The moonbats are swarming over Cut 'Em Loose Cooper's prison release (02-06-2026--Hour1)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendarshow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. The phone number seven oh four five seven oh one oh seven nine. It's also the WBT text line driven by Liberty Buick GMC. You can also find me on Twitter where things are a raging at peak Calendar. Why are things raging on Twitter? Well with a specific category, Well, I mean, okay, things are always raging on Twitter. Okay, fair enough, But I have got a swarm of the the leftist moonbats around me over the last twenty four hours on Twitter because they know it's bad. They know this is a bad story for my good friend Ray Roy cut him loose Cooper running for US Senate. They are now concerned their actions prove it. They are very, very worried about the connection between Roy Cooper's collusive settlement with the ACLU and the NAACP that turned loose thousands of inmates from the prisons during COVID, and they're trying to play a little too clever by half with their what about isms. I'm hearing what about Jay six ers, what about Jay six what about all the Republicans? What about this? What about that? What about this? What about that? Rather than. Dealing with the fact that Roy Cooper released thirty five hundred inmates during COVID, he did so after he was sued. The state was sued by the ACLU and the end of LACP in North Carolina. And here's the thing they touted it. We're going to take a walk down memory lane. I have here in my hands various stories, reports, and the settlement agreement itself that was entered into back in twenty twenty one. As I understand it, now, the list of the inmates that were released. I've seen different reports that the list has now been released. I've not seen the list. All it is is a list of three thousand, five hundred inmate numbers with like release dates. And because there were three different tracks that these inmates could go down in order to get out early and by the way, the Cooper administration before the settlement was publicizing how they were working on reducing the jail population in an accelerated fashion anyway, that they were doing things to clear out the jails. In fact, they had reduced the jail population by almost one third after the settlement. But before the settlement they were touting how they had released like six thousand inmates on an accelerated path to get them out of the jails because of COVID. You see and the reaction to this story. You can see the ground troops all mobilizing for Cooper right there. But response team is putting out these denials saying to Carlos Brown Junior, because this was the impetus for all of this, was to Carlos Brown Junior, the man accused of murdering Arena Zarutzka. And really there's like there's really nothing else too. I mean, like I don't even say allegedly because he's on video doing it. We have two different video angles of it, we have eyewitnesses. It's very clear he stood up behind this Ukrainian refugee who was on the light railback in August last year, riding home on the train. From work at the pizza place and she sits down in a seat. She's looking at her phone and Carlos Brown Junior stands up behind her and just blindsides her and stabs her in the neck and she dies right there within like a minute. He then gets off the train. He's muttering to himself, and that will be like whether or not he is deemed to be mentally incapable of standing trial, right, that's going to be the first sort of legal test to go through because the facts of the case, when you see the video, they are not in doubt he did it. So he was on the list of the people that were to be released as part of this settlement, and that is that is lethal to a campaign like Cooper's. The guy is running, as you know, four time attorney general, I was the two term governor. I've always been tough on crime, and I'm tough on crime because the Democrat politicians as savvy as Cooper is, and say what you want about Cooper, but he is politically savvy. He understands the stuff, the defund the police garbage was toxic to the Democrats in the last two legislative election cycles. They know this too. I mean, well, the smart ones do. There are still a bunch of leftists that still run on this decarceration and defund the police platform, although to be fair, they don't really say it out loud so much anymore. But I'm sure it's some point. I mean, that's what the abolish ice is all about too. It's just, hey, here's the law enforcement agency we can target for defunding. It's just let's say, well, we'll go after them, same messaging. So Cooper knows this right, That's why he always touts all of the endorsements from any kind of law enforcement organization when he was running for ag or governor. Because Democrats have a soft underbelly when it comes to crime and public safety. They're not seen as strong on crime because they're not. And you know, whether it's at the judicial level with their judges and the magistrates, or it's with the elected officials at the legislative level. They have proven this to be the case over and over and over again. Virginia is giving a it's a classic example of it right now too. They're running bills now that the Democrats have the trifecta up their House, Senate and governor, they're running bills to lower the penalties for all sorts of violent crimes and take your guns away from you too, So this way you can't defend yourself when the criminals are released back out onto the streets. So let's go back. This is from the Carolina Public Press, a piece by Jordan Wilkie. This was on February twenty fifth, twenty twenty one, so almost exactly what five years ago, and this was the day that the agreement was signed. February twenty fifth, that the settlement in the litigation was signed, thereby avoiding a trial after eleven months of litigation. The North Carolina prison system will fast track the release of at least three thousand, five hundred people over the next six months as part of a legal settlement over prison condition during the COVID nineteen pandemic. This is one of the largest and likely the largest and most specific releases of people from prison as a result of a court action during a pandemic, according to Aaron Littman, the deputy director of the COVID nineteen Behind Bars Data Project, which was led by the UCLA Law School. In other cases around the country where judges have ruled the release of significant numbers of people. Higher courts overturned the rulings. See that's what happens when you fight, you would actually win. The courts on appeal would overturn the lower courts dumbass rulings. But we didn't do that. In North Carolina, Governor Cooper and Josh Stein, they didn't do that. They entered into the deal because I assume they wanted to playgate their radical decarceration base. And since it was a settlement, which is an agreement between the parties involved, it cannot be overruled by a judge. Wait County Superior Court Judge Vincetent Rosier Junior or Rose Air Rosier Rosier. He ruled last June, so that would have been June of twenty twenty that prison conditions were likely unconstitutional in that the state had to take several measures to protect incarcerated people from COVID nineteen. So the measures that Cooper decided to take was to just cut him loose. There you go. It's easier to get the six feet of distance between everybody because that will slow the spread. We're going to get six feet apart by having fewer people in the prisons. So we just turn them all loose. Whitley Carpenter, a lawyer for Forward Justice, one of the civil rights groups that sued, said the most effective way to protect people in prison from the COVID nineteen virus is to reduce the number of people in prison. This was the point. This was the entire point, decarceration. Get people out of the jails. Super Bowl sixty deserves a sports book built for the moment. 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Wager tax passed through may apply in Illinois twenty one plus in most states, obviously void in Ontario. Restrictions apply. Bet must win to receive bonus bets which expire in seven days. Minimum ods required for additional terms and responsible gaming resources see DKG dot co slash audio limited time offer. In February of twenty twenty one, a piece appeared at the Carolina Public Press dot org by Jordan Wilkie talking about this settlement. The headline NC Prisons settle naacpiece agree to fast track release of thirty five hundred inmates. Spurred on by the lawsuit originally filed in state court in April of twenty twenty. The state prison system has already been releasing people at an increased rate. Okay, so before the settlement even happened, the state was accele the release of inmates. And you know who was part of that acceleration to Carlos Brown Junior, he was also on the list as part of the settlement, so they counted him towards the thirty five hundred. So here's the deal. Okay, they released him early. Had he not been released early, and when I say early, I mean he served the mandatory minimum sentence, but he still had about three years left on his total sentence. But they cut him loose rather than serve the max eight years for robbery with a deadly weapon violent crime. Right, So rather than make them serve the mandatory eight they cut him loose after the mandatory minimum sentence and put him on parole. He then commits another crime, gets rearrested, they cut him loose again because they had already started the releasing of the inmates on an accelerated rate. So had he not been released on his back in September of twenty twenty with the mandatory minimum sent and served, he would have been included in the list in the settlement release. That's number one. Number two. Are we to believe then, that you put you, being Roy Cooper, that Cooper put to Carlos Brown Junior onto the list in order to puff up the numbers he was already out, Pete, he was already out. He was already out. He wasn't released as part of the settlement. I mean he would have been, but he was already released. He was already out. Well, then why did you put him on the list to puff up the numbers so you could go out there and say we have the largest prison break, sorry release. Of any state in America. When Roy Cooper isn't out there doing laps around the governor's mansion doing the black power fist in the air with his mask halfway off his face in solidarity with the BLM rioters. Meanwhile he's telling everybody else, you can't go to an outdoor funeral for your loved one who died while locked away, and you couldn't visit in their final days when they died of COVID Like he did this lockdown for everybody, and then when the BLM folks take to the streets, that's okay, He'll march with them again. This was in his re election campaign. This was twenty twenty. He was facing reelection and so he needed to be in the good graces of this radical component of the Democrat base. He presents himself as a moderate, and he governs as a radical because he can't say no to these most depraved groups inside the Democrat Party. And so best case scenario is that you fast tracked Brown for early release before he was part of the settlement, and then you threw his number, his inmate number, onto your settlement list in order to jack up the numbers to make it look like you were doing the most in America. So he wanted the credit. He wanted the credit from the ACLU and the media in the radical base, the decarceration crowd, the defund the police crowd. He wanted. He wanted their praise, and he got it. By the way he got it. The state prison system was already releasing people at an increased rate. According to the settlement. The prison population went from thirty four thousand plus at the beginning of the pandemic, went from thirty four to four down to twenty eight five twenty five eighty one in one year. Let's see here. This is from This is a quote from Ben Finnoult, the director of the Just Sentencing Project for the NC Prisoner Legal Services, which is a nonprofit and nonpartisan law firm, quoted in this piece at Carolina Public Press as far as I know, it's the largest mass decarceration effort in the country. End quote. I said this yesterday, I said this the day before yesterday. Right, this is the point it is to empty the jails. And by the way, do you think it had any impact on the crime rate surging during and right after COVID? Now they're like, oh, crime is down. Crime is down, Yeah, because all the people that you let out probably have reoffended by now and have got locked up again. He says, My hope is that the Department of Public Safety is not simply going to, you know, release everybody who would have been released in the next six months, and to do it two weeks before they were going to be released, just to get that number up. Well, is that what Cooper did? Did Cooper trick you and the decarceration crowd? Did they pump those numbers up artificially by including people that had already been early released. In a May filing for the defendants, Nicole Sullivan, the director of re Entry Programs and Services for DPS, said, quote, there was simply no way to accomplish a mass release of offenders into the community at one time without sacrificing either the services, the re entry services that make re entry a success, or the interests of public safety. She said there was no way to accomplish this without sacrificing re entry services or public safety. Lawyers for the state held this position through most of the court hearing. It is not clear what has changed, if anything, in the state's preparedness is to release the additional people as required in this settlement. What changed? What changed? You said? DPS said, we can't do this without risking the interest of public without risking public safety, and then all of a sudden they agree to it, and they've never said what changed their mind. I feel like that's something that should probably be answered. 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Talk about a memorable gift. So do what I did. Trust the experts at Creative Video, conveniently located in mint Hill right off I four eighty five and online at create avideo dot com. From the WBT text line driven by Liberty, Buick gmc bain asks, is this Roy Cooper's Willie Horton? Yeah? I think so. That's what I said yesterday. And I think that's why you're seeing the reaction from so many people on the left, whether it's you know, the Rapid Response Team Cooper's campaign, Democrat Party media, but mostly it's the uh, it's the ground troops on so social media. Think of them as like keyboard warriors, like the keyboard version of the ice agitators up in Minneapolis. Right, so they are all like mobilizing now to try to browbeat this story out of existence, to try to say, what about the j sixers, what about that? What about this right? To try to distract and deflect away from what was celebrated by Cooper, celebrated by the ACLU and the NAACP and the defund the police crowd, and the decarceration crowd. These people celebrated this announcement five years ago. This was right on the heels of the BLM fiery but mostly peaceful riots. This was after Cooper had set up his Racial Justice Equity Task Force thing that then started providing guidance to magistrates and judges around the state about how to you know, look at a person's race before you throw them in jail, and if they are of the right race, lock them up. If for the wrong race, let them go. I mean, they weren't that explicit about it, but that was like, we have to be mindful of this, and everybody understands what they mean when they say that stuff. North Carolina before COVID, before this settlement, Okay, North Carolina had the fewest number of people in its prisons since nineteen ninety five, and with these releases, the population could be as low as twenty five thousand people in six months time. That is a one third reduction in the population in the prisons since ninety five, that is twenty five years. Do you think wait, has North Carolina grown in population in twenty five years. I kind of feel like it has. I remember reading something about the explosive growth North Carolina has seen. This is one of those things where it's like, we have all these people, We got millions and millions of new people that have moved in over the last forty years, and we don't keep building more jails. In fact, we have the smallest jail population than we've had since ninety five. How does that make sense? Are we better at preventing crime? No, this is a choice. It has always been a choice. This has been democrat priorities. So before the pandemic even hits, we're at thirty four thousand, they start mass releasing people, they get sued, they agreed to mass release even more people, and as part of the settlement there would be essentially a population cap for one year, so we would not albeit we would not be allowed to incarcerate more than a certain amount of people. If so, we would have to then accelerate more releases. That was part of the settlement too. If the number of people in prison goes up ten percent or more, the prison system will have to quickly release people to prevent further crowding. Like that is a turnstile system. But this is after conviction. This isn't even pre trial stuff. This is after conviction. Finnholt, who is with one of these leftist organizations, the Just Sentencing Project, he said that's not enough. Given that the prisons are experiencing a year's long staff shortage exacerbated by the pandemic, more people should be let out of prison. He doesn't even care what their charges are. He doesn't care what the sentences are for. He doesn't care what the crimes were that they committed. It doesn't matter. This is decarceration. They do not believe in imprisoning anybody. One boon of the settlement for DPS is that the department keeps its authority over who it lets out through its early re entry programs. That power could have been taken away should the state have lost the case at trial or in further preliminary rulings by the judge. So they go to a friendly judge, they get the judge to say keeping them in jail during COVID is unconstitutional. That then quote forces the settlement agreement, and all the state does is they get to maintain control over the method in which they release the people. So let's talk a little bit about that, because about two weeks after that story. Okay, two weeks after that, we get this story from Travis Fain at WRL. Top state prison officials started a second appearance before state lawmakers Tuesday with an apology. System leaders misled a legislative committee last week about a lawsuit settlement that'll bring early release for about thirty five hundred state inmates and an overall reassessment of the prison system's COVID nineteen prevention efforts. See, lawmakers were told only non violent offenders would get early release, when in fact, violent offenders will. Two prison officials said what they meant to say was no, violent offenders will get out early through one of the release programs. However, they will get out through two other release programs, and those two programs involve way more inmates. Sorry about that. See so when yeah, so when we said we weren't releasing any violent people, that actually was not the case. Actually most of the people were releasing are violent. Sorry about that, our bad. This came from testimony by Prisons Commissioner Todd Ishi in an hour and a half long questioning on the settlement. He said, I wish to issue an apology. I think when we left last week there was some confusion based on the lies we told. The settlement has guardrails on release, though of course everyone involved will already have a release date in twenty twenty one, meaning that they would have gotten out this year. Regardless, the thirty five hundred early releases will be spaced out over as much as six months. Those releases will be on top of fifteen hundred to seventeen hundred regular releases the system does each month as inmates, both violent and nonviolent, finish their sentences. Lawmakers asked whether they could revisit this settlement. Orlando Rodriguez, a lawyer for the Attorney General's Office who worked on the case, said it cannot. Sorry settlement terms close out the case and the terms are locked in. Lawmakers ask detailed questions about those talks, which the Cooper administration has said it can't answer because of the terms of the settlement. We're not allowed to talk about any of this. It was part of our agreement. You'll just have to trust us, even if it turns out that we are misleading you. Rodriguez did confirm, though, that the Attorney General, Josh Stein, was not personally involved in any of the settlement negotiations. Can't have any of. Josh's fingerprints on any of this stuff. No, no, no, 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 could check it out 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. All right, let me go over to the text line I guess let's say here. Bane following up, it's I it's ironic wanting to protect criminals. North Carolina Governor Cooper releases over three thousand inmates because it wasn't safe for them to live in close quarters. Then you have Governor Cuomo of New York. He wanted senior citizens to be saved from COVID, so he locked them all together in nursing homes. Do you ever get the feeling liberal leaders look at people as cattle? Again? I would just like, I would just like for somebody to finally ask Governor Cooper, did you make a single mistake in your response to COVID. That's it. Let's just start there. It's an easy question. Looking back knowing everything you know now, If you knew then what you know now, would you have done anything different? Did you make a single mistake in anything you did? I'm not talking about the challenges. I understand all that. I'm not talking about you know, a brand new virus, nobody know what's going on. All that, I get all of that. I gave Cooper a lot of leeway because he was dealing with something that we hadn't seen before. Everybody was, so I try to give a lot of grace. But the fact that after all these years he has never once been asked whether he made a single mistake. They have never identified this policy we did here may not have been the best policy. Like that is. That is shameful to the North Carolina media that covered it, that still cover him, that are covering it, like how have you not asked any of these questions? Completely incurious? And see, this is why people are so worried, is that they recognize how damaging this is among normies, among regular people that don't pay attention to politics. They see some of this stuff. It's gonna be bad. Our friend Andrew Dunn from long leave politics, he apparently got a hold of the of some of this list. He said, the secret list of inmates freed includes fifty one people who had been sentenced to life in prison. He has pulled their offender numbers and he's going through and getting the backgrounds. First up, Simon Ginopoulos, convicted of second degree murder in nineteen eighty six, sentenced to life plus twenty six years. He and his brother were convicted of killing a thirty year old Greensboro man who was tied up, gagged with a sock, beaten over the head with a coat rack and fireplace poker, and stabbed twenty four times in the back. Apparently these two brothers. The older brother got mad when he found out the younger brother was involved in a gay relationship with the victim. So the brothers go to the house. The victim welcomes them in because he has a relationship with the younger brother, and they murder him. Where are you on that one, lefties? Where are you LGBTQ community? This was one of the guys the settlement list. How about Sheen Tou Jenkins, convicted of the first degree murder of a Domino's pizza delivery man in high Point. The victim's father was devastated to hear that he had been released. This was out of the Davidson Correctional Center in Lexington. The victim Kevin Dean Hodgen, thirty five year old Dominoes driver during an armed robbery outside the Domino store on Kirkwood Street, gunned down armed robbery. Or how about Shannon McClintock, convicted of first degree rape and robbery and McDowell County in nineteen eighty four, he says. Andrew says, the details here are so horrific, I'm not even going to repeat them. Local media reported he was granted parole in twenty nineteen, but the Department of Corrections records say he was released in twenty twenty one after the settlement, So I'm not really sure what happened there. Fourth on the list Javier Alexander Mackler County, convicted on two unrelated murders. But the doc shows that he's still in prison, so I'm not really sure why he would be on the list. You'd have to ask Roy Cooper why he got counted as one of the thirty five hundred people freed. See again, what seems to be happening here is as I hear more of these cases. I think the Cooper people pumped up the numbers. I think they lied. I think they pumped up the numbers. Next on the list Eric Johnson, convicted in ninety four first degree murder Vance County. He shot his twenty two year old estranged wife in the head while lying while laying in the mud in front of her mother. He received a mandatory life sentence for the crime. Tony Hartzell convicted of first degree murder nineteen ninety five for beating and stabbing to death his eighty four year old neighbor. Jerry Foreman, was shocked to hear he got released. Quote, he should never be able to walk free, and we need to be protected in societ needs to be protected from somebody like this. That's according to Queens City News. That's just five of the fifty one life sentences that were on the list in that settlement. Again, I asked, as I asked yesterday, who made the list, Who made this list, who put the people on the list, who approved it? Was there any review. Regarding the systems that were used to release people. They had three methods to release prisoners under the settlement. One was called extended limits of confinement or ELCS, and that is the one that would not include violent offenders, but the other two courses, the other two tracks that were used did include violent offenders. They would get discretionary credits like time removed off of their sentences for various reasons. That's a long standing program, but it was accelerated by the settlement, and it will include some violent defenders. And the third pathway for early release runs through the state's parole system, which would include people now behind bars for a violent crime. And that would have been the category that de Carlos Brown Junior was in, but he had already gotten out under that track. He was on the list to get out on that track, but he had already used the track to get out five months prior and get re arrested and re released, even though he violated a term of his parole, which was that he got arrested again. The process kicked in in October of twenty twenty one, and only if North Carolina remains in a state of emergency, if the federal government or governor rescind the current state of emergency, or if twelve months pass, then that part of the settlement would be moot by the way the emergency the Roy Cooper's ed the emergency Declaration that ended in August of twenty twenty two, eight hundred eighty eight days we were under that. One note here from the settlement, this from section two b A or B one A. I should say that they would provide this list. It shall be treated as the list of the inmates. The list shall be treated as attorney's eyes only pursue it to the protective order entered in the litigation. Why why is this a secret? Why would you be trying to hide the people that you're releasing from prison? If it's such a great idea and you want all this credit for the largest prison release in the country during COVID, Why can't the public know who's just been released out onto our streets? All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. 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 dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone,