Whatley using vicious subterfuge to try to salvage a failing campaign

 Michael Whatley is blowing past ethical boundaries. He’s not just telling baldfaced lies. Rather, in a final effort to make his ineffectual attacks on Roy Cooper work, Whatley has deceived a grieving father into cutting an ad against Cooper on the false pretext that the ad was meant to advance the cause of gun control. Whatley is using vicious subterfuge against unwitting people to try to salvage a failing campaign. 

Dirty politics has a long history in North Carolina—and even more so in South Carolina. Our sometimes-deranged neighbors to the south play politics in a kill-house with all the restraint one would expect from the state that started the Civil War. North Carolina’s history is also rife with instances of skullduggery. In the 1930s, O. Max Gardner, the kingpin of the powerful Shelby-Dynasty political machine, passed a paper bag with $50,000 in hard cash across a table and instructed his accomplice to do his worst. The purpose of this dirty payment was to take down a progressive challenger who wanted to substitute Gardner’s textile royalism with a “New Deal in North Carolina.” 

And the record of scandal contains iniquity committed by progressives, Republicans, and other actors who stood for different ideologies than did the Shelby grandees. I’m afraid my man Kerr Scott engaged in the dirty game in 1954, facing an aggressive conservative campaign that was likely to become inflammatory as the election approached. One of Scott’s top lieutenants squirreled a conservative political operative away in a hotel room, plying the man with beers and steaks, and babysat him until the election was over and the risk that the operative would blow up the campaign had passed. 

These scandals have often made for delicious anecdotes. But this legerdemain typically stopped at the boundaries of dirty politics, rarely dipping into true depravity. Michael Whatley’s behavior was sociopathic. With malicious intent, he deceived a murder victim’s parent into testifying for a political cause that the father did not even support. He exploited a loving parent’s terrible grief. He used the man as a pawn. This is ghoulish moral turpitude. This is morally disqualifying. 

In 2026, the proper response to Michael Whatley’s despicable exploitation of a grieving father is to expel Whatley from politics. Our country holds political figures to a higher moral standard than it did 10-15 years ago. For example, Graham Platner and Eric Swalwell were quickly and forcefully driven out of politics when women made credible accusations of sexual assault against them. Whatley has not been accused of anything as serious as sexual violence. But his behavior was more than immoral enough to justify ejecting him from the political arena. 

The Republican Party seems untroubled by Whatley’s behavior. He is, after all, the truest kind of Trumper, a gut fighter without boundaries who is willing to do almost anything in the holy cause of defeating “woke” Democrats. But that is the Republican Party’s problem. North Carolina, on the other hand, has an opportunity to uphold moral standards in a way that emphasizes our commitment to decency in politics. Whatley will continue to run his losing campaign against Roy Cooper, flailing and fuming against a far better man. But the people of North Carolina can respond the right way: By ending Whatley’s political career