Few political strategists in South Carolina have been more central to the Republican Party’s rise than Chip Felkel. A key player in the Carroll Campbell, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush campaigns, his office is a museum of conservative victories—framed headlines, campaign posters, and memories of a lifetime in GOP politics.

And yet today, by his own admission, he’s a man without a party.

In this episode of The Official Unofficial, we sit down with Chip to discuss his break with the Republican Party over Trumpism, how both parties paved the way for our current dysfunction, and what a path back to sanity might look like.

It’s been a week since most of us woke up in the morning and learned that Donald Trump had secured enough electoral votes to ensure his return to the White House. Like many of you likely have, we’ve gone on quite an emotional journey since then. From despair to anger to resignation to introspection to resolve, it’s been a process, and we’re nowhere near any kind of satisfying unified theory of how we got here.

To help us figure some of that out—or perhaps just to have someone else to suffer through the question with us—we’ve invited our friend Eric Kocher to join us as the first-ever guest on The Official Unofficial. Eric is a Spartanburg resident, a pretty great poet, a former arts nonprofit director turned academic type, and the perfect person to have around should you need help describing the contours of our shared existential crisis.

Showing off some of those skills in today’s second segment, Eric had us try to change the minds of three fictional voters that the Democratic Party failed to reach in 2024. Were we able to do that, or did we ruin our chances with imaginary persuadable voters forever? You’ll have to listen to find out.

It’s been 25 days since Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Florida panhandle and tore a path of destruction that reached hundreds of miles inland, killing at least 228 people across six states, destroying thousands of homes, and leaving millions without power.

While Spartanburg escaped the worst of the damage, faring far better than communities a short drive away in Western North Carolina that will take years to recover, the storm was a generational event, the worst storm to hit our area that anyone can seem to remember.

On today’s podcast, we’re taking stock of what we saw from our vantage points in Helene’s aftermath, watching a community come together in recovery while also marveling at how quickly a natural disaster could be politicized by opportunists and how easily it could become fresh grist for a conspiracy mill that never seems to stop turning.

The storm was a unique and (hopefully) rare event in Spartanburg’s history, but it also brings us back to a question we’ll ask again and again on this podcast: When people’s carefully curated, algorithmically reinforced information bubbles can’t be pierced by accurate information, no matter how authoritative the source, what options remain for reaching them?

Will Rothschild first came to Spartanburg with one main goal in mind: to climb the next rung up the ladder of his career as a journalist at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. Raised in Greensboro, North Carolina and fresh from his first reporting stint at the Asheville Citizen-Times, Will and his wife Carey would ultimately form roots in Spartanburg, raising two daughters and becoming deeply invested and involved in the local community.

On today’s episode, we’re talking with Will about that journey and how a kid who never really had a place to belong decided to build one here.

Love the podcast so much you want it right next to all your other favorites whenever we drop a new episode? Check us out on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

This one is a little different — and in some ways long overdue. A lot of folks know Christopher George either through his writing, his communications work for the City of Spartanburg, his podcasting, his original watchdog-blogging from more than a decade ago … or from some combination of all of the above.

But what do you REALLY know about this guy? And why he thinks the way he thinks about community, government, the economy, art, and the proper way to make biscuits?

Under mild protest, CG agreed to sit down and be interviewed by me, his partner on The Official Unofficial. We get into family, what it means to leave and come back, and a whole lot more.

Love the podcast so much you want it right next to all your other favorites whenever we drop a new episode? Check us out on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

If you’re anything like us, odds are you’ve read or heard just about every take possible about last week’s Democratic National Convention. Have you heard two middle-aged white guys in a large-ish small (small-ish mid-size?) city in the Piedmont South share their versions of those takes though? We bet not.

On this episode, we give our rundown of last week’s events, ask each other a few questions to get a sense of what it all might mean, and share some personal reflections about Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and how each of them left their marks on the Democratic Party and on us.Love the podcast so much you want it right next to all your other favorites whenever we drop a new episode? Check us out on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

What happens when you get two news-obsessed former reporters together, and then they start talking about what’s been happening in local journalism for the past couple of decades? You get a far-reaching conversation about ideas like trust, objectivity, editorial direction, economic constraints, and individual ambition, and you get the first segment of a brand new podcast I’m starting with my friend Will Rothschild.

After that, we revisit the piece I recently wrote about JD Vance, delving deeper into the roots of his worldview and its newest expression as Trump’s running mate.