When North Carolina’s State Board of Elections met August 20 to decide early voting options for 20 counties where local boards couldn’t agree, it surprised no one that Auditor Dave Boliek’s GOP majority largely chose plans crafted by Republicans.

What was surprising, was the immediacy of the campaign to rehabilitate Boliek’s reputation by couching 2026 early voting plans as a victory for all voters after local whistleblowers revealed Boliek’s office, including former “elections liaison,” Dallas Woodhouse, pressured county elections chairs to pass plans favoring Republicans.

Attempting to distance himself from the elephant in the room, State Board Chair Francis DeLuca kicked off the marathon meeting admitting,

“I hope we never hear the name Dallas Woodhouse in here again.”

But if Boliek and DeLuca think they can fool voters into believing this summer’s efforts haven’t hurt voters, Woodhouse provided a taste of how they’d try.

First, Woodhouse suggested that the Auditor’s board may tout overall increases in sites or hours compared to 2022.

But registered voters in North Carolina have grown by 6% since 2022. Adding handfuls of sites or a few percentage points in hours this year doesn’t keep up.

Even in the 80 unanimous counties decided locally, analysis from political scientist Chris Cooper shows that while the total number of sites increased by five (+1.8%) since the last midterm, sites available per 10,000 voters actually dropped (-3.2%), signaling a shift away from where voters actually live.

Simply put, many of the sites and hours approved under Boliek’s watch meet his demands, not voters’.

The Auditor might argue that while he meddled in county options, it prevented bigger early voting cuts.

Preventing “bigger cuts” doesn’t mean chosen sites work for all voters.

Public records show the Auditor’s effort to add or protect sites that may help certain Republican candidates. Woodhouse’s texts focused on what sites and hours “GOP voters need” in counties like Columbus and Anson. These partisan add-ons may pad the State Board’s stats, but they distract from devastating site closures, including the site serving the poorest part of Columbus, multiple sites in Lenoir where 40% of voters are Black, and the most popular site for Black (and all) voters in Granville.

The Auditor could repeat tired excuses that unprecedented cuts to Sunday voting address poll worker fatigue, religious preferences, or costs.

But when the Auditor’s appointees cut Sunday access in 23 North Carolina counties that had it in 2022, they failed to mention their true motives.

Fortunately, Lee County Board of Elections member Jay DeLancy did it for them.

DeLancy’s testimony to the State Board revealed that Woodhouse told him to slash Sunday voting because the US Supreme Court’s 2026 Callais decision, gutting the Voting Rights Act, greenlit Republican cuts to options used by Black voters.

“I had not thought about getting rid of Sunday until [Woodhouse] planted that seed,” DeLancy told the Board.

Woodhouse started planting seeds a decade ago when, as state GOP chair, he sent a memo to GOP elections chairs in every county demanding they eliminate Sunday voting. His ultimately unsuccessful loyalty test followed a federal ruling that struck down legislative efforts to cut Sundays because doing so targeted African-American voters “with surgical precision.”

Thanks to the Auditor, the surgeons are back. And their amputations of Sunday voting will be felt throughout the state.

The Auditor’s State Board might try to justify their decisions by saying campus voting largely survived.

But campuses with some of the largest and most diverse populations likely disagree.

Public records show State Board Member Angela Hawkins worked with Woodhouse to make sure Wake County moved its NC State site off of the main campus. Woodhouse approved moving Pasquotank’s site to its under-renovation elections office rather than keep it on a historically-Black college or university (HBCU). In Guilford, none of the 168 public comments to the State Board supported the plan it ultimately approved, leaving no site at NC A&T, the nation’s largest HBCU.

Finally, the Auditor may try to say with a straight face that 2026 early voting planning was a transparent process, full of compromise.

But his partisan manipulations were only revealed after threats of litigation over unfulfilled public records requests —he has since admitted Woodhouse deleted many of those conversations.

If you “read the documents and check the record,” as Woodhouse suggests, the only thing in public view is the Auditor’s staff pressuring counties to adopt plans that led to some of the most toxic local debates over early voting in recent history and forcing only the voters to compromise.

These controversial changes so conflicted with community interests that even GOP elections board members in counties like Cabarrus, Jackson, Moore, and Randolph pushed back.

Like them, North Carolinians won’t be fooled.

Sailor Jones is state director of Common Cause North Carolina.

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By Kimberly Jones

Beacon Media

For the first time in three decades, North Carolina educators are heading back to school this week without the court case that had become a rallying cry for public schools known as Leandro.

On April 2, the state Supreme Court dismissed Leandro, a lawsuit that asked for what North Carolina’s Constitution has promised: a sound, basic education for every child.

The case became the argument for the courts forcing what the General Assembly has refused to do, allocating the money and resources necessary to improve our schools, creating opportunity for every child.

The court didn’t say the underlying problem was solved. It said the courts were no longer the venue to fix it. There is no more multibillion-dollar remedy plan working its way through the system. No more waiting on a court order. No one is coming to write the check.

So we need something else to rally around. I’d argue we already have it, and it’s not a case number. It’s the work itself.

Here’s the thing about a courtroom loss: it doesn’t touch the state Constitution. Article I, Section 15 of the North Carolina Constitution says: “The people have a right to the privilege of education, and it is the duty of the State to guard and maintain that right.”

Our demand to uphold the Constitution matters most this year, because what our kids need to succeed is shifting under our feet.

Every corporate partner who walks into a school talks about workforce readiness, about building “the workers of tomorrow.” It’s a fair goal, but I keep coming back to a harder question underneath that phrase: which kids get to be the workers, and which get to be the ones who design the work?

That’s not a hypothetical divide. It’s the same haves-and-have-nots fault line Leandro spent 30 years trying to close, just wearing new clothes, this time drawn along who has access to real technology instruction and thoughtful AI integration paired with meaningful discourse and critical thinking, and who gets a locked-down device and a worksheet.

There’s a bigger transformation happening underneath all of this, and it isn’t unique to North Carolina. Schools everywhere are being pushed toward AI as the answer to almost everything, and parents and communities are pushing back, not really about screens themselves, but about a quieter fear: that kids are losing the muscle to think without one.

That fear is producing a real call for social and interpersonal skills, the human parts of learning that no algorithm can replace. North Carolina already has language for this. The state’s own Portrait of a Graduate names seven durable skills our students need: adaptability, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, empathy, a learner’s mindset, and personal responsibility. None of those come from a screen. They come from a classroom where a highly qualified teacher is paying attention and building meaningful learning.

I think about two kinds of students, and I want to be clear that both matter equally. There’s the kid who was counting on a stable factory job, the kind that used to be there for a hardworking eighteen-year-old with a diploma, and finds that field automated out from under an entire graduating class before commencement even happens. And there’s the kid who did “everything right”, went to college, trained for a field, and still walks the stage to find that field reshaped underneath them, all of it moving faster than a four-year degree can keep up.

Neither of those students is a cautionary tale. Both of them reflect the labor market our students are entering. That’s why public schools can’t sort kids early into “college kids” and “workforce kids.” The skills that serve both are the same: the ability to pivot, learn new tools quickly, even help build a field that doesn’t exist yet. Thirteen years of public education aimed at one fixed destination is not a plan for either kid. It’s gambling with futures that aren’t ours to risk.

I am a humanities teacher in my 21st year, a field some say we don’t need because it doesn’t relate directly to a job. When I ask my colleagues what they’re really teaching, they’ll tell me that underneath the annotation and essays, students are really learning far more: how to read a situation, build an argument, revise under pressure, and adapt when the first draft doesn’t work. These are the most valuable skills in an uncertain economy.

Critical thinking isn’t a soft skill anymore. It’s the whole game.

This is where I think North Carolina public schools can actually lead. We don’t need to rally around Leandro this year. We get to rally around each other, around kids who are watching more closely than we know, to see whether they’ll get real instruction or a screen and a script, whether they’ll be handed the work or taught to help design it, and around a Constitution that still says what it always said. That’s still worth showing up for, with purpose, resolve, and joy.

As parents and educators, let’s recommit to teaching and living out these critical thinking skills ourselves. Let’s tell our stories publicly, and demand from our leaders that North Carolina’s public education system gets the funding and resources it needs, so our students grow up to shape the future, not just work inside it.

Kimberly Jones is a 21-year public school educator and the 2023–24 North Carolina Teacher of the Year. She teaches English and AP African American Studies at Chapel Hill High School and is a longtime advocate for strong, equitable public schools. This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.

By Joaquin Villagran-Hernandez

Beacon Media

The volleyball net was tied to two wooden posts with baling twine and the ball was half-flat — but none of that mattered to me.

For an hour, the crew of farmworkers I’d come to visit with Student Action with Farmworkers forgot about the heat and the 12-hour days topping tobacco plants ahead of them. One man played in work boots and a pair of shorts printed with the American flag. He spiked, he laughed, he argued a call at the line.

Together, we found joy, not hardship, in a place built to ensure no one ever sees either.

Most of us will never see one of North Carolina’s more than 1,000 farmworker camps, let alone meet the people who live in them. A study of labor camps in eastern North Carolina found that more than a third were hidden, deliberately set back from the road, tucked behind tree lines, or built where no paved road reaches them.

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Health workers, legal aid attorneys, and outreach teams like the one I worked on as part of an internship this past summer, often search for camps the way you’d search for something someone doesn’t want found. For the men and women who live there, this means no visitors, no neighbors, no one who would notice if something went wrong.

These are workers who enter the United States legally to work on farms as part of the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program. Each year, thousands of H-2A workers travel to North Carolina to harvest tobacco, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, and other crops. They are key to sustaining the state’s multibillion-dollar agriculture industry. They return for seasonal work year after year, leaving behind spouses, children, parents, and communities, living for months in isolated labor camps.

In 2024, José Arturo González Mendoza, 30, died in the heat at Barnes Farming in Nash County. While an autopsy later cast doubt on whether the heat was totally to blame for Mendoza’s death, it exposed the conditions the farmworkers endured, including not being given cups to easily drink water, according to the News & Observer.

As one worker said to me after our volleyball game, “Aunque estoy en el país más libre, no soy libre.” Even though I am in the freest country, I am not free.

He said it quietly, as if he were stating a simple fact. I found his words difficult to reconcile. How can someone in the country, so often described as the land of the free, still feel that freedom remains out of reach?

Isolation is not the only difficulty these workers face. Wages that were already thin have gotten thinner: a recent federal wage rule cuts what NC farmworkers are guaranteed to earn, and workers feel it. “El sueño americano está muerto,” one man said to me. The American Dream is dead.

Another put it this way: “Uno no gana aquí, ni en México.” You don’t win here, nor in Mexico.

Yet they continue to come.

Not because America is perfect. Not because the work is easy. But because they still believe there is dignity in building a better life.

The more of these workers I met, the more I wished state and federal lawmakers could hear their stories. Temporary farmworkers aren’t voters, but they are still constituents. Farmworkers live in lawmakers’ districts. They work in their districts. They spend their wages in their districts’ grocery stores. They pick the crops that carry entire county economies and feed the state and the country.

But because they can’t vote, they’re treated as if they don’t count.

Farmworkers deserve a seat at that table, even a small one: a listening session, a staffer who visits a camp instead of reading a memo about one, a policy process that asks workers what they need before deciding what they get.

In the labor camps of eastern North Carolina, what you see is not just hardship; it’s how much some of these men and women still want from this country, and how little of it we let them have. Workers who’ve spent 30 years bent over in North Carolina fields still ask, quietly, if there’s somewhere they can learn English. Not because anyone requires it, but because they want it for themselves.

They’ve given years of their lives to American agriculture, and in return we’ve given them an even lower federal wage, a housing law that says outhouses are acceptable, and a state that mostly doesn’t know they’re here.

Now I understand what that worker meant when he said he wasn’t free. They work here. They live here. They contribute here. Yet they remain unseen.

North Carolina’s farmworkers need lawmakers willing to see them as neighbors already living, working, and hoping for something better.

Joaquin Villagran-Hernandez, a Student Action with Farmworkers intern with the North Carolina Justice Center, is a first-generation Mexican American raised in Greene County, N.C.This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.

By Iliana Santillán

Beacon Media

I went to Mexico this summer as someone who had never cared much about soccer. Much to my surprise, within days I was planning my life around World Cup games, wearing a green jersey and singing with strangers after Mexico won.

Something had changed, and it was not only my opinion of the sport.

As soon as I landed in Mexico, the feeling of otherness left my body. I had not realized how much I carried it until it disappeared. Spanish surrounded me. Giant images of the Mexican national team covered buildings. Brands had transformed their advertisements into messages of encouragement for la Selección, Mexico’s national team. Green jerseys filled airports, subway stations, restaurants and city streets.

Everywhere I looked, the World Cup was there.Mexico felt radiant, and for the first time in a long time, I experienced that pride without feeling the need to explain or defend it.

Growing up in Mexico (before moving to the U.S. at age 12 and spending the last 23 years in North Carolina), soccer was impossible to ignore, but I never felt like it belonged to me. Like many women who grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s, I associated the sport with a familiar image: men glued to the television, the final score determining the mood of the afternoon, while commercials and popular culture often showed women serving food or observing from the sidelines.

This World Cup felt different. Somewhere along the way, I became what we jokingly call a FIFA in Mexico—a woman who suddenly discovers her inner soccer fan, especially during the World Cup. I bought the jersey, learned the players’ names, celebrated every goal and, during the weeks I spent with my dad, even planned our days around the games.

I had officially entered my FIFA era.

The World Cup brought me closer to my dad, reconnected me with parts of my heritage I had not realized I missed, and reminded me how powerful it can be to celebrate where we come from without making anyone else feel that they do not belong.

Every important game brought my dad and me back to his favorite neighborhood restaurant in Mexico City, not far from the central Zócalo, where one of the country’s largest fan festivals took place. We ate tacos al pastor, spent hours with his friends and were greeted by familiar faces each time we returned. A photograph of my dad and his friends with the owner hangs on the wall, a small detail that helps explain why the place feels like home.

College friends met up to watch. Couples turned games into dates. Retirees debated every play, fathers watched alongside their daughters, and a few children absorbed the excitement around them. People came for soccer but stayed for hours, talking and laughing long after the games ended.

That is one of the things I love most about Mexico: the ability to linger, to sit around a table without watching the clock and to make room for sobremesa, another story or one more person pulling up a chair.

When Mexico won, that feeling spilled into the streets. The restaurant erupted. People hugged strangers, and without anyone planning it, everyone began singing Cielito Lindo. Outside, cars stopped as people climbed out to dance. Bands played music in the streets.

Thousands celebrated at the Ángel de la Independencia, and even the rain could not send them home.

Mexico erupted in joy, pride and hope.

For weeks, the world saw a version of Mexico that rarely leads the news. Visitors experienced extraordinary hospitality, remarkable food and public spaces filled with celebration. They walked our streets, celebrated alongside us and experienced a country that welcomed them with pride and generosity.

None of that erases the challenges Mexico faces. But those challenges have never been the whole story. Sometimes we spend so much time responding to other people’s narratives that we forget to tell our own.

Making it to the World Cup is an extraordinary achievement. Every team arrives carrying its country’s history and the stories of players whose journeys cannot be reduced to a score or statistic. Once I started learning those stories, I was hooked.

One afternoon, while watching a game in Oaxaca, the province to the South of Mexico City, an American walked into the bar wearing a Team USA jersey.

He was welcomed immediately, and before long much of the bar was cheering for the United States alongside him. That moment captured one of the most important things the World Cup taught me: pride in your own country does not have to come at the expense of someone else’s.

I came home with a Mexico jersey in my suitcase and a deeper connection to my dad, my heritage and a part of myself I had not realized I missed.

I hope the next generation grows up proud of where they come from and curious about everyone else. I hope young people experience the joy of seeing their countries compete, their stories represented and new possibilities open before them. I hope they learn that celebrating their own history never requires diminishing someone else’s.

Iliana Santillán is an immigrant from Mexico, founder of the movement group Brava NC, and a statewide leader advancing civic engagement and political power-building in North Carolina. She is the co-host of Beacon Media’s Latino community media project, El Faro. This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.

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By Walter Gómez

Enlace Latino NC

Editor’s Note: This piece is republished with permission from Enlace Latino NC.

Forty-eight years ago, while the world celebrated the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina, a military dictatorship took advantage of the planet’s biggest sporting event to project an image of normalcy.

Behind the packed stadiums, the celebrations, and the international broadcasts, thousands of people were being persecuted, abducted, tortured, and disappeared.

Soccer did not cause those crimes. Nor was it their origin. But it did become the perfect stage to show the world a country different from the one millions of Argentines were actually living in.

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Nearly half a century later, the World Cup is once again being played in the United States. The differences between the two historical contexts are profound and evident.

Among the most evident differences between the two contexts is the way power carries out and communicates its actions.

Argentina’s military junta operated in secrecy: it hid detention centers, systematically denied forced disappearances, and built a machinery of silence to cover up the repression.

In contrast, President Donald Trump’s administration does not hide its immigration policy.

Operations carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are public, promoted through press conferences, videos, and official statements, and the president himself frequently presents them on his social media accounts as achievements of his administration and victories in its immigration enforcement strategy.

However, there is a parallel worth observing: while millions of people focus their attention on sports, public debate about other realities loses space.

“Bread and Circuses”

The phrase “bread and circuses” remains relevant. For centuries, governments have understood that major spectacles bring people together, stir emotions, and divert attention—at least temporarily—from the conflicts affecting a society.

Today, the United States faces deep political polarization, questions about its immigration policy, and a climate of growing tension toward immigrant communities.

In that context, President Donald Trump’s administration has intensified ICE operations, a strategy that has drawn criticism from organizations that defend human rights and immigrants’ rights.

The numbers tell part of the story. As of June 2026, 19 people had died in ICE detention centers.

In addition, there have been several cases of people who died after being shot during immigration operations, incidents that are now prompting questions, investigations, and demands for transparency.

Among those names are Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Joan Sebastián Guerrero.

But names matter more than statistics.

Each one represents a family waiting for answers. Parents, children, siblings, and neighbors continue asking how a detention ended in tragedy.

Why Are They Killing Us?

The question is born from the fear that today runs through thousands of immigrants.

Because the persecution no longer distinguishes only between people with or without legal status. In numerous operations, language, skin color, workplace, or simply appearance seem to turn someone into a suspect.

For years, political rhetoric has portrayed immigrants as responsible for nearly every problem facing the country: public safety, the economy, employment, education, and health care.

No campaign of persecution can be sustained solely by agents in the streets. It also needs a narrative.

Today, that narrative finds a powerful amplifier on social media, where misinformation, fear, and hate speech spread at a speed never seen before.

“Repeat a lie often enough and something will stick,” says an old phrase attributed to political propaganda. Repeating a lie enough times ultimately turns it, for many people, into an apparent truth.

Meanwhile, millions of immigrants continue waking up before dawn to work, pay taxes, sustain entire sectors of the economy, and pursue an American dream that seems to grow farther away every day.

Fear Is in the Air

It is evident in those who no longer take their children to certain activities, in those who have stopped attending medical appointments, and in those who avoid reporting crimes out of fear of becoming the next target themselves.

The operations continue. The investigations move forward slowly. Families wait for answers.

And the World Cup goes on.

Forty-eight years ago, soccer helped construct an image that concealed part of Argentina’s reality.

Today, without equating historical contexts or political systems, it is worth asking whether the world’s biggest sporting event once again coincides with a moment in which thousands of human stories are pushed into the background.

The World Cup will come to an end. The stadiums will empty once again. The broadcasts will end.

But the families of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Joan Sebastián Guerrero, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and so many others will continue waiting for justice.

Because when the final whistle marks the end of the World Cup, the question will remain the same:

How many lives can remain hidden while the ball keeps rolling?

Argentinian journalist Walter Gómez is the co-founder of the Latino digital news site Enlace Latino NC. This piece is republished with permission. All content published by Beacon Media is available to be republished for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.

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RALEIGH, N.C. — The new state budget signed by Gov. Josh Stein provides a $25 million lifeline for Healthy Opportunities, a first-in-the-nation program that significantly improved N.C. families’ health and drove down Medicaid costs.

The program was placed on hiatus in 2025 due to the budget impasse but now has funding to start up again.

The bold experiment provided Medicaid users with resources such as rent assistance, home repairs, mold and lead removal, nutritious food, transportation, domestic violence prevention support and other services not always covered by state insurance.

The results of the program were striking.

• A new study by UNC found Medicaid enrollee costs dropped nearly $2,000 per person per year

• ER visits and hospitalizations significantly decreased

• Thousands of jobs were created at local farms, businesses and nonprofits

• Millions of dollars were invested in rural communities

Families who benefited from the program, health care providers and supporters are celebrating the new funding, although more is needed to reach full program implementation.

“We’re thrilled that Gov. Stein and state lawmakers realized the extraordinary impact of this innovative program on North Carolinians,” said Rebekah Whilden, executive director of Carolina Forward. “This is not just a policy conversation. It’s about real families, real health outcomes and real cost savings for our state.”

“Most health outcomes are decided before you even see a doctor,” said Laurie Stradley, CEO of Impact Health. “This program proves that when you invest in people’s basic needs, you improve health and lower costs. It’s about spending our healthcare dollars better and investing in our local communities.”

To interview Healthy Opportunities participants or experts, please contact:

Jeremy Borden

jeremy@beaconmedianc.org

(703) 795-3824

VIDEO: Families share about the impact of Healthy Opportunities

Beacon Media

Recently, I joined a group of friends visiting the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, which is housed in Murray’s 19th Century single family home in downtown Durham.

I expected a simple story of Black hardship and triumph. I found so much more.

The center epitomizes the state of civil rights today because the private gender issues Murray navigated have become one of the most fraught political issues of our time.

Pauli Murray, the Center’s namesake, was born in 1910 and died in 1985 — and she was a century ahead of the civil rights conversation dominating today. After exploring the Center’s exhibits, I realized Murray had a connection to trans identity, and if she were alive today, would be a ready target for conservatives obsessed with the gender lines.

In fact, the Trump administration found a way to target Murray well after her death. Last year, an expected $300,000 federal grant, representing more than 20% of the Center’s funding, was cut and new exhibits and programming rolled back, according to WUNC.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on trans athletes in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox highlight how states are seeking to criminalize the existence of transgender kids by banning them from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. An earlier court ruling allowed the state of Tennessee to ban hormone blockers for trans teenagers in Tennessee.

The museum was enlightening, as Pauli Murray’s life represents the epitome of an activist as an agent for change. Murray was a founding member of the prominent civil rights organization Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E). She coined the term “Jane Crow” in an effort to address the way gender and race impacted discrimination, and co-founded the National Organization of Women (NOW).

Murray used all her skills to create social justice wherever she could, while privately navigating a gender her time had no words for.

In her personal writing, she used he and she pronouns and sought gender affirming care throughout her lifetime. She dated women, never called herself a lesbian, and deeply identified with a masculine sense of self. Murray sought testosterone treatment in the 1930’s, long preceding recent claims that “radical gender ideology” is being forced on children today. Murray was never the face of the multiple justice movements she existed across, and the posthumous revelations on her gender identity complicate how history narrates her impact.

Pauli Murray played basketball in high school as a young person navigating her own journey around gender. She also used both “she” and “he” pronouns. We can’t know for sure what pronouns Murray would have used publicly through her life if she had had access to them, but we know that she used she/her at the end of her life. That’s the most recent record we have of her preferences, so that’s what I’m using here.

What can we learn from Murray today? Politicians weaponize vague gender fears about bathrooms, athletes, and pronouns, using many of the same tools they used to challenge desegregation.

Murray reminds us that bigotry doesn’t easily untangle from race and gender. Bigotry, and the so-called leaders who wield it, will find our children and make their bodies battlefields.

As a Black man, I understand that the racism I often face is gendered. That shared experience is a call to coalition to defend civil rights of all people. I do not know what it means to be trans, but I know that standing in solidarity protects those of us marked as different.

Today, conservatives dominate conversations about transgender lives, while so many others mostly stay silent for one reason or another.

We have the power to do something different.

We change that by demanding that people are not excluded from the communities they belong to. The only conversation we need to master is one that demands that inclusion is non-negotiable.

Pauli Murray’s words guide us, even now, for how we can shift our approach to trans members of our community.

“I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods,” Murray wrote. “When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.”

We can show up for her legacy now by reminding people that justice for our trans community is a part of the civil rights that we, and Pauli Murray, have always fought for.

Martin Henson lives in Raleigh. He is an advocate and executive director of BMEN Foundation, which convenes Black men to address issues in their lives and communities. See his work at MartinHSpeaks.com.

This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.

By Beacon Media

Last November, federal immigration agents swooped into Charlotte under the guise of a law enforcement operation that, the administration of President Donald Trump told us, would rid the city of “the worst of the worst” criminals.

In the weeks that followed, agents showed up in shopping centers, courthouses and neighborhoods where they might find mostly Latino immigrants across North Carolina, detaining and arresting some 1,100 people. Those agents delivered far more terror than safety, as they arrested hundreds of people who had no criminal history, dividing families and as 56,000 students in Mecklenburg County stayed home from school in fear.

Immigrant communities across the country are still under siege and face unnecessary daily fear in our convoluted immigration system. And when protesters have responded there has been violence, death and crackdowns. Dozens have been arrested and may serve long prison terms for simply partaking in one of the most American and constitutionally protected activities of all — protesting their government.

Set against the backdrop of what experts call “unprecedented” grift and corruption from President Trump and his administration, these are just some of the latest hallmarks of authoritarianism. It is all meant to make us fearful and complacent.

They want us to throw up our hands and ask: What can we possibly do?

As we celebrate this 250th anniversary of our nation’s independence, Beacon Media wants to say and do the most patriotic thing we can think of: call out the rampant corruption and authoritarianism of the Trump administration while pledging how we will work with our neighbors in North Carolina to build a version of democracy that works for all of us, one storyteller and one community at a time.

The stories we tell ourselves and each other play a massive role in our lives. Too many reduce our politics to those who run for office or their frustration with one political party or the other. But politics is so much more than that — it is how we build our communities, share good information and reflect honestly about how we can make where we call home a place where all can thrive.

Media tends to inflame, or simplify so much to make the information they’re providing of little use to most who simply want to do their part to make their communities better.

So on this Fourth of July, we at Beacon Media wanted to say, as loudly as we can, that we’ll do our part to help y’all make sense of the world — and work to be a part of elevating the leadership who will make North Carolina a better state and country for the next 250 years.

Since it’s the Fourth, we’d like to note that America’s first president predicted this moment — and gave us the antidote. He worried that partisanship would turn to tribalism and then “the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

One solution: “Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened,” Washington said in his farewell address in 1796.

At the core of what we’ll continue to do is to give a megaphone to our Beacon Voices, community leaders doing the work in NC so that everyone, regardless of where they come from, has the opportunity they deserve.

As community and grassroots leaders, it is their stories and leadership that can begin to guide us through the next 250 years.

Beacon Voice Gwen Frisbie-Fulton said this week the blueprint lies in North Carolina’s past.

“Here in North Carolina, we have a tremendous organizing history,” she wrote in her latest piece. “From the Equal Rights Leagues of the 1870s protecting Black suffrage or the hog waste activism of the 1990s that forced our legislative leaders to pass the Clean Water Responsibility Act, citizen organizing has always been the corrective power guiding North Carolina forward.”

Beacon Voice and former Teacher of the Year Kimberly Jones sees the future in the eyes of her students. “My faith grows because I teach incredibly talented kids who are inheriting a world that I don’t know, but they have to be prepared for nonetheless. And I will tell you — the kids are alright.”

If there’s any place that can lead the way it is North Carolina, said Beacon Voice and our organization’s founder, Graig Meyer. We have a special responsibility to call truth to power and chart our way toward a democracy that includes all of us.

“There’s two sayings from North Carolina’s history that are relevant in this moment,” he said as part of our America 250 series. “One is, ‘As goes the South, goes the nation.’ And then there’s this other saying, about North Carolina being the ‘progressive Beacon of the South.’ So if you tie those two things together, the South’s importance to the trajectory of the country, and North Carolina’s ability to hold the South from completely falling into authoritarianism and trying to strive for progressivism — we better get it right here in North Carolina.”

Let’s get to work. Happy Independence Day, North Carolina!

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By Gwen Frisbie-Fulton

Beacon Media

I arrived at my neighborhood meeting a little late, but that didn’t seem to surprise anyone. I took a seat and glanced at the agenda written in marker on butcher paper. Tonight’s topics: Neighborhood newsletter, traffic on Boyd street, illegal dumping concerns, affordable housing conversation, and the upcoming potluck.

Over the years, I’ve sat in hundreds of meetings like this and, if I am being honest, no matter the place or the people they are often the same. There’s debate, there’s questions, working groups are formed. Yet, even with this redundancy, I never tire of them. Community organizing meetings are the drumbeat of our democracy.

And they always have been. This has been on my mind as we prepare to celebrate the Fourth of July and, collectively, reflect on our nation’s 250th anniversary.

While our democracy is a system of governance, it is the organizing of everyday people that has always moved it along. It’s the work of grassroots organizers, community groups, and movements that have advanced our country to live up to our shared ideals, from worker protections to defending the right to vote.

While who we elect matters to our democracy, so does the push and pull of the community members to ask questions, surface issues, uncover solutions and build pressure to make change.

Most of the wins we have achieved and the progress we have made over the last 250 years have been made through organizing.

Here in North Carolina, we have a tremendous organizing history. From the Equal Rights Leagues of the 1870s protecting Black suffrage or the hog waste activism of the 1990s that forced our legislative leaders to pass the Clean Water Responsibility Act, citizen organizing has always been the corrective power guiding North Carolina forward.

What strikes me is how I was never taught this organizing history in school — lessons that are as instructive as the wars and presidents we were tested on.

I went to high school in Raleigh and in Winston-Salem in the late 1990s, and then to college in Chapel Hill, but it wasn’t until I was nearly 40 that I learned about some of North Carolina’s organizing contributions.

In the 1980s, it was organizing in rural Warren County that birthed the modern environmental justice movement. When the state proposed to dump polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-contaminated soil landfill there, local residents, who were overwhelmingly poor and Black, worked to oppose the landfill and led civil disobedience actions to block the trucks from entering their community. While the landfill was eventually created, their work raised national awareness of disproportionate environmental burdens on poor communities and communities of color, and influenced later policy discussions and research on environmental equity.

I also never learned about the massive — and, importantly, multiracial — union organizing in our state from Winston-Salem to Kannapolis, or about the Native activists who successfully organized to secure federal Indian Health Services and educational scholarships for Lumbee students.

And yet, the leadership of North Carolinians in the Civil Rights movement was merely a paragraph in my high school text book.

North Carolina’s organizing legacy continues. Today, service workers in Durham, Raleigh and Charlotte are organizing for dignity on the job and a $15 minimum wage, and rural North Carolinians organizing around coal ash have held Duke Energy to account. And just over the last few months, residents in dozens of towns across the state have come together across ideology to fight data centers and big tech.

So, while my neighborhood meeting probably isn’t going to get a new environmental protection law passed or ensure the continuance of free and fair elections, what we are doing is a part of a long legacy of regular people coming together to try to shape our collective future.

For me, that feels like a good way to celebrate our nation this Fourth of July.

Gwen Frisbie-Fulton is a North Carolina storyteller and organizer who writes about race, class, gender and politics in the South. Follow her work on Substack at Working Class Storytelling.

This opinion column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free anywhere under our guidelines.

By Martin Henson

Beacon Media

Juneteenth is my Fourth of July. It comes with all my favorite things: barbecues, commemorations, elders standing up on stages with kente cloth and canes, and drum circles. I love it all. It’s my day of remembrance.

I celebrate Juneteenth like I personally delivered the 1865 message of freedom to the enslaved in Galveston. In 2021, Juneteenth became a federal holiday. But there are still many who don’t acknowledge it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that designation is taken away someday.

But the United States didn’t give this holiday to me, and, at least for me, it can’t take it away.

I’m celebrating Black freedom from chattel slavery that African American people demanded for ourselves. The U.S. government reluctantly acknowledged this freedom. The Emancipation Proclamation was a peace treaty from a nation at war with Black bodies. The Civil War was the front where this exchange took place, when frequent plantation uprisings made Black bondage untenable and a tool used by the Union to help win the war.

I celebrate Black people, not the document delivered by Abraham Lincoln, the same man who stated in his letter to Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”

To America, Black freedom, my freedom, was a chess move to undermine the Confederacy.

I have the day off on the Fourth of July. I see my family. Sometimes we pop a few fireworks. But I have never celebrated the American Revolution against the British, that independence complicated by the fact that both countries enslaved African people.

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I’m also reminded of the complexities of Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday. It came right alongside the concessions of a Black uprising in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd — we were offered this day as some sort of peace offering. The day is always in danger of being forgotten, always under duress.

We are reminded that our freedom can be removed in an instant: through gerrymandering, through conservative policymakers steadily dismantling the racial and justice-oriented formations that we fought for — the right to be free, the right to vote.

Cabarrus County Commissioner Larry Pittman called Juneteenth “a lie,” as of this writing, just a few days ago.

The country prepares to celebrate its own version of freedom that runs in stark contrast to the contested freedoms the descendants of slavery enjoy.

This year, President Donald Trump demanded that Republican states — supposedly run by GOP lawmakers who say they care about states’ rights — make unprecedented changes to congressional voting maps to eliminate many Black districts entirely to benefit his party’s chances at a majority in the election.

In my state of North Carolina, Greene, Lenoir, Wayne, and Wilson counties, which have significant minority populations, will see that impact this fall as they are gerrymandered from one U.S. House district to another where their votes can be diluted.

Gerrymandering isn’t the only vestige of racial attitudes promoted by the Confederacy. For one example, Fayetteville’s Fort Bragg briefly changed its name to Fort Liberty in an effort to escape its Confederate history, before being reassigned its previous title to another, according to officials at the time, non-confederate military hero by the same name.

I remember joking to my friends that Juneteenth may become illegal, receding back into the moonlight celebrations of our ancestors. But I will not allow my freedom to be seen as so small that it can be gobbled up or deleted by a federal designation — I must remind everyone of American history, the conquest, the blood, and the rusted chains of ships sunk and bodies lost in the sea. That is the legacy of the Juneteenth that we celebrate: not that we are totally free now, but what was done to us will never happen again. It’s a recognition that complicates the history of how America wants to see itself.

The reminder is ever-present, but my holiday, our holiday for those who want to join, is not doom and gloom. My Juneteenth trades “Resistance, Reunion, and Remembrance” for the 4^th of July’s pop culture mantra of “Boating, Barbeque, Beer, and Blowing Things Up”. Some find beauty in the Fourth. For me, Juneteenth surrounds me with joy. My fireworks sound like drumming. My BBQ comes with spades on the table. My tradition welcomes all to join in our celebration of history.

Some days Black folks are tired, and the fleeting recognition marking the end of our bondage is not a deterrent. The holiday was ours first. If it is taken away, Black celebration, Black joy, will never be.

In my family, we may wave a flag or two on the Fourth, but Juneteenth is a sacred reminder just as much as it is a celebration. America’s revolution began in 1776, but my ancestors’ ended in 1865.

It is the most American of things to celebrate freedom. For me, and so many others, Juneteenth is our Fourth of July.

Martin Henson lives in Raleigh. He is an advocate and executive director of BMEN Foundation, which convenes Black men to address issues in their lives and communities. See his work at MartinHSpeaks.com. This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.

Beacon Media

Editor’s note: This column, first published in 2024, has been updated from its original version.

From Sylva to Wilson, from Boone to Shelby, small towns across North Carolina are celebrating Pride—turning small parks and main streets into brightly colored, swirling places of laughter and energy.

There is something distinctly charming about a small-town Pride festival, less commercialized than those in big cities. Like all parades and community events in our small towns, there’s something more organic and homegrown, with small local businesses, families, and church groups working to create wonderment together.

I’ve eaten a rainbow-shaped sugar cookie from a bakery in Elkin so buttery that it melted in my mouth; I’ve helped a young child reattach their glittery fairy wings before prancing off after a parade around a barn in Pittsboro; I’ve listened to a sermon in Kinston where the pastor told us we are all designed to love one another, no exceptions.

To some, these rainbow-drenched barbecues, festivals, dance parties, and church services may feel new. That doesn’t mean gay and lesbian and trans folks haven’t been here all along.

An estimated three million or more people who identify as LGBTQ call rural America home; they were born here, build their families here, and run businesses here. Growing up, my dentist in rural Virginia was gay, my middle school math teacher was lesbian, my great-aunt was trans.

Queerness is as old as humankind—so why are some people acting so surprised it’s here?

Pride has been celebrated in the United States and North Carolina for decades now, but it’s meeting new resistance. Nationally, anti-LGBTQ demonstrations and violence rose high over the last decade. In 2024, law enforcement agencies sharing data with the FBI reported 2,278 hate crimes based on sexual orientation and 527 based on gender identity. Those numbers are down from record-breaking numbers in 2023, but remain high historically, according to The Advocate.

In North Carolina, this has looked in recent years like extremist groups such as the Proud Boys showing up to disrupt a family storytime in Wilmington and neo-Nazis showing up to protest drag queens in Sanford. In South Carolina, a man shot up a gay nightclub in Myrtle Beach in April and has been charged with a hate crime.

UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC-Greensboro, institutions once known for crusading for civil rights, posted and then took down online posts expressing support for Pride because of new restrictions by the Board of Governors.

What did UNC-Chapel Hill’s post say? “The Tar Heels are for everyone.”

For a country that prides itself on freedom and progress, where does this backlash come from– and why now?

Because to explain away a faltering economy, to make Americans peck at each other instead of at failed leadership, they need to find someone to blame. Anti-LGBTQ legislation is being pushed at the state level. In many states, lawmakers have introduced bills that would prevent transgender children from participating in sports and from seeking gender-affirming medical care. As Pride month started this year, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is tracking over 500 anti-LGBTQ bills across the nation, including 9 in North Carolina.

Even when they don’t pass, introducing this legislation and adding them to public discourse alone is harmful. They feed false narratives about “groomers” and “indoctrination,” and imply that it is normal to legislate and control each others’ identities, choices and lives in both private and public spaces.

All of this casts a dark cloud over otherwise sunny and festive Pride celebrations. There has been backlash against the queer community before, both with oppressive legislation and violence, but nothing at this level of political coordination and strategy. So, again, more than 10 years after marriage equality became the law of our land and as more Americans than ever join in Pride celebrations, why is this happening now?

The answer is as old as time: divide and conquer. Instead of appealing to our greater selves and bringing solutions to any of the real pressing issues of the day, some politicians are forever looking for ways to keep us apart, so we don’t vote and act together. With election margins razor thin in places like North Carolina, many have given up on trying to persuade voters to their side and have resorted to rallying voters against each other.

Politicians rarely bully someone their own size. The queer community is an easy target, with only 7 percent of adults in the United States identifying as LGBTQ. The trans community is an even easier target; while 70 percent of Americans say they know someone who is gay, only one in five say they know someone who is trans, and those who are transgender make up an estimated 1.7 percent of the population.

The truth is, these communities are being singled out as politically advantageous boogeymen.

We have seen this divide and conquer scheme work, but I know that people where I come from care about their neighbors and each other’s rights.

Right now, I’m glad to see small towns all across North Carolina pull out their bubble machines and rainbow tutus and turn up the music to play a little joy. Pride celebrations represent and benefit all of us in North Carolina, the state where we want everyone to call home.

Gwen Frisbie-Fulton is a North Carolina storyteller and organizer who writes about race, class, gender and politics in the South. Follow her work on Substack at Working Class Storytelling.

This opinion column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free anywhere under our guidelines.

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Davidson Local

Living Here, You Can Feel the Silence

I’ve lived in Davidson County long enough to know how news travels. When something big is coming, a new school, a factory, a highway change, people talk. Churches talk. Barbershops talk. Facebook explodes. But this time, with a 1,360‑megawatt gas plant that could reshape our county for decades, the loudest sound has been the silence.

Duke Energy has been evaluating land west of Lexington, near the Yadkin River, for months. They’ve filed documents with Raleigh regulators. They’ve briefed investors. They’ve told data‑center developers they’ll have the power they need.

But they haven’t told us… the people who live here, raise kids here, breathe the air here.

And that’s the part that feels like a betrayal.

The Secrecy Is the Story

Duke insists they’re “still evaluating sites.” Yet reporter Lisa Sorg of Inside Climate News uncovered a 1,600‑acre tract on Giles Road that Duke already owns and has been quietly preparing. County officials say they know almost nothing. Neighbors say they’ve heard even less.

This isn’t how you treat a community you respect.

A project of this scale, a major fossil‑fuel plant that will run for 40+ years, demands transparency. Instead, Duke has chosen opacity. They’ve chosen to move first and inform later. They’ve chosen to treat Davidson County like a blank spot on the map, not a place full of people with a stake in their own future.

What It Feels Like From the Ground

From here, on the ground, it feels like we’re being managed, not informed.

ls like Duke believes we’ll be easier to deal with if we don’t know what’s coming until it’s too late to organize.

It feels like they’re counting on the fact that we’re a rural county, that we won’t push back, that we won’t read regulatory filings, that we won’t show up in Raleigh.

It feels like they think we won’t notice.

But we do notice. And we talk. And we care.

This Isn’t About Being “For” or “Against” the Plant

Reasonable people can disagree about natural gas. Some see it as a bridge fuel. Others see it as a step backward. But no one should disagree about this:

A project that affects tens of thousands of people should not be planned in secret.

We deserve:

• Public meetings before decisions are made

• Environmental impact data we can actually read

• Clear communication from Duke Energy, not rumors and leaks

• A seat at the table, not a seat in the audience

This is our county. Our land. Our air. Our future.

What Davidson County Should Demand

• Full transparency about the proposed site, timeline, and emissions

• Independent environmental review, not just Duke’s internal numbers

• Community benefits agreements if the plant moves forward

• A real conversation, not a corporate presentation

Because if Duke Energy wants to build a plant here, they should have the courage to say it plainly, publicly, and early.

I’m not writing this as an activist or an expert. I’m writing it as someone who lives here — someone who loves this county, who wants it to grow, and who refuses to accept that decisions this big should be made behind closed doors.

Duke Energy may control the power grid. But we control our community. And it’s time we remind them of that.

Vance Bailey, a photojournalist, documentary filmmaker, writer, and conservationist, resides in Lexington, North Carolina.

This column was originally published by Davidson Local.

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By Billy Corriher

Beacon Media

In late May, the North Carolina Supreme Court approved Duke Energy’s drastic 2023 price increases. The court rejected arguments from N.C. Attorney General Jeff Jackson and others that the price increase was illegal and would harm Duke’s customers.

The ruling ensured that Duke was able to dip even further into ordinary North Carolinians’ pockets. And because it helps Duke Energy’s bottom line, that means it could make Chief Justice Paul Newby’s family richer. His wife, Macon Newby, owns at least $10,000 (it could be much more; the state doesn’t require officials to tell us) in Duke Energy stock, according to his mandatory 2026 ethics disclosure.

Yet, Newby didn’t recuse himself. It was just the latest example of corruption from the person at the top of North Carolina’s judiciary. The court approved the rate hike by a wide margin, so Newby could have sat out the case and gotten the same result. But it seems Newby prefers to shove his conflict of interest in our faces. The chief has now ruled in the company’s favor at least seven times since 2015. (Editor’s Note: Beacon Media reached out for comment from Newby or the N.C. Supreme Court and has not received a reply.)

North Carolina’s Code of Judicial Conduct says judges must avoid financial dealings that exploit their position or make them appear biased. The rules also state that “a judge should manage his/her investments … to minimize the number of cases in which the judge is disqualified.”

When the Center for Public Integrity wrote about Newby’s conflict in 2023, Gabe Roth of the judicial transparency group Fix the Court said, “Owning even one share of stock brings in that doubt that the judge might be biased.” The ethics rules say that if a party requests it, “a judge should disqualify himself/herself in a proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality may reasonably be questioned,” including when a family member has a financial interest.

In the most recent Duke Energy case, Attorney General Jackson argued that the N.C. The Utilities Commission should never have approved the price increase. The commission’s job is to get the best possible deal for us, Duke Energy’s customers.

Instead, the commission approved an even steeper increase for Duke Energy Carolinas—which serves the Western half of the state and the Triangle—than it did for Duke Energy Progress customers in the East. In her dissent on that case, Justice Anita Earls said the court should have overturned the commission’s decision because of this disparate treatment. She pointed out that, collectively, Duke Energy Carolinas customers will pay $129 million more than the company’s other customers.

People across the state asked the commission not to approve the increases, which Earls noted will benefit Duke’s shareholders. She calculated that about one-fifth of a typical residential customer’s monthly bill would go to pay shareholders.

“The record is replete with evidence that rising energy costs are hurting North Carolina consumers,” Earls wrote. “Yet Duke Energy seeks to increase rates while it posts record profits.”

The cost of just about everything is rising fast, but Duke Energy is the only big company in the state that has had to get the courts to sign off on its price increases. It’s clear that either Newby’s family should divest themselves of Duke Energy stock, or he should sit out cases involving the company.

Newby, however, has a history of ignoring ethics rules. In 2021, he wrote a ruling in favor of an adoption agency that he helped found. He has flagrantly violated rules prohibiting campaign contributions and other political activity. In 2022, he pushed out the head of the Judicial Standards Commission after she cracked down on such political activities.

The chief justice has worked with Republican legislators to transform the judiciary and give himself more power. He has used this power to institute a clear double standard on ethics. Newby has tried to sanction his Democratic colleagues while letting Republican judges off the hook. A 2024 ProPublica story revealed that the state Supreme Court refused to sanction two Republican judges who admitted to violating ethics rules. They admitted it!

State Rep. Marcia Morey, a Democrat and former judge, has cosponsored two constitutional amendments that would reform judicial ethics and clean up the mess Newby has created. They would make recusal rules mandatory and reform the judicial ethics enforcement process, if they can get on the ballot one day.

With his final term ending in 2028, Newby apparently no longer feels the need to appear impartial. Again and again, he puts his own interests and those of corporations over workers and consumers. North Carolina is poorer for it.

Billy Corriher is the State Courts Manager at People’s Parity Project Action. His new book is “Justice for the People - The Anita Earls Story.”

This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.

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By Anthony Flaccavento

Rural Urban Bridge Initiative

In the summer of 2023 in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, eight volunteers from the county Democratic Party joined local church members to restore a home for an elderly woman and her five grandchildren. Their home had been damaged by fire, leaving them to live in their garage for months. It took days to repair, paint, clean and make the home habitable again.

This was the first of what now totals nearly one hundred projects undertaken by the Page County, Va., chapter of Community Works since 2022. I and my colleagues at the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI) formed Community Works in Page and other rural counties to test a simple proposition: What would happen if liberals and Democrats in rural, “red” areas started working to fix local problems, side by side with their more conservative neighbors? We wanted to see if animosity and mistrust would decline. We hoped that putting “love thy neighbor” into practice might be the first step in reversing extreme political polarization.

Those of us leading RUBI believed restoring trust was a prerequisite to restoring our democracy and rebuilding our nation.

Across the country, more and more people are embracing this idea of community service as a means to fix local problems and overcome partisan mistrust. Some of that energy is emerging from rural Democratic Party chapters in states as different as Minnesota and Wyoming. Others, like Brickyard, are completely non-partisan. In that case, local veterans are key leaders of community service work.

A Ford Foundation assessment found that “when people come together around a concrete, local problem and a commitment to their shared future, the labels and divisions that dominate national politics tend to fade into the background.”

This is exactly what Meredith Dean, National Director of Community Works, has found. “We’ve seen how working side by side with neighbors, whether picking up trash, packing food boxes for seniors, installing smoke alarms or doing home repairs begins to change views, in both directions,” Dean told me. “National politics, and the media surrounding it, intensifies partisanship and mistrust of everyone on the ‘other team,’ whereas Community Works refocuses hearts and minds on what’s possible when we work together.”

Liberals in rural areas know first-hand how bad our reputation is with the great majority of our neighbors. Mistrust of liberal culture and the Democratic Party is widespread and intense. Our “brand” stinks.

As a result, progressives and liberals often keep to themselves except when joining public protests led by like-minded folks. I get this. I’ve been part of many such gatherings myself. But reaching out to our conservative neighbors is often viewed as pointless or even dangerous.

Under these circumstances, it’s common for rural Democratic Committees to struggle with dwindling numbers, so much so that scores of rural counties have no local Democratic Committee. Young people in particular are staying away. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Community Works turns this around. With technical and financial support, the program facilitates regular, concrete, non-political local action that includes a local Democratic Committee. Community Works is having major positive impacts in Virginia, Georgia and, bit by bit, five other states where chapters have launched.

But does it actually change hearts and minds? A just-released study from Nick Jacobs, who leads the non-partisan Public Policy Lab, says yes. According to Jacobs, “Across six counties within two states and across multiple outcome measures, Community Works consistently reduces the intensity of partisan polarization.” In other words, working together to solve local problems starts us down the path of rebuilding trust. Less talk, more action works.

The study had four key findings about residents of Community Works counties:

• They were less likely to view members of the opposing party with hostility or coldness.

• They were more likely to rely on their personal experiences than on party labels when judging who to trust or who cares about their community.

• They were statistically more likely to judge parties based on how well they govern, rather than automatically giving Republicans more credit.

• They were more likely to see local Democrats as distinct from national Democrats, judging them more by their community roles than by national political stereotypes.

The Trust for Civic Life has pursued a very similar strategy, built around “community hubs” which coordinate local work. Like the hundreds of volunteers involved in Community Works, they have found that, “National problems don’t get solved at the national level alone; they get solved in local communities. Polarization and isolation grow when people see each other only through national narratives that feel distant, abstract, and often adversarial.…Communities that know how to work through differences are more resilient, less susceptible to the forces that thrive on division, and capable of sustaining a healthy democracy.”

Community Works has moved beyond the pilot stage and now has chapters in rural communities in seven states. The work of local engagement is scaling up steadily, with nearly 600 community events undertaken by Community Works chapters, involving hundreds of civic organizations, community groups, veterans groups, churches and more. Stuff is getting done. Local Democratic Committees are rebounding. And people are rethinking their views of one another, moderating the intensity of their partisan views, and rebuilding trust.

As a farmer and one of the leaders of RUBI, I believe nothing is more important to rebuilding a healthy democracy.

To learn more about Community Works, contact Meredith Dean, meredith@ruralurbanbridge.org, or attend one of the Introduction to Community Works virtual meetings at 6:30 p.m. on the fourth Wednesday of each month. Sign up here.

Anthony Flaccavento is the Executive Director of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, the parent organization of Community Works. He lives, farms and works in southwest Virginia.

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This Op-Ed Piece is from OtherWords.org. See the full article here.

Even President Trump’s own Justice Department is having a hard time grappling with Trump’s brazen money grab from the IRS — and, by extension, American taxpayers.

First, Trump attempted to enrich himself and his family by suing the federal government for $10 billion — almost the entire annual budget of the IRS — for releasing Trump’s tax returns.

This is a first on so many levels.

Trump is the first nominated presidential candidate since the 1980s not to release his tax returns. Every other presidential candidate has voluntarily disclosed their tax returns as a gesture of openness.

Trump is the first president in history to sue the federal government for personal damages, and to the whopping tune of $10 billion. But legal experts, including many at the Justice Department, doubted the case would go very far.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams noted that Trump issued an order binding government lawyers to represent his own viewpoint and questioned whether Trump could sue an agency that he controls. Who would defend the government against Trump? The Justice Department never issued any legal statement nor sent lawyers to any of the proceedings.

Second, just as it appeared Judge Williams would dismiss the case, Trump negotiated a settlement with his own Justice Department’s lawyers establishing a $1.776 billion fund to pay off January 6 rioters and others who were prosecuted for their efforts to prevent the transition of power following the 2020 election.

While Trump and the Justice Department lawyers asserted the spending decisions will be made by a five-member commission, the five members are all appointed by the attorney general, four directly and the fifth selected by the attorney general in consultation with congressional leaders.

Since Attorney General Todd Blanche is a Trump loyalist, the commission is not likely to be independent. What is clear is that this is nothing more than a slush fund to reward Trump’s friends and those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 — yet another self-interested act no president in history has ever done.

Two Jan. 6 police officers who defended the Capitol filed a lawsuit to prevent any payouts from Trump’s slush fund. Filed in U.S. District Court in D.C., Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges argue that the fund violates the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on using federal money to “pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” More than 150 officers were injured in the violent attack.

And some members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, are pressing congressional action to nullify the fund, asserting that the administration has no authority to establish such a fund without congressional oversight or approval.

If you think Trump’s lawsuit and negotiated settlement are egregious violations of the public trust, Trump took another even more galling and unprecedented action. Attorney General Blanche announced an amendment to the negotiated settlement the very next day that would protect Trump and his family from any lawsuits and investigations by governmental entities, including tax audits.

The one-page amendment reads that the government would be FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED (emphasis original) from pursuing current tax claims against Trump and his businesses. This is not only immoral, it’s also likely illegal.

Trump stands to personally gain $100 million or more from such an agreement. Furthermore, 26 U.S.C. 7217 prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” interfering in tax audits. Though the law does not seem to apply to the attorney general, it could be argued that Blanche is acting at the behest of Trump and thus violating the law.

Trump is now clearly acting purely for his own selfish interest. Voters see it, the courts see it, and even congressional Republicans are beginning to question Trump’s leadership.

Craig Holman is the government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

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Beacon Media

LUMPKIN, GEORGIA — The first thing I packed for the federal detention center in Stewart County, Georgia, was hope.

The night before my trip to the private federal detention center in rural Georgia, I stood in front of my closet thinking about what my friend Suzy Geronimo might want to wear when she got out. A dress. Makeup. Shoes. I thought about what she might want to eat after weeks inside detention. I thought about whether she would want silence, music, rest, or simply the chance to feel like herself again.

I packed a suitcase, believing that there was a good chance I was about to bring my friend home.

Suzy is a well-recognized trans leader and longtime community organizer in North Carolina with deep and long-held relationships within the Latino community. She has spent more than 30 years in North Carolina advocating for immigrant communities, those who identify as LGBTQ, for public health, and preaching civic participation across North Carolina.

A trans immigrant does not engender much goodwill with very many folks at the General Assembly.

And yet it was there in Raleigh that I first got to know Suzy, fearlessly making the argument for all of those issues anyway to any lawmaker who would talk to her.

Even though she’s been outspoken on these issues for more than 30 years, her status, like so many, is being questioned and she is fighting to stay in her adopted country. A traffic ticket and other brief entanglements with police landed her in this remote detention center.

As I waited at least four hours inside the detention center in Lumpkin, Georgia, for Suzy’s bond hearing to begin, I stared at a wall filled with more than 100 names of people waiting for immigration court that same day.

Mexican. Salvadoran. Honduran. Guatemalan. Venezuelan. Colombian. Jamaican.

I listened to stories about men with children waiting for them at home. I heard about families trying to gather bond money. I listened to stories about people who had lived in the United States for decades and found themselves suddenly locked inside a detention center hundreds of miles away from the communities that know and love them.

One man had ended up in detention after a car accident. The accident wasn’t his fault — but he was picked up and detained anyway.

Another had children with special needs depending on him.

Case after case, what unfolded in those detention center courtrooms did not resemble the caricatures many Americans have been taught to fear. In fact, these people were just so ordinary.

That is the part we rarely talk about.

The national conversation around immigration has become so distorted that many people imagine detention centers as places holding dangerous criminals. But after spending time inside, I left with a very different understanding. The government’s own statistics earlier this year showed that fewer than 14% of the people arrested by federal immigration authorities during the Trump administration’s time have a violent criminal record, according to CBS News.

What I saw there was the vast majority of people trapped inside a system built for fear, uncertainty, and isolation.

When I finally saw Suzy, I whispered her name.

Her real name.

Suzy.

And I watched her face soften for a moment.

Because in a place designed to strip people of dignity, even hearing your name can remind you who you are.

Suzy looked like she was freezing during the hearing. She held onto her arms tightly the entire time, her body tense, her skin covered in goosebumps from the cold air blasting inside the courtroom. I could see her anxiety. I wanted to take her hand, breathe with her for a moment, remind her that she was not alone and that people back home were waiting for her.

I could see how detention had worn her and others down, physically, emotionally, mentally.

What I witnessed inside the detention center was not public safety. It was human suffering.

During a separate, prior visit to this detention center, I watched a grandmother walk out holding the hands of two little girls after they had visited their father. The girls began crying almost immediately because they did not know when they would see him again.

The grandmother tried to stay strong for them, but once they walked outside, you could see the weight of it all hit her at once. Later, I learned the girls had begun struggling in school and dealing with insomnia.

They were six and eight years old.

Suzy did not come home with me after that hearing on Thursday, May 21. The prosecutor cited the Laken Riley Act in keeping her detained, and another hearing is expected to be scheduled soon. That Act passed with a bipartisan majority in Congress in 2025 and requires the detainment of those who have been charged (but not necessarily convicted) of certain crimes, ostensibly to keep communities safer.

But the people inside this detention center were not the caricatures Americans have been taught to fear. They are parents. Workers. Grandparents. Community members.

Suzy had hoped that bond would be set and she’d be able to fight the charges from home. I was the only person, both from the media and as a friend, who had been able to make this hearing on short notice.

I’m grateful I was there. Suzy saw a familiar face. She heard her real name. And for at least a moment, she knew she had not been forgotten and that she was not alone.

Iliana Santillán is an immigrant from Mexico, founder of the movement group Brava NC, and a leader advancing civic engagement and political power-building in North Carolina. Iliana is a collaborator on Beacon Media’s Latino community media project, El Faro.This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.

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Editor’s Note: Beacon Media, through our Latino community media arm El Faro, has been extensively covering the case of Suzy Gerónimo, a well-known community activist who has spent years lobbying for trans and immigrant rights in North Carolina. She was arrested for a traffic violation and other charges in Franklin County and has been detained by immigration authorities fighting their push to deport her since March 17 at the federal detention center in Stewart, Georgia. Suzy’s roots are deep in North Carolina — advocates and friends in our state have all praised her tireless work and deep relationships in the Latino community over 30 years.

Iliana went to the remote detention center in Georgia because of Suzy’s importance to her community and because it offers an opportunity to understand how the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is affecting North Carolinians.

Continue to follow El Faro’s work on Facebook and Instagram and here on Substack.

The following is translated (edited from AI) of Iliana’s above Spanish-language video.

Today I traveled to Stewart, Georgia, hoping to leave with different news about my friend and leader Suzy Gerónimo. We were hoping that a judge would grant her release on bond or at least some kind of relief after weeks detained far from her community and from the life she has built for more than thirty years now in North Carolina.

But today there was no decision. The hearing ended with another date scheduled (potentially) as soon as next week, after the federal government used the controversial Laken Riley Act to argue that Suzy should remain detained while her immigration process continues. And, honestly, that was difficult to watch, because today in that room they were not talking about criminals, they were talking about separated families, about entire communities living in uncertainty, about a Latina trans woman and community leader who has dedicated years to fighting for other people.

Being inside a detention center and seeing how an entire community waits for news and answers changes your perspective quickly. Suzy did not end up here for being a threat to anyone. And while we wait for the next hearing, there is an entire community here waiting with her.

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Hey, Christian,

You don’t know me.

My name is Jacob Brooks. I’m from Ennice, North Carolina — Alleghany County — and just like you, I am represented by U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, even though you’re in Greensboro and I’m way far West. Ask your teacher what “gerrymandering” means and it’ll help explain how we’re so far apart and represented by the same person.

Look man, I saw what happened. I read your letter. I’m so proud of you for using your Constitutionally protected rights to advocate for strong public policy changes. I’m renewed by your courage to write to your member of Congress and make a case for a cause you so deeply believe in — in this case, climate change.

Not to mention, a tax rebate for an electric vehicle purchase is a great idea! I would absolutely take advantage. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Jeep Wrangler, but it’s killing me at the pump.

I’m sorry Congresswoman Foxx was rude, dismissive, and ugly in her response to you. “Incidentally, please ask your teacher to explain propaganda to you,” Foxx wrote. “While I will never be able to know, my guess is that your teachers will not give you a good educational experience and help you learn to think as they are too interested in indoctrinating you. How sad.”

Do not let her response deter you! Keep fighting for what you believe in. Keep using your voice, your rights, your brain — to push for good public policy. That is exactly what this country is supposed to be about.

And, as a former public school teacher, I am so proud to see that we are still raising kids like you — curious, generous, and willing to stand up.

Now, I want to tell you something.

I was in fourth grade once. And that was the year I became civically engaged — just like you just did. It was 2001. And our country was under attack. But Christian, in that darkness — there was so much light. We rallied around each other. We listened to each other. We flew flags off our front porches. And somewhere in all of that, I fell in love with this country.

I really did.

And I hope — I genuinely hope — that Virginia Foxx does not take that from you.

Because this is a special country. The longest-enduring democracy in the world. And that doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because people speak up. People who write letters. People like you.

Anyways, I’m proud to call you a fellow North Carolinian, and I hope our paths cross someday. Maybe on a campaign trail. If they do — remind me to tell you about the time I witnessed Congresswoman Foxx stuff dinner rolls into her purse.

Until then: keep going, man. Put the pedal to the metal, and don’t stop for nothin’.

Here’s to changing the world by changing ours.

Jacob Brooks is a writer, comedian, and advocate. He is the N.C. Director for Patriotic Millionaires. This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how many Latino families in North Carolina are quietly calculating risk before doing ordinary things.

Attending a graduation party. Traveling for Mother’s Day. Taking children to appointments, soccer games, church, festivals, or birthdays. For many families, especially mixed-status families, even joyful moments now come with a second layer of thought: Is it safe? Is it worth the risk? Should we stay close to home?

That is part of North Carolina right now too, and maybe that is why, over one weekend in April, the joy felt so significant.

On a Friday night in Wilson, N.C., at Casa Azul’s Me Siento Muy Excited festival, I found myself surrounded by a kind of intimacy and rootedness that is becoming harder to find. The Whirligig Station filled with Spanish music, families greeted one another warmly, teenagers posed for pictures, and children weaved through groups of relatives while entire sections of the crowd sang Selena songs together without hesitation.

The atmosphere reflected the people behind it. Two sisters, Flor and Elizabeth Herrera, are from Wilson and have spent years investing in their community, creating the kinds of spaces they wished existed when they grew up. You could feel that care. Families lingered instead of rushing home. Young people switched freely between Spanish and English. Parents looked proud watching their children occupy public space so naturally.

Standing there beside the baseball stadium where the Wilson Warbirds play, watching Latino families fully occupy one of the city’s most recognizable public spaces, I kept thinking about how much North Carolina has changed over the last few decades. Not suddenly, but steadily, through work, sacrifice, and deep roots that many people still underestimate.

North Carolina’s Latino population now surpasses one million people, roughly 11% of the state, and it remains one of the youngest populations here. Across rural towns and growing suburbs alike, Latino families are helping shape the future of this state in real time.

We are raising children here, opening businesses here, graduating here, buying homes here, and building traditions here. We are not separate from North Carolina’s story. We are part of what this state is becoming.

That reality became even more visible at La Grande’s Latin American Festival in Knightdale.

Wilson felt intimate and rooted in local community. Knightdale felt expansive. Thousands of people moved through the festival grounds while music carried across the crowd and conversations unfolded everywhere at once. Families gathered around food stands, young people moved confidently through the space, and local businesses, community organizations, and elected officials all shared the same environment.

What stayed with me most was the feeling of recognition. There was an unspoken understanding in the atmosphere, a kind of collective exhale.

For a few hours, people allowed themselves to be fully present with one another instead of consumed by fear, headlines, political rhetoric, or uncertainty.

Because what I witnessed that weekend was not simply celebration. It was community functioning exactly the way it is supposed to. People reminding one another, consciously or not, that they are not alone here.

And in this political moment, that kind of public joy carries weight.

As immigration enforcement and an effort by the Trump administration has targeted U.S. citizens and undocumented Latinos alike, so many are living in an environment of fear and invisibility. But these festivals reflected something entirely different. They reflected communities choosing visibility, connection, and pride anyway.

Walking back to my car after the La Grande event, I remember turning around one last time and looking at the crowd, the lights, the music, the families still dancing and talking long after sunset. I felt proud not only because of the scale of the festival, but because of what it represented. Latino communities in North Carolina are not shrinking inward despite the pressure many families are navigating. We are continuing to build outward through culture, business, relationships, language, and community.

That is the part of Latino life in North Carolina I wish more people understood.

We are not simply reacting to politics or surviving difficult moments. We are actively shaping the future of this state every single day, and these festivals make that visible in ways statistics and headlines never fully can.

Seeing other people outside and visible should encourage all of us, regardless of race or where we live. Go to the Latino festival in your town. Visit the local panadería. Support the family-owned restaurant you keep meaning to try. Spend time in spaces that allow you to encounter the people helping shape your community beyond headlines or assumptions.

Because the future of North Carolina is already here, and it is rooted, interconnected, and impossible to ignore.

Iliana Santillán is an immigrant from Mexico, founder of the movement group Brava NC, and a statewide leader advancing civic engagement and political power-building in North Carolina. She is a collaborator on Beacon Media’s Latino community media project, El Faro.

This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.

Subscribe now