Socialists, data centers, and teacher union power | Hour 3

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is her live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio and Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. I want to welcome to the program, as we do every Monday at two o'clock is Ap Dylan. She is a reporter over at the North State Journal. You can read her work at NSJ online dot com. And she is also the publisher, the promoter, the purveyor of her substack newsletter called More to the Story. You can subscribe to it there. Hello, Ap, how are you today? I'm good, Pete? How I am doing all right? Happy Royniversary? I think right. Yes, today's the anniversary of former Governor Cooper arching with the rioters who burned down Raleigh while he fled. Yes, yes, we discussed this last week For people who were not aware. AP finally got the confirmation through anonymous law enforcement retired law enforcement sources that during the height of the BLM mostly peaceful but fiery riots in Raleigh, that they evacuated the governor's mansion and they took Roy and his family to the Emergency Operations Center, and so he was not in the mansion. But then he came back the next day and did the march. And so this is what six years ago today, on this very day, he marched with the BLM rioters that he was too terrified to stay in his home while they were out front. Yeah, it's six years ago today. I didn't get you anything like for the anniversary, So sorry about that. No presence. All right, let's talk a little. I did this in depth last week when the Charlotte City Council held a public hearing on the a moratorium, a one hundred and fifty day moratorium for data center construction, and the place was packed with anti data center activists. And one of the groups that I saw that showed up there and spoke actually were members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation the PSL. This is Neville Roy Singman's group. He is a he's living in Shanghai. He's a wealthy multi millionaire, almost a billionaire now at this point, I think, and he's been funding all of these different groups Answer Coalition, right, the usual suspects, And so now they are obviously in North Carolina, they've been engaged in various protests and such, right, they've they've been around for a while in the North Carolina activist scene. No, yeah, they have, but it's only been in the last couple of years that they've really done a lot of protesting. They've been behind a lot of the anti Israel slash pro Hamas, pro Palestine protests, the ceasefire deals, that sort of thing. And now they've jumped on the bandwagon along with several unions and No Kings and a lot of the Democrats and opposing data centers being built, you know, wanting these moratoriums and going around to different city councils prussing them to do so. And they've had some success. I mean it looks like it's you know, in the last year, around thirteen towns in cities to issue these kind of moratoriums, and most of them are a year long. Northampton Counties was the longest with thirty two months. Wow. Yeah, that's huge, and that's not a county that can really turn intown the revenue right now, so you know. And then there's towns like Apex just passed one in April. One year one Boom only went with a ninety day moratorium, but that was back in March, so that's coming close to being gone, it's not already. So you know, Canton, Durham, Fayetteville, Spring Hope, Wendell, a whole bunch of these have all passed like either ninety air when you're moratorium. And it's the ones that these more terms are targeting here the large Hyperscaler facility, right And there's a new bill that's being around right now and it's gonna hit the hub Ops and Rules Committee tomorrow from what it looks like it's expected to be added. It's the Ratepayers Protection Act. And I talked to the main filer that they'll represent Winslow, and I've got an article coming out this week in NSJA about that. So yeah, and I had this discussion and actually one of the public speakers, a fellow by the name of Craig Reynolds, heard me talking about it, called in and we were in agreement on like my view on a moratorium one hundred and fifty days, so what five months? If it is simply to create a framework for data center construction, right, if that's the goal, then I'm okay with that, because we don't really have any kind of framework whatsoever in place for these types of projects. If the goal is to create essentially a ban, then I'm not in favor. And he pointed out that there are a lot of different kinds of data centers, right. They can be built in various ways. And you just mentioned the big one, the hyper scale, and these are the massive ones that you know, people think of whenever you say data center, but a data center can be actually kind of small. It doesn't happen. We're two hundred of them right now in North Carolina, right, They've been there for a long time. Yeah, he seems to have had a problem with them before. Now, so why is this important? The connection with the PSL, Why is this and the SEI US a. Lot of this anti hyperscaler facility that anti data center and stuff, and they're trying to lump it all together and they're they're trying to turn it into a campaign wedge issue for the fall. But also it's a lot of this has been tracked back to outside sources. These organizations like PSL are getting their marching orders and their talking points and things from foreign entities. You know nevilwere Sigham is is he's tied to the Chinese Communist Party. Yeah, he lives in China. Yeah. So you know a lot of this anti uh this propaganda really is what it is that it blows a lot of these things free out of proportion. Is you know, coming from adversarial countries or Russia. Isn't you know immune to that either that We've seen some influence coming in from them on social media. But why would they do that? But why would those countries be so interested in protecting our neighborhoods from these these data centers. Well they're not. They're interested in protecting their their race to get to the top of AI first. I mean, the next one hundred years is going to be dictated by this. You know, it's not going to be a resources race, It's going to be an aig rate. That's an information race. And you know, if the United States can't keep up, we're going to be you know, at their mercy so to speak, and attacking these hyperscaler facilities, which, by the way, President Trump entered into an agreement a rate pair of pledge with the tech heads back in March that they were going to bring their own power, that they were going to bring their own recyclable water, that they were going to do all these things. So it didn't impact anybody on the ground, It didn't impact citizens, and you know a lot of the media kind of ignored that or it kind of you know, it was a drumbeat and just got run over. But yeah, there are things in place, and this new act that has been supposed here in North Carolina has a lot of those similar provisions. It's targeting the hyperscalers. It's making sure that you know, the rate increases don't impact residents, and that they have you know, they can do impact studies before these things go in place. I mean, it really does lay out the framework that is probably missing at this point statewide. So I have a feeling this is going to whip right through the House Rules Committee and it's going to land probably in a vote either later this week or early next week. Yeah, it's it's the same thing. It's the New Nuclear Campaign, anti nuclear campaign that the Soviet Union funded and you know, promoted anti nuclear programs in America because they wanted they wanted to surpass us. That's all this is. Now, it's the same thing. Pay attention to who's who's leading the protests, right, That's what I would say. And then do your own homework, because, yeah, while there are issues with some of these hyperscale facilities and in places where water is a is a big issue or it's a scarce resource, in other areas of the country, there's an asolutely zero problem with them, right, So yeah, you know, do your own homework. Let's head over to the the story you've got up at your sub stacked newsletter called more to the story of Although both of these are out there or over there North Carolina. This was interesting. I didn't even know that they did this sort of a ranking. But North Carolina ranks forty eighth out of fifty states plus DC in teacher union strength, so we have one of the weakest teacher unions in America. So that's a good thing, I think. Yeah, this came out of the fourtam Institute. They do this report every so often. Think the last time they did it was four years ago, so they were due. But we have two teacher groups in North Carolina that are affiliated with national unions. There is the National Association of Educators or the nc Association of Educators, the NCAAE, which is the one that everyone is mostly familiar with. They are an NEA affiliate. And then there's a Professional Educators in North Carolina who last year recently became an affiliate of American Federation for Teachers AFT, which is the largest teachers union in the country. But that merger came with a lot of grumbling from P ANDC members who felt like they didn't get a vote, they didn't get to say it, and they didn't want it. So that was interesting to me, and I've got a report on that over at North State Journal for those who want to read about that. Those the pushback from the PE and C members. So what they did is they did like five different tiers. They did five different ranking areas. Overall, North Carolina willun's ranked forty eight, and they looked at five areas resources and membership, involvement in politics, labor and bargaining policies, policy wins and losses, and perceived influence and and perceived influence. They came into forty eight and in the labor and bargaining policies they came in fifty first, dead last, dead last, even behind DC. So yeah, well, and we are a right to work state twenty nine. Yeah, yeah, we're right to work state. They don't have collective bargaining rights, so like that that kind of makes sense. Well that could they get around that though with their stick out so that they did for their red for ed protests and other things. They basically, you know, have skirted strike clause by you know, doing these mass sickouts and all overwhelming the system so that the district has to close school. Yeah, I thought this was last time around. Yeah, seven hundred thousand kids were out of school this last time around all the state's one point five million students. Yeah, on Comedy Day on May first. And so this was interesting that North Carolina was number two in America in the number of strikes over a five year period from twenty nineteen through twenty twenty four. So, like we are, our unions in North Carolina have gone on strike, although they don't call it, don't call it a strike. It's totally not a strike. It's just a temporary stoppage of work in order to extract concessions from the employer. But totally not a strike and we've had there's only only one other state has had more over that five year period than us, even though striking is illegal in North Carolina for the teachers' union, Right, yeah, that's a maybe somebody could do something about that. I don't know, like, yeah, the report doesn't really get into the membership numbers too much. I mean, it kind of talks about how the numbers have fluctuated, and North Carolina's NCAA had the strongest decline in the country, the second largest drop behind Wisconsin between since twenty twelve, going down like from forty nine per twenty one percent. But the last report is told by the state auditor for their membership was in twenty twenty four. They've stopped doing these audit reports on the estate association. But that twenty twenty four report said that they had twenty five six and seventy nine members. But god, but. Well, first of all that year they were around, they were around ninety thousand and some public school teachers. That number has roughly remained the same over the last three or four years, hit its peak about ten years ago in ninety five thousand. But anyway, the NBA has refused to turn over its membership roster to the auditor for any audit that's been done on Okay, so that's important to understand. And then also, while the NC is the larger of the two groups, stancy, it's been patting its membership for several years by including retired members, possible future teachers, public supporters, like a mom on the corner kind of thing, and you know, versus actual paying dues members, like people were actually members. And I've got a chart in my in my article there which it draws from the twenty twenty four audit that was done on them at North State Journal. I wrote about this. But if you look at their twenty nineteen number they had, they reported six eighty three members. That's in twenty twenty it went down to five nine ninety six, and then twenty twenty one suddenly it's twenty six thousand and two of four. Wow, what a great membership drive? Holy what? Yeah? How does that happen? That's because they added everybody the king should think, yeah, membership roles, and you know, so I would I would guess that you know, their actual membership is probably far far lower. Yeah, probably undert back. To the twenty twenty level. Yeah, all right, Well leave it there. People can check out your work at more to the story end at the North State Journal. AP Dylan, thanks again for your time. I appreciate it. Talk to you next weeks. All right, see ya. That's AP Dylan. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Mint Hill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person, mail them they'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit Creative video dot Com from the text line, surely the lefty says, teachers keep striking until you get a decent salary. NC is blue. Jerrymandering is how the Republicans got power. Oh there's so much wrong with this, Okay, So first off, thank you for acknowledging that they are striking. Because they claim they are not because that's illegal, But thank you for agreeing with me that they are in fact striking and violating the law. They do have a decent salary now you can say that they should be making more, and the Republicans are looking at an eight percent pay raise for the teachers. They already have fifteen steps of one thousand dollars each in their first fifteen years on the job guaranteed. That's in addition to all of the cost of living increases as well. I think they're I think the average salary now for a teacher in North Carolina is around fifty eight thousand. This budget that the Republican legislature is looking to adopt would push that to I think someplace around sixty five thousand or so. So I would argue that is a quote decent salary. You could say you want them to make more, but that's I mean, that would be a more than decent salary, because a decent salary I would submit is roughly fifty to sixty thousand dollars, right, That's a decent salary. Then you say North Carolina is blue, it is, in fact not. It is not blue. You could say it's purple. There are areas that vote Democrat. There are areas that vote Republican statewide. We haven't elected or voted for a Democrat president since Barack Obama's first term, so it's been a while. The US Senators are both Republicans and they have been for a while, but they could lose those seats. It's always very close. So I'd say it's more of a purple state, right than a blue state. It's definitely not a Democrat state. And then you say jerrymandering is how the Republicans got power, and that is actually not true. That is the opposite of true. The exact opposite thing happened. Republicans won control of the General Assembly under redistricting maps that were drawn by Democrats. Okay, the problem you have as Democrats, surely is that y'all cluster. Y'all just live in the cities. You just cluster around the cities or in the city, and so you don't have any electoral power outside of the cities, say, and so when you're drawing maps, that becomes very difficult to then spread out those Democrat voters into many districts. So no Republicans won control of the legislature using maps that Democrats drew. Y'all did this. Actually, it's just it's just the progression of the electorate towards a more conservative party. Y'all used to be able to win statewide. Y'all used to be able to win a lot more races when you didn't go full leftist, you know, and you should never really go full left. That's just stupid. Over on the text line, a five to seven to one number says, the thought hit me that Trump may think the census counted all those illegals in the country, bolstering the blue state representation in Congress. This may be a response to fairly fix the issue he believes has unfairly given Democrats more seats. Right, Yes, the census counts illegal aliens. This is and Trump tried to stop the census from counting illegal aliens in twenty twenty, but was blocked from doing so. And so what happens is you have blue states, and the analysis has been run that if you only counted Americans in the census, that blue states would have far fewer seats in the US House of Representatives, they would have fewer seats in the elect or fewer votes from the electoral college as well. Right, So, and I've talked about this many many times on the program, that it also controls funding levels from the federal government that's based on population. So you have more people there, and they're the best kinds of people because they don't get to vote you out. If you're in the Congress and you represent an area that's got a very large illegal alien population, they can't vote for you or against you. So it's fantastic for you, right, you have fewer constituents that you actually have to worry about voting you out. So, yes, that is part of the issue in the redistricting, and that's what I believe it was. I think it was Texas when they did their round of redistricting, which once again, yes, Donald Trump did urge Texas to redistrict, but Texas also had a court ruling that they had to abide by. So that's why they had to redraw anyway in the mid decade, right, And there's nothing that prevents them constitutionally from redrawing mid decade, particularly when you have a court ruling. But they specifically noted that Texas was undercounted in the census, because this was another problem that the census erroneously counted in like a dozen states. They noticed afterwards they went through and they were like, yeah, we didn't actually get a totally accurate count in the twenty twenty census, and they were like half a dozen states that got overcounted and half a dozen that got undercounted, and like five of the six that got undercounted were Republican states, and like five of the six that got overcounted were Democrat states. And I'm sure that is just completely coincidental. I'm sure there wasn't any kind of you know, nefarious actors involved in doing anything like that. Just happened to break that way where all of the states that got shorted seemed to be Republicans and all of the ones that got you know, unearned benefit. They happen to be Democrat controlled states. I'm sure that has nothing to do with it, but yeah, like the census counting illegal aliens effects funding levels, and it effects representation, and illegal aliens don't get to vote you out of office, so it's like a win win for the Democrats. Awesome, Andy says. Don't forget that teacher's salary is actually twenty five percent higher than the figure than the average salary because they don't work twenty five percent of the year, as well as all of the banker's holidays they get in the vacation since the spring break, and that sort of thing sounds like a pretty good job. Maybe that's why they line up to go to school for it. Yeah, I mean, look, and that's one of the things that is very difficult to reconcile with so much of the the slogans and the you know, the the propaganda and the arguments that are made. It's like, you know, if if the job was so terrible you would have you would not be able to fill all of the slots, right that. The fact that we have almost one hundred thousand teachers in North Carolina, it's one of the largest you know, as far as like a type of job, it's one of the biggest in the state out in like Asheville. It's like education and healthcare, like the two big employers. And so yeah, like if it was a job nobody wanted to do, then you wouldn't have anybody going to school to be teachers. So again, like the the Republican budget writers have put in an eight percent pay raise for teachers this year. You know, eventually they have to pass the budget they you know, so it's been a while, it has been a while. Tony says, I don't understand all this winning the Republicans are speaking about. Haven't both parties shifted left over the last twenty years? Do you agree with that? How is that winning? Thanks? Well, I mean, if you're talking about Republicans, then the Republicans over the last twenty years have in fact had a lot of winning, particularly under Obama. They were cleaning up in a lot of states, winning governors races, legislative races. They had like at one point, I think they had something like twenty seven or twenty eight trifectas or something like that. They controlled most of the state capital. So now that's the Republican Party. They've you know, they got Trump in the White House, They've made the appointments the Supreme Court. They have a majority in both of the chambers right now. That's those are slim majorities, to be sure, But it sounds like you're equating Republicans with conservatives. They are not the same thing. Right, Conservatives find a home in the Republican Party because it's the only party that has any kind of similar philosophy. I mean, there's nothing in the Democrat Party really that they stand for that conservatives can sign up to, right, they like, there's nothing in their party platform that attracts me. So like, why would I ever vote for Democrats unless I'm in a Democrat district and I'm just trying to, you know, pick the worst candidate in the primaries. I do that, but it's because I'm in Democrat districts. I don't have a choice. So no, I'm not sure about that. But look, parties, I've said this for several years now, there was a realignment happening inside the political parties. And yeah, you're probably getting more of those old sort of liberal Democrats that are coming into the Republican Party because their party has gone insane. Just wanted to point out how normalized riots have become in America. Did you know that there has been, for like the last two weeks now, a daily Democrat insurrection occurring in Newark, New Jersey. It's like a freaking war zone up there, and there's like no coverage, even though something as close to New York City as that usually would dominate. But it's become so normalized that nobody even notices anymore. Nobody even noticed is that they're burning stuff, they're looting, they're assaulting cops. For two weeks there have been nightly and escalating riots at what's called the Delaney Ice Detention Center. David Strom at hot air dot Com writs massive resources have been poured in by outside NGOs funded by leftist billionaires foundations nevill Singham, the Chinese Communist Party. Protesters from around the country have assembled there. Expensive riot gear has been provided to these activists, and even scripts have been given to selected spokespeople to push out a carefully constructed message. As in Minnesota, eh local politicians have been backing the rioters, of course, insisting that they're only using their First Amendment right to protest, even if that means assaulting officers, fighting some mostly peaceful fires, mostly peacefully, stealing from local businesses, dismantling public property to turn the rubble into mostly peaceful weapons, and demanding that officers kill themselves, or just outright threatening to kill the officers and their families. It's all coordinated, and the riots are trained. Rioters rather, are trained in how to maximize damage, how to create the maximum amount of psychological impact on officers, and how to incite viral events for propaganda purposes. The governor a Democrat. Is it Mickey Cheryl or Mikey Cheryl? I don't care, doesn't matter to me. She has refused to help homeland security despite the riots taking place on the streets outside the facility, which are therefore, you know, New Jersey's jurisdiction. Those are your streets. Whose streets, New Jersey streets. But after enormous pressure, probably from the business owners that have been getting looted, she agreed to let the state police do riot control, and the results were not great. Not great. The state police managed to clear the area, but only temporarily long enough to see exactly how much equipment was left behind. And I've seen the video. It's like the Occupy Wall Street stuff. Because when I was a reporter, I went down to Occupy Charlotte and they were getting all of these donations. They had massive amounts of like all sorts of stuff, food supplies, right, riot gear. I mean in Newark they didn't have riot gear and occupied Charlotte. But that bring out did not last long. And now the governor is in something of a tough spot. Her own police now are getting attacked. That's seat that's the problem with your shock troops. These are revolutionaries who see all state power as illegitimate. And she doesn't seem to understand that she doesn't control the brown shirts. She continues to blame Ice for all the problems. But now her employees are getting injured, they're getting bitten, they're being you know, whacked on the head with bats and such. So she can't say nothing about the violence. So now she's doing another Walls dance, Tim Walls right, saying it's just a few outside agitators and that most of the people there are peaceful, sometimes fiery, and I it would go all go away if Ice just did what the revolutionaries demand, right, But that's the thing. Revolutionaries are hard to control. They are by their very nature, violent, deranged people whose goal is simply to destroy. The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution, and that is destruction. New Jersey episode. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.