A U.S. Army veteran and communications specialist who resides in Sanford will oppose six-term incumbent U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, who is seeking re-election in 2024. Primary Election Day is March 5. Early voting begins February 15.
Hudson, who resides in Southern Pines, represents Moore County and U.S. congressional District 9. He is considered the fourth-ranking member of the House. Hudson largely remained out of sight during the months-long effort by House Republican conservatives to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy, which after 10 months resulted in the emergence of Mike Johnson as speaker.
Hudson’s primary opponent is Troy Tarazon, 45, who is a retired Signal Regiment Chief Warrant Officer who, across 20 years of service, was deployed abroad twice and was stationed overseas for half of the years he wore the uniform. Tarazon (photo nearby) tells Liberty Digest he is motivated to run by an uncomplicated mission to be a “veteran’s voice” in Washington.
“I’m exactly the opposite of Richard Hudson,” said Tarazon, who has been married for two decades and is the father of three children. “I’m not a career politician; I’m not establishment.
“We have a lot of establishment partisanship out there. There are a lot of self-serving interests going on in Washington. I would be NOT a part of that. I would like to be voice for the veterans’ community, and express their specific needs and concerns. I do not feel Richard Hudson has that firsthand empathy I am able to have, that connection, that relationship (with veterans).”
Tarazon has paid close attention to debates about U.S funding of Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. While he has unwavering compassion for Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefields, “I really echo” lawmakers who argue that the U.S. should not continue pouring billions of dollars into an endless war.
“Where is that accountability happening?” Tarazon said. “I would want to see exactly where the money is being allocated, not just allowing (Ukraine) to have an open checkbook. We can’t do that. What’s our return on investment?”
Tarazon continues to work as a communications specialist as a contract employee on Fort Bragg with the Army Special Operations Command. His military career does not find him with enormous personal wealth to infuse into a campaign against an entrenched incumbent with access to the D.C. fundraising machine.
“That is going to be a significant hurdle,” he said “However, that is part of what I think will differentiate me from the status quo. I’m not a career politician; I’m not a millionaire. But I love this state, and this country. I don’t owe anybody anything. My plan is to take two months off until the primary and circulate myself through the counties.”
District 9 consists of Chatham, Hoke, Lee, Moore, Randolph and Scotland Counties and parts of Cumberland, Harnett and Richmond counties.
It was not Maui, or East Palestine (OH), or even the famous Moore County “Blizzard of 2000”, but The Pilot’s wide ranging “coverage” of a four-day electrical power outage that impacted 45,000 Duke Energy-enslaved households and businesses certainly did its best to embellish what befell the community one year ago, on December 3, 2022.
On the anniversary, readers of the December 3, 2023, Pilot Sunday edition, were greeted by thousands of words comprised of interviews with local citizens, elected officials and Duke Energy administrators. Editors might as well have given it a dramatic theme, perhaps, “Our Pearl Harbor”. Reflections on neighbors helping neighbors served the purpose of reminding readers that Americans are resilient and, generally, kind hearted. No harm in that, of course.
What was blatantly missing from the “special reporting” were tangible conclusions. If efforts by Pilot editors and reporters to fill up pages with endless column inches of text and photos were geared toward winning a comprehensive coverage award, it probably will succeed. Members of the media love patting one another on the back and handing out lucite “Best in Class” trophies.
But, overall, there was not much meat on the bone. On cue, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a thoroughly discredited agency, produced a photo of a minivan that was in the vicinity and whose occupants “may have information relevant to the investigation”. After all of the gnashing of teeth about who attacked two of Duke’s vulnerable power stations on the night in question, it would be most humorous if we learn that the culprit is a minivan-driving soccer mom who was off her meds after an ugly divorce, just needing to vent.
A Duke exec spoon-fed the newspaper with a pledge of $500 million allocated to grid security across four years. Yet, there are county officials who will confirm that they’ve seen no evidence of any significant upgrades to protect the local grid.
Rep. Richard Hudson (NC-09), who represents Moore County in the U.S. House, issued a statement on the anniversary of the blackout, purporting that he helped secure $1.6 billion to “bolster grid security”. It’s unclear what portion of that will actually trickle its way into the state. Hudson says he “introduced” (drafted) a bill to address supply chain factors that hinder utility companies from replacing damaged equipment in a crisis.
So what’s the point of revisiting December 3, 2022? With so little tangible progress to report, The Pilot obviously was eager to revive the narrative that a vulgar drag queen show at the Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines that same evening incited an overzealous Republican to lay down his Bible and pick up his hunting rifle.
Bang, bang. Lights out on the county and, thus, the drag show. God’s wrath symbolized by darkness. Such a tidy, handy narrative.
Various interviewees danced around the “connection”, frustrated no doubt that a perpetrator with a pick up truck equipped with gun rack and Confederate flag has not been caught and brought to justice. One who walked the line with a few toes slipping over it was Lauren Mathers, executive director of a nonprofit called Sandhills Pride. Referring to drag shows as “performances”, Mathers told The Pilot none were scheduled in in 2023 “out of safety”. The reporter might have asked, safety from what?
A Southern Pines business owner, Rachel Jurgens, could not resist re-stoking the power grid-drag show narrative, expressing to a Pilot reporter that she would “hate to think someone or a group of people had that much hatred in them to do such a thing.”
Perhaps if citizens are going to inevitably engage in hating, maybe it’s time to become more vocal in our hatred of the root cause of most disruptions of daily life — negligence. Earlier this year, 100 people on the island of Maui were killed amid intense wildfires ultimately linked to a negligent utility company and neglected vegetation. Among the 100, some were incinerated into dust.
In East Palestine, Ohio, last February, a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in the Ohio village. Saying they feared an explosion would ensue after 11 cars derailed, executives ordered workers to burn the toxic freight. Even now, the town of 5,000 has not recovered. Some residents moved away fearing contaminated drinking water and long-term health consequences. It was not until September, eight months after the incident, that the White House issued an “executive order” expressing concern about the “safety” of the people East Palestine, a town comprised mostly of Republican voters.
The author of the executive order, Democrat Joe Biden, has not visited the town to console its people. Not once. Maybe there is something worse than negligence. Arrogance.
Perhaps we’re seeing it in Moore County, in plain sight. What, other than willful arrogance, assigns a random power outage to the impulses of fringe radicals but does not, will not, address a serious threat and take responsibility to eradicate it?
What is remarkable about Dan Bishop is how he so comfortably infiltrates Republican establishment territory like a stealth weapon. The North Carolina congressman has little patience for the status quo in Washington that, time and time again, hands Democrats victories. But he rolled into Moore County in the early days of his campaign for state attorney general, and guess what happened?
Donors wrote checks, and Richard Hudson introduced Bishop to an intimate gathering of said donors. Hudson (NC-09) currently represents Moore County in the U.S. House; Bishop (NC-08) briefly represented Moore (2019-22) before yet another district map was hijacked by an activist court and moved Bishop’s territory to a swath just south of Winston-Salem and east of Charlotte.
While there is geographic proximity between the two districts there is a stark contrast between their representatives. Hudson is a gifted politician and reliable conservative voter on the major issues who has risen to No. 4 in the House hierarchy. He is not averse to falling back on Washington-speak such as “government shutdown” and “continuing resolution”, which were rolling off tongues earlier this month in D.C.
Nonetheless, Hudson’s leadership is potentially consequential. He says he is working to recruit Republicans to run for 37 House seats next year in an effort to take out vulnerable Democrats. If he succeeds in picking off even half of that number it would have tsunami-like impact, but only if the newcomers arrive with fiscal chainsaws.
Bishop instinctively votes against “continuing resolutions” — a procedural scheme used by the establishment to defer serious attempts to cut entitlement spending — and boldly supported last January the removal of feckless House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as a member of the media-maligned Gang of 20. He voted with 94 others against the recent November 15 “laddered” continuing resolution that will “fund the government” — and leave runaway spending unchecked — into January 2024. They were no match for 336 status quo “yea” votes.
But Bishop soon made an even more important decision — he’s not voting for compromise anymore. Bishop ultimately backed off voting to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy (who was going down either way after 10 months of unkept promises) and, consequentially, launched a run for attorney general. Why toil amid the infantry if you’re ready and able to lead?
Bishop’s inclination to turn off auto-pilot and fly into a storm probably was met by curiosity among some of his colleagues. For many, making it to the D.C. swamp triggers a desire to buckle up and let the plane fly itself with little regard for fuel costs or a final destination. With so few resolute conservatives remaining among House Republicans, Bishop calculates that he can watch the U.S. economy crash and burn from a front row seat or a rear view mirror, in Raleigh, where an iron fisted litany of attorneys general have ruled since the 19th century. (Regrettably, that’s not a typo).
He never will say so out loud, but an attentive ear lent to his November 27 remarks during a Moore County fundraiser heard a tone of caution about the race for N.C. governor next year. Republican Lt. Governor Mark Robinson and the presumptive nominee is taking on current Attorney General Josh Stein, an unabashed Leftist who has tagged teamed well with Governor Roy Cooper in a state awash in conservative red in many mostly rural locations.
Robinson’s less than robust record as No. 2 after an unlikely rise to political fame in 2020 won’t be his biggest obstacle between now and next November. It will be the cash gushing into Stein’s campaign war chest from many of the same shadowy outsiders who funded his 2020 run for AG.
Bishop referenced this as he placed emphasis on his own fundraising objectives. He will have no difficulty demonstrating how he differs on the so-called culture war issues (defending abortion law, parental rights in education, restoring law enforcement) from his Democrat opponent — in fact, Bishop will remain through 2024 in Congress fighting spending battles and brandishing conservative values in real time. Presumably, said opponent will be U.S. House first-termer Jeff Jackson. Yet Bishop knows that Jackson will be riding a crest of cash raised by lame duck Cooper, who leverages Republican vetoes of everything the Left holds dear by converting those vetoes into donations from the pearl clutching Left.
Bishop remembers well how money saved Stein in his AG race four years ago. Stein narrowly defeated Republican Jim O’Neill by 13,622 votes. The spread that mattered was a Stein campaign funded by $12.6 million compared to O’Neill’s $1.25 million operation, the Associated Press reported post-2020 election.
Democrats will be flush with cash again in 2024, especially in the AG race. They’ll leave no money source untapped to stop Bishop from becoming the state’s first Republican attorney general since 1896. In a twist of irony, the fiscal conservative needs supporters who spend with both fists.
When you read or hear a reference to “the Israel-Hamas War” please step back. If you’re paying attention at all, the characterization is absurd on its face.
Israel is a defined populace. Hamas is a branch of a terrorist organization operated by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is funded by Iran. Is this a war? The lazy, corrupt American media would have us believe that. The depiction post-October 7 is that Hamas attacked Israel to exact vengeance on an evil occupier of a land mass called Palestine, and now we are advised that Israeli military forces are killing innocent citizens of a municipality called Gaza, the population center of the Palestinian “people”, in retaliation.
Beware of two truths. The media is defaulting to its norm: deceit. And the war is not a black-and-white conflict that will render a victor and a loser.
“Israel and Hamas are closing in on an internationally brokered deal to pause fighting and free some of the roughly 240 hostages taken by the militant group … amid heightened scrutiny of the civilian toll of Israel’s operation in Gaza,” reported The Wall Street Journal on November 20, 2023.
Let us cut through the BS. Hamas, savage bands of terrorists funded by billionaire elitists in Iran and Qatar, seeks a “deal” whereby Israel stops bombing it into oblivion. During this “pause”, Hamas turns over “some” of the relatives of Israeli citizens who avoided being murdered on October 7 only to be taken into bondage. This is not diplomacy. This is lunacy.
A correct military response by Israel would be to escalate its tactical military attacks within Gaza, under which there is a network of tunnels that provide safe passage to the vicious rebels who killed more than 1,400 Israeli citizens of all ages during an unprovoked attack on October 7. Why would Israel pause anything? What proof exists that these hostages are living, breathing? What would convince a normal person that these innocents also were not mutilated and beheaded? Israel’s mission must be clear: destroy every tunnel. Every last one.
But there will be casualties in Gaza, in Palestine! Why the moral outrage? Hamas and its overlords in Iran did not bother to calculate the loss of life when it waged its sneak attack on October 7. Yet, Israel must measure its response so as not to exact collateral damage on “Palestine”? (Photo: Dr. Laura Mullen stepped down from her position as Wake Forest University’s Kenan Chair of the Humanities after an ‘X’ post backing Hamas’s brutal October 7 gunfire assault on an open-air concert in Israel that killed at least 230 citizens).
That Americans would even waste a moment engaging in this moral equivalency conversation illustrates how comprised our culture has become. The Biden regime refuses to align its shoulders with Israel. It is intent on pursuing the most repugnant goal of a “two-state solution”, which defies the Biblical right of Israel to exist and placates to the empty narrative that Palestine is relevant.
The Biden regime’s weakness emboldened Iran and Qatar to target Israel, just as it emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine, and just as it panders to China’s ambition to seize Taiwan. But the Marxists who have hijacked the Democrat party in America are not merely weak on the world stage, standing by as history plays out. They are blind, ideologically or deliberately, to what the so-called “Israel-Hamas war” leads to.
It leads to jihad against the United States that will make 9/11 look like a petty crime. A former Columbia University professor, a once wholly indoctrinated scholar, and a Jew, Liel Leibovitz, regrets that he participated in the “mind rot” of America’s poisoned educational institutions, and today warns of what is coming. He imparted this dire forecast during a November 19 interview hosted by podcaster Josh Hammer.
“Before we even figure out or try to answer this very good and very pressing question, when does this war end, we would be well served to ask ourselves what this war is. It is not a war between Israel and Hamas. It is a war between the so-called axis of resistance … comprising of course Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis (in Yemen), and with the enthusiastic support of both the Russians and, to a larger extent, China.
“It is a war between the axis of resistance and the civilized world which includes Israel, the U.S. and France, but also India and Saudi Arabia and Armenia. And a bunch of other nations fighting the same oppression, under different management, under different guise. I think once you understand it like this, you have a very different set of aims. It is not just that Israel must now eradicate Hamas, a terror organization of several, 10 thousand cretans, who, God willing, will be destroyed very, very quickly.
“It’s not even that Israel would then have a sizable problem on its hands about what to do with a civilian population of about two million who have been completely brainwashed for decades that the only cause for their existence is to slaughter and murder jews.
“The larger problem and the larger question is, how do we fight the larger war? It would be a damn shame to see American boys and American dollars lost to this conflict. And, thankfully, I think there is a pretty easy path forward. The first is to let the people who already fully committed to fighting this war fight this war. Israel is very, very dedicated to assuring its own survival, obviously. I think the United States needs to simply get out of its way, and not impose any needless ultimatums, or requests, or demands, that have much more to do with Joe Biden’s electoral needs in, say, Michigan (and its large Muslim population), than they do with the actual national security interests of the United States.”
Leibovitz breaks it down very clearly. But this path forward is not being articulated on America’s elite college campuses, where anti-semitism is in favor and Hamas is a “victim”. On the streets of America’s cities hoards are gathering to denounce Israel in defense of the “defenseless” Palestinians (photo nearby: NC Highway 147 near Durham). The flag suddenly likely to be burned on a college campus is not Old Glory; it is the Israeli flag. Meanwhile, images of the Palestine flag, which does not unite a “people”, are turning up constantly in Amazon and Google search engines.
“The philosophy of those marching with Hamas (around the world) and against the West is clear and obvious,” writes political commentator Ben Shapiro, a Jew, in a Daily Signal post. “The West is powerful; the West has exploited; the West is white; therefore, the West is powerful because the west is White and exploitative.”
It is likely this anti-American climate will escalate until the next attack on our homeland, which will be orchestrated from afar and executed by combat ready young men who have poured across the U.S. southern border and organized into cells, awaiting instructions even now. This scenario forecasts an even more devastating day of terror on our homeland. It will look like October 7 in Israel more than September 11 in New York City.
The next attack will not target the well heeled titans of commerce in their glass towers. It will play out as a vicious, medieval rampage infiltrating small towns, farmers’ markets, street fairs and parades. Blood will flow out of dead, mutilated bodies strewn along the familiar streets of Pinehurst, Southern Pines and Aberdeen. Electrical grids will be decimated, wreaking economic chaos. For good measure, perhaps another “virus” proliferates. October 7 was a dress rehearsal. It did not trigger a war. It launched a reconstituted global jihad.
The American Left expects citizens to harbor permanent outrage about the pro-Trump, pro-election integrity gathering in Washington on January 6, 2021, as if we’re to forget the role of China’s bioweapon that spawned a fake pandemic that derailed our economy and normalized election fraud.
Yet, less than three years later, it demands that we also must appease pro-terror, pro-massacre enablers in a geographic footprint called Palestine who openly celebrate exterminating Jews and fein disbelief that Israel would retaliate on behalf of its slain brothers and sisters (and their decapitated infants).
As it turns out, hating Israel is a global phenomenon (after recent protests in Madrid, Paris and other European population centers). On American university campuses and the streets of our already crime ravaged cities, Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel and exacted a death toll that surpasses 1,400 innocents, including U.S. citizens, are celebrated under the thin guise of pro-Palestine “demonstrations”. These disturbing protests are not Palestinian pride demonstrations; far from it. These are full throated displays of pent up hatred of Jews and their homeland, Israel.
A group of Jewish students at a New York City university escaped into a library behind a locked door. But Cooper Union College campus security did not seek to protect them by dispersing “Save Palestine” protestors nearby. The Jewish students were merely encouraged by a librarian to hide “upstairs”, out of sight. (Anne Frank chronicled what it felt like to be hunted in a similar manner in 1940s Nazi Germany).
A pro-Palestinian rally in Washington Square Park, near (New York University’s) campus, featured a demonstrator with an antisemitic sign reading, “Please keep the world clean”, reported The Times of Israel. (October 26, 2023)
And, after years of hand wringing about a so-called swarming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, apologists for the Left in the corrupt news media barely batted an eyelash when defiant young protestors occupied the very same Capitol (the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building) as recently as October 18 because they’re worried sick about the fate of defenseless Palestine residents who cheered the slaughter of defenseless Israelis on October 7.
Ultimately, more than 300 were arrested for illegally demonstrating and three people were charged with assaulting police after protesters descended on Capitol Hill to call for a cease-fire, reported the Associated Press. But what will be their fate? What punishment will they receive? The arrested were summarily released, other than the trio who were held pending a court appearances. They’ll likely be fined, or merely admonished.
Contrast this measured response with the plight of American citizens held in Washington, D.C., jails, and other jail cells, with no court dates pending, for months after January 6. Often they were held in solitary confinement. After all, they also were “unvaccinated”. Hopefully, history will record how the fundamental rights of these decent people were trampled by corrupt courts. Remember Joe The Plumber who confronted Barack Obama? Today, these same “Joes” are sent to prison.
Yet, they are the lucky ones compared to those sentenced to insane prison terms for the sin of being physically present on that bleak January day. The longest sentence was handed down to one who was not present — Enrique Tarrio. The Proud Boys leader is sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy. He watched January 6 unfold from Baltimore.
The mother of a U.S. military veteran gunned down at close range by a Capitol police officer on January 6 was arrested on the two-year anniversary of her daughter’s murder for the crime of protesting on a Washington street.
Now, consider an even more stark contrast: A trial under way in Denver in which an activist Leftist judge is hearing from lawyers representing six citizens who seek to remove Donald Trump’s name from the 2024 Presidential ballot in Colorado, using a flimsy 14th Amendment interpretation strategy. In opening remarks, a Trump loathing attorney tried to make a case that January 6 would never have happened minus Trump’s role as a catalyst via his social media posts calling for “violence”.
This exercise would be hilarious as a desperate act of “lawfare” were it not, like so many ongoing show trials targeting Trump’s destruction, made to seem so feverishly legitimate by a compliant, Trump loathing media. Fortunately, the lawyer defending Trump was defiant in his countering, opening remarks, during which he dismissed the trial merely as a weak attempt to embellish now exiled Liz Cheney’s contrived “January 6 Report” that emerged from made-for-TV proceedings orchestrated by a Hollywood producer. Her January 6 commission desecrated the U.S. Capitol much more deliberately than a few hundred energized Americans posing for selfies that day.
We have arrived at a crossroads. Moral equivalence — a favorite cautionary buzz phrase on the Left — is turned on its head. Israelis must die but Hamas-ruled Palestinians must live. Trump supporters must be eviscerated, silenced, marginalized but kangaroo courts must be normalized in direct defiance of the will of our Founders. The Left is King George III; MAGA is the Continental Congress of 1775. The former heeds that we back down, the latter replies, bring it on.
Bring it on, Hamas. Bring it on, special prosecutor Jack Smith. Bring it on, New York district attorney Letitia James. Bring it on, and watch what happens in November 2024 when American voters turn out in numbers that will defeat the Left and even the margin of election fraud.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the globe on October 30, and he spoke the words of a leader who knows well that history is being made before our eyes. The divine providence he references is directed toward Israelis and defenders of their homeland and basic human rights. But he also echoes the determination of those who fight in America every day to deflect the destructive aims of the Marxist Left.
“This is a time for war. Today we draw a line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism. Israel will stand against the forces barbarism until victory. Israel’s fight is your fight. Israel’s victory will be your victory.”
