tea party

June 2, 2017 - Among the corporate sponsors of this year's Conservative Leadership Conference organized by the Art Pope-founded Civitas Institute are Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and Duke Energy.

November 30, 2016 - Gregg Phillips of Texas, a former Republican Party official turned conservative activist, sits on the board of True the Vote, a tea party-connected poll monitoring group that peddles exaggerated claims of voter fraud while pressing for restrictive voting laws.

October 27, 2016 - Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s calls for his supporters to monitor the polls in 2016 raises the specter of the South’s long history of voter intimidation. Voting rights advocates are ramping up their own poll monitoring in response.

October 13, 2016 - Floridians will vote soon on Amendment 1, a ballot measure that's been billed as pro-solar but is actually an effort funded by big utility companies to protect their monopoly and slow the transition to rooftop generation.

November 6, 2015 - With good preachers shouting a new gospel that champions working folks of all races.

May 18, 2015 - The Republicans running Mississippi have the prison system in shambles, workers' compensation gutted, education on a precipice — and journalist Joe Atkins looking back to populist Louisiana Gov. "Uncle" Earl Long for solace.

January 15, 2015 - The Bible instructs us to "love the stranger," but migrants probably won't be feeling much love this year in Mississippi. Gov. Phil Bryant is up for re-election, and he has built his political career in part on demonizing undocumented migrant workers.

October 3, 2014 - North Carolina election officials are investigating a mailer sent by a conservative advocacy group funded by Art Pope and the Koch brothers that contained misinformation about voter registration. Facing South has identified at least three other states where people also received inaccurate mailings from the group -- and one of those efforts involved an attempt to strike people from voter rolls.

July 24, 2014 - State Senator Chris McDaniel's still-contested narrow loss to incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran in Mississippi's Republican runoff last month exposed a divide with the Republican Party possibly as wide as the divide that ultimately split the one-party Democratic South in the 1890s between the "Bourbon" establishment and the rebellious "Populists."

July 2, 2014 - Today marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended Jim Crow segregation and led to a profound political realignment of the South that continues to shape the nation today.