Chatham County Line

Chatham County Line is your community newspaper serving Chatham County and southern Orange County, North Carolina.

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

About two-thirds of North Carolina's whole population live in urban or suburban counties, while another third lives in rural ones.

Urban/suburban counties have stronger economies, with more jobs and higher incomes, while rural counties tend to be struggling economically. That's why disproportionately more rural residents rely on SNAP (eg. "food stamps") and Medicaid to get by.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

If this is true, then America has done a tremendous job creating a cadre of Darth Vaders in its billionaire class:

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

This Wall Street insider just exposed the secret doomsday escape plans of AI billionaires.

1 in 3 billionaires has a fully funded plan to abandon civilization when things collapse.

They meet their pilots at Oakland airport, board a Gulfstream 650, fly to New Zealand, and disappear into a bunker that cost tens of millions to build.

And this isn't some conspiracy theory. There's literally PROOF:

Sam Altman told The New Yorker he stockpiles guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, and gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force. He owns a patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to when society breaks down. His backup plan is flying with Peter Thiel to Thiel's compound in New Zealand.

Peter Thiel became a New Zealand citizen in 2011 after spending only 12 days in the country. He bought a 477-acre estate for $13.5 million and submitted plans for a bunker-style compound embedded into a hillside with a 1,082-foot glass-lined guest lodge for 24 people.

Mark Zuckerberg is building a 5,000 square foot underground shelter beneath his $270 million compound in Hawaii. Blast-resistant doors made of metal and concrete, its own energy and food supplies, and an escape hatch accessible by ladder.

Every construction worker signed an NDA and different crews were forbidden from speaking to each other.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, quietly disappeared to Fiji during the pandemic. He reportedly bought at least one private island in the Mamanuca archipelago. When local media reported his presence, Fijian authorities ordered the article taken down.

Scott Galloway sat with one of these billionaires who walked him through his entire exit strategy step by step.

His response: "You don't think your pilots are going to kill you and fuck your wife? You don't think the people in New Zealand are going to come take the rich guy's shit?"

But here's the thing that really matters...

These are the SAME people building AI.

The same founders telling Congress that AI will cure cancer have already decided they're leaving when it goes sideways.

Galloway confirmed a secondhand account from someone close to one of these AI CEOs. The CEO admitted he believes there's a 7 to 10% chance AI results in a catastrophic event for humanity. And he doesn't care because being the person who summoned this intelligence is "more consequential than whatever happens."

These billionaires don't use public healthcare. They have concierge medicine delivered to their living room. Their kids attend $75,000 per year academies while public schools spend $10,000.

They fly private. They have private security instead of police.

Galloway's words: "The 0.1% are no longer invested in the well-being of America. They've totally dissociated because they're sequestered from it."

And the incentives to reach that level are so extreme that founders will make ANY decision necessary to get there.

Galloway called it the Darth Vader pipeline. Every tech CEO follows the same arc:

Sam Altman was "the gay son we all wanted." Soft spoken, testifying before Congress about safety.

Now he's subpoenaing nonprofits that criticize OpenAI and telling people to stop complaining about energy costs.

Galloway on all of them: "These guys would sleep with their cousin for a nickel."

The next chosen hero is Dario Amodei at Anthropic. Galloway says he'll follow the exact same path because the system makes it inevitable.

Then he dropped his most dangerous prediction:

He thinks there's a 1 in 3 chance AI ends up like jet transportation, vaccines, or PCs. Technologies that changed civilization but where NO group of companies ever captured serious shareholder value.

The entire airline industry across all of history is at break even. Moderna is down 90%. AI models are converging.

Open weight Chinese models are free and a third of corporations are already using them.

His prediction: Go short the AI ecosystem. The winner of AI might be us, the users. Not the companies.

And if he's right, the domino effect is terrifying...

40% of the S&P is tied to AI. Most GDP growth over the last two years came from AI capex. So if corporations start dropping OpenAI and Anthropic for free Chinese models, the entire market could crash.

This is just like the Chinese steel dumping in the 80s:

Flood America with cheap AI, kneecap the companies propping up the stock market, then trigger a recession without firing a single shot.

The billionaires building AI have escape plans ready. They've detached from society entirely.

They know there's a real chance this ends badly and they're building it anyway.

Every tech hero turns villain on a shorter timeline.

And the financial system is so dependent on AI valuations that one move from China could bring it all down.

And we're still trusting these people to self-regulate.

What do you think?

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

Public policy choices can be measured and have consequences. Below is the economic data for the last year regarding tariffs:

[Mark Zandi @Markzandi]

We have a year’s worth of economic data since Liberation Day, when President Trump announced much higher tariffs on most imported goods and countries, and the data are definitive; the tariffs have done significant damage to the economy. Since that day, job growth has come to a standstill, with only the non-traded healthcare industry adding meaningfully to payrolls. Also, since that day, inflation has accelerated, with the consumer expenditure deflator increasing at a 3% year-over-year pace, up from 2.5% before the tariffs and well above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. And the trend lines don’t look good, especially as the economic fallout from the Iran War hits with full force. The higher energy and other commodity prices caused by the war threaten to do even more economic damage than the tariffs, further undermining growth and pushing inflation higher. The U.S. economy is resilient, but just how resilient is set to be tested.

[Steve Skojec @SteveSkojec]

He’s dead on.

[Chuck Todd @chucktodd]

There really is only one way to improve representation for all Americans in Congress: UNCAP THE HOUSE! It’s what the founders intended; they did NOT want to see Congressional Districts that were bigger than most major cities. Want to dilute the influence of courts and partisans, UNCAP THE HOUSE!

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

Key takeaway: corruption is why things do not work:

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

This is the best political ad I’ve ever seen.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

Interesting point to ruminate:

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

Billionaire-funded right-wing media has successfully inculcated a large swath of America to believe that all of the country's problems are the fault of literally everything other than the billionaires who have grabbed themselves most of the resources while everyone else starves.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

Very informative:

[Tomas Pueyo @tomaspueyo]

America only has one map

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

@joshrogin A leopard does not change its spots.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

@ProudSocialist This clip and its context certainly raises a number of legitimate questions that should be answered by an open and transparent Congressional inquiry.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

The departed:

[Tim Boyum @TimBoyumTV]

He just missed out on the UNC coaching search 👀����😎

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

The political/industrial complex always has excuses for not supporting public funding of elections and/or granting open access to the airwaves to all candidates. If this were done, then consultants would have to forego fat commissions for buying airtime for campaigns and media corporations would have to forego some gravy they make on election ads.

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

Every two years, media corporations that own local TV stations are handed billions of dollars by politicians for doing nothing more than providing airtime for campaign ads...

...and yet those media corporations plead poverty to justify mass layoffs of local TV journalists.

It's almost as if these corporations actually have plenty of money to fund local journalism, but instead their executives and shareholders choose to just pocket most of the cash.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

This is the canary in the proverbial coal mine:

[InteractivePolls @IAPolls2022]

CBS News Poll – Trump approval trend among White non-college voters:

🟢 Feb. 2025: 68-32% (+36)

🟢 Sept. 2025: 58-32% (+26)

🟢 Feb. 2026: 55-45% (+10)

🟤 April 2026: 48-52% (-4)

Net 40-point negative swing

[Governor Josh Stein @NC_Governor]

If all planned data centers in North Carolina are built, developers would receive an estimated $450 million in sales tax exemptions each and every year. And with the state’s impending fiscal cliff and the federal government retreating on longstanding commitments, state revenue is especially precious.

We should spend taxpayer dollars only when it adds value to our people. And do we really want to subsidize energy consumption by data centers when they are making everyone else’s power bills go up? It doesn’t make much sense to me.

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

The @Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, is out with a major new research study showing that immigrants, both legal and illegal, contribute significantly more in taxes than they receive in public benefits.

And there's more: because immigrants (both legal and not) are such large net-contributors of tax revenue, they also structurally reduce government budget deficits.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

The radio show with Chapel Hill Council member Theo Nollert aired today. We discuss affordability and housing in the community.

Theo introduced amendments to LUMO that were passed last week that made duplexes easier and made it easier for a property owner to subdivide and sell subplots on a larger zoning lot.

The next set of amendments he will present will focus on legalizing triplexes and quadruplexes.

https://t.co/B5eDYSitgl

Theo Nollert is the Policy Director at Carolina Forward, a North Carolina think tank, and is currently serving his first term as a member of the Chapel Hill Town Council. Before joining Carolina Forward, he ran the North Carolina Democratic Party’s 2024 campus turnout program and was the president of the Graduate and Professional Student Government at UNC.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

The bigger question is what counties in each state are they moving from and where are they moving to? So for example in a state that Trump won in 2024 such as North Carolina the two counties adding the most net people are Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) which are blue counties that did not vote for Trump in 2016, 2020 or in 2024.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

@VanJones68 Trump Amerikkka is cognitive dissonance dancing with hypocrisy under the gaslight while irony smirks in the shadows and pretension cannot shake the nagging doubt that this is a cosmic satire that became a farce.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

@ggreenwald Trump Amerikkka is cognitive dissonance dancing with hypocrisy under the gaslight while irony smirks in the shadows and pretension cannot shake the nagging doubt that this is a cosmic satire that became a farce.

[Chatham County Line @ChathCoLineNews]

@harryjsisson Once again cognitive dissonance is dancing with hypocrisy under the gaslight while irony smirks in the shadows and pretension cannot shake the nagging doubt that this is a cosmic satire that became a farce.