Democrat Braxton Winston Now Has a Republican Opponent for Secretary of Labor

 

BRAXTON WINSTON

I've been following Winston's trajectory into politics since he won his seat on the Charlotte City Council in 2017. He promises to be a Democratic star attraction on the fall ballot. Winston was born in North Carolina into a military family, was recruited by Davidson College to play football, earned a degree in anthropology, coaches football part time at Providence Day School, and became an accidental but powerful symbol for Black Lives Matter in Charlotte following the September 20, 2016, police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott. That killing prompted several days of street protests. A chance photograph of Winston by the Charlotte Observer’s Jeff Siner went viral (see below) and catapulted Winston into local fame. He's 40 years old.

On September 20, 2016, Winston was on his way home after coaching a middle school football game. He was driving Old Concord Road past the Village at College Downs apartments, where a ruction was going on. An angry crowd was gathering the way a crowd gathers after a shooting, and Winston pulled over to find out what it was.

Winston actually makes his living as a cameraman -- videographer -- who films home games for the Charlotte Hornets as an independent contractor. He began live-streaming the aftermath of the Keith Lamont Scott shooting to his Facebook page.

A Charlotte cop on the scene told Winston to leave. Winston didn't, and the cop left him alone. The cop already knew Winston as a good man from a previous incident. In November 2015, Winston called the cops to help a Hispanic woman being severely beaten by her husband. There was a big commotion, involving neighbors and a little boy running around crying. Winston grabbed up and hugged the boy to him. With his mother going to the hospital and his father to jail, the little boy didn’t want to leave Braxton's arms, "so Braxton went with us to the hospital. He stayed the whole night, trying to make sure the little boy was OK as he clung onto Braxton...” (according to CharlotteMeck PD Officer Shannon Finis). A year later the same cop allowed Braxton to stay on the scene at College Downs apartments.

Student reporters for The Davidsonian, after several interviews, concluded this: "Winston had never been involved in any protest movement. He thought of tear-gas or potential injury as 'the price I got to pay to speak up on behalf of my children, [on] behalf of myself, and [on] behalf of what I believe in and what the world should look like.' ”

According to Olivia Daniels and AJ Naddaff, "tension between police and civilians escalated. Winston removed his shirt to cover his mouth from tear gas. He approached a line of police in riot gear and thrust his fist in the air in an act of civil disobedience." Jeff Siner took his picture.

Later, after things died down, Winston became a community spokesman, first calling for the resignation of CharlotteMeckPD Chief Kerr Putney and then meeting face-to-face with him and apparently reaching an understanding that there had to be a change in methods for interacting with segments of Charlotte that feel over-policed and under-served. When eventually the police officer who killed Keith Lamont Scott was exonerated because department policy leans way over backward to absolve the government from responsibility when the police kill people without due process, Braxton Winston acknowledged that police followed policy in letting the cop off. But after he was elected to the Charlotte City Council, he worked to reform procedures.

Braxton announced he was planning to run for Secretary of Labor in April 2023 after six years on the Charlotte council (and attaining the distinction of Mayor Pro Tem). He is also a labor activist -- a professional videographer but also, as a stagehand and grip, a union member, in "our region’s robust sports television and entertainment production community" (Winston website).

LUKE FARLEY

On Tuesday this week, Farley bested three other Republican candidates for the nomination to run in this race, taking over 30% of the vote and thus avoiding a runoff. 

His website makes him seem like a deeply unserious person. A white-on-red banner on his homepage proclaims "Make Elevators Great Again," an allusion to the former Republican holder of this office, Cherie Berry (no friend of labor), who has endorsed him (that endorsement also loudly proclaimed on his home page). I have my instant doubts about any candidate who begins his introduction, "I am a Christian...." That tells me everything and also precisely nothing about this guy's character.

His main policy obsession appears to be mandated COVID vaccine shots, which he naturally opposes.

He's a lawyer in private practice, specializing in OSHA rules, which on the face of it, in my view, makes him also instinctively anti-labor.

Oppo Research Coming for Democrats

 

For hardcore politicos, the ones especially with a disturbingly microscopic interest in North Carolina politics, Marshall Terry's interview with Bryan Anderson about the skill and practice of "opposition research" is a really informative read. It was done for WFAE, Charlotte's NPR radio station. Anderson previously wrote a piece for The Assembly, "Oppo Man," about Charles Hellwig, a self-described "right wing nut" who wants the most conservative person to win any race he signs on to help. Hellwig was the operative who exposed Cal Cunningham's sexual adventures before the 2020 election. He's very proud of it.

So WFAE interviewer Anderson got Hellwig to spill beans on who Hellwig is currently assisting, or planning to assist, through the 2024 elections:

Erin Pare

*Erin Paré, Republican House member from Wake County (Dist. 37), the last surviving Republican to represent any Wake County district in either House or Senate. She beat Democrat Sydney Batch in 2020 and held on to the seat in 2022 by a healthy 3 points. According to press accounts, she was very active on shaping the new anti-abortion laws and was one of the "moderate" Republican women who kept the ban to 12 weeks rather than 6. She has just announced her candidacy for the U.S. Congress, for CD13, the seat currently occupied by Wiley Nickel. She came out of the gate sounding very much like the darling of a right-wing nut: "I won’t stand by while radical liberals ruin our economy, allow crime to run rampant on our streets, and indoctrinate our children. I have stood up to the woke mob here in NC and I’ll do the same in Washington! Join us - let's stop the radical Left!" So now Charles Hellwig will be digging into Wiley Nickel like a mealworm.

*Jon Hardister, who's giving up his House seat (Dist. 59) (and a powerful role as chief Republican whip) to run in 2024 for labor commissioner. He's considered a dishonest snake for being the prime operative in the budget veto override ambush pulled off by Speaker Tim Moore early on the morning of September 11, 2019. The Democrat so far in the race for Labor Commissioner: Braxton Winston II, a Charlotte city councilman. He'll no doubt present a colorful target for Hellwig's oppo research.

*Fred Von Canon, a veteran also-ran who's now signing on for a Congressional race in CD1. He ran twice unsuccessfully against Terence Everitt for the District 35 House seat. Before Von Canon can face incumbent Democrat Donald Davis in November, he must get through a possibly nasty primary with Sandy Smith, a Republican businesswoman from eastern North Carolina. She's the MAGA flamethrower who has lost a CD1 race twice in 2020 and 2022. You might expect a man like Hellwig to gravitate to the much more conservative Smith, but the other part of his druthers in a Republican candidate -- the most conservative -- is the kicker, "who can conceiveably win." Hellwig apparently doesn't think Sandy Smith can beat Don Davis.

 

Braxton Winston Running for Labor Commissioner

 

The offices the wolfish Republicans can't gerrymander in North Carolina are the Council of State seats, including the Commissioner of Labor. The various commissioners with their own constitutional kingdoms run statewide, along with the governor and the lieutenant governor. Every four years the voting power of Charlotte and Raleigh and Fayetteville and Greensboro isn't sliced into strips and sauteed for the benefit of conservatives too extreme to win a fair race.

So Braxton Winston has a shot. He announced he's running for Labor, and he could energize whole new swaths of infrequent voters who'll follow his banner.

Winston has served for the last six years on the Charlotte City Council and is currently mayor pro tem. He is also a labor activist -- a professional videographer but also, as a stagehand and grip, a union member, in "our region’s robust sports television and entertainment production community" (Winston website). He was born at Camp Lejeune where his father was serving in the Marine Corps, but Braxton was educated up north at the super-prestigious Phillips Academy Andover, "where he excelled in academics, arts, sports, and student government." After high school, Braxton came back to North Carolina for a bachelor's degree in anthropology at Davidson College.

But the real measure of the man came in 2016 when Keith Scott was shot dead after police say he failed to drop a gun upon their order. The officer who shot him was not charged. On the evening of September 20, 2016, at the south Charlotte address on Old Concord Rd. where Keith Scott lived and where he was shot dead, a crowd gathered and grew angrier.  Braxton was in that crowd and he live-streamed Keith Scott's daughter pleading with the police -- "Why did you just kill my father? He didn’t have to die." Something shifted in the videographer, who had after all led a pretty privileged life: "And it was just like, a chill came over me and everything changed. And I took the people’s side ... you know, we gotta get these questions answered and when the police tried to get out of there, the people demanded the conversation to keep going and that turned into a protest. We were met with riot police and tear gas after that and, you know, the rest is kind of history.” [WBTV]

That history contains a famous, viral photo of Braxton Winston, shirtless, with a clinched fist confronting a phalanx of riot cops. AP photographer Jeff Siner took the shot. Braxton said his shirt was off to serve as a gas mask. He had not been prominent before as a civil rights activist "but found himself taking on a leading role after the demonstrations, which eventually turned into a run for office. Charges against him after his arrest were dropped, as was a lawsuit he filed against the city. [Guardian]

That photo was September 2016. By 2017, Winston was running for an at-large seat on the Charlotte City Council. He was one of four Democrats elected and was reelected just last fall.

He puts his money were his mouth is. In 2020, during building fury over the killing of George Floyd, he was arrested a second time. He had joined protesters outside of Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department's metro division "in an attempt to de-escalate the tensions between the police and the citizens of Charlotte," an official Winston statement said. "During the time he was out there, he was in communication with CMPD, press, community leaders, and protesters." [WCNC]

Winston is part of a whole wave of young talent now emerging in North Carolina, and none too soon. It won't be instant, a winning wave, but it will come. Statewide campaigns will be the point of the spear.

#RevolutionInTheU.S."

Braxton Winston. Photo by Chuck Burton/AP

Braxton Winston is part of the wave of new, diverse talent taking public office for the first time after the recent round of elections. Winston just won a seat on the Charlotte City Council.

That's just the most recent chapter of his story. Winston was born in North Carolina into a military family, was recruited by Davidson College to play football, earned a degree in anthropology, coaches football part time at Providence Day School, and became an accidental but powerful symbol for Black Lives Matter in Charlotte following the September 20, 2016, police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott. That killing prompted several days of street protests. A chance photograph of Winston by the Charlotte Observer’s Jeff Siner went viral (see below) and catapulted Winston into the fame that comes of courage. He's 33 years old.

Asked if Braxton Winston had been a student activist at Davidson College, his favorite anthropology professor said, “I’m not saying that Braxton wasn’t ‘woke’ during his college years, but he wasn’t in leadership in social justice.”

If you don't know what "woke" means, try this (and scroll down).

So on September 20, 2016, Winston was on his way home after coaching a middle school football game. He was driving Old Concord Road past the Village at College Downs apartments, where a ruction was going on. An angry crowd was gathering the way a crowd gathers after a shooting, and Winston pulled over to find out what it was.

Winston actually makes his living as a cameraman -- videographer -- who films home games for the Charlotte Hornets as an independent contractor. He began live-streaming the aftermath of the Keith Lamont Scott shooting to his Facebook page.

A Charlotte cop on the scene told Winston to leave. Winston didn't, and the cop left him alone. Perhaps because she/he already knew Winston as a good man from a previous incident. In November 2015, Winston called the cops to help a Hispanic woman being severely beaten by her husband. There was a big commotion, involving neighbors and a little boy running around crying. Winston grabbed up and hugged the boy to him. With his mother going to the hospital and his father to jail, the little boy didn’t want to leave Braxton's arms, "so Braxton went with us to the hospital. He stayed the whole night, trying to make sure the little boy was OK as he clung onto Braxton...” (according to CharlotteMeck PD Officer Shannon Finis).

About a year after that incident, one of the same cops who had seen Winston act heroically with the little boy encountered Winston again, at the Keith Lamont Scott shooting on Old Concord Road. The neighborhood was stirred up, the cops were getting questions they either couldn't answer or wouldn't, and more people were arriving by the minute. Braxton Winston had his iPhone camera. And what his camera saw woke him.

Student reporters for The Davidsonian, after several interviews, concluded this: "Winston had never been involved in any protest movement. He thought of tear-gas or potential injury as 'the price I got to pay to speak up on behalf of my children, [on] behalf of myself, and [on] behalf of what I believe in and what the world should look like.' ”

According to Olivia Daniels and AJ Naddaff, "tension between police and civilians escalated. Winston removed his shirt to cover his mouth from tear gas. He approached a line of police in riot gear and thrust his fist in the air in an act of civil disobedience." Jeff Siner took his picture.

Jeff Siner, Charlotte Observer

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article123858364.html#storylink=cpy

The very next night and still on the street, Winston’s video caught the sound of a pop and the sight of spattered blood -- the police shooting of protester Justin Carr.

Later, after things died down, Winston became a community spokesman, first calling for the resignation of CharlotteMeckPD Chief Kerr Putney and then meeting face-to-face with him and apparently reaching an understanding that there had to be a change in methods for interacting with segments of Charlotte that feel over-policed and under-served.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article123858364.html#storylink=cpy

When eventually the police officer who killed Keith Lamont Scott was exonerated because department policy leans way over backward to absolve the government from responsibility when the police kill people without due process, Braxton Winston acknowledged that police followed policy in letting the cop off. But he intends to help review and rewrite that policy as a Charlotte City Councilman. Councilman Braxton Winston and Police Chief Kerr Putney are going to have an interesting journey together.

P.S.
Forgot to mention that there was an interview with Winston worth hearing today on "Morning Edition."

Rad more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article123858364.html#storylink=cpy