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Anderson Clayton, Travis Fain, and Thomas Mills take on the latest developments in North Carolina politics. This week, we discuss Phil Berger’s primary and his family’s legacy. We look at Governor Josh Stein’s take on marijuana. And Anderson talks about her tours through rural NC.

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North Carolina has had a lot of news in the past two weeks. We bread it down on Restless Natives NC.

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The second episode of Restless Natives looks at town hall meetings, the ongoing Riggs-Griffin race, and the impact of the economy on elections. It’s a fun episode.

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Transcript:

I’m Thomas Mills for PoliticsNC. Today is Tuesday, Apr 25, 2025 and the knives are out at the Department of Defense.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth continues the steady stream of bad press that goes with rank incompetence.

This week, he fired or replaced his entire upper management, including his chief of staff.

Hegseth and his cronies said they were leaking, but they were some of his closest aides.

Before long, Signalgate 2.0 dropped.

It turns out, Hegseth didn’t just give confidential information to an unsecure chat group of Cabinet Secretaries.

He gave a blow-by-blow of a strike on Yemen to another chat group with friends and family.

By the end of the weekend, Hegseth’s former spokesman at the Defense Department wrote a scathing article in Politico calling on Trump to fire the Secretary.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Trump, for his part, is standing by his man.

He says Hegseth is doing a great job and the White House shot down rumors that he’s about to get canned.

But he will eventually, because can’t help himself.

He reminds me of Mark Robinson.

Like Robinson, Hegseth’s bad habits are ingrained.

They’re part of who he is.

He’s been lying and making bad decisions his whole life.

He's a braggart who needs to let everybody know how important he is.

Discipline won’t cure what ails him.

Nope, like Robinson, the hits will keep on coming.

Trump keeps him because he’s totally in the bag.

He’ll do whatever he’s told, no matter how egregious.

When you’re trying to install an authoritarian regime, a guy like Hegseth is good to have around.

He’s a guy who would order troops to fire on Americans or invade a sovereign nation unprovoked.

He doesn’t need to be too savvy. He just needs to follow orders.

The question is whether he can make it long enough to be useful.

At some point, Hegseth’s going to do something that reflects badly on Trump–more than rank incompetence does.

When that happens, Trump will fire him.

The question is whether it happens before or after he’s been useful.

I’m Thomas Mills, signing off for PoliticsNC.

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Transcript:

I’m Thomas Mills for PoliticsNC. Today is Tuesday, April 15 2025 and we’ve returned to a dark place in our history.

It’s been more than 70 years since authorities or quasi-authorities could snatch people off the street and disappear them into a gulag for some indeterminant period of time.

That practice largely ended in 1955 after the lynching of Emmitt Till.

After almost 60 years of Jim Crow rule, enough people finally became outraged at the vigilante justice and lack of due process that had condemned so many African Americans to death or long prison sentences.

Before then, Black men were regularly picked up for petty crimes, or for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and sentenced to work camps where they provided slave labor to build roads, bridges, tunnels, and railways or to supply labor for local industries.

You know, kept taxes and wages low.

Donald Trump has brought it back with a twist.

His goons are snatching people off the street and sending them to foreign gulags with no due process.

He’s not using a corrupt justice system like the ones that condemned Black men to hard labor.

He’s ignoring the justice system altogether.

He’s refusing to comply with an order from the United States Supreme Court to return and unlawfully imprisoned man.

And a lot of Americans are cheering.

Republicans in Congress are acting like Southern legislatures of the early 20th century.

They are turning their backs on the rule of law and civil rights.

They won’t defend the courts.

They are complicit in undermining the Constitution and supporting authoritarianism.

They are the real victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

They are deluding themselves.

Watching him threaten our allies, end long-standing trade agreements, blow up our alliances, side with dictators, crash the stock market, trash civil rights, ignore court orders and pretend that’s good for our country?

That’s Trump Derangement Syndrome.

They are the descendants of the people who argued to keep other people enslaved.

They stripped voting rights and civil rights from citizens at the turn of the 20th century.

Now, they’re watching silently as a would-be dictator threatens to send American citizens to foreign gulags.

It took almost 70 years to defeat them last time.

We may have to fight longer this time.

I’m Thomas Mills signing off for PoliticsNC.

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