Watauga's Own "Four" Eggers Shuts Down Investigation into Dallas Woodhouse's Voter Suppression Activities

 

Photo Jesse Barber

 

Last Thursday, with Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four") presiding over the State Board of Elections (SBOE), Jeff Carmon, one of two Democratic members, spoke about the allegations that preceded Dallas Woodhouse's resignation as Auditor Dave Boliek's enforcer ("liaison") to all county boards, going over and around the actual staff at the SBOE. It had become well established that Woodhouse was behind orders in some specific counties advising the closing of early voting at college campuses and an end to Sunday voting in Black communities.

“Given the seriousness of these allegations and the public attention that they have generated, I believe we have an obligation to establish a complete and factual record,” Carmon said. “At this stage, I believe the board has little choice but to subpoena Mr. Woodhouse so that he may answer questions under oath.”

Eggers was horrified and shut that shit down quickly, refused to allow a vote on a subpoena for Woodhouse, arguing hilariously that it would be inappropriate to go after Woodhouse now because he's resigned his job and is a private citizen. What? When Carmon pointed out that Woodhouse's official actions were the point, not his private behavior, Eggers retreated to a threat, warning Carmon that he'd better "drop it," before the Republican majority called for investigating people who ran the SBOE for Roy Cooper and Josh Stein. (Will Doran, WRAL)

This is the same Four Eggers who secretly directed efforts to suppress the college vote in Watauga in 2013 after his younger brother was installed as the chair of the Watauga BOE. Bertrand Gutierrez scooped that scandal for the Winston-Salem Journal, and I used up a lot of bandwidth writing about Mr. Eggers and his attempt to change the entire landscape of voting in Watauga County. The first meeting of the Watauga BOE after the Republicans took over, August 12, 2013, a huge crowd had been alerted that something bad was about to go down. The meeting room was standing room only, so they moved to the main courtroom. The Republican majority proceeded to pass a dozen or more "resolutions" (changes in policy) that were proven later by digital thumbprint to have been ghost-written by the chair's big brother Four. One of those resolutions closed early voting at AppState. That meeting, with that crowd, became a raucous circus of protest, with cat-calling and boos. The lone Democratic member of the Watauga BOE said damn twice, and it was captured on video. The Civitas people alleged that the Democratic member "cursed through the whole meeting." An exaggeration that nevertheless summarizes adequately the vibe of that day.

That decision to close AppState early voting, on appeal, was upheld by the SBOE, also Republican majority at that time. A non-profit, the Watauga County Voting Rights Taskforce, and individual plaintiffs, sued in Wake Superior Court to restore the student union site. On October 13, 2014, literally on the eve of the start of early voting for the fall elections of 2014, the senior resident judge Donald Stephens issued a sharply worded decision declaring the Watauga BOE's shutdown at AppState "arbitrary and capricious." The next morning, and just as quickly as the judge had ruled, the staff of the Watauga BOE was set up in the student union and ready for early voting. We were first in line. And we've had early voting on the AppState campus ever since because a judge ordered it. (Q. Does a judge's order have a limited lifespan? How is that determined?)

Couldn't do it in Watauga in 2014. But willing to let Dallas Woodhouse do it in 2026. Same "Four" Eggers.

 

The Blimp That Dared the Lightning

 

I've been collecting individual impressions of the Trump speech last night -- because no way am I tuning that shite in, though I can't avoid for long the substance of what the con man sez, just in case. Several have mentioned the lifeless delivery, as though he had someplace to be and had (at long last!) lost interest in the 2020 election. Lucian K. Truscott IV caught the vibe: "Trump didn’t believe a word of it." 

I think that's accurate. He's a man so thoroughly false and fake that all his utterances and gestures can only be understood as parts of a big con, a "patriotic" dumb show of bilkery, a living version of Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, wherein a mysterious stranger boards a Mississippi steamboat and manipulates the passengers by exploiting their trust, vanity, greed, and prejudices [A.I. assist for the summary].

Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani "and the rest of the half-baked half-wits who filed lawsuits challenging the election results in 2020" (Truscott) introduced affidavits ("statements" not taken under oath) alleging (for example) that somebody saw an election worker in Georgia hand a flash drive to another worker. No followup, because, for example in the Georgia instance when someone bothered to ask more questions, the alleged flash drive turned out to be a breath mint. "Somebody heard." "Somebody saw." Mere statements without substance or proof, yet perfect for the Fox News hounds of our Republic who, abandoning all hope, believe what the con man says because all other gods have failed to deliver.

Trump spent much of his 25 minutes telling the folks that he has ordered declassified all the long-hidden secrets about the stuff that happened in 2018 and some stuff that happened in 2019 and then all came to a head in 2020 when all the conspirators succeeded in rigging the election -- for all those years, 2018, 2019, and 2020 -- Trump was president. All the relevant agencies he now wants to finger were under his control, appointed by him. But what do the Fox News hounds know? They peer into those now muddy waters and figger it must have been Biden who done it.

He's so clearly desperate to protect his own ass that he's willing to sic the January Sixth Types, or ICE, or the National Guard on whole communities that are known to detest him and his policies. Everyone expects the worst, come November. While I don't think he's going to discourage a single Democrat or left-leaning Independent -- they'll get themselves to the polls over hot coals, if that's what it takes, through barbed wire barricades and fields of open gunfire, and they'll vote against every Republican on any and every ballot in every county, district, and state. Some Republicans will stay home, either embarrassed past the breaking point by this president or newly uninspired or completely turned off by the Iran War (or any dozen other possible motives for disaffection in trumpland).

He's a mess. Flailing his arms maybe to scatter the odor of his own mortality. But falling asleep, dozing off, checking out when anyone else but him has something to report. How can this great over-inflated Hindenburg not crash and burn?

He Loved Those McDonald's

 

Congressman Chuck Edwards of the 11th CD put out a press release yesterday that he and his wife Teresa have sold all their McDonald's restaurants in Henderson, Transylvania, and Haywood counties to good friends in Asheville who are already McDonald's franchisees. The Edwardses owned seven McDonald's, according to the letter that Teresa addressed to Leslie Boyd, banning her from entering all of them because Boyd was leading a boycott. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to the Congressman himself, Teresa Edwards has been essentially the general manager of all the restaurants ever since Edwards was first elected to the NC Senate a decade ago. The demands got very much heavier after Edwards went to Washington in the 2022 elections. The responsibilities Teresa Edwards carried might crush a young person, let-alone a 65-year-old woman who had helped Chuck build the McDonald's empire over four decades. I can see selling out of that treadmill and retiring.

But retiring ain't in the cards right now.

The Congressman is locked in a reelection death-match with good-old-boy Democrat Jamie Ager, with various polls and pundits suggesting Edwards would be suddenly vulnerable in a Blue Wave. Plus bad press has dogged Edwards. Hurricane Helene survivors -- and they are legion in his district -- have not stopped biting his ankles over the paltry Trump admin treatment of the region, and now he's under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for wholly inappropriate contact and interaction with 20-something girl staffers.

Selling a highly profitable and beloved set of restaurants takes on the odor of panic, doesn't it? Beloved? Edwards has talked about how, at the age of 16, he went to work at a McDonald's that he later was able to buy, and he took justifiable pride in the kind of joy he was able to bring to his customers for over 40 years. He has put his bone and blood into building that chain of franchises, so selling out must hurt more than a little. Does he need to juice his campaign budget, because fundraising has been lagging? (Trump doesn't seem likely to chip off a chunk of his gigantic MAGA Inc. fund -- reportedly at least $350,000,000 -- which Trump appears to be hoarding for himself. But of course he would.)

Selling those restaurants at just this time draws attention to itself as something quite extraordinary.

 

High Rage Threshold, for a Monday

 

Gov. Stein signed the budget last week

 

 

Dylan Halper, an intern at The Assembly, went through all 634 pages of the new state budget (so I didn't have to) and highlighted some of the earmarks, many of which don't offend me, like 

$31 million to the North Carolina Museum of History

$4 million to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences 

$4.4 million to the North Carolina Museum of Art

$750,000 to the Museum of the Marine

$100,000 to the North Carolina Pottery Museum in Randolph County

I even smile about highly specific earmarks for very local gigs, like the $20,000 the budget gives to the tiny town of Fremont in Wayne County for its annual Daffodil Festival, which goes back to the late 1950s. I'm for supporting that because it's community-building and it spotlights flowers. This budget originated in the NC Senate. Buck Newton represents Fremont in the Senate. I can applaud Buck Newton if he funneled that measly $20k to the daffodils.

Intern Halper picked up on the tension between state-funded higher education and the GOP powers in the General Assembly and found in the budget what might be an anomaly: "The claws are not out for North Carolina State University. It will receive $20 million for its Commercial Leap Ahead for Wide Bandgap Semiconductors (CLAWS) Hub, which is researching a type of semiconductor technology that the university says could be more effective than traditional silicon." [italics added]

It's too bad that our Republican government continues to fund crisis pregnancy centers to the tune of $1.5 million. Those places are Christian propaganda mills that have been shown to push "inaccurate information" on desperate girls who don't know what to do. Another $3.3 million is going to a more interesting anti-abortion org with a "continuum of care," which pairs women experiencing unplanned pregnancies with a social worker to “help address the circumstances prompting her to seek an abortion.” On its face, that sounds helpful to me.

I like that there's a million dollars in the budget to protect the OBX wild horses and $50k to support the activities of a non-profit therapeutic horse-riding school. But the $100,000 going to UNC-Wilmington's all-female equestrian club gives me pause, especially after I spent some time on their Facebook page. It appears to be, in very frequent photo arrays, a mainly white sorority with one Black member. That 100k is for horse feed, I suspect -- the club actually owns 8 horses, according to Halper -- but that's still a lot of oats for a social club.

One budget entry that Halper found also stopped me cold: $90,000 for a pickleball court in the town of Godwin, population 128. Tom McInnis (R) represents Godwin in the NC Senate, where the budget bill originated. But Diane Wheatley represents Godwin in the House, and she might have had some influence. According to its demographics, Godwin is an aging, low-income, sedentary community of almost equal numbers of Black and white (over 45% Black), and any space for recreation can be a blessing.

It makes sense to spend $30 million on keeping the Greensboro Coliseum (which now goes under the name of First Horizon) up-to-date and up-to-grade, because of the general economic benefit of Atlantic Coast Conference tournaments held there once a year. 

And I can applaud the $109 million + that goes to expand the medical school at East Carolina State University (which I think probably accounts for the white coats you see arrayed behind the governor at the signing ceremony, photo above) and $15 million to the Methodist University Cape Fear Valley Health School of Medicine in Fayetteville.

You Think That Rearranging Furniture at the SBOE Absolves It of Corruption? Dallas Woodhouse Still Works There!

 

NC Voices

 

The cover story Dave Boliek put out in September 2025 about hiring Dallas Woodhouse as some sort of State Board of Elections (SBOE) "liaison," whose role, we would soon discover -- to absolutely no one's surprise -- was actually to lord it over county boards of elections and inhibit college-age and Black voters wherever possible. At the time of Woodhouse's hiring, Boliek announced him to county election officials: "[I hired] him to assist in your efforts to ensure election integrity while encouraging maximum participation in our elections." Hahahahaha

The best reporting I've seen on the Woodhouse "reassignment" at the SBOE, the piece below, is thorough and complete. I don't know who wrote it, but thank you!

And if you're a partisan like me and tempted to celebrate the mere rearrangement of furniture at the SBOE -- window-dressing for a corrupt and exposed operation -- I would advise you not to. Dallas Woodhouse is still there at the SBOE, along with his embedded philosophy of might-makes-right, and trailing all that heavy baggage of cut-throat politics. You think the people who hired Woodhouse and who now obviously depend on him to be there have changed their spots? This isn't a victory, but it exposed their corruption. 

RALEIGH -- By WRAL News  A North Carolina Republican operative who was hired by the state auditor to help shape the state’s election boards and early voting plans has been reassigned, and his election liaison position has been discontinued. 

State and county elections officials are beginning to ramp up preparations for the 2026 midterm elections. Mail-in ballots will go out in September, early voting starts in October and election day is Nov. 3.

State Auditor Dave Boliek reassigned Dallas Woodhouse, a former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, NBC News reported Wednesday morning. Woodhouse had served in the role since September.

“Now that we are more than a year past appointments, and board chairs have settled into their roles having worked through a municipal election, primary election, and most of the local boards have passed early voting plans for the general election, the Auditor's Office has discontinued the elections liaison role,” a spokesman for the auditor’s office told WRAL in a statement Wednesday. “The elections liaison was established because the Auditor's Office gained new responsibilities. The position was not meant to be permanent.”

Woodhouse will work on strategic initiatives that relate to constituent services and communications, according to the spokesman.

Republican state lawmakers stripped responsibility for overseeing state and county election boards away from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein in 2024 and gave the power to Boliek, a Republican. Under Boliek and Woodhouse, the state board of elections and all 100 county election boards have switched to GOP majorities, and some have begun enacting longtime Republican priorities such as eliminating early voting options on Sundays — a popular day with Black voters and on college campuses. Black voters and students tend to vote Democratic.

According to reporting from WLOS and NC Local, Woodhouse and Boliek were involved in efforts to ensure the new Jackson County Board of Elections would shut down a polling place on campus at Western Carolina University. In the Triangle, the Wake County Board of Elections also recently voted to eliminate a longtime early voting site at N.C. State’s student union, and to move it to a remote part of campus, WRAL previously reported.

Woodhouse was reassigned on June 2, NBC News reported. Woodhouse earns $110,000, according to a database of state employee salaries.

In September, Boliek wrote to some county election officials that “to assist in your efforts to ensure election integrity while encouraging maximum participation in our elections, I have appointed Dallas Woodhouse as my liaison.”

Woodhouse referred a request for comment Wednesday to the auditor’s office.

 

Dallas Woodhouse Causes Embarrassment, But what Dallas Woodhouse Stood For Still Very Much the Philosophy at the State Board of Elections

Big news this afternoon: Dallas Woodhouse, who has a history of trying to knee-cap college students' voting and Sunday voting for African-Americans, has been "reassigned" in the State Board of Elections. Instead of his $110,000 per annum job of "advising" local county boards of elections -- principally, advising the Republican majorities to eliminate campus polling places where possible and stop Sunday voting in communities with large Black congregations, Woodhouse has been reassigned to a desk in another part of the SBOE.

But it's all window-dressing, and it means nothing. The attitude toward suppressing certain voters still reigns in Auditor's Dave Boliek's MAGA brain. Woodhouse had caused Mr. Boliek some very bad optics after he was revealed telling the chair of the Jackson County Board of Elections, "Don't let them have a vote," them being students at Western Carolina University who had become accumstomed to a student union early voting site. There's also evidence that he told the Pasquotank County Bd of Elections chair to eliminate Sunday voting.  Pasquotank County is 35% Black.

The leopards can white-wash their spots, but they're still going to be blood predators.

 

I Guess We're All Communists Now

 

Trump repeated the word Communist so many times yesterday -- with the four granite-faced Presidents above him, averting their eyes -- that you might have thought it was 1950. On February 9th of that fatal year, Sen. Joseph McCarthy held up some pieces of paper in front of the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, and whined in that reedy, unpleasant voice of his, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Women cringed. One of them fainted. There were dropped salad forks all over the room.

The witch hunt was on!

The suspicion of Communism crept through the American bloodstream, or rather raced like a fulminating virus, fanned into white-hot intensity by the John Birch Society. Birchers were all over the Panhandle of Texas. By the time I was in the 7th and 8th grades in the late '50s, popular fright-sayings about Communists and Communism, preached relentlessly by members of the Society, had reached my level of pre-social-media gossip. The Birchers were particularly good at ferreting out school textbooks with "Communist propaganda." What in particular was Communist propaganda? Any acknowledgement of a struggle for civil rights among America's Blacks.

I was a very religious kid to boot, so I could fall prey to a pamphlet that appeared in 1960 warning of a likely "Catholic takeover" if John F. Kennedy became President. The anti-Catholic thing was closely allied with the anti-Communist thing -- Baptists predominated, and there ain't no Baptists like Texas Baptists. There were plenty of Texans who didn't mind saying out loud, and loudly, as Texans sometimes speak when provoked, that Kennedy was an N-word-loving goddamn Communist. That's why Texans of a gentler nature so rued the terrible event in Dallas. Why did it have to be Texas! Poor dumb, damn Texas.

To the Communist-baiting Texans in the Panhandle, one of the worst things the Catholic President Kennedy did in his short presidency was the diplomatic breakthrough called "the Chamizal Conventions," a land-exchange between the U.S. and Mexico that Kennedy successfully negotiated. The Chamizal "situation" had been a sore point since 1864, when a particularly severe flood changed the course of the Rio Grande and stranded over 600 acres of Mexico on the north side of the river. This led to a history of incursions and takings and dyspeptic relations between countries. Kennedy resolved it quickly, agreeing to give back to Mexico some 366 acres of the original Chamizal tract and an additional 264 acres near the adjacent Cordova Island, while taking for the U.S. the other 193 acres of Cordova Island. That international boundary still stands today.

Kennedy negotiated the agreement, but it fell to President Johnson to carry it out in stages, and those stages included some Texans' getting mighty exercised that their land was being unfairly, unconstitutionally, and communistically taken from them. I remember reading up on the history at the time and writing a letter to the editor of the Plainview Herald supporting the Mexican position. I was being a very fair-minded little Christian and budding historian to reach that conclusion. I was told later by a classmate of mine who also worked as part-time receptionist for an insurance agent that her boss had a file folder labeled "Suspected Communists" and that he had instructed her to put my letter to the editor -- which he had patiently clipped from the Herald -- into that file. Apparently, I've been a Communist since I was 18.

We label what we fear, and so does Trump. He doesn't fear Communists. That's just the scare-word he remembers from his own childhood -- he and I are the same age, give or take. What Trump fears and chooses to label with an old insult is the surge of voting enthusiasm for the men and women who have been winning elections on the Democratic side and sometimes upending apple carts of more conservative members of their Party -- the brave and outspoken "progressives," the sometimes self-described "socialist Democrats." That's what he fears, being charged and tried by new politicians who have power because they have followings.

 

NC House Pumps the Brakes on NC Senate's Rush to Harsh Your Vibe

 

Today a bill, H 328, "Regulate Hemp-Derived Consumables," got fast-tracked and passed the same day in the NC Senate, with some 14 of the 20 Democrats in the Senate voting for it. The House's original H 328, which the Senate hijacked and wrote its own substitute, would have required public schools to adopt policies prohibiting hemp-derived consumable products in school buildings, on school grounds, and at school-sponsored events. Okay. We all can support limiting easy access to intoxicating hemp products for minors, but the North Carolina Healthy Alternatives Association (NCHAA) sez the new Senate rewrite is a bad bill for the future of the billion-dollar state hemp industry. 

The House adjourned without taking up the the Senate's substitute H 328, and Speaker Destin Hall appeared resistant to it: “It’s up to the [House] caucus, at the end of the day,” Hall said. “It was a complicated bill, and so folks are going to have probably a month to digest it and see if they approve of it,” he told reporters. The General Assembly plans to reconvene on July 27th.

"Complicated," Destin Hall said, which sounds like a warning to me.

The NCHAA thinks it will overnight send North Carolina's booming hemp industry into the crapper: 

• Cannabinoid Ban: HB 328 bans all cannabinoids except for Delta-9 THC, even non-psychoactive compounds like CBD. This is a direct contradiction of the federal definition of hemp and would eliminate many therapeutic products that consumers depend on.

• Potency Caps: The bill caps edibles at just 10mg of Delta-9 THC per serving. For comparison, most popular hemp-derived gummies on the national market range from 25 to 50mg per serving. These caps would force companies to reformulate or exit the North Carolina market entirely.

• Vape Restrictions: It also limits vape cartridges to 3ml total Delta-9 THC—an unrealistic threshold that, from a manufacturing standpoint, is virtually unworkable.

• Exorbitant Licensing Fees: HB 328 requires a $25,000 license fee for manufacturers and $500 per retail location with no cap. These costs are far beyond the reach of small operators and would create massive entry barriers that favor large out-of-state corporations.

• Criminal Penalties: The bill authorizes criminal charges—including Class H felonies—for unlicensed sales. It also imposes escalating fines and empowers the Alcohol Law Enforcement Division (ALE) to revoke licenses and issue penalties of up to $7,500 per violation.

NCHAA concludes: "These are not minor adjustments. These are measures designed to constrict the industry, cut out competition, and centralize the hemp market into the hands of a few."

 

How I Fell Upstairs and Found God

 

I got super-annoyed by C.G.I. at the movies -- computer-generated-images -- back around the time super heroes were pretty much it, everywhere. Super heroes and tiresome fantasy. Supernatural hoo haw. Pop culture became lousy with C.G.I. gimmicks, imitations, wild flights of illogic and cheap, cheap story-telling (even though C.G.I. is super-expensive to produce). So I turned up my nose at the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) when it was new and fresh. I wanted real human stories told about real, flawed human characters in adult situations. I'm no longer new and fresh myself, but I have Disney streaming anew, and no way was I not going to induce my second adolescence watching the MCU timeline unfold. Little did I know what I missed because of Pecksniffian snobbery.

I appreciate morally compromised characters, but I usually associate them with realistic interpretations of human life, not space-and-time epics. Don't we all actually prefer the self-involved to saints? I'm elated to find frequent divided minds among the super-heroes who gather under the rubric of "The Avengers." Bruce Banner is my living notion of ambiguity, always teetering between unchecked power and unchecked rage. Tony Stark can be a prancing egotist, but he also knows guilt intimately and unrelenting. Thor can't get over himself; he's as self-centered as Tony without the wit or god help us finesse. Captain America, Steve Rogers, is the most saint-like of the Avengers but sparks a civil war when he refuses to subordinate his power to the state by signing the Sokovia Accords. He's standing up for what he believes as a principled person, that big government has no business holding a super-hero's leash. We have to applaud that righteous puritan.

The best example of moral complication is the great MCU villain Thanos, played by Josh Brolin through a trio of films culminating in Avengers: Endgame. Brolin, despite the heavy masking required to make Thanos appear other-worldly, plays a towering, powerful villain and a character full of regret on how the world is destroying itself with runaway consumption. He's kind of a soured environmentalist. Thanos believes as sincerely in his own moral mission as Captain America believes in his. Both are prepared to sacrifice life to be true to themselves. Thanos quite righteously sacrifices his adopted daughter Gamora on the desolate planet Vormir, because to obtain the Soul Stone he's instructed to sacrifice someone he loves. Gamora is handy. In The Infinity War, Thanos snaps out the lives of half of all living creatures -- not just humans, but animals too (visually the filmmakers make people turn to blowing dust before our eyes. The disappearance of Peter Parker who's cradled wounded in Iron Man's lap is truly one of those scenes that'll sneak up on you at the movies and make your eyes water). Thanos becomes a mass murderer not out of hatred, not for conquest, but because he wants the blessed world to be sustainable. He sees overpopulation and greed as the only defining features of this world, and those greedy traits offend him deeply. Thanos dies believing in his own heroism. His death is melancholy for that very reason. We hate to see any soul, even a misguided one, face his own colossal failure.

The writers of the MCU universe explore all sorts of topics, like the wholly arbitrary and spiteful nature of divinity, particularly the god Odin who brooks no stubbornness. (Any resemblance to the angry God Jehovah of Christian nationalists would appear to be purely coincidental.) Thor is my least favorite Avenger, except when he gets dissolute. In the long run getting banished to Earth improved his character. Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow (played by the sparkling but-seriously-don't-mess-with-her Scarlett Johansson) is my favorite, and her self-sacrifice (again on that awful planet Vormir) to save Clint Barton (Hawkeye) is another moment of terrible moral consequences derived from doing what's right.

Heroes are necessary bearers of culture -- every culture, every sub-culture, living now and in every time. Heroes transmit principles, sometimes the local gospel, often the illustrated moral decisions that keep societies and civilizations cohering. We need them. I fall back on something my friend Dalton George wrote on Substack:

"I'm of the mind that we have a biological inclination towards heroes. Our longest-surviving stories, art, and songs detail heroes. An individual is up against something much great than themselves, someone using their agency to benefit the community, country, and place. There's a reason Marvel movies are the cash cow they are. Brighter minds than mine have observed that our society is largely starved for heroes." 

I relish the idea that heroes arose from our very evolution through danger. We have to have heroes, and we'll create one on the spot if need be. But the Sokovia Accords were all about keeping unchecked power under scrutiny. Because otherwise giant ballrooms arise where once there was the law and duty and honesty and the good of the body politic. Heroes are not self-centered pricks.