1) 🕵️🕵️🕵️ Preview of Locke’s new report on crime

• Locke has published a report last month, “More cops, less crime: how intensive community policing can solve North Carolina’s crime problem.”
• It has 4 main points:
  • Crime continues to be a problem in North Carolina
  • The burden of crime isn’t evenly distributed, falling most heavily on poor and black communities
  • The best way to reduce that burden would be to implement intensive community policing
    • I.e. deploy more police to act as peacekeepers in high-crime, high-disorder neighborhoods.
  • Because the communities that need intensive community policing the most are generally the ones that can least afford it, implementing a program of intensive community policing in those communities will probably require supplemental police funding from the state. 

You can read the full report here. 

2) 🥸🥸🥸 NC’s DOGE-style program discovers lack of transparency at NCDHHS

• The Division of Accountability, Value, and Efficiency (DAVE) released a report last week, which identifies hundreds of millions of dollars in unaccounted-for funds at North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS). 
  • According to the report, “DHHS generated $386 million in lapsed salary funds in SFY 2024-2025, with $151 million from state appropriations and $235 million from receipts and federal funding.”
    • Lapsed salary funds represent money that was budgeted for the agency for certain positions, but were not spent on those positions because they remained vacant for part or all of the fiscal year.
  • NCDHHS claims that the lapsed salary funds were redirected for use on needs that are not otherwise funded through the budget bill. 
  • The $386 million is the most lapsed salary generated by any state agency in North Carolina. 
• The lack of transparency is especially concerning for an agency that spends nearly $40 billion in state and federal tax dollars a year. 
  • We will be watching closely as DAVE continues to publish more reports. 

You can get the full picture here. 

3) 📖📖📖 Liberalism, conservatism, and America’s vocabulary problem

• To an earlier generation of conservatives, "liberal"  was a pejorative that came to mean big government, high taxes, bureaucratic bloat, and top-down social experimentation, a label for political opponents rather than a philosophy.
  • This rhetorical shorthand was a "branding victory" but an "intellectual defeat" for conservatives:
    • Leading to the loss of the original meaning of "liberal," which comes from the Latin līber (meaning "free"). 
  • Core conservative principles (individual rights, free speech, limited government, rule of law) are actually the core commitments of the classical liberal tradition from which the nation was born.
    • Classical liberalism is a political philosophy rooted in liberty, constitutionalism, and the dignity of the individual, focusing on freedom protected by constitutional structure.
    • Whereas conservatism is the disposition toward political life grounded in prudence, continuity, and respect for inherited institutions.
  • The United States is a nation founded on liberal principles and maintained by a conservative temperament - conserving American institutions means conserving a liberal political order.
• Surrendering the term "liberal" to the progressive Left has created a philosophical vacuum, leading to the rise of "post-liberal" movements on the American Right.
  • These factions reject individual liberty and constitutional pluralism, recycling older political forms such as centralized authority and enforced cultural uniformity.
• The term "liberal" should be reclaimed by conservatives as an act of intellectual honesty, not rebranding.
  • Conservatism without liberalism risks sliding into reactionary tribalism; liberalism without conservatism drifts toward rootless abstraction. 
  • Reclaiming the term would allow conservatives to clearly articulate their defense of individual rights, constitutional governance, and pluralism.
• Liberalism is what American conservatives have always been conserving, and reclaiming this truth is a civic imperative to defend liberty against illiberal threats today.

You can read the full article here.