Pitfalls for US when SOME folks won’t stay in their lanes

There used to be a very serious rule-of-thumb in politics that one should STAY OUT of other people’s races unless they want other people meddling in THEIR races.  Unfortunately, way too many politicians out there have visions of being king-makers. The real tragedy is that way too many honest, hard-working people take voting advice from people who wouldn’t know the truth if it walked up and slapped them in the face. 

We’ve got two glaring examples here in Moore County of individuals getting in the middle of appointments and elections they have no business being involved with in the first place.

County commisioner Tom Adams and state Rep. Neal Jackson are becoming quite the pair in local politics.  Tom Adams got elected to an open seat on the county board mainly because his opponent was another guy named Adams who does a local radio show and has also run unsuccessfully for a lot of other stuff.  (A lesser-of-two-evils kinda thing.)

Neal Jackson is a Moore County pastor who represents good chunks of Moore County and Randolph County in the North Carolina House. He got elected to the House with a lot of acclaim and high hopes he’d become a conservative star.  Sources tell me – unfortunately – Jackson spends way too much time preening for a House leadership role.  Others tell me Jackson is under the impression he’s got a good shot to be the heir apparent to 9th district congressman Richard Hudson. One has to wonder where we fit in among all that ambition.

Sandhills Community College board of trustees.   It wasn’t long ago that the term of board chairman Larry Caddell was about to expire.  The Moore County board of commissioners, who had originally appointed Caddell, were voicing concerns about re-appointing him for another term. The commissioners were looking for replacements.

Looking at the public record, it would appear the commissioners had some justification for their concerns.  Caddell, the late George Little, and John Dempsey had run the college with an iron fist for years.  Transparency was a problem.  Pravda-on-Pennsylvania rarely covered the goings-on at the campus.  It was hard to find meeting minutes, agendas, and / or notices.

THIS particular item appears on every board of trustees meeting agenda:

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That’s just false.  It invites open meeting law violation complaints and lawsuits against the college.  And it gives the impression there’s something to hide here.

There are a number of instances in college archives where meeting minutes can’t be found. They certainly can’t be recreated if the meeting recordings were destroyed. So, we’ll never know what happened at those gatherings where decisions were made regarding the expenditure of our tax dollars. 

As Dempsey retired, an audit of the college came to light revealing $6.2 million in mismanaged funds.  Word also surfaced that the college had been hit with a tax lien.  Couple that with Dempsey’s efforts to immerse the college’s faculty, curriculum and governance with Marxist-flavored DEI and you could see a real problem developing.  Caddell had been on the board, in a position of influence, for the whole time this mess was going on. Yet, it appears he did nothing and had little to nothing to say about it. 

It’s unusual for Caddell to have  nothing to say. We got a hold of a rather rare, rather elusive recording of a trustees meeting.  It featured Caddell doing about 90 percent of the talking — peppered with some verbal assaults on Carthage and Southern Pines town employees.

Back to Caddell and his term of appointment.  The boys in Raleigh changed things around giving legislators for a particular county an appointment to their community college.  Neal Jackson was the beneficiary of that move here.  Word got out that Jackson was bound-and-determined to put Caddell back on the board despite his recently-uncovered track record.

When asked about his favoring of Caddell, sources say Jackson explained that he was motivated by a number of Pinehurst / Southern Pines *money folks* who didn’t want to see Caddell go. So, Jackson moved to put Caddell back on the board. Caddell was allowed to continue as board chairman, and the train kept a-rollin’. 

Moore County Board of Commissioners.   

We’ve written more recently about the travesty of Robbins mayor Cameron Dockery being elected to the county board of commissioners.  We learned, through Dockery’s social media posts, that Jackson, Adams and Larry Caddell all played a role in getting Dockery through the primary.

The problem?  An audit by the state found at least five years of nightmarish financial practices in Robbins town government.  Dockery was mayor for all of it.  (Of course, it became public AFTER the primary election.). The audit found evidence of a forged check and several duplicate checks issued to town vendors.  (Not all of those duplicates were recovered or accounted for.). Apparently, there had been no reconciling of town accounts for at least five years. 

Yet, Jackson and Adams and Caddell all marketed Dockery to voters as an experienced, masterful municipal affairs manager. Sources tell us Dockery even promoted himself on the campaign trail as a masterful custodian of public money.

Meanwhile, Dockery’s opponent in the commissioner’s race was (and still is) employed in accounting.

The audit confirmed that town leaders met with the state auditor about the town’s financial problems in August 2025.  Dockery filed for the commissioner’s race in December 2025 – giving the impression he was abandoning the sinking ship to let someone else fix the problems. 

The problem we have here?  It appears that Jackson, Adams and Caddell all either badly misinformed voters about Dockery’s competence and qualifications or seriously deceived the voters.  It’s important to know exactly when this trio learned of Robbins’s money problems.

This trio captained an effort to elevate a man at the center of a financial mess in Robbins to a position of authority over the county bureaucracy and its funds.  If they knew about Robbins and its problems before the election, that is a serious problem.  It’s a serious problem – period – to allow someone like Dockery to be rewarded with more responsibility after his poor performance in Robbins.

If Dockery were to resign prior to August 1, he would avoid having his name on the ballot and a replacement could be chosen.