just...

What? The minute I looked at that, that was the first thing that struck me by his post was he completely had it wrong.

And then he followed up again and accused me of taking money from county parties.

I was being paid.

And I'm like, yeah, I gave a speech and I got paid.

A lot of people do that.

Rachel Maddow, I think, made $12 million last year from speeches.

So I'm curious then, do we also judge every reporter in all outlets? Are we going to start putting those adjectives on everybody? Based on what? As I understand it, I should ask you, but my understanding was that you're unaffiliated.

Walk us through a little bit of that.

Well, yeah, that was sort of what was going through my head when I was drafting the question to the campaign.

You know, we saw Joe Biden's decline.

You know, he was quite a bit older than Roy Cooper is right now, who I believe he's 69 years old.

He would be in his mid-70s by the time a six-year term was filled in the Senate.

You know, Senator Mitch McConnell's had a lot of health problems recently.

Then we saw the abrupt passing of Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham.

The Elias Law Group has been very heavily involved in the North Carolina political and legal system over the last decade or so.

How did that process play out for you?

Not well.

Thanks for having me on, Nick.

I appreciate that.

Over the course of reporting for North State Journal, we had tried to contact the governor's office, you know, dozens and dozens of times when he was governor for various reasons.

Um, especially during COVID, um, because as your listeners might know, um, we were blocked from asking questions during the COVID briefings.

The campus office had used a, um, application.

Just kind of walk us through what your current thoughts are on this United States Senate race as we get ever closer to the November the third midterm.

All right, so why do Republicans say that this is necessary? And then what do the Democrats say this is about?

Well, well, Republicans, you know, they're building on their, their tax cut schedule that they've done over the last decade, which have brought tax cuts down.

It's increased the amount that, uh, parents can do for the child tax credit.

It, it's done a bunch of things.

Um, and it's set to, it's set to go down by 2.99 by 2020... 2032, sorry.

That's the personal tax rate.

Um, you know, previous triggers to the lower rates were removed in the most recent budget.

Why are they looking to do this?

So what, what makes it so special?

Well, yes.

Um, from what I am understanding, uh, lawmakers descended on Raleigh today, at least leadership did.

Um, and there will be possibly a special session called this week in order to put a, uh, moratorium, uh, a temporary moratorium on the state's gas tax in order to give folks a break at the pump.

Um, in particular, this kind of was sparked by Josh Stein, uh, doing something similar for farmers with their dye-based, um, diesel, which diesel prices have just been crazy compared to everybody else's prices for gas, and he wanted to give them a break, so he was, uh, he was doing some, some work with that.

And that's sort of what I think prompted this by lawmakers.

Um, i- in a nutshell, uh, you know, we charge, what is it, 41 cents a gallon in state motor fuel taxes.

Mm-hmm

made it

extremely difficult for repairs and for, infrastructure, you know, completion and that sort of thing.

So, I mean, you have to give them some slack there, but, um, you know, on the housing side of things, though, it's moving kind of at the same trickle that NCORP was, um, they had, uh, 7,924 applications submitted according to grow NC's own numbers.

And as of June, their own numbers say that only 113 houses were completed.

Meanwhile, uh, private groups.

or kicking their butts.

Um, the Baptist on mission had 472 homes repaired.

No, he didn't

So do they have like are they approaching this from a like, you know, we we know the truth kind of perspective, like we know what happened and this is to prove our theory.

Well, they've got a lot of documentation on their website.

They have a timeline.

They've got the Defease Project, which was an issue that was raised in a lot of the congressional hearings dealing with the origins of COVID and papers and activities that happened with the DARPA project that was initially initiated for this.

So there's a lot of evidence-based material on their website, and they say that it's sort of like a pattern of You know, it's a hard pattern to miss that, you know, this was, you know, unavoidable.

This was inevitable, actually, that this was going to happen.

But they say there's a couple folks in there that haven't been asked to come before Congress, one of which was one of the researchers who went back and forth, a woman named Daniel Anderson, who they say is, quote, relevant as a possible witness and part of a testable hypothesis.

So like if you want to go deeper into like math or reading or, you know, I don't know what other subject history or something like all of these different subjects are going to have different proficiencies.

Oh, our favorite organization

... yeah.

Yeah, also runs NC News Line, you know, dark money funded, the whole nine yards.

Um, so let's see.

So the Justice Project, uh, it focuses on state supreme courts.

In particular, they only have five courts that they seem to be interested in on their website, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.

Um, they, they're obviously looking to flip seats there.

Mm-hmm.

They must be doing a lot of drag brunches.

Yeah.

I thought that was interesting.

The year before that, it was over $768,000 that they had received, and one of their...

Consistent supporters has been the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which is one of the groups that's been most prolific in funding progressive and left-leaning organizations in North Carolina.

You know, from 2020 to 2024, they gave them over $659,000.

And, you know, at the bottom of this Carolina Migrant Network's website, they have a whole bunch of names of groups that are apparently affiliated with them, including Z. Smith Reynolds, but also NCI Ulta.

Does he have some thoughts on data centers?

Right, so explain, like, when you say coded, what does that mean?

Well, they used certain billing codes for, you know, for hormone blockers and things, and they listed them as other kinds of therapies.

And, you know, they had at least 14 that were coded for hormone treatments, another 15 for mastectomies.

Breast augmentations and genital surgeries, these were listed as the top items for gender-affirming care by an organization, a nonprofit organization that had been prompting these locally.

And the report figures basically said that something in the range of around $12,000 for surgeries like mastectomies were coded differently.

They were put under codes for endocrine disorders unspecified or precocious puberty rather than gender-related

That would have been a Roy Cooper override,

correct? Yeah, that was like a year or so ago, but it looks like this group had been getting money for some time now.

So what do we know about this meeting and the potential candidates? I saw Tim Moffitt pulled his name out of the running.

He did.

State House Representative Jennifer Bochum, her other step-up, she's also from the Henderson County, And, uh, she's, she put out a lengthy statement on X about that saying that, you know, she's, she's gonna go forward and put her name in for the nomination.

Um, other names that have been thrown into the mix, um, are past candidates for various offices, including NC 11, which was, uh, Matthew Burrell.

Um, he ran in, I believe in 2022, but lost in that primary.

So he didn't make it to the November ballot.

Um, there's a guy named Ken McKim.

So does this bear any kind of aside from the obviously the financial support? Is there any I mean, is there any other benefit that these relationships have or downsides? Like, do people know enough about like these fundraising structures that you can tie Cooper to these other or these other senators and vice versa?

Um, Siembra is, uh, Siembra NC, um, and, uh, tell folks a little bit about what this organization is and, uh, like where did they get their money?

They are a 501c for dark money group, uh, heavily funded through Arabella advisors and George Soros and other dark money pastors.

Um, they are involved in, uh, well, anti-ice, anti-immigration enforcement, um, They have a whole bunch of tools on their website for folks to learn how to identify ice coming for them and how to stay away from them and legal advice and that kind of thing.

Um, they also launched a, uh, app tracking system, uh, to track ice movements in North Carolina and like an alert network, kind of like they did in Minnesota.

Um, and they were also involved in, in pressuring former governor Roy Cooper to veto the ice bill back in 2019, which he did.

And then another bill was later filed and passed, and that veto was overridden.

They were also involved right now in a push to have local municipalities and governments adopt a Fourth Amendment workplace resolution, Fourth Amendment being protecting against unreasonable search and seizure.

Well, I asked them about that.

So did this photo have a question that they were going to ask from North State Journal if they got the opportunity to do so?

No, we didn't have a particular question for the Cooper event.

We just sent him hoping that he would be able to have access and to take a few photos, maybe get a couple quotes from whatever speech was given, and that was it.

We weren't looking to engage on that.

We have heard that there are a lot of media gaggles after these things, and we heard that mainly through the grapevine because we're not on Roy Cooper's media list.

He has not put us on it, though we've asked.

So that's a problem.

Well, it's kind of hard when, you know, you guys are stiff arming all of these other reporters and media outlets for political or ideological reasons like, oh, they're not in the click, you know.

But there was an interesting response from the State Board of Elections Executive Director Sam Hayes about information that was sent to what the state of North Carolina's election board.

Well, in the White House has a Web site dedicated to the topics that were covered by Trump in his speech.

And I have that linked in the story so people can go look at each one of those topics.

has a sublink within it that has either files or documents, zip files and things that you can download.

But each one of those topics has a sublink within it that has either files or documents, zip files and things that you can download to see the actual documentation of what he was talking about.

And one of them had in the very first couple of pages had states that protect federal elections.

and it talked about different states who have been proactive in using save database user information in order to clean up their voter rolls and proactive save user states included in that list was north carolina who had the same database that identified over 34 600 deceased voters but also almost um 1600 non-citizen voters and The SAVE data has been acknowledged by the State Board of Elections, but this particular set of information that came out, it says that they're looking at the information of the 1,600 potential non-U.S. citizens, and they're looking through the databases very carefully to find out if they're actually still there, if they've been removed, and they're moving forward with that.

Yeah,

So lay that out for folks as to how this thing ended up at the Supreme Court.

Okay, well, back in 2020, late 2020, going into 2021, The Biden administration's Department of Education decided it was going to rewrite Title IX to include gender identity, which threw the doors wide open for men in sports and locker rooms and all other female spaces and vice versa if a girl was identifying as a boy, etc.

So that became an issue.

And within the proposal of those changes, those rule changes, at least 23 states sued the Um, and several other private entities sued as well as, um, interested parties.

So there were a bunch of lawsuits that ramped up and heading into 2023, they had paused the rule.

And then going into 2024, they moved forward with it, but then they quietly rolled it back in December of 24, citing the number of lawsuits that were coming to a head, which were going to rule not in their favor.

2.

Most people forget House Bill 2 returned everything to the status quo.

But the Confederate stars and bars, that was never part of the official state flag.

No, that was one of the old battle flags, and there's multiple different versions of that battle flag.

You know, I mean, they just happened to be Yank 1 that was like...

You know, I'm sure they probably asked AI for it or something like that.

And if you were to ask AI for it, it would probably pump out that same image.

But it was...

You know, I found that image actually on a website that sells these kinds of things.

Of

Like, what is the justification for not using E-Verify here? That, oh, we need to be able to hire illegal aliens if we only employ 15 people or 10 people or something?

Yeah, for the smaller businesses, it's much easier to figure out whether or not they're compliant or not.

For the larger businesses of 25 or more, that's when it gets a little bit difficult.

Like you had that raid in Kings Mountain last year that the guy who was running that business up there, I want to say it was some kind of equipment supply or, you know, like big rigs and buses and that kind of stuff.

I think it dealt with that, but don't absolutely quote me on that.

They had a large number of employees there, and there were at least a dozen illegal aliens among them.

And the owner there said, well, they showed me real paperwork, and I didn't know any better.

It's a weird

Yeah, that was

sort of the implication that there was something not right with it.

Right.

You know, but this is just kids getting to, kids and families getting to choose the school of their choice, the private school of their choice.

And yeah, that money does come from the state, but it doesn't come from the education budget.

It's got its own little bucket of money.

So it's not taking money from education that she likes to claim in that video, I believe.

last week,

Well, pick whichever one you want to start with first.

[laughs] Well, both these cases track back to 2024 and were filed by the Republican National Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party.

And one of them deals with, uh, removing non-citizens from voter rolls using, uh, jury duty excuse forms, uh, where they self-identify these things.

But the other one was, uh, the never citizens issue, where it's somebody who's registered to vote in the state 'cause, I don't know, they have a tie here, their parent or a grandparent or something, but they've never ever actually lived in the state.

Um, so that ruling with the never resident, it leaves in place the ability to use, um, to vote in federal elections, but it's barring them from voting in state elections going forward, which seems apt, um, and follows federal law.

Uh, and that sort of, um, carries over to the other issue, which was the non-citizens on the voter rolls.

There was a controversy last year with the NCSB wanting to use the SAVE database.

Yes

Why would they do that? But why would those countries be so interested in protecting our neighborhoods from these data centers?

Well, they're not.

They're interested in protecting their race to get to the top of AI first.

I mean, the next 100 years is going to be dictated by this.

It's not going to be a resources race.

It's going to be an AI race.

It's an information race.

I don't know.