- Hi, I'm Marc Rotterman.

Coming up on "Front Row", US Supreme Court revisits school prayer, Governor Cooper has a plan to help college students with summer school and is medical marijuana in North Carolina's future?

Next.

[riveting music] - [Speaker] Major funding for "Front Row" was provided by Robert L. Luddy.

Additional funding provided by Patricia and Koo Yuen through the Yuen Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities and by: Funding for the "Lightning Round" provided by Boddie-Noell Foundation, NC Realtors, Mary Louise and John Burress, Rifenburg Construction and Helen Laughery.

A complete list of funders can be found at pbsnc.org/frontrow.

[dramatic music] ♪ - Welcome back.

Joining the conversation, Mitch Kokai with the John Locke Foundation, Broadcast Journalist Jonah Kaplan, Political Analyst Joe Stewart, Colin Campbell, Editor of "The North Carolina Tribune".

Okay, let's begin Mitch, with the school prayer case currently in front of the US Supreme Court.

- This is the case of a fellow named Joseph Kennedy, a Marine and a football coach at the high school level in Washington State.

And he had gotten into the routine of going after the games to the 50 yard line and saying a prayer.

And after having done this a few times, some students who were also Christians said, hey, can we join you?

They started joining him.

He started leading them in a prayer and then more students joined in after the games.

But then at one point, someone initiated a complaint saying maybe some of these students are feeling compelled to do this 'cause this is their coach and he controls their playing time.

And so once the complaint started coming out, he stopped leading prayers, but still did the prayer and still had some other students out there.

But then this eventually led to a lawsuit.

The Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled against Kennedy saying that his First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion paled in comparison to this idea of compulsion, to engage in religious activity that shouldn't take place on the school level.

And once the Ninth Circuit came out with its ruling, at the Supreme Court level in a rare case, Justices Alito, Gorsuch, also Kavanaugh and Thomas all came out with a statement saying that they found this to be a troubling ruling.

The case eventually got to the US Supreme Court.

We heard the oral arguments and it looks as if the Supreme Court may be moving in the direction of ruling in Kennedy's favor.

- This was voluntary prayer though, right?

Nobody was coerced to do it.

- It was not coerced at all, but the complaint was that because this was a coach, because this coach controlled playing time with some of these players, people who might not have wanted to participate might have felt compelled to do so because he was their coach.

- Do you think Joe, this is a culture war issue?

- Well, at the very least in the immortal words of the philosophers Run-DMC, it's tricky.

[all laughing] These issues of faith are very hard for people to feel comfortable with in the balance against the right to free speech and the free assembly and the right to religion.

And we don't, we have a history in this nation of wanting to resist anything that even gives the appearance that the government is trying to establish some preference over one religious faith versus another.

In the expression of faith, for this gentleman to kneel and give thanks for what he saw as the safe conduct of his players in a game is part of his faith and it's understandable why a person of faith would feel that way, but the fact that it's a school and that they are young people and they're impressionable and there might be some sense in their minds that they're gonna get playing time if they go along with something, even if they don't agree with it, it does have to be adjudicated.

- Well you know, John, a lot of pro football players take a knee and cross their self after a touchdown.

- I think the distinction has to be made.

Where is it sanctioned by the school?

Are they doing it as part of, okay, you joined together in the National Anthem, now let's say a prayer together or is it done privately?

Is the coach making it a part of the game ritual?

Is he making it part of the teams coming together versus again, is that just the freedom of expression?

I think for a Supreme Court precedent, we have to look at can you put the 10 commandments in front of a school building?

Can you mandate a religious service at school if it's a public school?

That's, again, the distinction.

And when it comes to professional sports, again, that's not a publicly funded entity, so I don't think that's-- - Right distinction.

- I don't think that that's kind of apples to apples there.

The Supreme Court, yes, they're probably going to come out, definitely, I mean, if you do the math.

You just mentioned four, all they need is one more and they're probably gonna get that with either Roberts or with Justice Barrett, but again, is it something the school sanctioned or is it the freedom of expression that's independent of the routine?

- Colin, wrap this up in about 40 seconds.

- Yeah, what's gonna be interesting to see is if they rule in favor of the coach, how broadly do they rule and how narrowly tailored is this ruling gonna be to this particular scenario and this particular situation or does it open up the door to some more lawsuits challenging the degree to which prayer may be able to encroach upon the school environment.

- Okay, I'm gonna come right back to you.

Talk about Governor Cooper's plan to fund college students' summer school classes.

- Yeah, this is an interesting issue.

It sort of speaks to two priorities that the governor has, one is college affordability, but the other is just sort of getting students back on track from the two years of COVID.

A lot of students, both in the K12 and college level have fallen a little bit behind in their studies.

So Cooper in the last week has announced this program he's calling the Summer Accelerator.

It's gonna be $27 million total funding and it's gonna offer $5,000 grants to go to tuition, room and board for students who are taking summer classes to catch up in their studies.

Part of a sort of a larger push.

He's got these other grants for community college studies in general that he's been going around the state promoting.

So really seems to be kind of a college affordability as a signature issue for the governor right now.

- Now, UNC President Hans has endorsed this idea.

- Yeah, he's behind it.

What's particularly interesting to me about it is that this is not something that the legislature signed off on.

He asked for more money for this program through the last budget process, didn't get it, but is coming back with this sort of pot of money that comes through some of the federal COVID money that the governor controls and therefore he can sort of create this program on his own without going through the legislature as he might otherwise have to do.

- What do you think the odds are, Joe, that they'll get more money from the legislature?

- Well, it appears that the tax collections are a little bit ahead of schedule.

So there may be a bit more money for the General Assembly to hand out for projects like this once they reconvene after the primary election in the short session.

And I think it probably is symbolically important for us to do the things, what I would call, as we enter the condiment phase of the pandemic where it's all about ketchup.

So we're gonna have to make these kinds of investments to get people over the last two years, who've had a setback of one kind or another to get them back to where they would've been if they hadn't had this disruption of COVID.

- Mitch?

- To me, the interesting piece is something that Colin alluded to, and the fact is that Governor Cooper is using some money that he has control of that came from the federal government is part of dealing with COVID.

And I think the General Assembly, if you set that aside, would probably be amenable to this, especially since the UNC System seems to like it, that President Hans is supporting this.

But you run into this situation that we've seen a number of times in recent years, where you have Governor Cooper on one side, you have legislative leaders on the other, and they're kind of tugging over who can control policy and money.

And if they look at this and see this as a way of the governor trying to get around them, they might not be as amenable to supporting it as they would otherwise.

- Jonah?

- Well, then hopefully, they just keep their eye on the ball, which is what Governor Cooper has been consistent of.

We're having all these new companies coming here.

We want to give them North Carolinians for their jobs.

We don't wanna have to bring in other people.

We have to develop a workforce.

And the Finish Line Grants that the governor has pushed for, the enrollment that has dropped in community colleges in particular, when people have been dropping out because they need to get other jobs to come up with some of these other monies, this is where the gap is gonna create, especially when we come to equity and affordability and getting more marginalized communities to get some of these jobs that are coming in, whether it's Toyota, whether it's Boom, whether it's Apple coming in.

We have to get those skills.

And not even just those big jobs, but we need more paramedics.

We need more nurses.

Those are the kind of people that go to these summer schools.

Those are the kind of positions where you need those certifications, and you can finish out at summer school.

- You know, a lot of these kids, Joe, are way behind because of COVID.

- Yeah, I could speak for my own daughter's experience.

She's a junior at Appalachian, and she had to take a semester off.

The online learning platform just wasn't for her, but she's now a little bit behind where she needs to be to stay on track to graduate in time.

And I think ultimately, what President Hans said is the university is very committed keeping kids on that track to finish their degree work within four years.

And so it is gonna take this a little bit of additional instruction time to make sure that most kids can stay on schedule.

- Colin, final thoughts in about 20 seconds, my friend.

- Yeah, and I think this is gonna be interesting to see if this sort of thing continues, and whether the governor's gonna lead the charge on this, and whether the legislature goes along to expand it going forward with the more money the governor's gonna request.

- Okay.

I wanna move on, talk about medical marijuana.

There may be some momentum in the General Assembly, Jonah.

- Well, if we look at other historical kind of coming through in North Carolina, they were among the last to add a lottery.

This could be a different gamble.

See what I did there?

[men laugh] - Don't compete.

- North Carolina, North Carolina is one of only 13 states in the country right now that has no form of basically legal, whether it's recreational marijuana, or even medicinal marijuana.

And now, there's a bill that could be coming up in the short session.

I believe Senate Bill 711, which also now makes kind of fun sense.

Yeah, how about that?

Which is going to potentially legalize at least marijuana for medicinal purposes.

Obviously, there's a lot at play here.

One is, if you have, again, marginalized communities, decriminalizing marijuana could reduce the amount of people going to prison, could reduce the strain of the justice system.

Could also be a cash windfall.

Colorado, for instance, is bringing in more than $420 million in tax revenues by legalizing recreational marijuana.

I don't think in North Carolina, they're gonna go from zero to 100 that quickly, but medicinal marijuana, look, Virginia is having that, and they're on track by 2024 to make it legal for recreation.

So the question for North Carolina lawmakers is, is it going to balance kind of the push towards modernity, the push towards progressivism or is it going to be the more conservative state?

And look, we have a lot of young people, a lot of colleges.

This is where it gets dicey.

- You know, SurveyUSA said 57% of North Carolinians want legalized recreational marijuana.

- Yeah, that's sort of a pretty staggering number.

- [Host] I saw that in your Tribune.

- Yeah, exactly.

We had that poll in the Tribune, and another thing we had in the Tribune, interestingly, was looking at the way the two chambers in the legislature view this issue.

The Senate is very supportive of this.

Senate rules chairman, Bill Rabon, who's the second most powerful guy in the Senate is sponsoring it.

Senate leader Phil Berger has said he supports Rabon's version of the bill, which is about his conservative approach to medical marijuana, as you can get a lot of safeguards that prevent you from going in there and saying, "Oh, my back hurts.

Can I have a prescription for weed?"

But the House, when I talked to House speaker Tim Moore, he says, there's not an appetite in the House for Republican Caucus to do this.

So even though the polling suggests that there's a big support from it, a lot of these small town, conservative lawmakers across the state and the house aren't quite ready to take that step and get on board with this.

So I'm not sure it happens this year.

- Mitch?

- Yeah, I think the most interesting thing is sort of the changing dynamics on which chamber of the General Assembly is standing athwart various ideas.

Oftentimes, it's been seen as the Senate standing in the way of these types of procedures.

But because Bill Rabon, who's such a powerful member of the Senate, is the main backer, that chamber seems to be inclined to go along with it.

Whereas the House seems to be the one stepping back and saying, "Wait a minute, we're not sure about this."

The same thing is playing out when you look at Medicaid expansion.

- Well, what is the case for medical marijuana?

- Well, certainly, there is an argument to be made that this is the type of thing that's going to help people who are dealing with chronic conditions, where other things don't help, and perhaps one of the alternatives- - Chemo.

- Is having chemo, or an opioid that could become a a huge problem for them.

If medical marijuana is a good alternative, people are saying, why not give it a try?

You mentioned that 57% support for the recreational.

The support for medicinal marijuana was much higher, I think higher than 70%.

- Jonah, about a minute to wrap.

- But again, it's not just the polling.

I mean, other states, 37 states are doing it.

And for many of these states, they're making a lot of money.

So North Carolina is probably gonna look at, "Yes, we have a good surplus of cash coming from sales tax.

Is this in another place?"

We talked about online gambling.

That's something happening in many other states, whether it's Tennessee, whether it's Virginia, whether it's South Carolina.

But where is it going to come from?

- Let Joe jump in here.

- Yeah, one final observation.

Senator Rabon himself has a very compelling personal story to tell while battling cancer.

He found that marijuana provided some relief from some of the side effects for his treatment.

Soldiers with PTSD report that this really helps them, but we still have a long way to go.

Is allowing smokeable forms of marijuana the right way?

Are there other medicinal applications, nebulizers, or inhalers?

And how will we distribute it?

Maybe through the ABC stores?

Maybe that's the right way to do it.

- Okay, I wanna come right back to you.

The richest man in the world just bought Twitter, quite a firestorm.

- Yes.

It's very interesting.

Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world of Tesla fame.

He said he wants to purchase Twitter and he's offering up $44 billion, which I checked by the way, would allow Front Row to be broadcast for 500,000 years.

[laughter] So, just saying, if he wants to come next to your door, Marc, you might be able to go on for half a million years.

- Just get me a meeting with him.

[all chuckle] - Musk had been purchasing Twitter stock for a while and had gotten up to about 10% ownership share.

There was some discussion about him joining the Board of Twitter, which he initially said yes and then no.

Then it looked like Twitter was gonna resist the purchase and now they seemingly have gotten together.

Now, not all of this is his own money.

He's putting up about $21 billion of the $44 billion, offering a stock price- - [Marc] Pocket change.

- Yeah, pocket change, of $54.20 per share.

The stock has been down.

They just released quarterly earnings of $1.2 billion for the first quarter, which is a 16% increase.

And the bottom line here is, despite the fact that Musk said that, "Twitter "is a global platform for free speech "and in its current form, it can neither thrive "nor serve that social imperative."

But this is a business decision and Twitter, which was founded in 2013, was really only profitable for the first time in 2018.

It's still, some question how they generate the ad revenue to make it worthwhile.

It's not the largest social media platform.

Facebook dwarfs it with 3 billion utilizers worldwide.

So the question is, is Musk gonna use this for good or will he become another robber baron like Jay Gould, the railroad in the 2019 century who bought Western Union to try to control the distribution of news through AP.

- Mitch, what's been the reaction from the tech giants and the media and mainstream media?

- Well, a lot in the mainstream media have been worried about what is Elon Musk going to be doing with this?

The idea that perhaps he's going to be a allowing a lot of disinformation to be spread on Twitter.

To me, some of the most interesting reactions are Jack Dorsey, the guy who was the man behind Twitter, who says that Elon Musk is the singular solution I trust.

- He stands to make about a billion dollars too.

- Well.

Yeah [everyone laughing] [overlapping chatter] - But he definitely has endorsed this.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos has been trolling Musk about this and saying that he thinks that this is perhaps going to enable the Chinese to be playing some more nefarious role in our politics.

- Well, Bezos has his own online newspaper, right.

The Washington Post.

- Exactly.

- Colin.

- Yeah.

I mean, I think that's the difference is, you know, we're definitely moving into an era where rich guys do control the media.

And with respect to sort of the profitability angle, the question is, does Musk really think he can make this more profitable?

Get more people to sign up for the service and use it just as much as they do Facebook or TikTok or Instagram, or does he just want to have more of a say in this space where the media plays heavily, politicians play heavily, a lot of very powerful, very influential people spend a lot of time on Twitter.

A lot of us journalists spend way too much time on Twitter and that sort of shapes our understanding of the world.

And that's where it can be a sort of an influential platform more so than just the average person wanting to go on there and post their vacation pics.

- John, do you think that Musk just wants the megaphone?

- What's been interesting.

- He can promote Tesla on this ya know?

- What's been interesting to watch is he's almost kind of been the new Donald Trump in that everyone now is excited about what he tweets.

I mean, everything from when he says "I'm gonna buy Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in it" or "I'm gonna buy McDonald's because I can't stand "that the ice cream machines are always broken."

I mean, these things are going viral and every time he, and this morning, we're taping on a Friday, he says that the far left hates that they, they hate themselves.

And I'm not a fan of the far right either.

Let's promote more love and less hate - But there has been a lot of censorship like the Hunter Biden story never made it on Twitter.

- Well, and.

- [Marc] And by the way, it's been proved to be right that the lap truck up is real, right?

- I think the, what Musk is going to have to balance here is he says he wants to promote the laws of free speech.

That's great.

But free speech could also mean some very gory material.

It could mean explicit material.

Free speech, does that mean Holocaust deniers should be allowed on Twitter?

Does that mean?

- [Marc] Farrakhan?

- Does that, Farrakhan, does it mean that the.

- Does Trump come back?

- Well, he says he's not, does it mean that all world leaders should have, whether it's Putin, whether it's the Ayatollah, what is this?

So where is the balance of free speech?

What's the point of Twitter besides to make money?

- Okay, we'll continue to follow that.

Let's go to the most underreported story of the week, Mitch.

- North Carolina recently got an F grade in a new report and usually that's bad news, but in this case it might not be.

An anti school choice group that's called the Network for Public Education based in New York City gave North Carolina an F and ranked the state 46th out of 50 for its education policies mainly because of the robust school choice that we have, the opportunity scholarships, a growing number of public charter schools, also an education savings account.

And so this really, this ranking flies in the face of what parents have been talking about ever since the COVID 19 pandemic came out, the opportunity to have more parental choice, more options for your kids.

If you really don't like having the school choice and you want to go by what this ranking says then you could look at Nebraska - [Marc] Who funds 'em, do you know?

- I don't know the funding of this group but it is a left of center group and very much in favor of the public schools and pumping more money into them.

Nebraska, the Dakotas, Vermont, and Kentucky do really well in their ranking.

- Jonah, underreported, my friend.

- So the President and the Administration typically has a Press Secretary, but now the Department of Homeland security is starting a Disinformation Governance Board.

And this is, it's a slippery slope and okay, so they're gonna, you know, get - Under Myorkas, the Secretary.

- Under the Secretary and it's specific to monitor and combat misinformation, disinformation, specific to Russia, specific to immigration at the border, specific to COVID 19. Who is the government though, to regulate what is accurate or non accurate or misinformation?

Is it, and really who is the arbiter of that?

When now we have such proliferation of information - Well is a free speech the arbiter.

Why can the government call balls and strikes?

- That's the slippery slope that it's going down.

It now, two things can be true at the same time.

There is misinformation about different things that are out there, but is it the government's role to then call that out?

And where is the line between what the government says.

Can it say we don't like that article even though it's two years ago when they were saying COVID 19 might have come from a factory or it come from a lab.

No, that was misinformation.

Now, it's not misinformation.

- It's very overwhelming, Joe.

- Well, with all the talk about Twitter this week, a news social media platform has emerged, Be Real.

And it's trying to keep things authentic.

Twice a, once a day.

- Keep it real, Joe.

- At a random time during the day - Keep it real.

- It sends you a message.

You have two minutes to take a picture with your phone both the front and rear looking cameras.

So, it's you in real time, doing something, no chance to be made up.

It's only gonna project the real sense of people.

No likes, no filters.

It'll just be us living our lives with everybody else that we know.

- You know what else is real?

Putting the phone down.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

- The question is, if people are starting to anticipate this, do they make themselves up and are that way all day long, waiting for their two minutes?

So we'll see - Colin.

- So my underreported this week, some interesting outside money coming into two Democratic Congressional primaries.

North Carolina, one's the fourth district, Western side of the triangle.

The other is up in Eastern North Carolina.

And this group of the American Israel public affairs committee has one of their associated super PACS dropping about $300,000 on ads each in two races.

One's to support Don Davis, who's sort of the moderate State Senate Democrat running for Congress up in the Northeast in the first district.

The other is for another State Senator Valerie Fushi, who's running in the fourth district.

And what's interesting about this is that this is a group that typically supports more Republican candidates.

Obviously they are a group that supports Israel's interest in the U.S. and our foreign policy.

- Right.

- But they're backing the more moderate candidates in these and spending more than the candidates themselves raised for their own campaign in the first quarter.

So pretty good amount of money going into these ads, but not controlled by the campaigns themselves.

- Thanks for bringing that to our attention.

Let's go to lightning round, Mitch.

Who's up and who's down this week?

- Who's up?

Anybody but Biden.

There was an interesting poll that came out from Issues and Insights and TIPP that asked who should the Democrats put on the ballot in 2024?

81% answered someone other than Joe Biden.

Only 19% thought that the president should run for re-election.

Even among Democrats, only 29% of them wanted Biden on the ballot.

Only 12% wanted Kamala Harris on the ballot.

Down, U.S. gross domestic product.

Down at an annualized rate of 1.4% for the first quarter.

It had been expected to be down 1%.

So that was even worse than expected.

- Jonah.

- Up is the number of anti-Semitic incidents in America, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League.

A lot of it has to do with the connection between what's happening in Israel and Jews around the world, and especially in America, getting blamed for that.

And with this notion with APAC, which typically has been by partisan, now as the Democrats slide left, that's why they're getting more involved.

So it's kind of a frightening scenario for many American Jews.

What's down are the extremes of both parties.

Cawthorne, Chip Roy and the squad all voted together.

Marjorie Taylor Green, in voting against a measure that would allow the U.S. to seize assets of Vladimir Putin.

- Joe - Up is union activity, even though only about 11% of American workers are in a union, which is half of what it was 30 years ago.

The perceptions of unions are relatively unchanged over the last 50 years.

Gallup poll shows 90% of Democrats approve of unions, 66% unaffiliated voters, but only 47% of Republicans are favoring unions.

We continue to see efforts with Apple and Starbucks and other groups.

- Amazon.

- And Amazon.

I think American attitudes about unionization probably do not change much.

Down, the public's interest in January 6 investigations.

The Democrats might see this as a fire-up-your-base kind of thing, but a recent poll from the Pew Charitable Trusts said that the percentage of Americans who said Donald Trump bore primary responsibility for January 6 is down eight percentage points.

And it's down 11% among Democrats this year over last year.

- I think there's too many issues superseding it.

Don't you?

- Well, to some extent you might say other things now are occupying people's attention about Donald Trump, including his legal problems in New York and such.

But I think it is like anything else in American politics.

People just want it to be over and move on.

- Tom.

- So up, I've got State Senator Chuck Edwards, who of course is running against Congressman Madison Cawthorn out in the Western end of the state.

Cawthorn has had more scandals in the past week than we have time to ever talk about on the show.

And Edwards, according to some of the polling, seems to be reaping the benefits of that and really is standing out as the main opponent.

Whether he's got enough mojo to get across the finish line, who knows.

Down, I've got the North Carolina division of emergency management.

They got kind of raked over the coals during a legislative hearing this past week.

- Right.

- Over a school safety panic alarm system.

They were given funding for it years ago.

Have not gotten any of those into schools yet.

- Headline next week, Mitch.

- Fed open market committee meets amid growing concerns about inflation.

- 50 basis point rate?

- That's what they're talking about.

- [Marc] Headline quickly.

- Carolina Hurricanes, number one seed heading into the Stanley Cup playoffs.

- Headline next week - Primary election drill goes to hyper-drive now that the early voting's started.

Can a fist fight between two candidates over yard signs be far behind?

- I'm not seeing many yard signs.

Are you?

- I was traveling the state this week.

I've seen a lot.

- For sure.

- Colin, quickly.

- Early voting in the first week falls short of expectations as far as turnout.

- Great job, gents.

That's it for us.

Thanks for watching.

Hope to see you next week on Front Row.

Have a great weekend.

[upbeat music] - [Narrator] Major funding for Front Row is provided by Robert L. Ludy.

Additional funding provided by Patricia and Koo Yuen through the Yuen Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And by.

Funding for the lightning round provided by Boddie-Noell Foundation, NC Realtors, Mary Louise and John Burress, Rifenburg Construction, and Helen Laughery.

A complete list of funders can be found at pbsnc.org/frontrow.

[dramatic music] ♪