Sen. Michael Garrett

Jack & Charlotte’s dad. Allison’s husband. Guilford County’s State Senator. Small business owner. Citizen.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

Hey Siri, what’s it called when the government owns the means of production?

Oh, and which party is in control of The White House? Asking for a friend.

[Cato Institute @CatoInstitute]

The US government now holds equity stakes in 30 private companies, up from zero just over a year ago. In some cases, it's the largest shareholder.

This raises massive questions about capital misallocation, government neutrality, and cronyism, says @scottlincicome on @MSNOWNews.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

Republicans control the House. Republicans control the Senate. Republicans control The White House.
Republicans control the Supreme Court

[NCGOP @NCGOP]

Washington's career politicians have failed to deliver while hardworking families continue to feel the squeeze of rising costs. Michael Whatley is running to break the gridlock, cut taxes, lower everyday costs, and put North Carolina families first. It's time for new leadership that fights for results—not politics.

Vote for @WhatleyNC and let's bring real change to Washington.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

But that building will not leave you there. It surrounds you, images, voices, sound coming at you from every direction at once, until you remember something that is not sentiment but simple historical fact: we have been here before. Every time it felt too dark. Every time it felt too big and too late and too far above the pay grade of ordinary people. Every time it felt larger than you, larger than all of us, larger than anything one person could possibly move, that is precisely when Americans from different places and different walks of life linked arms and pushed, and pushed this country toward ideals it had written down beautifully and never once delivered. They did not wait to be rescued. They were the rescue. They have always been the rescue. And so are we, if we decide to be.

The last thing I did was walk into a hall where the ceiling is a sky made out of his Selma speech, every word hand-stamped by the artist, layer on layer on layer, thousands of them radiating outward from a single square of white light. Up close you can read them one at a time. Step back and they dissolve into light. I put my head back and looked up into it with wet eyes and thought about my children, and about what it would mean for them to inherit a country still capable of that much light.

And then I stood and listened to his farewell address. He knew what was coming. You can hear it in his voice, he knew. And he stood there anyway and asked us to believe. Not in his ability to bring about change. In ours.

He reminded us that the highest office in this land is not Senator. It is not President. It is Citizen.

I hold one of those offices by the grace of the people of Guilford County, and only for as long as they will have me. I hold the other one for life, and so do you. It came with your birth certificate or your naturalization papers, it has never once expired, and it does not require anybody's permission to exercise.

So, it falls to each of us. Link arms. Be the light that chases out the dark. Our children are counting on a generation that refuses to hand them a wider gap than it was given, and that generation is not coming from somewhere else. It is us. It is you. It always was.

Push.🇺🇸

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

I could not have written this yesterday. I want to start there, because it is the truest thing I can tell you about the Obama Presidential Center. I walked out of that building emotionally wrung out and I got in the car, and I could not say a word, and anyone who knows me will tell you that silence is not my natural condition. It took a night's sleep and a long morning of staring at nothing before the thing would hold still long enough for me to look at it. Some experiences hit you so hard that language arrives late. This one arrived this morning, and it arrived with tears, and I have decided not to be embarrassed about that.

It started before I ever reached the door. My Uber pulled up on the South Side, I stepped out onto the sidewalk, craned my neck back, and there it was, cut into the stone at the top of the building, his words from Selma, that America is unconstrained by what is, that in this quest we grab for what ought to be. I stood there in the sun while strangers walked past me on their way to lunch and I could not read it through without my eyes flooding. I hadn't spoken to a single person. I hadn't seen a single artifact. I hadn't even gotten in line, and the building had already taken something out of me.

Inside, it begins so gently that you don't see what's coming. A little glazed handprint pressed into clay, Barry, 3½. A schoolboy's notebook in careful cursive. A girl from the South Side who rode a bus more than an hour each way, twice a day, because her mother had decided that education was the whole ballgame, and whose high school counselor looked her in the face and told her she wasn't Princeton material. I stood in front of that panel thinking about every kid in Guilford County who has been handed some version of that same sentence by some version of that same adult, and about how thin the line is between the ones who are believed in and the ones who aren't.

And then, before it tells you a single thing about him, the museum turns and tells you about us. Wall after wall of the people who made 2008 possible and were never once on a ballot with him. Shirley Chisholm. Barbara Jordan. Harvey Milk. Judy Heumann, telling this country that disability only becomes a tragedy when we fail to provide what people need to live their lives. Women's liberation marchers. ACT UP kids screaming into a wall of official silence. Solidarity in Poland. A man standing alone in the road in front of a column of tanks. Not one of them lived to see the finish of the thing they gave their lives to. Every one of them pushed anyway. And standing there it dawned on me that the room I was about to walk into wasn't a beginning at all, it was a receipt. It was what happens when generations of un-famous people refuse to stop pushing and the pressure finally, finally gives.

Which is why the 2008 gallery takes you apart. The confetti. Michelle with the girls in her arms. A skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name saying out loud that there was no way somebody like him could win a statewide race, and then sixteen months later, there he was. But what stops you in that room is not the confetti. It is the math underneath it, what it actually took, and who actually did it. Millions of people who had been told their entire lives that this was simply not how America works went out and proved otherwise, in living rooms and church basements and union halls and barber shops, on foot, in the cold, knocking on the doors of strangers. Grandmothers who had been turned away from a ballot box in their youth stood in line for hours to cast one. And for one improbable stretch this country looked itself full in the face, told itself the truth about what it had been, and chose to be better anyway. Not perfect. Better. Together. Whatever else is true about today, that happened. We did that. It is in the record and nobody gets to take it out.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

Then the museum walks you into the weight of it, and the weight is enormous. There is a replica of the Oval Office, and sitting on that desk is a small nameplate somebody gave him: Hard things are hard. Four words. I stood there longer than I stood anywhere else in the building. I have never held anything within a thousand miles of that job and those four words still landed in my sternum, because every person who has ever tried to move something heavy for other people knows exactly what they mean, and knows how lonely the knowing is.

And then came the room I have not been able to put down since. One room. One day. June 26, 2015. The Supreme Court rules that love is love and marriage is marriage, and the country erupts, and there on the wall are his words about how for all our differences we are one people, stronger together than we could ever be alone. And that same afternoon he boards a plane for Charleston to bury nine people who were murdered in their own church at Bible study. Joy and grief inside the same twenty-four hours. The doors thrown open and the caskets carried out on the same page of the same calendar. I stood in that gallery and wept, and I was not the only one weeping, and I understood something I have known intellectually my whole life but had never felt in my body all at once: that is America. That has always been America. The very best of us and the very worst of us reaching for the same microphone in the same hour.

What I did not expect was how relentlessly the building refuses to let that be a story about him. It is almost stubborn about it. On every single floor there is an on-ramp, a prompt, a station, a wall that stops narrating history, turns to you, and asks a question. Not admire this man. Not go be a president. It asks what you are going to do, where you already are, with what you already have, in whatever role you already hold. Be a neighbor. Coach a team. Run for the school board. Show up at the county commission meeting on a Tuesday night when nobody is watching. Organize your block. Feed somebody. Teach somebody. Sit with somebody who has no one sitting with them. One wall puts it in five words: we are the change that we seek. Another says the work of perfecting this union is a baton, handed forward, unfinished on purpose, and the only real question in any generation is whether somebody bends down and picks it up. I have spent my adult life in rooms where people talk about power as something you are granted. That whole building is an argument that power is something you pick up, and that almost nobody on those walls had permission when they picked it up.

Which brings me to the part I could not have said out loud yesterday.

My tears were not nostalgia. They were not about one man or one election or some golden era I would like to climb back inside of. My tears were about the country and the world we are handing our children. From the very beginning the American promise has been to close the gap, the distance between the ideals we wrote down and the reality we actually live in. Every generation is handed that gap and asked to make it narrower, and some of them made it dramatically narrower at costs I cannot fathom paying. And on a bad day right now it feels like we could be the first generation to hand our kids a gap that is wider than the one we were given. That is a terrifying thing to carry around a dark museum on a Wednesday afternoon, and I carried it from room to room like a stone in my coat.

[David Axelrod @davidaxelrod]

There was plenty senators could have asked Dr. Fauci about what lessons he learned, and the country should, from the COVID pandemic. Instead they engaged in an obvious attempt to demonize and entrap the 85-year-old, who received the Medal of Freedom from a Republican POTUS for the work he did to save millions here and abroad from the AIDS epidemic.
This was not about public health. It was about one senators longstanding vendetta.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

Willie Nelson just put words to something I’ve been carrying around for months and couldn’t name.

Rural America was never built on industrial footprints. It was built on people who stayed. On land that fed somebody. On a sky dark enough to still see stars in.

I think about the farmland in Guilford County. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. You don’t un-pave a field. You don’t hand a working farm back to a family after the transformers go in.

“Whoever controls food and water, controls the masses.”

He’s right. Millions of us feel it. We should act like it.

Push.

[Willie Nelson @WillieNelson]

To whom it may concern and to everyone else as well,

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

War with Iran, troops being killed, rising gas prices, healthcare unaffordable, rent sky rocketing, groceries surging…. And this is the mid answer.

We are the laughing stock of the world.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Hop in... best dimension yet.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

At 12:01 tomorrow morning, Donald Trump raises your grocery bill again.

New tariffs. Eighty countries. The third legal justification he’s tried this year, because the Supreme Court threw out the first one and a federal court threw out the second. He got told no. Twice. He did it anyway.

And every Republican who could have stopped him said nothing.

I was in a grocery store in Guilford County last week. A woman ahead of me was counting. Not the change in her hand, the items in her cart. Deciding what goes back.

She put back the ground beef. Kept the milk.

That is what this looks like at eye level. Not a chart. Not a quarterly number. A mother in a checkout line doing math she should never have to do, because a man who has never once stood in that line decided her dinner should cost more.

Nobody voted for this. Not her. Not you. The Court ordered $160 billion refunded, money taken out of families’ pockets and handed back only after judges forced it. And instead of stopping, this administration went hunting for another law. Then another. Tomorrow, a third, with a justification even trade experts call a pretext.

Republicans control the Congress. They set the calendar. They could end it in a week.

They won’t. And here is what they did in North Carolina with that same power instead:

Our bill to bring down health care costs, shelved.

The Carolina Housing Promise Act, shelved.

The gas tax rebate that would have put money back in your pocket this summer, shelved.

Three bills. Three chances to help. Three doors shut in your face.

So don’t tell me they couldn’t do anything. They chose this. Every time the choice came up, they chose him over you.

You’re working harder than your parents ever worked and standing still. Groceries up. Rent up. Gas up. A war overseas driving all of it higher. And the people you sent to hold the line are holding the door open for rising costs.

But here is what they are counting on you forgetting.

There are more of us.

The lineman in the union hall. The state employee who hasn’t seen a real raise in years. The bartender closing out at two in the morning. The server working a double. The grocer watching his margins vanish. The small business owner who signed a personal guarantee and lies awake doing the numbers. Democrat, Republican, independent, never voted in your life, the cart is getting emptier for all of us.

They win when we’re pointed at each other. They lose the minute we turn around and look at them.

I have kids. I think about what I’m handing them. Not a country where the math always breaks against working people. Not a country where a family’s dinner is priced by someone who will never have to look them in the eye.

A country that belongs to the people who built it. Because it always did.

That woman in the checkout line wasn’t asking for a handout. She was asking for a country that isn’t rigged against her.

We can give her one. We have the power to course correct, we always have. It was never theirs to take.

So, let’s act like it.

Push.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

That's where we are. In the room. Before the moment.

I have to tell you: I am not discouraged. I'm the opposite. Because five seats is small. Five seats is a number you can hold in your hand. The people who redrew that map are betting that it's too boring to fight over, that you'll look away, that the quiet is on their side.

It isn't. Not anymore. Not if you're reading this.

Somewhere in North Carolina tonight there's a teacher filling out paperwork at her kitchen table, wondering if anyone will show up for her. There's a canvasser lacing up for a Saturday. There's a volunteer learning a database she didn't know existed six weeks ago. They are not waiting for a wave. They're just going.

They need us behind them. That's all this is.

My kids are going to ask me what I did. Not in some grand historical sense, just, at the dinner table someday. “Dad, what did you do?”

I want to tell them I found my people. I want to tell them we were outspent and out-mapped and we did it anyway, because two hundred and then two thousand and then twenty thousand of us decided that a quiet room in Raleigh belongs to the people who live here.

Five seats. A handful of quiet rooms. And all of us.

We can do this. I've counted it a hundred ways and we can actually do this.

So, let's go get it. Let’s make history, together.

Push.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

Five Seats.

I want to tell you about a room.

It's a committee room in Raleigh. Fluorescent lights. Maybe eleven people in the gallery. No cameras. No national press. On a Tuesday afternoon in that room, with almost nobody watching, we decided who gets to vote in North Carolina and how hard we're going to make it for them.

You didn't see it on the news. There was no chyron. There was no cable panel breaking it down at nine o'clock.

That's not an accident. That's the design.

Last October, in rooms like that one, the General Assembly redrew North Carolina's congressional map in the middle of the decade because Donald Trump told them to. North Carolina is a 50/50 state. With gerrymandering, our delegation was already 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats. Under the new map it could be 11 and 3. Redistricting bills in North Carolina cannot be vetoed. Not by the Governor you elected. Not by anyone.

One room. One vote. A congressional seat, gone.

Here's what I need you to understand: the people who want to take your vote from you are not confused about where power lives. They found the quietest room in America and they moved in.

So let me tell you what we're doing about it.

I'm the Deputy Democratic Leader in the North Carolina Senate. I'm raising money for our caucus program, and a caucus program is just this: the shared engine that a party's legislative candidates run on together. Field staff. Data. Mail. The ability to put a real campaign around a middle school teacher or a nurse or a veteran who decided to run and has never done this before. Candidates don't build that alone. They can't. The caucus builds it once and shares it out.

We need five seats.

Not fifty. Not a wave. Five.

I've knocked those doors. I know those precincts. Some of these races are going to come down to a few hundred votes, and a few hundred votes is a mail piece, a canvasser, a week of paid organizing. That's it. That's the whole margin between a state that trusts its people and a state that controls them.

Now, here's the part I need you to sit with, especially if you don't live in North Carolina.

Spending on U.S. Senate ads this cycle is projected to hit a record breaking $2.8 billion. Two point eight billion dollars, mostly for thirty-second spots that you will mute.

A competitive state legislative race costs somewhere between eighty thousand and a few hundred thousand dollars.

Read those two numbers again.

For a rounding error on a single U.S. Senate race, you can fund an entire caucus program. Not one ad. The whole program. Every candidate. Every door.

And the people in that Raleigh committee room? They write the voting laws. They decide the early voting sites. They draw the congressional maps that decide who runs Washington, for your state too, because a House majority is a House majority no matter which state supplied it. They pick who referees the next election.

So, when someone tells you the Senate race is the whole ballgame, they're not lying to you. Those races matter enormously. But they are the loudest room, and the loudest room is not the room where they take your vote away.

The quiet rooms are where they do it. The quiet rooms are cheap. And nobody is watching.

Be the person watching.

What I'm asking.

Give what you can. Ten dollars. Twenty-five a month. Whatever is real for you, because I would rather have two hundred people at ten dollars than one person at two thousand. The two hundred people are a movement. The one person is a transaction.

And if ten dollars isn't something you have right now, I mean this just as much: forward this to someone who's never given to a state race in their life. Tell them about the room.

Here's what I keep coming back to.

Every hard thing this country has ever done, it did in the quiet first. Before the bridge in Selma there were church basements. Before the vote there were kitchen tables. Somebody always had to believe in the room before anybody believed in the moment.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

The House will pass a $12 billion bailout for farmers suffering from high fuel & fertilizer prices caused by the Iran War, expensive equipment & parts caused by tariffs, and lower sales prices for commodities due to trade disputes with China.

But the GOP is fighting communism!

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

Who’s your favorite Canes player? 🧐

[Michael Whatley @WhatleyNC]

Roy Cooper is a fraud.

His entire campaign can be summed up in this picture of him pretending to watch a race that was posted 6 hours before they even waved the green flag. 

I understand that the race started after his bedtime, but he missed a great night in Wilkes County!

[Harry Sisson @harryjsisson]

The president of FIFA tried to get Trump off stage and he wouldn’t leave… such a weird and awkward moment. He’s a loser

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

What they perfect here, they export. If this isn't in your state yet, it's coming, North Carolina is the testing ground. So, wherever you're reading this, show up in numbers too big to ignore, again and again, until the message back to Raleigh and to Washington is unmistakable. We see you. We are not looking away. Don't let anyone tell you it won't matter: one seat, one, breaks the supermajority that made all of this possible, and five takes the chamber outright. That's how close we are. That's how much you count.

So, organize. Organize. Organize. And do it again.

It's late now, and the room is quiet. Three hundred miles away my kids are asleep, the ones who will cast their first ballots before I'm ready for it, and somewhere out there is that grandmother, and that granddaughter, one who's voted for forty years and one who hasn't yet voted at all. In a country worth its promise, their votes weigh exactly the same. That is the covenant. It was handed to us whole by people who bled for it, and our only real job, the whole assignment of a single generation, is to hand it to the next one without letting anyone chip a piece off in the dark. I am not willing to be the father who let it happen on his watch. I don't think you are either.

Tonight the President tried to make the country afraid of the light. He had it exactly backward. The light was never our enemy. It's theirs. It's the thing that ends them.

So, grab it. Hold it up. And do not look away.

Push.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

Tonight, the President of the United States stood in front of a camera and threw a cloak over America's elections.

He called it fraud. He called it stolen. He pointed at phantom voters and imaginary busloads and a shadowy "them" in some city far from you. And while the whole country stared at the darkness he made with one hand, the other hand kept working, quietly, exactly where he wanted it.

That's the trick. The lie isn't the point; the lie is the cloak. He makes the room go dark so you won't see what's happening in it.

I watched him do it from a hotel room, still in my travel clothes, an hour after I'd called home to say goodnight to my kids. I love you. I miss you. Get home safe, Dad. And I sat on the end of a hotel bed, hundreds of miles from my own, listening to a man on the television tell the country that the democracy those two children are going to inherit is a fraud, and I felt something cold go through me. I'm writing this now with one lamp on in a dark room, because some things you have to say while your hands are still shaking.

So, let's turn on a light. Let me show you what he doesn't want you to see. Not in some city far away. Here. In North Carolina. Tonight.

It starts with two words, typed into a phone by someone in our State Auditor's office and sent to a county elections official this spring:

"Drop Sunday."

They were talking about your grandmother.

Picture her. For forty years she's voted the same way; church first, then the whole congregation riding together to cast their ballots before the sun goes down. Choir robes still on. Some who don't drive anymore. Some who buried husbands and raised grandchildren and never once missed an election. For her, that Sunday drive isn't a logistics problem to be optimized. It's sacred. It's the day she gets to look her country in the eye and say, "I am still here, and I still count." They call it Souls to the Polls. It isn't a chore. It's joy. It's the freedom their parents were beaten for, exercised out loud, together, on the Lord's day.

"Drop Sunday." Like she's a line item. Like her vote is a thing you delete.

Move the light. Now, your daughter. Eighteen, away at school for the first time, learning who she is without you in the next room. She goes to vote, right there on the campus where she lives and sleeps, the way students there have for more than a decade. Maybe she texts you a photo of the sticker. Maybe it's the proudest you've been of her all year, your kid, becoming a citizen, doing the exact thing you raised her to do. This time, the polling place isn't there. They moved it a mile away, across a four-lane highway, to a spot with no bus and nowhere to park. Far enough that a lot of kids just… won't. And that is the whole idea, that she gives up, that she doesn't bother, that the habit never takes. They are not trying to change her vote. They are trying to make sure she never casts it at all.

None of this was an accident. And to understand it, you must see the biggest dark room of all; the one where they got the power to do it.

In the dead of a lame-duck session at the end of 2024, after the voters had already spoken, the legislature reached in and took a power the people's governor had held for nearly a century: the authority to appoint the boards that run our elections. They stripped it from the incoming Democratic governor the voters had just elected and handed it to a single partisan officeholder: the new, Republican State Auditor, Dave Boliek. An office built to audit waste and fraud, suddenly holding the keys to democracy itself. Overnight, without one vote from you or me, all 100 county elections boards in North Carolina flipped to Republican control.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

So why? Why go to all this trouble, the closed sites, the scripts, the ballots tossed on a technicality? Nobody does this for sport. They do it because power is the whole prize, and our vote is the one thing that can take it from them. Think about what that power is actually for. It's the permission slip to serve the few people who paid for it and hand the bill to everyone else. A politician who rigs the game before the whistle blows never has to answer to us, so he answers to them. The donor gets the tax cut. The company gets the sweetheart deal buried in a budget nobody was allowed to read. And we get the invoice: the school with no air conditioning in August, the neighbor dropped from her health care, groceries climbing while the shop on the corner boards up its windows. That's not bad luck. That's the trade. They keep the power, a handful of insiders cash in, and the cost lands on our kitchen tables.

And here is why it should chill every single one of us, whatever our party: a rigged election doesn't just beat the other side. It fires our ability to fire them. The Republican in Stovall and the Democrat in Oxford are in the exact same trap, because when the game is fixed, none of us can vote out the people selling us all out.

Let me say the word for what this is, because everyone keeps tiptoeing around it. It's un-American. Not as an insult, as a fact. Two hundred and fifty years ago this country was built on one radical idea: that power flows up, from the people, toward the light, not down, from a ruler who decides in advance which of us count. Men froze at Valley Forge for it. They bled at Normandy for it. They marched across a bridge in Selma and had their skulls cracked open for it. And now, on our watch, a handful of people who could not win an honest argument are trying to quietly turn it around, to make power flow back down, from them onto us. That is a betrayal of everything we claim to be. A betrayal of everyone who died to hand us this. And underneath the party and the politics, it's a betrayal of something more human than any of that: the plain, holy dignity of being counted, of walking into a room as a school janitor or a surgeon or a nineteen-year-old or a great-grandmother, and for one moment weighing exactly the same as the richest man in the state. That is the closest thing to equality most of us will ever touch. And they are trying to take it while we sleep.

This was never left versus right. It's the powerful against the people, the few protecting themselves against the many they're afraid of. And here is the thing they are truly afraid of: there are more of us. Far more. Their whole operation needs the dark, the quiet rooms, the cheap-seat texts, the ballots killed over an envelope flap. It only works if we're not looking. Which means the single most powerful thing any of us can do is refuse to stop looking. He threw a cloak over the country tonight. So, we lift it. We shine a light in every county, every board meeting, every dark little room where they thought no one would come.

And these rooms are open to us, right now. These plans are being locked in this month, county by county, in meetings that are open to the public, which means they are open to you. Walk in. Bring your neighbor. Bring your kid. Say out loud that your Sunday hours stay, your campus site stays, your church van has somewhere to go. Make them look you in the eye and say to your face why fewer of your neighbors should get to vote. They will hate that. That's exactly why you do it.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

What happened in Butler was horrific. No one should be shot at a political rally, or anywhere else.

I hope that same clarity extends to the kids gunned down in classrooms, the families in grocery stores, the people killed in movie theaters. And to Alex Pretti and Renée Good.

Violence is either unacceptable or it isn’t.

[Susie Wiles @SusieWiles47]

Two years ago, our country witnessed an unspeakable act of violence in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Being at the hospital in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of President Trump is a day I will never forget.

Through it all, President Trump wasn’t focused on himself. He wanted to make sure everyone else was okay.

I was with two dear friends that - Dan Scavino and Steven Cheung and must admit I had a few minutes of being in shock and even a little weepy.

I’m grateful to God for His protection over the President and the team. But the cost of that day was nevertheless greater than many realize and we will continue to pray for the families impacted.

We will not forget the day in Butler.

[Sen. Michael Garrett @MichaelKGarrett]

@jared_shult 💯!💯💪🇺🇸💙