The people of Rockingham County broke the machine’s architect. Now we break the machine.

Jack & Charlotte are going to grow up in this state. So are your kids, your grandkids.

The maps he drew are still in place.

The supermajority he built is still standing.

But the wall is coming down.

Push.

He said, and I’m quoting directly, that he will do everything he can to “support all Republican Senate candidates and protect our supermajority.”

Even in defeat. Even walking out the door. His last act is to protect the machine.

That’s not bitterness. That’s a warning.

He accepted the result. And then he reminded us exactly what he values.

I need you to read the last line of his statement. Because this is the part that matters.

I’ll say this: he respected the result. In a time when conceding an election has become a radical act for Republicans, Phil Berger looked at the outcome and accepted it. That’s not a compliment, that’s a baseline. But it’s a baseline his party has abandoned, and it matters that he held it.

He just congratulated Sheriff Page on his victory.

The people in his own backyard have sent him home.

He just conceded.

I’m looking at his statement right now.

Phil Berger, he’s the man who ran the NC Senate for fifteen years, who drew the maps, who voted to erase a speech from the permanent record, who built a machine designed to make itself untouchable.

Our children are watching.

Generations not yet born are counting on decisions we make right now, in this hour, in this darkness.

We do not get to look away.

Rise. Fight. Restore.

Push.

The least we can do, the absolute least, is honor that sacrifice by refusing to let cruelty become normal. By refusing to let the gutter become the standard.

By refusing to sit down, scroll past, and let history record that we saw this moment clearly, and did nothing.

Stand up.

Not for a party. Not for a politician.

For the country you are trying to hand to children who had no say in the world we’re making for them.

Robert Mueller walked into fire, again and again, because he believed America was worth it.

It will demand more from us than comfort allows.

But we do not get to use that as an excuse to look away.

So, it falls to each of us, Democrat, Republican, Independent, who has ever looked at their child and felt the terrifying beauty of knowing you are responsible for shaping who they become.

They did not do that for us to surrender it in silence.

The rot is deep. Scrubbing this stain from the soul of our nation will not happen in a single election, a single speech, a single post on a Saturday afternoon. It will take years.

They bled on the beaches of Normandy for children they would never meet. They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge into swinging batons because they believed, despite every reason not to, that America’s promise was worth the pain.

I will not raise children who think that is normal.

I will not raise children who think that is America.

And I know I am not alone.

Because we have been here before.

Men waded through freezing water at Valley Forge for a country that hadn’t fully been born yet.

Not because I don’t have the words. Because I will not let my children believe for a single second that what they saw this morning is acceptable. That cruelty is strength. That power means you never have to be decent. That you can dance on a hero’s grave and call it justice.

And I’d tell them. Proudly. That the President is someone who carries the weight of all of us. That the job calls out the very best in a person. That it’s the highest honor this country can give.

I believed that when I said it.

I will not have that conversation today.

I think about my kids.

I think about the car rides where Jack or Charlotte asks me out of nowhere, the way kids do, when the radio’s low and you think they’re not paying attention, “Dad, what does the President do?”

He was all of those things.

He was a Republican.

He was, by every honest measure, an American hero.

And the President danced on his grave.

When we were all afraid and we needed someone steady, someone serious, someone who loved this country more than he loved himself.

He ran into hell when other men were running from it. He came home with a Bronze Star & a Purple Heart soaked in the blood of his sacrifice. He spent the next four decades standing in the breach, as a prosecutor, as FBI Director, as the man who held our nation together in the smoldering ash of 9/11.

That office.

Those words.

Now let me tell you who Robert Mueller was.

He didn’t have to go to Vietnam.

A Princeton degree. A blown-out knee. A future waiting for him in the comfort of civilian life.

He waited a full year for that knee to heal, just so he could serve.

Let that sink in.

Good. I’m glad he’s dead.

Said by the man who holds the most powerful office in the history of human civilization. The office of Washington. Of Lincoln. Of Roosevelt standing in the rubble of Pearl Harbor promising a nation trembling in the dark that we would rise.

The President of the United States learned that Robert Mueller had died.

And he picked up his phone and typed:

“Good. I’m glad he’s dead.”

I need you to stop.

Put down whatever you’re doing and feel the full weight of those words.

Oil just jumped 13%. Brent crude over $105.

Somewhere, someone promised you’d get tired of winning.

They weren’t wrong.

History is being written right now. Every hour. In real time.

And I refuse, I refuse, to watch it happen without saying:

This is not who we are supposed to be.

We can still choose to be better.

The 148 little girls in Minab deserved to come home from school. And the Constitution of the United States deserved to be honored before the first bomb fell.

So tonight, I am saying out loud what I believe in my bones: the three service members who died deserve a country that honors their sacrifice with accountability. The five fighting for their lives deserve to know their government did not send them carelessly.

To the children of our service members. To the little boys and girls who will someday open a history book and read about February 28th, 2026.

They will ask us: What did you do?

I want to be able to answer.

I’m not sure they do.

But I know this: every generation of Americans has inherited a world shaped by decisions made before they were old enough to have a voice. The question that keeps me up tonight, the question that should keep all of us up, is what world are we handing to Jack and Charlotte.

I will watch them walk out our kitchen door, backpacks on their shoulders, and I will feel something I imagine every parent in America will feel this week, something that sits between love and terror and the fierce, desperate hope that the adults in charge know what they’re doing.

With every fiber of my being, I hope.

Hope is not a strategy. Hope does not bring back three American families shattered this morning. And hope does not bring back 148 little girls whose backpacks are still on their chairs.

My son Jack and my daughter Charlotte will go to school tomorrow.