EDITORIAL: Canceling Anita Sharpe

Guilford County School Board member Anita Sharpe comes under fire this week for sharing misinformation in her Facebook page, for bolstering the Big Lie — that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election — and sedition against the electoral process of the United States.

The video Sharpe shared on her Facebook page, which has since been taken off YouTube for relaying false information, concerned Nancy Pelosi’s laptop, which retired Lt. Gen Thomas McInerney claimed was stolen by US Special Forces. In the video, McInerney describes Pelosi as “frantic,” and said that the laptop’s potential exposure was the reason for the House speaker’s rush to impeach Trump, not, as she stated, that he poses a “clear and present danger” to our country.

It’s important to note that McInerney, in the course of his professional career, insisted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2004 (he didn’t), that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya (he wasn’t) and that all Muslim men should be strip-searched at airports. In his final segment as a commentator on Fox News he claimed that torture “worked” on Sen. John McCain while a POW in the Vietnam War, bestowing upon him the nickname “Songbird John” (that was never McCain’s nickname).

None of these things gave Sharpe pause before sharing the now-banned video. And when called out on it on a Greensboro politics Facebook page, she responded with a cut-and-paste text meme from the far-right cesspool, the one about how “Liberals have tried to make me feel bad about who I am!”

Sharpe should feel bad about who she is: a bigoted and delusional white lady unable to effectively deal with changes in society over the last 40 years, an elected official who has actively undermined the democratic process, a gullible fool who believes the lies that align with her toxic worldview while ignoring the facts of objective reality.

As such, she must resign her post with the Guilford County School Board, effective immediately.

She is unfit to make decisions for the 70,000 or so students in the public school system, 42.7 percent of whom are Black. Indeed, she is unfit for any elected office, as are many of her party colleagues.

We cannot have a functioning democracy when the president himself incites an insurrection and local politicians condone it. We cannot trust a government populated by those in league against its values and traditions. America cannot be run by people who harbor such un-American sentiments. They all need to go.

And Anita Sharpe is as good a place to start as any.