Episode 7: Venezuela and The Board of Education Race

“The 3 Guys Podcast: Episode 7 – Venezuela and the Board of Education Race” opens with a hard-edged conversation about Trump’s lightning raid to grab Nicolás Maduro, the slaughter of Maduro’s security forces, and the remarkable lack of U.S. combat deaths. The hosts hammer the left’s sudden concern for “international law,” walk through America’s ugly regime-change record, and debate whether Trump just executed a ruthless but effective reset in Venezuela or lit the fuse on another long-term entanglement.​

The episode then shifts to New Hanover County’s Board of Education primaries, where low-turnout, loud ideologues, and culture-war battles over book “porn,” DEI, and school closures collide with real issues like abuse scandals, overcrowding, and learning loss. The hosts profile Democratic and Republican contenders, question whether 2022-style anti-institutional anger will still sell, and lay out how incumbents and challengers on the right can run on having “fixed” schools while Democrats lean into book-banning narratives and anti-Trump energy.

Transcript

0:06

Welcome to the three guys podcast, I'm Reuel Sample, joined as always on my left by Nick Craig. Hey, Will. How's it going? Happy New Year. Happy New Year. And Ben Shachman. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Risen from the dead. Yeah. Everybody on Facebook was pulling for you. I appreciate that. Yeah. And it's so glad that you're back. Yes. Happy to be back. The common cold is still the reigning champ, as far as I'm concerned, taking people out for weeks. Geez. Forget RSV and COVID. It's just the old school. Yeah. It's all on one of us right now. Just good old fashioned chest cold. Just knock you out. There's no flu like the old flu, I guess. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you're doing well. Well, welcome back. Thank you. And Nick, you've got some great news this week. You are now back on the radio up in Charlotte? Yes, sir. Yeah. I got the podcast picked up in Charlotte. So the show's on in a somewhat condensed edited form on WBT radio in Charlotte nightly. So yeah, good to have an opinion show back in the old airwaves as they say. Congratulations. Thanks. We had absolutely nothing to do with that, but I'm glad that you're doing it. I didn't really have anything to do with it either, if we're being blatantly honest. I got to ask, do you now feel like there's any additional pressure to keep it between the lines? No. Right. No, not necessarily. The only thing would be any level of profanity, which I typically tend not to use, but I mean, especially with the president, every once in a while, he'll throw a swear word into something. So being a little bit more mindful of that, but yeah, not really. And it's in the evening. So you could like bleep yourself. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Others do. Yep. Absolutely. So, well, congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate that. And you're still at WHQR? Yes. And a good kickoff for the year? Yeah. Yeah. So far, so good. We got everyone back in the newsroom this week and it's, you know, just an avalanche of emails from very important things that people would send us like on New Year's Eve, like you said. You need to cover this right now. Right now. Yeah. So. Well, speaking of kicking off the new year, President Trump kicked it off in grand fashion last Friday. Kicking some doors in the new year. Yeah. So Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro and his wife were taken into custody in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Zero servicemen killed. I guess seven injured. And the man renditioned back here to the United States. Yeah. A little bit of a forced extradition, I guess, is probably the way that you would describe it really. The part that you just mentioned, and I've seen some conflicting reports, and again, the accuracy is kind of hard, but something like 75 private security or government security men that were protecting Maduro were apparently all killed. So it was a slaughter from their vantage point and to not have a single U.S. service member be wounded to the point of death, I mean, obviously seven people, I don't know. We don't know the extent of their injuries, is absolutely remarkable. I mean, you're going into some random ass house at 2.30 in the morning. I would imagine machine guns and everything else flying and the fact that nobody got killed on the U.S. side is, talk about high risk, man. The thing, I mean, just from a military point of view, and this is not my bailiwick, but as I understand it, Russia was providing some relatively up-to-date military hardware, including anti-aircraft missiles and other stuff. And I mean, geez louise, this is not a good product review, like zero out of five stars would not purchase these Russian anti-aircraft missiles again. I think there was one aircraft, one U.S. aircraft that was damaged, but was still flyable. So yeah, if you think about it, you had the Russian anti-aircraft, you had the Iranian suicide drones, and then you had the Cuban security forces. This is why you don't get your national defense at a yard sale. That's exactly right. I say this though, and I mentioned this point on my podcast this week, it was either Monday or Tuesday. You talk about a high risk, high reward thing. And if you had woken up, if the United States citizens had woken up Saturday morning and learned Maduro was not captured and 15 service members got killed, we would be having a very different conversation. We'd be having a very different conversation. So you talk about laying it all out on the line. I mean, obviously they had good intel, but you're jumping into a relatively fluid and dynamic situation. That to me is the most remarkable thing at all. We could be talking about the president being impeached for allowing U.S. service members to get killed today had that situation unfolded, which presumably there was a semi-high probability of something like that. There's no 0% risk military mission. I mean, I don't know what the percentage is. Is it 20? Is it 30? Is it 40? I mean, you're storming somebody's house in a foreign country. I have a friend who's in the Air Force who told me just putting that many planes in a theater with no armed people on the other side runs as a non-negligible risk. Yeah. Somebody was saying the reason why they had Delta Force do it and not Navy SEALs is that they would be podcasting about it all the time. By the way, Delta Force is headquartered here at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Delta Force doesn't exist. It's officially non-existent. The people that would make up Delta Force, had it existed, are based at Fort Bragg here in North Carolina. I'll clean up my rhetoric. Ben, on the right, they are saying this is what we voted for. But on the left, it's a little bit tough because they're saying Maduro was a thug. He was indicted. He's no doubt behind all the drugs and the crime that's coming into Venezuela. But the answer from the left is this was unconstitutional and this was against international law. Yeah. I mean, that's largely what I've heard. I would say, just to go back real quick, this is what we voted for. Trump routinely said he was against regime change. And I think the question, kind of to Nick's point, was this is a huge gamble. And we still don't know what it means to quote unquote run Venezuela. There is a world in which we get sucked into another forever, if not forever war, then forever protectorship or some kind of long-term onerous thing where U.S. service members are spending considerable time in Venezuela, again, in a non-zero risk situation. That's going to be really unpopular with the people who voted for Trump. You remember some of the amazing speeches that Trump gave when he was just destroying Biden on Afghanistan and saying that we will never do this again. If he then turns around and does that again, that is a really difficult situation for him to be in. If he does pull off a basically bloodless palace coup, and it does look like there was, it's hard for me to believe that there was no inside information coming out of Venezuela to the U.S. intelligence agency. There had to be somebody in there. Like, how do you have a map of this guy's house, which has apparently some like steel-protected security room? And like, unlike other regime changes where we have handed over power to whoever the other guys were, often to our detriment, you know, we're like, well, the Ba'athists were bad. Surely the Shias are fine. And that doesn't always work out, right? 30 years later. Yeah. Or, you know, maybe the Taliban would do a good job. In this case, you know, the ruling party is still in power. So it feels like there was good intel. And there is, so there's a possibility in which he pulls this off. He is able to engineer some stabilizing measures in Venezuela and that with zero cost in terms of American soldiers. And I could see that being pretty popular because he could then, Trump could then say, this is how you do it. You don't, you know, you don't cook up some bullshit about yellow cake uranium and stay for 30 years. You know, you get in, you get out. So I think it's, it's, you know, there's a lot of people who are trying to armchair quarterback this, but you really don't know how it's going to play out. So as far as what we voted for, it's not really clear yet. Yeah. Well, before you answer all the rules question, I want to jump in on that because that is probably the biggest risk. And there, there was criticism on the right to the point that Ben just made of the United States has a horrific track record with regime change. I mean, there's very few examples in history that you can point to if MAGA make America great again, or America first taking over and putting in a new regime in Venezuela does not inherently fit that definition. So there is a lot on the line with the MAGA base that this does not turn into 30 years of occupying Venezuela. He's got to do this correctly or his base rightfully so is going to say, and you're different than George Bush. How? Well, which is exactly why he, he did not put in the opposition leader who probably won the election, but she didn't have the backing of the present military system. She doesn't have the backing of the present parliamentary. So you're right. It's really not a regime change. It's sort of a reset of the regime. Yeah. I think people will be, you know, not totally swayed by that kind of nuance. They'll be swayed by is the US investing time, energy and, you know, young American men while the American economy is suffering. And if the economy starts to do better and we're not doing that kind of stuff in Venezuela, I think it will not end up being a giant liability for Trump. As far as what's being said on the left, I think you're right. I think some people are focused on the international law of it all, which I think folks on the right are pretty much dismissed because one, it's an unenforceable system. It gets violated all the time. There's a pretty heady track record of the United States doing stuff that violated international law. Our past misadventures in Latin and South America to the point, I mean, if you want to say, look, let's just talk about this, our own backyard, quote unquote, you can talk about Nordiega. You could talk about the Sandinistas. There's lots of stuff we've done that has not been kosher by international law. So that's, I don't think that's a what about. I think, you know, I think there are some people who have said, yeah, you know, Republican and Democratic presidents have routinely just dismissed international law when it's inconvenient. I think the more compelling argument is whether or not this is constitutional. I think, you know, Ben Shapiro had a good bit about this where he's, you know, the jury's kind of out because, again, it depends if we're still involved in this 60 days later and Congress is, you know, asleep in a coat room somewhere, then that feels unconstitutional. Which is not that. Which is not totally uninvolved. No, it's a government shutdown, the 31st of January. I think one of the more compelling arguments from the left is if we are going to be an influential international power, do we risk some level of hypocrisy when we're like, well, when we don't like a leader, you know, and from our point of view, Maduro is very bad. Maduro was a bad guy. Yeah, he was. Yes. And I think at least some folks on the left have done a good job of saying both things can be true. We don't like how Trump did this. We're not sad he's gone. But I think the best argument from the left is, does this now make it even harder for us to criticize the Putins and the President Xi's who say, well, as far as we're concerned, the people running Taiwan are bad people. Right. You know, they're not running the economy the way that we think it should be run. The people in Taiwan are not living the kind of life they should be living in the People's Republic of China. You know, do we open ourselves even more to criticisms of hypocrisy? Because, again, this would not be the first criticism of us flouting laws when they don't suit us. So I think that's that's the best argument from the left. I think the argument from the right, I mean, you guys probably articulate this better than I can, but it seems to be focusing on this is not that big of a deal. You guys, this was a limited strike. You know, we're not going to get sucked into this and ultimately it'll be good for everyone. I actually think it was a big deal. I don't know if the right is going to to push it down as a non-big deal. I think I think you're right is that the international, the whole idea of the international law, and I talked about it on this morning's update, there is no such thing as an international law because you cannot, you cannot, there's no body to adjudicate, you can't adjudicate it. And it's really as Ben Shapiro said, and I'm so thrilled that you listen to Ben Shapiro. Everyone's welcome. Not an everyday habit. Ben, if you're listening, you've got a new fan. That there's no such thing as international law. It's international schoolyard politics. Is that the biggest people on the block, strong countries do what they want and the weaker countries do what they can't. And so the only reason, talking about Taiwan, the only reason why China doesn't go into Taiwan is not because of international law. It's because China knows they're going to get blown out of the water by everybody else if they decide to do that. And as soon as they think that they won't, they will. Exactly. And that's why Russia went into Ukraine because international law says that you can't do that. But Russia says, yeah, we can get away with that. I think, I mean, just a minor point, a whole other podcast for a whole other time. But I do think Russia's in a more desperate internal domestic situation. You know, their birth rate's cratering, their economy's cratering. They can't wait for military developments because they are not advancing at the same rate as China. China can play a long game in a way that Russia, Russia has to distract protesters, they have to distract angry people. They need more human beings. That's why they're stealing babies out of Ukraine. So Russia's motivated by desperation and a little bit of a sense that maybe they thought they could bully around the Western powers. Yeah. You know, one of the things, to Ben's point, is if this does not turn into full-on U.S. occupation, poor Marco Rubio, I mean, this sorry son of a bitch is now like the head coach for seven NFL teams, he's the president of Israel. But it's like the Eagles. Yeah. The Eagles, the Cleveland Browns. I mean, this poor bastard. He's going to be the Shah of Iran. Yeah. I mean, he'll be running Cuba shortly, which he's got, you know, strong roots. His father was, I think, 100, his father, I think, came over to the United States from Cuba. So this poor bastard has got seemingly every responsibility. He's not going to be the governor of Minnesota before too long. So if there's not long-term military involvement, long-term United States running Venezuela, then I think the arguments being made largely on the right now come to pass. If not, as we talked about a couple of minutes ago, then this is going to be seen as a not America first, a not MAGA, more of a neocon establishment kind of operation that people didn't like. They didn't like the Mitt Romneys. They didn't like the John McCains and the Bush administration. Now, in retrospect, because of a lot of those things, that's why there's so much to gamble from this said operation. And it feels like people around Trump understand that. They understand that, you know, most Americans remember Colin Powell humiliating himself. Most people remember, you know, endless misadventures in Afghanistan and have been trying very, very hard to put a lot of daylight between the neoconservative approach and even Barack Obama's approach, which is kind of a little bit more neoliberal and what Trump is doing. But Trump keeps saying neocon shit, like bringing up like, oh, we're going to get all this oil. And people are like, oh, my God, don't say that. Sixty million barrels. Didn't he actually post that the oil have been put in barrels, even though they haven't actually put oil in barrels. I don't know. But he keeps saying stuff that, you know, Trump himself keeps saying stuff that feels more imperialistic than tactical. I saw a post yesterday. I don't know who to attribute it to. It was some parody meme account I follow on X. And the point was that a lot of these things, the words coming out of Trump's mouth about oil and barrels is like 1980s businessman style shit, which is what he is. And so like, it's kind of interesting, you know, the OK Boomer meme and stuff like that. Like, yeah, here's a guy in his 70s who was incredibly prominent business wise when those kinds of comments, oil and barrels and that kind of shit was like literal gold. The other point that I think that is interesting about all of this is some of the left reaction with the previous administration having offered a 25 million dollar reward on January 9th of 2025. So a year ago, offering 25 million dollar reward for the rest of Maduro. And it's it's interesting. I saw Harris and some other folks in the previous administration posted on X about that. And their ratio was just brutal with people saying, is this you? I mean, like this was your comment. So it's some, as Ben noted earlier, some can say, yeah, we can chew and walk up. We can chew and chew gum and walk here. Maduro's a bad guy. We shouldn't have done it this way. Then there's other folks on the left that are seemingly saying nothing bad about Maduro. Like, oh, he seemingly should have stayed in there, which is insane. Or like crying crocodile tears. This is the guy that it's like, it's amazing that Trump has got some of these people on the left. And we see this on the other side, too. But Trump has got these people so broken on the left that they're the no kings people who have been protesting every weekend for a freaking year now are like this king. Right. I mean, I think it was not the worst. It was 2020 where William Barr put a 15 million dollar bounty under Trump. Put the original 15 million dollar bounty out for Maduro. And that's when he was indicted, too. And that's when he was indicted. The indictment was never publicized at the time, but that is when he was indicted. And then, yeah, the Biden administration raised it to 25 and then Trump doubled it to 50 million in August. And, you know, you could tell there was some deep state consensus that Maduro needed to go. I mean, I don't think anyone in the Pentagon thought he was good. I mean, there are obviously mixed feelings about this amongst Venezuelans. But I think there are people who don't like the idea of the U.S. running around their country because there's a history of that. But I don't think that they're sad to see a man who has destroyed their country and plunged them into poverty. They're eating dogs off the street. Exactly. I don't think they're sad about that. I do think it is funny that there were some. Yeah, I think it's funny. I think that leftists who just fell into the Trump derangement syndrome trap and said, well, if Trump does it, it has to be bad. And then we have to, you know, it's checkers and we can there's only two colors. And if we're not the red checkers, we're going to be the black checkers. Which means if Trump is doing this, then we have to find some good thing about Maduro. And it's like, no, you can do both. I'm going to show a little bit of my ignorance on this. Unlike everybody else on social media, I would not consider myself an expert in Venezuela. So many geopolitical experts this week. Everybody seemingly has a PhD in Venezuela, if you could have that. I didn't realize until at 3.30 when I rolled over Saturday morning and looked over my phone. And it was like every app on my phone was like breaking news, United States, storms, Venezuela. So I had been up, I woke up at 3.30 and started researching. I did not realize how rich resource wise Venezuela was. I knew that they had oil. I didn't know anything really about the all the metals and all of that stuff. Venezuela should be akin to Saudi Arabia, the UAE. The resources they have are unfreaking believable. And it's a huge country. Again, I didn't realize how big Venezuela was. It's like half of South America. And I don't think that's why Trump is going to do any kind of military conquest of Venezuela. I think it's going to be an economic conquest. I think he's going to restore the oil companies, what they are getting. Just like what he wants to do with the Ukraine. He is going to enrich Venezuela through its partnerships with the United States. I think a lot of people are going to get enriched. Some of them will be Venezuelans, some of them won't. I don't want to spend the whole podcast on this because none of us are geopolitical experts. But I think that's the lay of the land right now. I think there are some folks on the left who have done a good job of walking and chewing gum at the same time. Some folks on the right who have done their party duty. They haven't stepped totally out of line. We've been down this road before, so let's be careful that we don't go all the way down that road. I think the average Americans were just kind of like, what? Happy New Year. One thing I think is interesting. From an objective journalist point of view, not from a partisan point of view. The Atlantic had, it's early in the year, but this might be the best headline of the year. It's called the Fuck Around and Find Out Presidency. The lead was, Reagan and Monroe wouldn't have approved of this language, but they would have approved of the spirit behind it. And there is now an effort in Trumpistan to set this up as promises made, promises kept. And if we say we will do a thing, no matter how hardened your nuclear facility is in the desert, if we say we're going to blow it up, we are going to blow it up. And to see how that plays with the electorate. Because we haven't seen a president wave the sword like that. They've usually been running away from their own military actions, especially Democratic presidents, Clinton in Serbia, Obama in Syria, and North Africa. They were involved. They did what they thought was right and best for the people in geopolitical terms. But they weren't out there being like, see, I told you I would kick Gaddafi's ass. That wasn't a policy campaign point. Where Trump seems more than happy to pivot to that. So I'm curious if people will go for that. Well, I got to tell you, whether you agree with it or not, is that you had two big, huge things, Iran and Venezuela, where I got to tell you, if you're a guy, your testosterone is just flowing. Because they went in, they blew it up, and they just... If you went to bed at midnight Eastern time on Friday night into Saturday morning and woke up at 5 a.m. and you slept for five whole hours, the entire operation was done. I mean, that's insane. And the geopolitical world changed. Because in Venezuela, he took on, as we said earlier, Russia, China, Iran. The craziest part about that, I don't know if either of you saw this, the night before this happened, there was a large group of Chinese dignitaries, delegates meeting with Maduro. I saw that. All these pictures on social media, and then like 14 minutes later... He's not there anymore. The United States is flying Blackhawks and kicking ass at Dakinator. I do have some friends in the military who were like, Ben, I know you're not going to like this, but that was kickass. To your point, I wonder if there's a section of the politically disaffected young male electorate that's just... After politician after politician, they can get behind this. I wonder. Look, I know. I've been in the military. You were a chaplain. You're not supposed to root for the violent. I haven't seen any flash... I did see one flash poll from CNN that kind of asked the question two different ways. It was like, do you approve US military operations in Venezuela? It was very, very unpopular. Something like 12% in favor. Then they asked the same question, do you support the actions taken by the president? The number was in the 40s. It was much, much higher because it wasn't full blown. As of right now, it's not full blown military occupation or something else. In the coming days, weeks, and months as the secretary of state becomes the president of Venezuela, it'll be interesting to see what that public opinion is. It also depends a lot on how the vice president, now interim president, behaves. If he gets with the program and manages to keep whatever political detente he's had with the Colombians and the other nations where there's some real possibility of friction, and the narco state doesn't decide that this is just a great time to get rid of the facade and take over a nation, there's lots of ways it could go badly. There's also ways in which the now interim administration can try to keep a lid on things. I've heard a few reports of the day after there was gunfire around the capital and they were firing anti-aircraft stuff to discourage drones, which was weird language because they didn't actually say whether or not there were drones. I saw that they were shooting at their own drones. They had no idea what was going on. Isn't it a woman though? Wasn't his vice president's woman? No, the woman was the opposition leader. Who won the Nobel Prize? Yeah, won the Nobel Prize, won, but lost. So no, it's not her. Trump was asked about her. He seemingly was agnostic at this point. He said he'd spoken to her on the phone or somebody in his administration. She's offered to give him the Nobel Prize. He obviously thinks he should get the Nobel Prize. He's not getting the Nobel Prize. In broadcast terms, we're going to do what's called a hard break and head on over to New Hanover County. Very different from Venezuela. Both on the coast. Less geopolitically stable. Just listen for the helicopters, guys. Sounds afraid of them. We've got, I didn't know if you guys knew this, we have primaries coming up. February 12th. February early voting starts. Early starts February 12th. Literally almost a month from now. Yeah, it's wild. And then the actual election is March 3rd. That's what, three weeks of early voting? That's way too long. For a primary? At four voting sites with maximum probably 20,000 people voting over the span of like three and a half weeks. Wow. Including election day. I'm all for making it as easy and accessible for anyone who wants to vote. But even I, all the way over here, on the camera left side, I'm like, that's a lot of time. Not only is it a lot of time, but you think about, and this is obviously an issue that is more red meat for the conservative right, is the resources that go into having, and most of the employees that they hire for this are part-time. Yeah. Obviously the election board is staffed year round, but they hire up, bulk up during election season. I'd love to see, and maybe, I don't even know if you can get a public records request on, I wonder how much it costs to run. Like when it's all said and done, and we see 21,000 people voted, and then we learn that the county spent God knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars, what is the cost per voter to do this? Because there's four sites. It's Northeast Library, Board of Elections Center, downtown, and then Carolina Beach. That's a lot. Those are the most American and important thing that we can do. I'm less concerned about the money. I think it's more, I was always more concerned with geographic accessibility than time. If you can't find time in that two week period to even mail in a ballot, which you can do, then I feel like, there has to be some personal responsibility on this one. You can't come to your house and bring a ballot to you. If only. I took concerns about, for example, not having a downtown location. I take that more seriously than people who are concerned. If, for example, they were to cut it from three weeks to two weeks, I'd be less concerned about that. One of the other sides of it too, from a resource standpoint, is also the candidates. This is a primary election. Most candidates don't have significant bank rolls, especially in some of the races we're talking about. They started in the fourth quarter. It's crazy. The idea of having early voting sites, four of them staffed for, I think it's 14 hours a day for almost three and a half weeks. That's a lot of time for candidates. That's a really hard thing to get people to agree to, especially when nobody's voting. You'll stand there for six hours and four people roll in. You're talking about a freaking waste of time. Because primaries are determined by about 25 to 30% of the electorate. If that, it's typically way lower. It's way less. I think it's closer. It was in the teens last time we looked at it. It might be a little bit higher this year because you've got, at least on the Republican side, a relatively contentious Senate primary. There are some local Democrat races that have some stuff. It turned out better in Pender and Brunswick County, if only because they're so ruby red. Whoever wins the primary in those districts, and it's one-on-one. Whatever district commissioner, whoever wins that primary is the commissioner. It behooves them to get out and vote in the primary. The unique thing, we're just going to talk about the Board of Education today. My favorite. Your favorite, too. Last night, I spent three and a half hours watching a Board of Education meeting. The interesting thing is that all four incumbents are from the Republican side. Three. All three, sorry. All three positions are from the Republican side. Let's talk about the Democrats first. Both of you folks probably know more about these folks than I do. The first one is Brittany LaRue. Brittany LaRue is one of the newcomers I have had a chance to talk to. She kicked off her campaign with a listening tour before she was putting together any policy points, which I thought was smart. You can have great ideas, but if your ideas don't line up with what the average person is thinking, that could be disastrous. I haven't interviewed her formally, but she didn't seem like an ideologue. Which I think increasingly has put people off. Obviously, if you're in their camp, that's fine. But these elections, not the primaries, but the general elections, get determined by unaffiliated voters. Who, in my conversations, tend to get more put off by the ideologues. I would agree. For the primary, this is old school political truism. You can go way right or way left in the primary if you think that's where the winds are blowing. If your eye is on the prize in November, and you're just trying to get through the primary to November, then being crazy left or crazy right is not always the best idea. I can tell you that's one of the toughest things to tell folks if they make it through the primary. It's doing that course correction. It's doing that course correction, because they think they're giving up on the folks that they voted for. To the hardcore ideologues on both sides, it appears that way. If I run a hard right in a primary, and then I get into the general, and I'm still right, but I'm not as hard right, the far right extreme base that I just pandered to, to come out and vote for me, I go, what the hell? You are part of the problem. The same thing exists on the more progressive side. There are folks in Pender County, for example, who are so far right, they don't think there should be a government. They're like anarchist libertarians. They turn on candidates so quickly. Nick sees this. Pender's a disaster. It's hard for journalists, and I think we occupy a similar position to politicians. We're trying to hear from the public. There are smaller, louder groups of people, especially if you're a young journalist or a young candidate. It can really feel like that's the people speaking. It's like eight people with keyboards and no day jobs. Nick always makes this point. They don't donate money. They don't volunteer for campaigns. They're not influencing their friends and their circles of influence. The definition of a term that is used online, they're shit posters. That's literally what they are. They spend all day entrenched in Facebook. Pender citizens unite. That dopamine rush, whether it's liberal progressives or the more grassroots right, when they're in your corner, I've seen candidates fall into that trance because of that dopamine rush. It feels so good because nothing makes these people happy. All of a sudden, they're happy with you. That can be very intoxicating. They're incessant with it. It's constant. You get this more active base on both sides. On your side, they are posting about you on social media. Every single day, they are hanging on every word out of your mouth. Everybody wants to have somebody in their corner. It feels good. The things that people on the right of the right in Pender say about Rausser, I was like, I don't know what else Rausser could do to make you happy. He might not be my cup of tea, but I think he's checking the general Republican boxes. I'll tell you, Rausser posted about the congressman who died. In California. The response to that on his Facebook page was horrendous. People suck, man. They're not the best. Let's keep with the list. Nelson Gerard Ballot. Oh, Nelson Bollier. Nelson ran in a Democrat primary in 2022 and lost. He was a sitting member until the 2022 election. There were multiple recounts. I think it actually went to a hand recount. It did. He was on the Board of Education in 2022. Serving four years before that. Was the vice chair of the school board. Ran in a Democrat primary and lost. He served out the remainder of his term, but then was not able to run for re-election. He had one disastrous meeting he chaired when I think Stephanie Adams would have been the chair at the time. When he was screaming, this is not a battle zone. He stopped the meeting in the middle and suspended the meeting. The board fled. It was a freak. He was on the school board and his own voting base, the Democrat party, literally outvoted him in a primary. The idea of an incumbent losing in a primary isn't the craziest thing, but typically it's a one-on-one battle. When you're electing in 2024, it was four candidates. When you, as an elected, cannot get into the top four spots, you can't get a stronger sign of disapproval. We just saw that with Clifford Barnett. There wasn't a primary with that, for lack of a better term. This is a primary election. You're a sitting elected official and you get your ass handed to you. Where the left was at, the liberal progressive left got very involved in that school board election. From what I could see, I would go to the early voting sites and I would see more than six people. I would recognize them from school board meetings. There were a lot of frustrations. Some folks were frustrated that Nelson had offered multiple olive branches to his conservative counterparts on the board. Depending on how the winds are blowing, that can be seen as statesmanship or betrayal. The winds were not blowing in his favor. There were frustrations over the reopening stuff. I think Nelson was more open to reopening the schools when the science was coming around. There was just a general frustration with sitting board members. In 2022, there had still been no real resolution to the child abuse. Just the rampant child abuse that was going on in the school district. I think maybe even undeservedly, he took some flak for that. He ran on reform in 2018. I don't think the average voter understood the legal complexities. At one point, the school board was suing Liberty Mutual Insurance to try and get them to help make these victims whole. It's not like they weren't doing anything. I don't think a lot of that was getting to the public. All these horrible things happened. Years have gone by. The board can't publicly apologize because they're gagged by their attorneys because litigation is ongoing. They just took a lot of heat from the left for that. Important to note, prior to the 2022 election, when Nelson was still sitting on there, it was a 5-2 Democrat board with only two Republicans. One of them being Pete Wildebor, the other being Stephanie Cravo, who then would later go on to be censured by the Republican Party. There was a large revolt, to Ben's point, on anybody that was in power. Whether you were a Democrat, there wasn't any Republicans on the ballot in 2022. Excuse me, there was one. Pete C. I don't think he did a great job on there, but he also just called a lot of flack for being in the position when parents wanted their kids back in freaking school and sexual abuse from 30 years was being seemingly thought as if it was being covered up. It wasn't at that time, but it appeared that that's what was going on. He was screwed. It was always my personal opinion that the board as a whole could have done more to talk to the public about it. Lawyers are lawyers, but at a certain point, I don't think the board saying, we feel your pain, was going to blow up the litigation. There was also some pretty significant Democrat infighting going on on that board. Judy Justice was on the board at that time. You had Stephanie Walker, Stephanie Adams on the board, and Nelson. They were all Democrats, but they were not all cut from the same cloth of Democrat. There was a lot of very contentious meetings between them. Screaming and yelling at each other. We've got to go on before another regime change handles here in the Western Hemisphere. Margie Gerurtsman? Margie Gerurtsman, Wendy Davis, and Rick Sutherland are all newcomers. I haven't had a chance to really talk in depth with any of them. To Nick's point, Democrats in the school board have not been a monolith. You've seen some folks who have paid a little bit more attention to the outspoken advocates. That's paid dividends at the polls sometimes. Even though a lot of those advocates are unaffiliated and not necessarily wedded to the Democratic party. You've seen other Democrats who have tried to be more institutionalists and work with their Republican colleagues and try to keep some of the culture war at bay. I don't know how much you can do that on the school board. I'm curious to see where they land in that spectrum. There are four spots open. Four candidates. Jerry Jones ran before. Jerry Jones ran before. Before we get into the four stuff, one of the things that I find interesting, and I will admit I'm not a Democrat, I'm not well versed in these candidates. I know Nelson's name, I know Brittany LaRue, and I know Jerry Jones's name. There have been, and just back in 2022, there were multiple Democrats that ran. None of them were successful. I was, as I was keeping track of candidate filing, there are a lot of unknown names on the Democrat side of the aisle for this primary. So it's going to be interesting to see, of these candidates, which ones can, none of them, I don't think, have raised any significant funds. And they won't before March 3rd. Not before March 3rd. They likely don't have large volunteer networks. The Democrat party, like the Republican party, is not actively involved in the primary. It doesn't mean there's not some things going on behind the scenes. There will be no new Hanover County Democrat party volunteers saying, at a poll saying, here are the candidates to vote for. So it's really going to be a test as to who can get their name out there. Nelson's probably, Nelson and Jerry probably, Nelson probably has the strongest name ID because he served on the position for four years. He's been there before. So here's the question though, is that in 2022, it was a tough time to be a Democrat on the school board. I mean, the Republicans launched everything against them. What are the key things that we're going to, that we can probably see from the Democrat candidates this time around? What are they going to focus on? Book banning. I mean, that's going to, that's been one of the popular attacks. It was successful in last year's election where, what, two Democrats won and one Republican on the school board in New Hanover County. I think you're going to see a lot of the larger culture war issues, a lot of it is book banning and things of that nature that play very well with the Democrat base because there is concern on their side of the aisle that this is actively going on in school districts across the United States. I think in the primaries that would be, that would still be successful. I think you can't, even though I don't think I've heard Trump talk about books very much. I think he's, he's alluded to the issue now and then at campaign rallies, but it hasn't really been front and center. He's, he's hammered on, you know, transgender issues and high school athletics more than he's talked about books. But I think any attempt during the Democrat primary to, you know, link their race as part of a greater anti-Trump struggle, I'd be shocked if you didn't see that. And I think they'll be relatively successful. The question is, again, how do they then set themselves up for November where there are unaffiliated voters who, who really are less motivated by that, but also Democrats who are getting tired of it and have started to notice things like, you know, overcrowded classrooms, learning losses we still haven't caught up with, more traditional Democratic issues like racial disparities and the need from their point of view to sort of reorganize and redistrict the schools. Cause you've got schools that are overwhelmingly full of low income minority students, which has disastrous results. So those issues more than some of the pyrotechnics we've seen over the last four years. Let's move over to the Republican side. We actually have three incumbents that are coming back. Pete, Pete Woodward decided not to run again. So you've got Pat Bradford, Josie Barnhart, and Melissa Mason. Correct. It's, it's a mixed bag for incumbents because, because they have a record, you know what they, what they stand for, but they have to run on that record. Yeah. And it's a midterm election year. We talked about this on a couple of our shows before the new year. It's a tough year for it's got, in all likelihood will be a tough year for Republicans. It's a midterm election. The same way that 2022 was generally in North Carolina, not a great year for Democrats. Midterm election with Biden in the white house. You do have three candidates, however, that have held leadership positions on the school board. All three of those individuals have been either the chair or vice chair of the board. So you would suspect their name ID is pretty strong. And to the point of the record, I would suspect all three of them, Pat, Melissa, and Josie are all going to run on the things that they've accomplished over the last four years, easier to do that. But when, you know, the rubber meets the road on this stuff, Ben and I are weird. We watch school board meetings. Too much. There are good natured people of which I could not disagree with any more politically that show up to these meetings. You walk into a Walmart, a dollar general, a target, or any other store throughout Wilmington or New Hanover County, and ask them about school board issues. They have no freaking idea. And they generally don't care. And so that's one of the things that's tough for school board. From a political perspective, it's a very sexy race because there's a lot of angst. The call to audience is a freaking disaster every single meeting. But the general public, I don't really think, is all that invested in a lot of this stuff. This is where the culture war really hits the road. In a school board meeting. I mean, like talking to Republicans that are like really dialed in, are still, you know, feel a certain kind of way. About how David Perry, who's not running, and Melissa Mason fell on the AI issue, the AI security pilot versus Pat Bradford and Josie Barnhart. You know, I thought it was a fascinating issue because I love AI as a topic, hate it as a thing. But, you know, all of the concerns were fascinating from a journalistic point of view. To Nick's point, you stop the average conservative at a Harris Teeter, and they're like, what? AI? What? There's a school board? What I am curious, though, is, so those issues that we'll see in the general election, about, you know, what kind of Republican they try to be. Do they try to maybe distance themselves from some of the heat and light of the Magiverse? And be, you know, for example, Pat Bradford could very, I think, very credibly in November, just focus on her work at getting the bond done. That was hard, boring bureaucratic work that will benefit a lot of people. And it couldn't be further from the theatrics of the White House, right? So if you wanted to distance yourself, that would be, I'm not giving free advice here, Pat, but that would be one thing. You need to go on a campaign finance report as a condemnation. But in the primary, you know, where no one has to be ashamed of being a Republican, you know, how do they play that? It'll be interesting because each one of these, Melissa Mason, Josie, and Pat, all have mixed relationships with Republicans across the board. And that, you know, that is, you know, that's who you need to win in the primary. You're not trying to cater towards unaffiliated voters. We've seen candidates on both sides try to do that in the past. It's weird when they do it because you're like, do you know who can? And then the results come out and you're like, oh, this person got blown out by 6,000 votes. Because unaffiliateds can go and vote. You know, there's the rare unaffiliated who feels like they're the adult in the room and I'm going to go vote in the Democratic primary and keep those knuckleheads from voting. But by and large, they don't. These are your hardcore part. A primary with 18% turnout is the hardest core partisans on both sides that you'll find. And there are unaffiliateds in that group, but those are people that are hardcore partisans, right or left. They just are registered as unaffiliated. So the two folks who are new to this whole thing, Amy. Semi-new. Semi-new. Well, Amy is brand new. PhD type. You can see her initial interview with the press on the Wilmington Standard. I look forward to checking that out. She's dialed in. She's got a lot of education behind her. Yeah, from what I've read and seen on her Facebook. But zero political experience. Yeah. And I think people will be okay with that. But you know, it's interesting. And when you look at the 2022 race, Josie had no political experience. Melissa Mason, had no political experience. Pat Bradford, yes, involved in the community and had done a lot of stuff with Guardians of Light and stuff, but no political experience. I think she had run for Wrightsville Beach. She may have. Okay. Don't quote me on that. She may have run for that, but they really, their clarion call on what won them the election was reopening the freaking schools. I mean, that was, and so you didn't necessarily, you didn't need that political experience to say, schools have been shut down for too long. Learning loss is extreme. Get our kids back in the classroom. This is, you don't have that same rallying. That's what's so interesting to me about this race is that I don't think it was just reopening. That was a big part of it. It was anti-institutional. It was the people in charge of putting porn in your schools, keeping kids at home and derailing their education. Everything the quote unquote experts are doing is bad and is hurting our kids. And we just need some common sense to say, we need some common sense people who haven't been tainted with politics to fix this. And that played in 2022. And you can go check out the election results and see how that worked. I don't know. I really don't know if that works twice. It's going to be interesting because a lot of this stuff has already been taken care of in other areas. But before we get into that, let's talk about Chris Sutton. Chris ran for our school board in 2022. With Pat, Melissa, and Pete. And did not make it through. He's been very active in the school board going to almost every meeting. I think he's there every single time. Sometimes he has to leave, but I think I've seen him every time I've been there on Tuesday. So let's talk about Chris. Yeah. I mean, he ran in 2022. He's a lifelong Wilmingtonian, which is not normal for almost anybody. He would be a unicorn as it relates to that. He did not win over the support of Republican voters in 2022. When you look at the 22 primary results, Pat, Melissa, Pete, and Josie are all pretty closely grouped together. I don't remember what the margin is between them, but it's not very much. Chris is a pretty significant percentage-wise distant fifth person. And so the question is going to be, does he have a message now that will resonate with those Republican voters that not that long ago, yes, four years is a decent amount of time, but they've already rejected him. Not a completely dissimilar situation, from what we were talking about with Nelson. Democrat voters told him four years ago, we don't want you in this position. They have said a similar thing to Chris. Again, different times. Is he able to message them in a way that they agree with him now? I don't know. It has been four years. That's a long time to go through your stuff. It's also hard to note, I'll mention this, when there's four seats available, three of them are incumbents. It's really hard to break through that. It's just a race for fourth between Sutton and Dunn. I find it hard to believe a circumstance where that is not the case. So what are Republicans going to run on? In 2022, they ran on DEI, they ran on transgenderism, they ran on poor in schools, they ran on getting the schools back open. Let's face it, the transgenderism in schools has been handled by the North Carolina State Assembly. Yep. DEI has been taken care of by the North Carolina Assembly. We've got school choice that is now in effect. 25% of all students in North Carolina are outside of the public school systems, which is amazing. So what are Republicans going to run on? Well, for the three incumbents, they're running on, we fix this stuff. This was a problem four years ago. Your kids were not in the classrooms. They were shoving porn into their faces. We had all of these issues. We solved it. It is a waving the flag that for Pat, Melissa, and Josie, that will be a large part of their campaign because, hey, you trusted me four years ago. I told you I was going to do X, Y, and Z. I did it. Come vote for me again. For Amy and Chris, there are still plenty of red meat Republican issues. I mean, we just saw over the last couple of weeks members of the Chapel Hill, Carrboro City School District be hauled in front of the General Assembly over inappropriate books in the classrooms not long ago. I think it was all those books were in the classroom. I think they got those books off that. There's an internet list. You can pull the books off. I don't think he actually fact-checked to see if they were in the schools. It was effective political theater. It was effective political theater. There is still evidence that some of that may be taking place in New Hanover County. I guarantee you could find at least one book you could make the Scopes Monkey trial out of if you wanted to. And from a political standpoint, the same way that maybe some of the anti-Trump sentiment stuff on the left is a winning message, so is porn in the classrooms and men and women's sports on the right. I wonder if they're going to be running against the ghost of Tim Merrick and Judy Justice who have aspirations of leaving the school board and are, in my estimation, and they might disagree with me, but the most left-leaning of the current Democratic school board members. And we're going to talk about the county commission coming up, county commission and other senate races coming up. Oh, that'll be fun. I'm glad Ben brought that up because it's interesting because for the Republican primary running against Democrats doesn't really work because Democrats aren't voting for you. I do think, though, come the general election, those on the right will say, hey, public, you elected two people to do this job for four years and both of them are essentially giving you the middle finger but Tim is in a... He's already in a job. I wanted to ask about that because I hear this both ways and I don't have a good sense of what the majority view is. I hear some folks who are very frustrated that, for example, Judy Justice leaving halfway through her term, Wilmington Councilman Kevin Spears, I don't think he was specifically talking about Judy but he called it political hobbyism. It's a pretty good phrase for it. Obviously, some people who they're not going to leave the Democratic Party or they might even still vote for that person but it just chafes them somehow and there are some folks who absolutely see no problem with it. I mean, I've heard and this seems to be a bit more on the Democratic side where people get frustrated by that. I've heard fewer conservatives who are, for example, mad that Dane would leave halfway through his term. One of the things that I've seen and I've talked to a couple of unaffiliated voters about it, they see the situation where Dane Scalise going to the House is a little bit different because Ted Davis is retiring. He's not running so it's not like Dane is going into a bare knuckle boxing match with Ted to knock him out of his seat. Ted is leaving. You need a strong Republican to do that. He's been called up. He's been sucked up into the higher office. Whereas in Judy's case, she could stay on the school board and the Democrats would still have enough people to run. Absolutely. There's five people in that primary. I can see some sex in that. I think it's the same thing with Silette too. If there was a situation where next man up, then it would make sense. Tim, I guess you could make that same argument that he's running for that higher office. That is one hell of a political leap to go from school board which in terms of size and scope of government, they don't generate any funding. It's important, but it's a very small government entity to jump from that to a very relevant district in the North Carolina General Assembly. It's a hell of a political leap. But to Ben's point about when is it okay to leave office, I'm happy when Republicans do it, Democrats, they may or may not be happy. Same thing on the left. I think it does have a little bit to do with is this political opportunism? Or is this, hey, the party needs someone to run for District 20. Yeah, which would make sense. It's a relatively competitive district. Ted is leaving, so the incumbency, the name ID of the guy in charge is not there, but that does not exist and we're going to talk about Dark Horse slash potential spoiler candidate Rebecca Trammell who's trying to run in Senate District 7. You know, at my age, I'm probably going to forget, but I will make a note. Look at this, a real news man has got his notebook in the pen quickly available. Concealed carry in that pen. Yes, I have a license to learn. So, February 12th everything starts and March 3rd. We're going to talk more about these folks because then it's all out for November. It won't probably stop. It won't stop. You have a little bit of a break, maybe 60 days or so, where things kind of meander, but as soon as we get into the early spring it's going to be full throttle to November. So, leave your predictions in the comments. Let us know who you think will make it through and the winner gets a signed K-cup from Ben. Wow. This is news, you're breaking news. One of those little K-cups. Oh, yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, from your little thing. So, do you have to handicap four or four in both races? Yeah, yeah. I'm going to make a bunch of fake accounts and predict every possible... That is a lot of work for very little reward. I'm going to go to AT&T and say, hey, I need different renditions of all these candidates. That's going to generate 6,000 results. Terms and conditions apply. Finally a good use for Chachi. So, thanks guys. Thanks. Good podcast. All the best to you in the new year, especially with your new thing that's going on. And in the meantime, they can find you every day at the Nick Craig Show. Yep, weekday mornings, 7 o'clock on all of the local streaming platforms, nickcraig.com, and then weeknights, 9 o'clock on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And you're over there on WHQR. Yes. Your reporters are working very hard. They are. Under the watchful loving eye of the FCC. I mean, you've got to be careful. Welcome back. Come for your ass if you're not. You guys suffered a little bit of loss. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Yes, it officially shut down. Yeah, there was some talk that it would go dormant, but I think they'll keep a little bit of staff around just to wind everything down. But WHQR is still going strong. So far, so good. Listener supported. And so please check out WHQR's website. Check out your Sunday stuff. Yeah, and your freaking email and blog on Sunday is fantastic. So outstanding. And please do check out the Wilmington Standard. We're back in full force. We're adding a new podcast next week, so make sure that you check that out as well. And guys, Happy New Year. Happy New Year. For the Three Guys Podcast, I'm Reuel Sample. Thanks for listening.