I recently posted in a Facebook group dedicated to politics about the judge's decision to open up the churches, and one of the commenters asked where all the attacks on Governor Cooper's pandemic restrictions were coming from. I explained about the upcoming election, including Dan Forest's dismal poll numbers, and that has definitely played a role in the visible pushback. Forest is connected to both the ReopenNC people and the Return America group that filed the lawsuit.

But in order to really understand why these (and many other) people are primed to defy common-sense government actions, we need to delve into the trust deficit that has been building for decades. Follow me below the fold if you can trust me to not mislead you:

Pat McCrory really doesn't like anyone shattering his delusions. Where Pat lives, in Alternate Realityville, he is always right, he has high ethical standards and everyone loves him.

When the Associated Press pointed out that Pat got a nice payoff from the Lending Tree folks, and that he hadn't actually earned that payoff according to the standard rules, and that the didn't fully report the payoff on his ethics forms, and that he didn't actually resign fro the Lending Tree board until after he became governor, and that there were several irregularities associated with this transaction; and then reminded readers that all this was reminiscent of Pat's previous highly questionable behavior surrounding his Duke Energy stock holdings, Pat melted down. [And not just because attempts to describe all of Pat's vagaries result in an extreme run-on sentence :-) ].

The day after a wire service reported that North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory received a six-figure stock payout from an online mortgage broker that is regulated by the state, the governor’s emphatic reaction to the story nearly eclipsed the news itself.