They give a look at what the best email program money can buy actually delivers. In short, it’s a professional, Washington-built fundraising machine creating an alternate reality.

Let’s dive in.

Over 35 days, I received 72 emails from Cooper’s campaign and affiliated fundraising accounts — just over two per day.

My best guess is that these emails are the work of Battle Axe Digital, a Washington, D.C., firm that has worked for a coterie of far-left interest groups, like the ACLU, National Education Association, the Women’s March and Service Employees International Union.

Federal campaign finance records show Cooper for North Carolina paid Battle Axe Digital more than $1.8 million in 2025 alone, for things like email list acquisition and digital consulting.

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The cycle usually goes like this: First, the state passes a law meant to keep more dangerous people behind bars. Then everyone starts warning about overcrowding and thin staffing. Then the pressure builds to soften the law, loosen the rules or find some workaround to move people out.

We’re back at that last part right now.

The Charlotte Observer ran a piece this week about overcrowding in urban county jails, including Wake County’s surge in defendants being held without bond. WRAL quoted Wake DA Lorrin Freeman saying Iryna’s Law might be an “overcorrection” that needs tweaking.

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That’s not completely irrational, but it’s also worth remembering that the prospect of upheaval is often a fundraising strategy. Republican fundraisers want donors scared, because fear raises money. Democratic fundraisers want activists excited, because hope raises money. So you’re going to hear a lot about a possible Democratic House majority over the next few months.

In fact, it’s already started. WUNC just published a piece laying out how the flip could happen.

My view is simple: Republicans are going to lose seats, maybe more than they want to admit. I think there will be at least a loss or two that makes you do a double-take. But Democrats are still a step short of taking the chamber.

Sure, it is theoretically possible. Democrats would need a net gain of 12 seats, and there are enough toss-up and “lean Republican” districts based on the John Locke Foundation’s gold-standard Civitas Partisan Index to make that possible.

But getting from possible to probable is a long walk. That result would far exceed the nine seats Democrats flipped in 2018, the last “blue wave” year in North Carolina.

Some of the dynamics are similar: Republican president, midterm electorate, Trump not on the ballot, Roy Cooper helping Democrats, and so on.

The map is different now. In 2018, Republicans still held a lot of suburban Charlotte seats and similar districts that have since gone permanently blue. There are not as many easy pickups left.

There is a 1994 echo here, though. That year, Republicans took the N.C. House for the first time in more than a century. They did not become the permanent majority overnight, but the win changed expectations, built a bench and helped set up the next era of state politics.

A Democratic flip in 2026 could work the same way in reverse. Republicans would probably have a chance to regroup before redistricting after the 2030 census, but losing the chamber would still reshape Raleigh for at least one cycle.

I do not think it comes to that.

The best Republican incumbents in tough districts have spent the last few years giving voters a reason to know them beyond the “R” next to their names. Rep. Tricia Cotham has a hard race, but she should be considered a slight favorite in a true toss-up district. Reps. Mike Schietzelt, Erin Paré, Allen Chesser and Jonathan Almond have done the same. They are vulnerable because of their districts, but they are not generic.

The problem is that some others might be.

I’ll be honest: There are incumbent House Republicans on the competitive list who I have never heard of. Maybe that says more about me than them. But if I follow this stuff for a living and your name barely registers, swing voters may not have a firm view of you either.

That is a dangerous place to be in a midterm like this.

The last thing you want to be in a blue wave year is a generic Republican.

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In the paper

Pat McCrory has spent nearly a decade in political exile, but a new poll suggests Republican voters may not have written him off as much as Raleigh assumed. In my newspaper column last week, I argued the next Republican governor won’t be Pat McCrory, but may need more of his focus on jobs, executive competence and statewide vision than the General Assembly wants to admit.

Read it here, free with gift link: Republicans wrote off Pat McCrory. Not so fast, a new poll says

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Question of the week

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It’s too messy, too hard to explain, and even in a worst-case scenario, not all that scandalous to begin with.

But did it actually do “big damage” to Boliek’s chances of getting elected governor in 2028? That’s the provocative claim in a newspaper op-ed today that caught my eye. You can read it here with a gift link.

I think the answer is yes, but not directly. And not for the reasons the column lays out.

To start off, I think Boliek is doing a fantastic job and has really breathed life into the state auditor’s office. He’s made the office useful and relevant in a way it hasn’t been in awhile. The rapid-response audits have been a particularly valuable tool, and actually delivering on a major audit of the DMV within the first year is a big deal.

However, Boliek has always had the perception of being the “legislature…

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The subject was House Bill 1104, the bill moving through Raleigh to reform part of North Carolina’s involuntary commitment system.

Reeder was blunt. North Carolina’s mental health system is struggling, and it is worse for people already in jail or moving through the courts. The bill does not try to fix all of that. But it does try to fix one important failure point.

When someone is arrested for a violent crime and there is reason to suspect serious mental illness, the state needs a real evaluation quickly. Today, Reeder said, that does not happen in any systematic way.

HB 1104 would push those evaluations into jails through telehealth and mobile crisis teams. The bill also strengthens court-directed outpatient treatment, extending the window from 90 days to 180 days. That gives people more structure, more time to stabilize, and a better chance to stay on medication and out of the revolving door.

This bill will not fix the mental health system. But it asks the right question: What if we stopped waiting for the next crisis?

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Honestly, I expected this short book from 2001 to read like a time capsule or a relic. Instead, I found it to be shockingly current.

Hunt published First in America: An Education Governor Challenges North Carolina the day after he left office, with a challenge for North Carolina to become a top-tier education state by the end of the decade.

That … did not happen, obviously. But the book remains striking for its mix of ambition and realism. Hunt believed deeply in public schools, and he also saw their flaws pretty clearly.

That in itself is notable. How many political figures today acknowledge that you can support public schools without making excuses for them?

Not every part of the book aged perfectly. Hunt was too optimistic, I think, about what government could do by itself. Schools cannot overcome the breakdown of the family, no matter how many programs you try to create.

But I think the core of his message remains a pretty solid education agenda. It just won’t likely come from a Democrat.

Better early childhood education. Hunt’s solution for this was Smart Start, his signature program and the one he defended tooth and nail until the day he died. I think Hunt was clearly right on the diagnosis, but I’m not sure about the efficacy of the program. There hasn’t been a rigorous study of Smart Start in a decade at this point, and it’s likely due for an update or overhaul. North Carolina implemented universal full-day kindergarten in 1978, and I think universal public pre-K might be a good idea at this point.

More, smaller schools. Hunt thought schools had gotten too big. He admitted that he had supported consolidation earlier in his career, but came to believe the country had gone too far. Schools had become enormous and impersonal in the name of offering more courses and more opportunities. He wrote that no high school should have more than 1,000 students, no middle school more than 600, and no elementary school more than 400. That’s pretty radical today, but I love it. Hunt never really got into charter school debate in the book, but today, this feels like part of the solution here.

Eliminating disruptions. Hunt was also unusually direct on school safety. He wrote that disruptive and violent students should not be allowed to keep hurting other children or stopping them from learning. His answer was not to abandon those students. It was to put them in alternative schools, separate buildings, or different campuses where they could still be educated without making learning impossible for everyone else. Our education policy has moved in the opposite direction.

Money does not equal quality. At one point in the book, Hunt complains that many educators wanted progress measured by how much money got spent, while resisting efforts to measure the performance of schools, teachers, or students. “It’s also important to insist that our schools set high, real-world standards for what all students should learn, and that teachers teach all students to meet the same standards,” he wrote.

The takeaway

The left often treats criticism of public schools as an attack on teachers, students, or public education itself. A significant part of the right see the failures and leans toward writing off the institution altogether.

Hunt did neither. He supported public schools while being clear-eyed about their role, their flaws, and the interest groups involved. He believed they were important enough to defend and important enough to challenge. He wanted more for schools, but he also wanted more from them.

That is the forgotten part of his education agenda, and that is a harder line to walk than it sounds.

“I believe the educators make it too complicated and the politicians make it too simple,” Hunt wrote. “They are both wrong.”

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This may be the first you’re hearing about it; its rollout got little attention, and it’s easy to see why. Like a lot of strategic documents, it’s a little mushy and full of mind-numbing phrases like “stakeholder alignment,” “integrated service delivery” and — God help us — “wraparound support.”

But reports like these are actually a lot more important than you might realize. I’d even say they’re among the most important things a governor does, and they reveal a lot about a state’s priorities.

Gov. Pat McCrory released the N.C. Jobs Plan in 2013, and Gov. Roy Cooper put out “First in Talent” in 2021. Now it’s Stein’s turn.

A governor cannot personally create jobs, of course, but he can set priorities and divvy up money and set the direction that the state will go. That’s why I look pretty closely at these sorts of things.

Stein’s plan ha…

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The quote that stayed with me came from Wendall Pelham, whose son, Spc. John Pelham, was killed in Afghanistan in 2014 while serving with the 3rd Special Forces Group.

“Still go do a hotdog and a hamburger and still drink the beer or drink the wine or drink the water, whatever you want to do,” Pelham said. “Just take a nanosecond or a minute or two and reflect on why we as Americans have an armed services and what we owe them.”

That is not too much to ask.

North Carolina has more than 10,000 names listed in the Gold Star Family Registry. My hometown of Apex has three, including two men who died in Iraq.

You can search your own hometown at GoldStarFamilyRegistry.com. I’d encourage you to do it.

Find a name. Read it. Say a prayer for that family. Then enjoy the cookout with a little more gratitude.

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I had two columns run in the newspaper last week.

The first one was a little out of the ordinary for me, but it was a fun one to write. I desperately want North Carolina to land a Major League Baseball team, and Charlotte seems to have no interest in pursuing one. So I call on the city to back Raleigh’s bid instead. Read it here, free with gift link: Charlotte should help Raleigh land Major League Baseball

The second one focused on Charlotte’s surprise vote to cancel the I-77 South toll lane project. It’s the first test of the post-Mayor Vi Lyles era, and it’s not promising for the state’s largest city. Read it here, free with gift link: With I-77 vote, Charlotte is the city its critics have been warning about

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Right now, we’re at five proposed constitutional amendments at various stages of the approval process. Remember, it takes a supermajority of the legislature to put these amendments on the ballot for voters to approve, but the governor has no veto power over these.

The Senate has a supermajority, but the House is one vote short. You better believe there will be some wrangling to get a disaffected Democrat or two to go along with them.

That may or may not happen, so there’s a very real chance that not all of these amendments ultimately go to the voters. But for now, I’m going to briefly rank and analyze the proposals.

Here’s my take, from the best proposed amendment to the worst.

1. Right to Work

Senate Bill 1082 wou…

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That is why you are seeing a wave of blue states impose special tax burdens on people with high incomes, often at $1 million or more. Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey have all gone that route already, and the state of Washington just enacted a 9.9% tax on income above $1 million. Michigan and Illinois lawmakers are considering doing something similar.

Now progressive activists are trying to bring the idea to North Carolina.

Last week, the group Patriotic Millionaires came to Raleigh to promote a 7% tax rate on income above $1 million, with the money raised to be dedicated to public schools. They even got a handful of Democrats to file a bill to that effect.

There’s zero chance it will gain any traction, but I still think the idea is worth discussing. Because there are plenty of good reasons to oppose such a tax policy, even if you have no particular affection for the rich.

I…

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Each week, the hosts of Acquisitions Anonymous review the listing for a business up for sale and decide whether they would consider buying it. These folks are serious investors and operators, which means they notice all the little red flags that most of us would miss.

They’ve done dry cleaners, HVAC companies, funeral homes, franchises and even, one time, a worm farm.

Last week, their eyes landed close to home: Spruce Pine, North Carolina.

The crew evaluated the listing for City Drive-In, the 75-year-old restaurant that serves as the town’s front porch.

That this historic property is for sale is apparently news. At least, I have not seen it reported anywhere, and it’s a pretty big deal. I hope the eventual buyer is somebody with a heart for the town and for its history. You can see the listing for yourself here.

But the details of the sale are not what I want to focus on here. What was striking to me was how the investors talked about the town. Not in a bad way, by any means. Just different. And considerably more blunt.

“I think your biggest risk here is if somehow this town dies,” one host said.

Now, I love Spruce Pine. I’d say it’s my favorite little town in North Carolina, and that makes it very easy for me to look at it with rose-colored glasses. So do most folks who typically discuss the town and its trajectory. Town managers, the Chamber of Commerce, the economic development folks, all have a natural interest in emphasizing the positive.

The easy version is a mountain town with good people and a beautiful backdrop, slowly but surely driving toward a brighter future.

The hosts were not in a position to judge all that. They had not been to Spruce Pine, and they were not doing real due diligence.

But they did ask the questions a serious investor would ask, and they’re not the ones you typically hear in polite civic circles. Would someone want to build a life there? Can the town keep enough people coming through the door?

Where Spruce Pine really stands

I’m not going to pretend like I have the final verdict on the town, either. I don’t get up to Spruce Pine nearly as much as I’d like. But I’ll tell you what I see.

Spruce Pine is a different type of mountain town than a place like Boone, Blowing Rock or Highlands. It is considerably less polished and more blue collar, much more of a mining town than a tourist one.

In a lot of ways, that is a huge asset. You go there for a slower pace, and you can actually afford to buy real estate there. Spruce Pine has not been whitewashed into a resort town, and I hope it never is.

But it also limits the growth story. Mitchell County as a whole drives far less tourism revenue than most other mountain counties.

Mitchell County had only $46.6 million in tourism spending in 2023 (I used pre-Helene numbers, for obvious reasons). In comparison, Avery had $259.5 million. Haywood had $350.2 million. Watauga had $517.5 million. Buncombe had nearly $3 billion.

You feel that when you’re there. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Mt. Airy and how it’s really leaning into the Mayberry marketing with a good amount of success.

It would be a harder road for Spruce Pine to do something like that. It’s not really set up like a destination town. The Ingles is still closed after Helene, leaving Mitchell County with one supermarket, Walmart. Downtown has some good places to eat and shop, but not enough retail to make a full weekend work the way it would in a more mature visitor town.

Spruce Pine was hit extremely hard by the hurricane, with the North Toe River flooding much of downtown. It is climbing back, but even before the storm it had challenges.

The Town of Spruce Pine streetscape plan is a good example. The town council recently got a rundown on the vision, featuring wider sidewalks, landscaping, outdoor dining, more places for people to spend time downtown. That is exactly the kind of thing Spruce Pine needs if it wants more visitors lingering.

Here’s the catch. The estimated total cost is about $34 million, while the town’s entire General Fund budget is about $3.35 million per year.

That is the Spruce Pine challenge. The town has real promise. It also has small-town math.

The TV show

What does that mean for City Drive-In? I’m not sure. But it would be enormously useful for Spruce Pine, and for small towns all over North Carolina, to ask these sorts of questions out loud.

I almost want to see the Acquisitions Anonymous crew roll into Spruce Pine for a week, talk to the owners, the town, the bankers, the employers, and the people who actually eat there on a Tuesday, then give us a readout on how an investor would look at the business’s — and the town’s — future.

Honestly, that would make a great reality TV show.

It would also fill a real gap. Economic development leaders know their towns from the inside. Investors see a different set of risks. Small towns need both views if they are going to succeed.

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I’m trying to track down a specific kind of North Carolina legislative artifact.

On the Do Politics Better podcast1 a few weeks back, Sen. Phil Berger told a story from when Democrats controlled the N.C. Senate: Republican bills were often sent to the Senate Ways and Means Committee, which rarely or never met.

Berger said he would write to Sen. Charlie Dannelly, the committee chair, asking for bills to be heard. Dannelly would send back a formal reply saying, essentially:

“Sen. Berger, the bill you reference will be heard at the next Senate Ways and Means Committee meeting.”

I’d love to find any example of this kind of correspondence. Does anyone know whether one still exists — in legislative archives, personal papers, old Senate files, or someone’s box of political memorabilia? I’d be grateful for any leads.

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You can read the piece here, free with gift link: The NC budget ‘deal’ is a great start — with one worrying detail

In the column, I briefly touched on the reasons why I’m skeptical of the amendment, but I wanted to go deeper here because this is the sort of issue that’s worth some healthy debate.

To start, none of my concerns are about low taxes themselves.

North Carolina’s tax reforms have paid off in a major way over the past decade. I’d love to see a serious path toward eliminating the personal income tax altogether, though I don’t think the legwork has been done yet to show what that would look like.

My concern is more about putting such a low rate cap in the state constitution.

The personal income tax rate is 3.99% now. Under t…

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When the gunfire subsided, the homeowner was dead, his teenage daughter had been shot in the leg, and both assailants had fled.

One suspect soon died at a Hoke County hospital from a gunshot wound to the chest, police said. The other was later identified by police using Ring doorbell footage as Calvin Wayne Locklear.

Police charged him with first-degree murder, and Locklear eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the home invasion killing, according to state records.

It was not his first time behind bars. And based on the records I’ve reviewed, it is not clear why he was free that June evening at all.

Locklear was one of more than 4,000 offenders who appeared on the “early release” list prepared to satisfy a 2021 settlement between Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration and left-wing activist groups who sued over prison conditions during COVID.

The New York Post looked at the data and reported that thousands of offenders that Cooper “set free” went on to commit new crimes, including 18 later charged with murder.

But is that the real story? Or just another example of what Carolina Forward calls “Cooper Derangement Syndrome”?

That question sent me down a rabbit hole. The deeper I went, the less convinced I became that the simple version explains what actually happened. The reality is much murkier – and in many ways, much more depressing.

What I found was not one clean smoking gun. It was something more frustrating: a justice system that keeps moving dangerous repeat offenders in and out of the system with little accountability.

That, to me, is the real scandal.

Note: My research for this story began with the new site CooperReleasedHim.com. This is a pretty big achievement from independent journalist Stephen Horn to make the opaque early release list open to the public.

The revolving-door justice system

The simple version of this story is that Cooper opened the prison doors during COVID and thousands of inmates walked free. That is not really what happened.

When you dive into the actual cases, it appears that very few people were actually set free from prison early in the way normal people would understand that phrase. In almost every case I examined, the “early reentry” the settlement afforded simply meant cutting short the parole period, or counting people the system had already moved out of state custody.

That’s not necessarily vindication for Cooper. Because what you see in those files is not mercy or careful rehabilitation. It’s a revolving door. North Carolina already had thousands of repeat offenders moving through the system again and again. In that sense, Cooper’s settlement looks less like a one-time jailbreak and more like business as usual inside a broken system.

What the early release list does is make the problem more concrete. It tracks 4,234 offenders tied to the Cooper settlement, with a staggering 52,000+ offenses on their records before the settlement. Afterward, 2,412 were listed as recidivists, with more than 6,100 post-release offenses.

Those are huge numbers, but nothing out of the ordinary. An official state recidivism report found that prisoners released under the COVID settlement had a 48% recidivist arrest rate within two years, slightly higher than the 44% rate for regular prison releases.

Looking through their files, you see people cycling in and out. They often serve shockingly little time for serious crimes. They get released onto supervision. They violate their parole and go back into prison. They leave again. Then, in case after case, they return to the same conduct that brought them into the system in the first place.

No case I’ve found captures the problem better than Locklear’s.

The Locklear timeline

Calvin W. Locklear appears on the early-release list as offender number 1044422, verified by N.C. Department of Adult Correction records.

His record goes back to 2008, when Locklear was arrested after police found 20-year-old Rodriguez Harris lying on a Fayetteville road with a gunshot wound to the head. Locklear, then 19, was wanted for attempted first-degree murder and common law robbery in connection with the shooting.

State records show he was convicted in July 2011 of manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, common law robbery and malicious conduct by a prisoner. He was sentenced to a term between 8 years, 4 months and 10 years, 9 months, state corrections records show.

Locklear was released from state prison onto parole on April 12, 2020, after serving those sentences.

Because the details on all these cases can be so murky, I checked the records with Keith Acree, the communications director for the N.C. Department of Adult Correction. He sent me a timeline of the case from there.

Six months later, while still on parole, Locklear allegedly committed new offenses, the corrections department stated. Warrants were issued in October 2020 for habitual misdemeanor assault, possession of a firearm by a felon, and assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury. He was arrested on those charges on November 18, 2020.

The next day, the Post Release Supervision and Parole Commission issued a warrant for violating his supervision. After a preliminary hearing, Locklear was ordered returned to state custody while the commission reviewed his case.

On December 4, 2020, Locklear was transferred from Cumberland County to state custody. Three days later, the commission revoked his parole and returned him to prison, with a projected release date of August 12, 2021, according to the early-release list.

The Cooper administration’s settlement came two months after Locklear reported to prison, in February 2021.

According to the N.C. Department of Corrections, the state received a detainer notice from Cumberland County, indicating that they wanted to hold him on charges from the October 2020 alleged offenses.

On April 15, 2021, state officials confirmed that the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office would pick him up when he was released. On May 14, 2021, the state released Locklear to the Cumberland County jail.

Under the Cooper settlement, Acree told me, that transfer counted as “early reentry” since his state confinement was ended. Locklear’s post-release supervision status was reinstated upon transfer, and he exited a state prison facility at least 14 days earlier than his projected release date under the settlement.

Put plainly, Locklear left state prison early under the Cooper settlement and went into county custody because he had pending charges.

What happened next is less clear. Cumberland County apparently released him sometime before June 2, 2021. I asked the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office for records related to his release, and my requests went ignored.

But the result is clear enough.

Locklear’s projected state release date was in August. He left state prison in May. Less than three weeks later, a 33-year-old father named Justin Jackson was shot dead inside his own home.

Who was responsible?

Leaders in the General Assembly have just created a Governmental Operations subcommittee to investigate the Cooper-era releases, including how decisions were made, what conditions were attached, how parole was managed, and what role current Gov. Josh Stein’s Department of Justice played when Stein was attorney general.

It’s easy to write this off as pure politics. Cooper is running for U.S. Senate with a handy lead.

But I see real lasting value in getting to the bottom of what these cases reveal about the sieve-like nature of North Carolina’s justice system.

To me, the deeper question is simple and unanswered: Who in North Carolina is responsible for keeping bad guys locked up?

At this point, Cooper’s early-release list likely never becomes the clean political scandal some people want it to be. North Carolina should still make good come out of it.

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But my, does that naiveté show. Page did a 90-second interview with the Hometown Holler and quickly got his first taste of the Raleigh learning curve.

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So why don’t you give it a try?

Today, I’m launching Break Raleigh’s Budget Impasse, a budget simulator web app that lets you put together your own version of a North Carolina budget.

You can start from one of the major proposals already on the table, then change it however you want. As you make changes, the simulator tells you whether your plan balances and gives you a rough sense of how your deal might land with the House GOP, Senate GOP and Governor.

If your plan runs a deficit, you have to fix it. If it balances, you can submit your deal and get a quick read-out on what kind of budget you built.

Every priority has a cost. Every concession creates a problem somewhere else. And if you want to make everyone happy at the same time, good luck.

Obvious caveat: This is not intended to be a 100% legislation-ready fiscal model, and I am sure there are some small errors in there. Real budgets include hundreds of line items, technical provisions and timing issues that a public simulator cannot fully capture.

Try it here: Break Raleigh’s Budget Impasse

Then send me your deal. I want to see what you come up with.

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Since Monroe Mayor Robert Burns has filed paperwork to create a committee to run for governor, I’ll also share this one again.

Finally, in my latest newspaper column, I argue that toll lanes are a net-positive for North Carolina, but they also turn commuting into a casino where traffic relief is the prize and every driver has to decide what escape is worth.

Read it here: I-77 toll lanes turn your commute into a casino — and it’s working

Question of the week

Have you tried the budget simulator yet?

Let's make a (budget) deal!

That is the job of executive leadership.

I write a lot about governors and other executive leaders because they matter in ways that can be easy to underrate in North Carolina. The General Assembly is still the most powerful branch of government in this state. It writes the budget and drives most of the big policy changes.

Republicans leading the General Assembly are perfectly content to have a Democrat in the Executive Mansion. They don’t have to pretend to share power, and it gives them a useful foil. Voters seem to like divided government in North Carolina, too.

I understand the logic. But it has limits.

There is value in having some unity of purpose between the executive and legislative branches. Not so one rubber-stamps the other, but so both can tackle the same problems from different directions.

Teacher recruitment is a g…

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Chances are you’re in the same boat, since most of North Carolina’s urban districts have done the same thing. My older daughter is about to take EOGs for the first time, and she is already anxious about it. Great time for an extra day off school.

I wrote about the N.C. Association of Educators’ plans in my newspaper column this week. My basic point is that when a “teachers” group measures success by how many classrooms it can empty, it’s a pretty good sign that this is more about political power than educational stewardship.

Read it here, free with gift link: NC teacher walkout is sacrificing students for left-wing politics

But the mess does raise a broader question that is worth thinking about on its own. Where, exactly, is the line between political theater and political mobilization? In other words, when does a protest become a stunt, and vice versa?

Real mobilization is one of the hardest things to achieve in politics. Getting people to care enough to leave work, rearrange their lives, and physically show up somewhere is incredibly difficult, at least for normal people. Most political leaders cannot do it on command, no matter how many emails they send or how many consultants they hire.

I don’t think I’m going out on too much of a limb by saying the organized left is far more comfortable with protests, pressure campaigns, and public demonstrations than the right is. You’ll see some kind of liberal rally every other week. When is the last time conservatives in North Carolina really did anything similar?

Both sides get this wrong in their own way. The left overdoes it. Democrats are often too quick to turn every grievance into a march, every policy fight into a moral emergency, and every institution into a pressure target. Republicans, meanwhile, often act like public mobilization is too corny or messy to be worth trying. That leaves conservatives with electoral power, but not always much organized civic muscle between elections.

That is why I tend to look at protests through a pretty simple framework. Is it bottom-up or top-down? Is the grievance real? Are the demands realistic? Were other methods tried first? And is the pressure aimed at the right target?

Real mobilization usually comes from somewhere deeper than messaging. It has to tap into a frustration people already feel in their bones. When it works, it feels less like an event and more like a release valve.

That is part of why the examples that stick in my mind are things like Widen I-77 and ReOpen NC. Whatever you thought of them, they felt real. They did not feel like consultant products or institutional rituals. A lot of the more local No Kings protests are the same way.

This year’s May Day demonstration does not really clear that bar. It is not a spontaneous uprising. It is a highly organized, top-down action. The demands stretch well beyond practical school concerns into a broader ideological program. And the tactic is not especially well aimed. The legislature will not even be there Friday. Lawmakers will be back home for the weekend. The people feeling the disruption most directly are parents and students.

That is usually a bad sign. A good protest puts pressure on the people who can solve the problem. A bad one mostly burdens bystanders and calls that leverage.

This one has enough organization behind it to be disruptive. I am just not convinced it has enough authenticity or enough discipline to be effective.

That may be the real dividing line. Political theater seeks visibility. Political mobilization builds legitimacy. From a distance, the two can look pretty similar. Up close, they are very different things.

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Question of the week

Last week, I asked you about marijuana. A narrow plurality of you (38%) were OK with medical marijuana, but not full legalization. The next biggest group (33%) didn’t want any marijuana legalization.

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The N&O just reported that Sen. Phil Berger is looking at moving quickly on a bill to freeze property tax revaluations. I get the argument for it. Some local governments have used soaring property values as a way to bring in a lot of revenue and spike homeowner tax bills.

A moratorium on property tax revaluations may sound like relief. It may even produce some in the short-term. But it is the wrong tool for the job, because the problem is not really about property values. It is about tax rates, tax collections, and the lack of accountability around both. Those are very different problems.

That distinction matters more than it may seem at first. Revaluations are supposed to tell us what property is worth. They should be accurate, current, and connected to the market as best th…

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That may sound harsh, but a new state audit released Monday makes a pretty strong case for it. The Office of the State Auditor examined how community colleges used $1.25 million in Hurricane Helene emergency relief money meant to support student and staff mental health.

Two-thirds of the money remains unspent. But what did get purchased is enough to make you do a double-take. The audit found thousands of dollars spent on rhino-shaped stress balls, potted succulents, wellness journals and guided bird walks.

My first instinct was to ask why the General Assembly put this money in the budget at all. But on reflection, I think lawmakers had the right idea. Mental health support is a legitimate part of disaster recovery.

Still, this is the risk when you throw hundreds of millions of dollars around and then send the money through layer after layer of bureaucracy. Common sense gets lost somewhe…

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Over the past few years, I’ve used AI tools, data, and basic automation to speed up my work in ways that would have sounded absurd not long ago. That may give me a skewed view of the real world.

It almost certainly gives me a skewed view of state government. Even so, North Carolina’s public sector might be even more low-tech than I realized.

To that point, two stories caught my eye last week.

The first was State Treasurer Brad Briner’s announcement that his department is rolling out artificial intelligence tools across the agency.

The office said a 12-week pilot using ChatGPT showed productivity gains of up to 10% in certain divisions, and now it is moving into broader training and implementation.

The use cases are the ones you’d expect: research, drafting, summarizing, plain-English rewrites, document comparison. I love to see it, but none of this exactly sounds cutting-edge in 2026.

The second was Attorney General Jeff Jackson’s testimony about Medicaid fraud.

Jackson told lawmakers that better data-mining technology could help the state catch more fraud. The division has done some of that work since 2017, but it has no positions dedicated solely to data mining.

As WRAL described it, he told lawmakers that only a few other states have started using this kind of technology for Medicaid fraud detection, and that he sees it as the way of the future. What he’s talking about is combing through billing data, spotting outliers, and identifying patterns.

Again, that’s great that he’s focused on it. But I guess I had it in my head that our state law enforcement was already doing this sort of work — not some Criminal Minds fantasy, exactly, but at least basic data analysis at scale.

I don’t say any of this to diminish what Briner or Jackson are doing. Far from it. Focusing on this stuff at all is a huge step forward. In government, where the temptation is always to preserve the process instead of improving it, even basic modernization takes real leadership.

What these stories suggest, though, is just how low the baseline may still be.

A while back, I read the book Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka, who served as the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama administration. Her argument, in simple terms, is that government tech usually falls behind not because people are dumb or resources are lacking, but because bureaucracy rewards process and self-protection more than results.

That certainly fits with what I think I’m seeing here.

North Carolina does not seem to have a shortage of smart people in public office. What it may have is a shortage of urgency. Or maybe a system that makes urgency hard.

I’m not suggesting state government should go full “move fast and break things.” But I would like to see a bit more impatience. A bit more willingness to test tools, rethink workflows, and challenge the assumption that the current way of doing things is the safe way simply because it is the old way. To their credit, Briner and Jackson seem to understand that.

Because in a lot of cases, the bigger risk is not moving too fast. It is moving too slowly while the world changes around you.

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Charlotte is making a huge bet on public transit just as CATS admits roughly half of riders aren’t paying fares. In my latest column, I argue that this is not mainly a revenue problem. It is a safety and order problem, and a city whose buses now rank among the most dangerous in the country cannot afford to treat fare enforcement as optional.

Read it free with gift link: No fares, no safety, no transit future for Charlotte

Question of the week

I love your optimism. Last week, 83% of you agreed that towns like Mayberry are still possible and are a worthy goal.

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