come from, that white people are superior to Black people in this country?

Well, they come from none other than Thomas Jefferson himself. Not only did Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence and its words, “all men are created equal” at the same time that he owned about 200 enslaved Black people, he wrote the founding document of white supremacy, “Notes on the State of Virginia.” In his 83 years on this planet, eight of them as President of the United States, Jefferson wrote thousands of letters but only one book, commonly referred to by Jefferson scholars as “Notes.” And so, as citizens collectively descended from Jefferson’s ideas about democracy, it is incumbent upon us that we should pay his one and only book the attention it deserves.

Jefferson wrote the book in 1781, five years after he wrote the Declaration, two years before the end of the Revolutionary War, and eight years before the founding of the country with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In his book, Jefferson attempted to set forth a description of why he thought his state was a repository of what comprises a civilized society and makes it good and worthy of enduring. He discussed his ideas of governance, including a separation of powers, individual rights, freedom of religion, and other ideas which would find their way into the Bill of Rights, which he and Madison insisted be included in the Constitution as a condition of their signing the document.

A good portion of Jefferson’s book is devoted to a chapter he calls “Laws,” in which he sets forth literal laws and punishments for breaking them, as well as a theoretical framework for solemnizing marriages, settling debts, registration of land sales, inspections of goods such as tobacco and flour and turpentine before sale, defining citizenship and other matters of state.

In a chapter of about 7,000 words, Jefferson devotes nearly 3,000 of them to the subject of slavery, emancipation, and race. Nearly the entirety of his discussion argues against emancipation. He is afraid that freeing slaves, because of the harm that had been done to them, “will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

He quickly moves on from the existential crisis that would be caused by freeing slaves to the reasons he feels Blacks should not be free. They are “inferior” in every way: “Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us,” he writes. Not done yet, he launches into as racist a description of the physical characteristic of Blackness that exists: “Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species.”

Got that? He’s comparing the preference of white people for others of similar appearance to the preference of an “Oranootan” for Black women rather than Oranootan females.

It gets worse, and yet even more familiar. Blacks are stronger, “they seem to require less sleep,” “they are more ardent after their female,” yet their “love seems with them to be more an eager desire,” as compared to, say, white people’s “tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.”

And worse: Blacks are not as educable as whites. “In reason they are inferior;” “they will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation.” It would take mixing the races, to which Jefferson expresses strong opposition, to improve the lot of Blacks. “The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.” But by implication can be blamed wholly on their race.

Finally, Jefferson gets to the nub of his discussion of slavery and race. If slaves are freed, “What further is to be done with them?” He discusses how the Romans did it with their slaves, who had the advantage of being white: “Among the Romans, emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master.” But not so Black slaves: “This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people… with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”

See that? There is no hope for them because of their Blackness. Jefferson, in his time and by historians known as a man of Reason, cannot see through his own prejudice, born as he says, “of observation.” An engineer, architect, scholar, scientist, and horticulturalist among his other talents, Jefferson was convinced that while anecdotal evidence proved his racist observations, scientific studies would prove his racist theories: “To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire, or by solvents,” he wrote.

His “general conclusion” was the founding statement of white supremacy in this country: “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

Some of these ideas no doubt had their roots in systemic racism in other societies in earlier times. But Thomas Jefferson put it all down for posterity here in this country. As one of the two or three most important of our founding fathers, his words still carry great weight and can be made to affect our lives every day. The Supreme Court, for example, is in the process of tying the First Amendment, of which Jefferson was one of two authors, into a pretzel to justify discrimination against entire categories of American citizens because of religious beliefs of some.

Jefferson’s disgusting ideas about race still find an eager audience in America. Carlson and his ilk, outright white supremacists such as those Carlson went so far as to invite as guests on his show, embrace Jefferson’s ideas even to this day. Carlson may have lost his platform at Fox News, but he and his ilk are still out there pushing their ideas of white supremacy couched in intellectual batting like the so-called great replacement theory. That fact is all you need to know about the struggle ahead. To end slavery took the Civil War, and yet the war against the Tucker Carlson’s of this world and their not yet dead ideology of race is still to be fought.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Trump May Dream Of 'Civil War,' But It's Not Going To Happen

Trump May Dream Of 'Civil War,' But It's Not Going To Happen

When it comes to prognostication, my favorite philosopher has always been the eminent Lawrence Peter Berra. “It's tough to make predictions,” Yogi famously said, “especially about the future.”

For all his baseball genius, Yogi came by his skepticism honestly. He spent three years managing the New York Mets—enough to make anybody leery about expressing confidence for next year.

Nevertheless, here goes: Regarding American politics, most of this loose talk about an impending civil war is just that, talk. Organized, armed militias running around the countryside attacking political enemies? Not going to happen. Of course there will be violence. This is, after all, the United States of America, where there are cranks and loons of every kind and description armed with guns and explosives.

Terrorism, maybe. After all, it was no less an eminence than Thomas Jefferson who wrote that “[t]he tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” And Oklahoma City terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who had the phrase emblazoned on his T-shirt when he was arrested. McVeigh imagined that murdering 168 fellow citizens with a truck bomb would spark civil war. Instead, he was tried, convicted, and executed in 2001.

For the record, Jefferson penned the unfortunate phrase in France, a slave-owning aristocrat playing revolutionary at Paris dinner parties. He wrote regarding Shay’s Rebellion, a 1787 anti-tax uprising in Massachusetts which his fellow Virginian George Washington believed demonstrated the need for a strong national government. At the subsequent constitutional convention (which Jefferson did not attend), Washington’s views prevailed. As president, he sent soldiers to put down the Pennsylvania “Whiskey Rebellion” with prejudice.

Following his own presidency, Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and designed its staggeringly beautiful campus: a living monument to stability, order, and Thomas Jefferson himself. One of the most appalling things about the “Unite the Right” torchlight parade there in 2017 was its desecration of “Mr. Jefferson’s university” as Virginians call it. You couldn’t expect a barbarian like Donald Trump to understand that.

But I digress. The main reason there’s so much loose talk about civil war is the publication of recent polls showing that strong majorities of Republicans continue to believe that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from the aforementioned Boss Trump. Meanwhile, the latest Washington Post -- University of Maryland poll shows that the “percentage of Americans who say violent action against the governmentis justified at times stands at 34 percent.” (40 percent of Republicans vs. 23 percent of Democrats.)

That and similar surveys show that between 58 and 71 percent of Republicans tell pollsters that Trump was the actual winner of an election he lost thunderously, making Joe Biden an illegitimate president.

It bears mentioning that contrary to the usual 50-50 framing, Republicans represent nowhere close to half of the electorate. One quarter is more like it. Looking at it that way brings the actual proportion of the sorehead minority down to something like half the headline number saying somebody needs to kick ass to bring back the glorious reign of the old p***y grabber.

It doesn’t say how many are prepared to drop the remote, clamber out of the recliner, and take up arms whenever Tucker Carlson says it’s time. Given the advanced age of the Fox News demographic, I’m confident the great majority of would-be warriors—like Trump himself—mean to follow the action on TV.

“The thing that’s most concerning is that [this false belief] has endured in the face of all evidence,” says Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of two honorable Republicans in Congress (the other being Liz Cheney). “And I’ve gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people’s minds.”

The answer is almost certainly not. After all, this is pretty much the same demographic that has resisted science and medicine amid a worldwide disease pandemic. Indeed, many are now angry with Trump for boasting about the very vaccines that they’ve risked their children’s lives resisting. They’re about to have a rough few weeks. Swallowing his election lies has been is risk free and easy by comparison.

There are also signs of waning certitude. The same Washington Post poll shows that the percentage of Republicans denying Joe Biden’s legitimacy has dropped from 70 to 58 percent since the January 6 insurrection. What’s more, fully 72 percent of all Americans saw the January 6 riot as a threat to democracy: a number that can only rise as investigations proceed.

Once the dam springs a leak, it’s doomed.

Having spent much of my adult life as a Yankee in the American South, I have seen this movie before. As recently as the 1960s, many Southern whites thought the world would end if schools and universities integrated. So watch the upcoming Alabama-Georgia game, and tell me what you see.

Civil war over Trump?

In his dreams. Nowhere else.

Why General Lee Doesn't Deserve A Statue But Jefferson Does

Why General Lee Doesn't Deserve A Statue But Jefferson Does

Reprinted with permission from Creators

In New York City, a statue of Thomas Jefferson has graced the City Council chamber for 100 years. This week, the Public Design Commission voted unanimously to remove it. "Jefferson embodies some of the most shameful parts of our country's history," explained Adrienne Adams, a councilwoman from Queens. Assemblyman Charles Barron went even further. Responding to a question about where the statue should go next, he was contemptuous: "I don't think it should go anywhere. I don't think it should exist."

When iconoclasts topple Jefferson, they seem to validate the argument advanced by defenders of Confederate monuments that there is no escape from the slippery slope. "First, they come for Nathan Bedford Forrest and then for Robert E. Lee. Where does it end? Is Jefferson next? Is George Washington?"

No historical figure is without blemish, they protest. And it's unfair to condemn our ancestors using today's standards. If owning slaves is the discrediting fact about Lee, how then can we excuse George Washington? As if on cue, "TFG" chimed in with a statement chiding the city for "evicting" the "late, great Thomas Jefferson, one of our most important founding fathers." Not so important, apparently, that former President Donald Trump felt the need to learn about him though, because the next phrase was "a principal writer of the Constitution of the United States." Sigh. No, Jefferson was in Paris during the Constitutional Convention. He authored another founding document Trump hasn't read. But never mind.

There is an answer — a reason why it's right to remove Robert E. Lee from his pedestal in Richmond, Virginia, yet wrong to exile Thomas Jefferson from a place of honor in American life. It requires grappling with the full complexity of human beings and the mixed legacy of history. We must, as William Shakespeare said, "Take them for all in all," that is, judge them for their entire lives, not just a part.

People who defend monuments to Lee on the grounds that he played an important role in our history are confusing significance with honor. Lee surely played a huge role in our history, but as the leader of an army whose aim was to destroy the union. That made him a textbook traitor. As Ulysses Grant put it in his memoir, recalling his feelings upon accepting Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, Lee had fought "valiantly" but for a cause that was "one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."

Is it fair to judge Lee by our modern standards? Perhaps not, but even by the standards of his own day, he is wanting. Much has been made of Lee's supposedly agonizing decision to resign his U.S. Army commission because he could not "raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children." But others, including Gen. Winfield Scott, who offered Lee command of the Union army in 1861, also hailed from Virginia, yet remained loyal, as did Virginian Gen. George Henry Thomas, the "Rock of Chickamauga," and an estimated 100,000 white Southerners who fought for the Union.

Lee's image has been sanitized and even beatified by purveyors of the "Lost Cause" narrative about the Confederacy. They've depicted Lee as an upright, chivalrous defender of tradition, a moral man and a Christian. But, as Adam Serwer reminds us, Lee was a cruel slave master. In the words of Wesley Norris, one of his slaves who attempted to escape and was whipped, "Not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done." As the leader of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee enslaved all of the Black Union soldiers he captured as well as free Black Pennsylvanians his army encountered.

As the author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson enshrined the ideals that made this nation. Jefferson's words formed our national identity as free people and marked a departure in human affairs. A 19th-century Hungarian nationalist, Lajos Kossuth, called the American Declaration of Independence "the noblest, happiest page in mankind's history."

Was Jefferson a hypocrite? Oh, yes. One of history's most flamboyant. He owned slaves and almost certainly fathered children with his dead wife's half sister, Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman. But he never defended the institution (as Lee did), quite the contrary. He wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

Do we overlook Jefferson's shameful private behavior? No, but we take him in full. His contribution to human liberty, despite his personal behavior, entitles him to a place of honor. There will always be an asterisk, but to say that statues honoring him "shouldn't exist," as the New York City assemblyman did, is to dismiss the Declaration, the American anthem.

As for George Washington, there would have been no nation to criticize or lionize without him. If Jefferson was the poet laureate of liberty, Washington was the living exemplar of republican virtue. Having led the revolution, he could have proclaimed himself king or dictator. Some urged him to do so. When King George III was told by the American artist Benjamin West that Washington intended to resign and return to private life after winning his country's freedom, the king said, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."

He was. Many a revolutionary leader came after him. Most became despots in turn. None has achieved his greatness.

Yes, Washington held human beings in bondage, and that was terrible. Owning slaves is a blight on his record, but the rest shines bright. No nation that has judgment — and gratitude — can fail to honor him forever.

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her most recent book is Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense."To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: mercuryatlasnine at Pixabay

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's plantation.

Why America’s Cultural Education Needs A Truth Upgrade

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call

When I visited Monticello, the home of America's third president, Thomas Jefferson, it was certainly impressive. But there was so much information shared by the friendly tour guide about the great man's genius that a lot was left out about just who was making the Virginia plantation turn a profit. Who was building the furniture and brewing the beer? Who was doing the planting?

When I asked the kindly woman for more details on the lived experiences of the enslaved men, women, and children at Monticello, her attitude grew decidedly chilly. And when I asked about Sally Hemings, who bore Jefferson's children, beginning when she was a young teen and Jefferson was in his 40s, well, the docent's face lost what little color it had and her rehearsed spiel descended into an unintelligible word salad. Then she changed the subject.

Blessedly, if I were to visit Monticello today, there is an exhibit devoted to Hemings, acknowledging the woman, known in Jefferson's time but disappeared or downplayed by histories, at least until historian Annette Gordon-Reed's books and other scholarship fueled conversations that DNA testing confirmed.

It wasn't just embarrassed guides at Monticello that misled for so long. Anyone relying on other cultural interpretations would have been clueless. In 2000, I wrote about a CBS offering, Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, which portrayed the relationship between a man of power and privilege and the woman he owned as straight out of a romance novel, complete with swelling chords and actor Sam Neill as Jefferson in a Fabio-style wig, locks blowing in a wind machine-generated breeze.

Disturbing, if a ratings grabber.

History, what is taught in the classroom, is vital if we are to understand the present. Right now, the country is embroiled in a contentious discussion over how much truth about systemic racism to allow in classrooms, with, unfortunately, little consideration of how and why promoting "fairy tale" history can damage schoolchildren of all ages and races.

But education extends past hours sitting at a school-room desk. Let's face it, a lot of folks absorb what we see on TV or in the movies as kind of true. We half-listen to a museum guide without questioning the motives of the people who crafted monuments and museums that shape memories of the dead.

Whitewashed images

There is a reason why many Americans believed that only "white guys" with crew cuts had the "right stuff" before "Hidden Figures" told the story of the Black women who fueled the space race. Though that film took some liberties, mathematician Katherine Johnson was able to get her flowers in public and in person before she died last year. She no doubt provided inspiration for African American schoolchildren previously discouraged from pursuing science and math careers, children who never saw themselves represented in whitewashed celluloid images.

I employ cultural references in my columns because a classic film or a summer song that everyone can hum is shorthand for shared community when so much else is polarized.

But there are dangers when you rely on those touchstones. In the phrase "based on a true story" tagged on to all those fictionalized tales, "based on" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And predictably, just as in our history books, people of color are too often left out.

To be clear, no creator is compelled to cover all the bases when embarking on a project. The saying that people who are dissatisfied should stop complaining and make their own is fair, up to a point, since access and funds are definitely not available to everyone with an innovative idea.

But with gag orders being placed on teachers trying to lead students toward a complete and nuanced conversation about American history, the stories we tell — on big and small screens, in exhibitions — gain in importance.

Sometimes, the distortion is frivolous, as when the fractured timeline of "Back to the Future" had Michael J. Fox's Marty McFly inspiring Chuck Berry's signature rock and roll guitar riff. I laughed and cringed. It was a comedy.

Sometimes, though, it's serious, as in the case of 1988's "Mississippi Burning." Director Alan Parker used the excuse of creative license when he made heroes out of agents in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, charged with investigating racist violence in the South in the 1960s, and relegated Black civil rights heroes and their allies to background characters. In reality, Hoover seemed more interested in snooping on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s private life than racial justice. But Parker's vision won prizes.

Why does it matter?

Think of the enduring view of the post-Civil War West, set for generations by a public raised on the films of John Wayne, who is so revered he has an airport that bears his name. (And if you worship "The Duke," check out his 1971 Playboy interview laced with bigoted stereotypes about Black folks and Native Americans; his steadfast belief in "white supremacy" is pretty terrible.) For years, with a few notable exceptions, Westerns erased the tales of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans, except in stereotypical roles. Only in recent years have more folks learned, often through Hollywood, of the exploits of Nat (or Nate) Love, also known as Deadwood Dick, rodeo pioneer and actor Bill Pickett, and law enforcement officer Bass Reeves, whose stories had more drama than most.

America just commemorated the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which many only learned of when HBO's "Watchmen" recreated it. Life became art became life.

Changing The Narrative

Because the stories we tell become the world we live in, a diverse group of creators is building a new and necessary legacy, with expected pushback and criticism from those who think the discredited versions of history and the art that reinforced it were just fine.

Politicians already know how much culture shapes the narrative of America that people hold in their heads and hearts, which is why it's called a culture "war." In Texas — of course, Texas — there's a new battle of the Alamo, actually a law designed to entrench in education and at landmarks a sanitized myth epitomized by Wayne's 1960 "The Alamo," a myth that omits the role that protecting slavery played in the battle and the state's history.

In Washington, D.C., post-pandemic visitors may experience a new view of who deserves honors. The House voted this week to remove from display in the Capitol the bust of the late Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — who authored the infamous Dred Scott decision that held Black people were not U.S. citizens — along with statues and busts of Confederates and white supremacists. Taney would be replaced by Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice. We'll see how the proposal fares in the Senate.

And when, years after my Monticello experience, I visited Montpelier, the plantation home of James Madison, the fourth U.S. president and Jefferson's slave-holding neighbor, archaeologists and volunteers were excavating bones, beads, shards of pottery, anything to discover a fuller picture of life there. It's been reported that found near a slave dwelling was a pipe bowl, ironically bearing the word "Liberty."

No "fairy tale" could be more poignant for Americans hooked on a good story.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.