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your support. I want to welcome to the program. Back
to the show. Actually, Douglas High served as communications director
for the Republican National Committees, worked on several successful Republican
Senate campaigns here in North Carolina. Doug, welcome back to
the show. How are you, sir.
Speaker 2: It's great to be with you.
Speaker 1: Thank you, absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you sound fuller now that we are over on
the the FM dial once again.
Speaker 2: So funny how that works.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right. So you had a piece at the
Charlotte Observer and you wrote it with Andrew Bates. He
was the senior Deputy White House Press Secretary under Biden.
He also served in the Obama administration. And so you
guys are writing about the schedule of the North Carolina primary.
But the first question I had is how did you
come to write this piece with him? How did that?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: How did that happen?
Speaker 2: Andrew and I are from the same town of Lewisville,
that's about ten miles outside of Winston Salem. It's a
one stoplight town, so everybody sort of knows everybody from
that town. Although Chris Paul is from Lewisville as well,
and I've not actually met him, but so he seemed
like a natural person to reach out to and talk
about this idea of whether or not North Carolina should
go first or not, because I thought it would benefit
the state, it would benefit Democrats and it would benefit Republicans,
and he thought the same.
Speaker 1: All right, So this is for the twenty twenty eight
presidential primary, right, this to move North Carolina ahead. We're
already pretty early thing, right, didn't they move us up
a couple of years ago? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yes, And obviously the Democrats have moved there, you know,
states in various orders. South Carolina, you know, having gone
first to help Joe Biden, they're looking for a new home.
Republican team set with Iowa and New Hampshire. Democrats are
looking for a place to go. And Andrew and I
both think that North Carolina is a natural for a
whole lot of reasons. One, it's a perennial close state.
It's a close state in the presidential election. You know,
Trump won it three times, but his biggest margin was
three point seven percent. It's a perennial close state for
gubernatorial and Senate campaigns, and we know that we'll have
Republican senators and Democratic governors. The last time there was
a double digit Senate win in North Carolina was in
nineteen seventy four. And it's also great for the economy.
A lot of people flying in and out of Charlotte
and RDU I mean, and they're stopping at that Bojangles
at the Charlotte Airport like I did last week I
was there. They're renting cars, they're buying gas, they're buying snacks,
bottled water, hotel rooms, office supplies, radio ads. And if
you're a restaurant like Midwood Smokehouse or Noble Smoke or
Bridges and Shelby, you're gonna be rented out. They're gonna
be campaign events, you're going to be doing catering. It
is a job growth vehicle, all right.
Speaker 1: So what is all right? What's the process then for
the Democrats to actually do something like this, And is
Andrew Bates is a powerful enough to spearhead this thing.
Speaker 2: Well, no one's powerful enough to do it on their own.
But the state party has to make an effort to
say we want to be first, and a lot of
states want to be first, so they'll have to put
together an RFP, a request for proposal, and bring it
before the DMC, as other states will. South Carolina doesn't
want to lose it. It's been good for South Carolina.
Iowa and New Hampshire have been fiercely protective of of
their first place status and then bring it up for
a vote in front of the DNC. And we think
we've made a strong case for why it should be
North Carolina, why it would be politically beneficial for Democrats
and for Republicans as well. And part of that, by
the way, Pete, is it also develops a whole lot
of homegrown political talent. If you work in politics long enough,
you meet a lot of people from campaigns who are
from Iowa and New Hampshire. And that makes sense. Why
would we not want to grow that talent? Democrats and
Republicans here in North Carolina. If I'm at the state
GOP headquarters on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, I want to
be able to raise extra money and hire extra people
and grow some of that talent and throw some of
those spears that you get to do in the early
primary states.
Speaker 1: Talk a little bit about the demographics though, because I'm
guessing the Democrats have already expressed through the last primary
seasons that they are open to moving it around. So
and I don't know if they if they have settled
on South Carolina, But what is the what's a comparison
between the South Carolina demographics and the North Carolina demographics
that would son out Democrats.
Speaker 2: It's a it's a much more diverse state, and you
have cities obviously throughout the state. It's not like in Atlanta.
It's not like Georgia where there's one Atlanta and sort
of that's it. You have big cities like Charlotte, then
you have the smaller cities like Asheville and Wilmington, Winston
Salem where I'm from, and a whole lot of rural areas.
So any candidate who campaigns there can't just try and
win all the votes in the big city and forget
the other places. They'll have to go to Charlotte and Shelby,
They'll have to go to Winston Salem and Readsville and
Greenville and so many places like that. And it is
obviously one of the fastest growing states in the country,
which tells I think Democrats and Republicans that it's that
it's a state that is really on the move and
will become more important six years from now than it
is today. And another reason why we think that North
Carolina should be top of the list for Democrats because
they're making this move now, and if Republicans decide that
they don't want to be iow in New Hampshire first
in line as they've traditionally been, I push for North
Carolina for Republicans as well.
Speaker 1: So is there because I guess I'm thinking, like the
Democrat voter base that would vote in the primary in
South Carolina does that you know? Is there some sort
of are there lessons that the campaigns draw from the
turnout or from a candidate's performance in South Carolina? Because
I can understand why it's important South Carolina being important
for Republicans, but for Democrats it's less clear.
Speaker 2: Well, it was because Joe Biden felt that he would
do very well there and Jim Clyburn was in a
position to make it happen, right, and that was it.
Part of that was the high African American voter base
and voter turnout and the Democratic Party in South Carolina,
where Biden did very well. Some of that is obviously
still it is true in North Carolina as well. Biden
certainly wouldn't be running And the number of HBCUs throughout
the state is another reason why, especially for Democrats, you
would think it would be a state that is high
on their list to move as early as they can.
And that's you know, whether you're talking about Johnson C.
Smith or Winston Salem State in my hometown Elizabeth City,
they are scattered throughout the state, all right.
Speaker 1: So now look at the Republican side of it, you
seem to think that the GOP is not interested in
moving states around for its primary.
Speaker 2: Right now, it is still Iowa and New Hampshire first
and second, it doesn't look like that's going to change.
And I've worked in Iowa. I ran communications for the
twenty twelve Iowa Caucus. I'd love the Iowa Caucus but
I would much rather have that come to North Carolina,
and I think it would be better for the party
both in a primary sense, but also in a general
to be in North Carolina early because it forces campaigns
to organize. And one of the things if we see,
if we look back to two thousand and eight, the
fact that the primary process went on so long for
Democrats ultimately benefited Obama because he had a campaign structure
in place because he was still fighting with Hillary Clinton
in North Carolina in that late primary. If that had
happened early in the primary, it is a spearhead for
his campaign for the Clinton campaign as well, And that
is a lot of talent that would have stayed in
the state and remained there. And if I'm talking to
Democrats now, I would make that case for them as well.
Speaker 1: What about you just mentioned the Iowa caucus. What about
the difference in the format caucus versus primary. Does one
of those mechanisms benefit a campaign more to be early.
Speaker 2: You know, it's really hard to tell. There's nothing quite
like the Iowa caucus. You'll have caucus sites that will
range from a school gymnasium much like a primary, to
somebody's house, which obviously you never see happen in a
primary situation. It's a very different process and it certainly
benefits organization more than necessarily fundraising and what have you.
But they're just very different ways of doing things. In
Iowa's a very different state. And part of the reason
that Democrats left Iowa was one it wasn't competitive anymore,
and the other was the demographics didn't really work for
their voting base. South Carolina sort of made sense for
the primary for them for their voter base, but it
certainly didn't make sense for a general. You know, we
didn't have that. The Senate races are never in play,
the presidential races are never in play. Gubernatorials. North Carolina
has all of that.
Speaker 1: What about the open primaries? You've got to unaffiliated voters, right,
does that open up the parties to shin Anagan's Operation
Chaos type of organized efforts or maybe does it produce
more quote unquote moderate candidates because you do have a
lot of unaffiliateds that may be crossing over.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Rushian Ball always talked about Operation Chaos, and it
was a great idea that never really happened. And it's
one of those things that we think that campaigns sort
of have the time to pull off, and they really don't.
There's been no campaign I've worked on when we've ever had,
you know, not enough on our plate that we could
meddle in another primary as well. We wish we could have,
we couldn't. And for your unaffiliated voters, they're sort of
looking at the field as well to determine which way
they want to go. But either party can say they
want an open or a closed primary. That's up to
the political party.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not aware of any any party leaders that
are saying that they want to do that on either side,
So I don't see that changing. We'll leave it there.
I appreciate you making looking some time for us today,
Doug High He served as the comms director for the
RNC and on several Republican Senate campaigns as well. Thanks
for your time, and you can read the piece of
the Charlotte Observer.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Thanks Doug.
Speaker 1: Take care.
Speaker 3: You know.
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video dot com. All right, So I know, Doug said,
Doug High. We just had him on and he said,
you know about the operation Chaos and didn't really work,
And that was always my understanding of it as well. However,
there are examples in North Carolina now that I think
there's like four or five candidates that have now filed
to run as Republicans in various districts, but they're not.
They don't have voting records that match a you know,
Republican viewpoint. They have voted in Democrat primaries. So there
are several of these people running for you know, local
races around the state. I think there's one member of
there's one. Yeah, there's one running in Tim Moore's district
for Congress. She's not a Republican, but she is registered
as a Republican now and she's going to try to
primary him. I don't know how she thinks that's going
to work if she has to, you know, go and
appear in front of any kind of an audience that's
voting in the Republican primary. But we shall see. There
are a couple of these candidates. Also this story out
of the New York Post. The New York City Democratic
Socialists of America the DSSA, has issued a rallying cry
for its members to infiltrate parent and community groups as
they fight to push their agenda through government enemies, including
Governor Kathy Hockel. The newly emboldened local chapter of the
Democrats Socialist of America's pushing its members in a takeover
of lower lefe level government entities to try to supercharge
their far left policies under the new face of their movement.
The mayor elect Zoron mamdanin quote, we must plug Zoron
organizers and supporters into lower level city institutions en mass.
That's according to the co chair of the New York
City DSA, Grace Mauser. She wrote this in the magazine Jacobin,
which is the socialist magazine which I think sells advertising,
which is kind of weird, calls itself the leading voice
of the American left. She says New York City has
hundreds of small semi governmental bodies that are typically ceded
to less progressive forces, such as community boards, parent teacher associations,
and community education councils. She urged the nearly twelve thousand
members as well as other Mamdani supporters, to take advantage
of volunteer spots at libraries and parks. If they can't
get a city seat like in city government, you can
still take advantage of volunteer spots. Quote. We have the
opportunity to create a sense of mass ownership over the
city and build support for Zorn's agenda from the bottom
of city government to the top. She, by the way,
sits on Mom Donnie's Transition Committee for Small Businesses. Yeah, okay,
aren't you a socialist? Though? Like okay, she's done the
committee for the Transition Committee for Small Businesses and Minority
and women owned business Enterprise. She said the infiltration would
be key in rallying the low levels of government to
enact their far left agenda despite the objection of their
enemies quote unquote that's the word she uses. Their enemies
named specifically Governor Kathy Hokeel because the governor despite the
fact that she endorsed Mom Donnie, who then did not
endorse her. But she has said that she would not
support raising, you know, income taxes in the city. I
think she also expressed opposition to the free quote unquote
free buses. One political insider quoted in the story here
at the New York Post Ken Friedman or Friedman, It's
Fry Friedman anyway. He says they're young, politically misguided revolutionaries
in a big hurry for the revolution to begin on
January first, twenty twenty six. They should use the next
month to study the success rates of previous socialist revolutions,
but that would be impossible because real socialism has never
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and make memories that'll last a lifetime. All right, So,
a massacre at Bondai Beach, I believe is how that's
pronounced in Australia. Australian. This is according to the Associated Press.
Australian federal and state government leaders agreed to immediately overhaul
already tough national gun control laws after a mass shooting
targeted a Honukkah celebration on Sydney's Bondai Beach, leaving at
least fifteen people dead. Fifteen dead is the latest count
that I have heard. Forty two others injured. The action
would include renegotiating the landmark National Firearms Agreement that virtually
banned rapid fire rifles after a loan gunman killed thirty
five people in Tasmania back in nineteen ninety six, galvanizing
the country into action. Remember they went around and confiscated
the firearms. Nobody was allowed to buy the guns, have
the guns all of that. They melted them all down,
and that was supposed to be the model for all
Western countries, all countries, everybody really across the planet. That's
the way you reduce these types of mass shootings is
you take up all the guns, except of course from
police and farmers. Yeah, farmers apparently get a carve out,
which I was not aware of that but kind of
makes sense. But why, I mean, these guys got guns.
The two men that opened fire apparently a father and
son team from Pakistan. Although the son was born in Australia,
the father immigrated and then became a citizen and for
some reason was allowed to own a firearm. I'm not
sure if he was a farmer. But now they're like, okay, well,
you know what we could do is we can overhaul,
as they say, the AP says, we can overhaul the
law that allows for non citizens or naturalized citizens to
get guns, so it would only be open gun ownership
would only be permitted for citizens like the son. So
not really sure how this law overhaul would actually have
prevented this shooting. Also, we find out that the sun
was in fact on the government's radar once again a
known wolf, if you will, not a lone wolf. The
violence erupted at the end of a summer day when
thousands had flocked to Bandai Beach, an icon of Australia's
cultural life. They included hundreds that were gathered for the
Hanukkah by the Sea event celebrating the start of the
eight day Hanuka festival with food, face painting and the
petting zoo. So a couple of Pakistani guys Muslim as
I understand it, opened fire on a bunch of Jewish
people celebrating the start of Honikkah. We may never know
the motive here. People like that's just the way these
things go. Two police officers injured treated in hospitals along
with the forty others they killed. These assassins, these maniacs
killed fifteen people ages from ten to eighty seven years old,
including a rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and a ten year
old girl. Police shot the two suspected shooters. There was
a fifty year old father died at the scene. They
went over they were standing up above, they were like
over this. They were on a pedestrian bridge and so
they sort of were at the center at the top
of the bridge and they were shooting down into the crowd.
His twenty four year old son is in a coma
in a hospital. This is why I said, we may
never know why they did this. The Prime Minister of
Australia not exactly a profiling courage in my mind on
all of This guy's name is Anthony Albanese and he
confirmed that Australia's main domestic spy agency, the Australian Security
Intelligence Agency, had investigated The Sun for six months. Back
in twenty nineteen, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that ASIO,
which is the Security Intelligence Agency ASIO, had examined The
Sun's ties to a Sydney based Islamic state group cell.
Albany's did not describe the associates, but said ASIO was
interested in them rather than the Sun, So he just happened.
So they were actually looking at some other people that
were connected to this isis cell. And the shooter, the
twenty four year old I guess at that point he
would have been like eighteen, and he was just, you know,
one of the people that were associated with the cell,
so they weren't investigating him, Okay, right, well, because that
makes sense Hey, guys, we found an ISIS cell in Sydney.
We should look into the people. Oh no, no, but
not all of them. We're just targeting like this, these
one or two guys over here that are part of
the cell. No need to look into all of the
other people that are in the terrorist cell. He was
examined on the basis of being associated with others and
the assessment was made that there was no indication of
any ongoing threat or threat of him engaging in violence,
said Albany. So that was wrong. No, he did pose
a threat. He did pose a threat for potentially engaging
in violence, because he did. He was the one that
was jumped from behind in that now viral video footage
that we have seen from the attack. He had walked
down off the bridge and was in a grassy area
next to the parking lot, and a guy crouches behind
one of the cars and sneaks up behind the twenty
four year old, jumps on him and gets the gun
from him, points the gun at him, and then apparently
he is shot in his shoulder and his arm, and
he puts the gun down while the twenty four year
old apparently goes back up onto the bridge. He let
him go. He goes back up onto the bridge with
his dad, where they get taken out. There are also
reports that some of the law enforcement officers did not
return fire. They were frozen in panic and fear. Don't
know if that's true, but that's one that is one
of the reports I have heard. All Right, if you're
listening to this show, you know I try to keep
up with all sorts of current events, and I know
you do too, And you've probably heard me say get
your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because it's how
you detect media bias, which is why I've been so
impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a
website and it combines news from around the world in
one place so you can compare coverage and verify information.
You can check it out at check dot ground, dot
news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast
description too. I started using ground News a few months
ago and more recently chose to work with them as
an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories
get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows
you which stories get ignored by the left and the right.
See for yourself. Check dot ground, dot news slash Pete.
Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off
any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited
access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps
my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they
make the media landscape more transparent. Let me jump over
here and chat with James. Hello, James, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Hey, how are you doing this good? How are you well?
I'm enjoying watching the usual suspects act in the exact
usual manner. The head of the government in New South Wales,
which is where this took place, I noticed that before
anyone had any information at all, the very first thing
he came out and demanded was stricter gun laws and
to take more firearms away from people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was Chris Men's the premiere of New South Wales,
and who said, if you're not a farmer, you're not
involved in agriculture, Why didn't Why do you need these
massive weapons that put the public in danger and make
life dangerous and difficult for New South Wales police?
Speaker 3: Right? And the thing is that the last time I checked,
you don't use rifles and shotguns to plow fields.
Speaker 1: No, that's why I was kind of scratching my head
on that one too, Like farmers are allowed to have
the gun, but I'm not sure exactly how that aids
them in the farming. I understand for protection when you're out,
you know, you know, tending fields or whatever. But that's
the same reason why anybody would want to own a
firearm is for Texas.
Speaker 3: Well, that's true, but you see, it appears that these
people are a little bit even further to the left
than are beloved progressive as far as the disarmed the
law abiding citizen, because the criminal is never going to
obey the law anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, precisely. I bet some people wish they had a
firearm over the weekend at that beach.
Speaker 3: Oh. One other thing, yeah, and if I may, Uh,
this happened in Sydney and Sydney just a few months
ago had a pro terrorist demonstration of newly imported, mostly
newly imported members of the religion the Peace who were
chanting gas the Jews.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, these people went out and protested at the
Sydney Opera House.
Speaker 3: Right, which is broad and walking distance of the beach.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pro Hamas. Yeah. And then and Australia has had
a rash of attacks on Jews over the last two year.
Speaker 3: Government hasn't done anything.
Speaker 1: Correct, very little. Yeah, James, I appreciate the call. Great points.
Uh the uh. The leader of Australia, the Prime Minister Albany's,
had proposed new gun restrictions, including limiting the number of
guns that a licensed owner can obtain and reviewing existing
licenses over time, just to make sure, like maybe you're
like the fifty year old dead father that carried out
the attack, who came to Australia in nineteen ninety eight
on a student visa and became a permanent resident after
marrying a local woman. Officials would not confirm at the
time of this publication by the AP, they would not
confirm what country he had migrated from. They did not
want to say that because I think everybody now, I
think we can all agree that the real concern here
is the Islamophobia, right, That's the real concern. His proposals
were announced after the authorities revealed that the older suspected
gunman had held a gun license for a decade and
had amassed his six guns legally. So this is the
system you put in place, was this is the one
you you turned you made everybody turn over their guns.
And this is the system you put in place that
allowed the jihadist guy who came on a student visa
married an Australian woman in order to stay. Well, I
don't know if it was if it was in order
to stay, but you know that was one of the benefits.
He gets to stay, and then he gets a license,
and then he can buy an arsenal of six guns,
which a lot of my friends would say, it's like,
that's not even like you're not even counted as a
collector at just six. You gotta get way more. So
this is the system that you put in place. His
son who did not have a gun license, so that's
why he wasn't shooting any of the Oh no weight
he was, but he didn't have a license. I guess
he shot ads guns. See like, this is the absurdity
of it. You built this program. This is what you
decided to do when you told everybody else to disarm.
And the guy who wants to use the guns for
a terrorist attack, which is what this was, right, he
is not dissuaded from getting guns. He in fact did
it legally, which his son could have done as well,
because while he may have been Palin around with ICE's
terrorist cells, doesn't mean he was ever the subject of
the investigation itself. See it's all very clear. All right.
That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much
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