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The state of North Carolina: A people magnet

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Tuesday, 10 February 2026

Written by Margaret Dickson

As a relatively new grandmother, I get frequent “growing like a weed” comments, and my grandbabies are doing just that—getting bigger and better every day.
So too is their home state, a fact that warms this tarheel-born and-bred writer’s heart.
Recent data from the US Census Bureau confirms that North Carolina bounced into the fastest growing state spot in 2025 with a whopping 84,000 new residents, bumping both Texas (2024) and Florida (2023) down the line. We now have nearly 11.2 million residents, with most of our growth coming from what demographers call “domestic migration,” people leaving other states to come to North Carolina. Some projections have us passing Georgia and Ohio to become the 7th largest state in the early 2030s. There is also the possibility of enhanced political clout at the national level with an additional seat in Congress based on our population boom.
And who is coming?
Many are people interested in high-paying jobs in banking and in technology. They may actually “work” in another state through remote communications, but want to live and raise families here. Access to both the ocean and mountains, cities large enough to have attractive amenities but are not metropolises, and temperate weather are big draws. Retirees are coming for many of the same reasons.
Population growth is clearly desirable in all sorts of ways—an expanding economy with more workers, additional investment and tax base, and more consumers to purchase goods and services. Our incoming residents are also likely to be more diverse culturally and educationally than our native population, which makes North Carolina a more interesting place to be.
Growth brings its challenges as well.
More people mean more public needs, including public services like roads, bridges, and public transit. Rush hour in Charlotte, Raleigh, and—yes, Fayetteville—confirms this in about 30 seconds. Our new residents need places to live, which can drive up both demand for housing and its affordability. More people call for both more and more extensive health care options, and children they bring with them need more, and in many cases, better schools. More people generate urban sprawl that eats into natural areas and farm lands and creates various environmental issues, as we have seen in both our mountains and our coastal areas.
Most of our new residents are drawn to urban centers, both for jobs and for culture. This means they spend their money there, further exacerbating North Carolina’s increasingly clear urban-rural divide. Urban areas with larger tax bases and more educated residents are thriving, while rural areas can rarely compete with the schools, health care, and amenities of our cities. Political and cultural conflicts can be threatening and highly divisive.
All of which is to say, North Carolina’s future requires smart planning at both the state and local levels. Our General Assembly must be willing to invest in our state’s infrastructure, both in cities and in rural areas, instead of cutting budgets and giving tax breaks to top earners and corporations, many of which are based outside North Carolina. It must stop starving public education and sending our tax dollars to barely regulated private schools, many of them with a religious slant. Local governments must be creative in attracting new residents to their areas and persistent in their efforts to provide quality education and health care.
The bottom line here is that if North Carolina does not continue to offer a high quality of life attractive to newcomers, some of our “domestic migrants” are going to politely migrate to some other state that does.

Joshua Norton: The man who would be emperor

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Tuesday, 03 February 2026

Written by Pitt Dickey

Let us now praise the most famous man born on Feb. 4, 1819. Come and admire Norton 1, the first Emperor of the United States. Coincidentally, this column’s stain on world literature will appear in print on Feb. 4, 2026, only 207 years after his birth. Better late than never. Today, we salute this great but forgotten man. It is said that history repeats itself. But that would be wrong. Sometimes it does rhyme. There are certain resonances between the reign of Emperor Norton and our own current Fearless Leader, President Trump. Let’s see if you can find them.
The Emperor Norton 1, AKA Joshua Abraham Norton, declared himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. Unsurprisingly, Norton 1 was a resident of San Francisco at the time he became Emperor. San Francisco is famous for attracting colorful individuals. Norton also pronounced himself the Protector of Mexico. Hark the sound of history rhyming, as our current Fearless Leader has declared himself the Acting President of Venezuela, and soon to be the Protector of Greenland, Canada, the Army/Navy football game time slot, some lady’s Nobel Peace Prize, and Minneapolis. Delusions coupled with Executive Directives can be fun.
Only one other person born on Feb. 4 rivals the greatness of Emperor Norton. Our old pal, Ferdinand Magellan born in 1480. Magellan gets credit for being the first to sail around the world in 1522. Coincidentally, he sailed through the Strait of Magellan at the bottom of South America. The odds of Magellan sailing through a Strait named after him are astronomical, yet that is what he did. Kudos. Only Lou Gehrig contracting a disease with the same name as his comes close.
I digress, back to Emperor Norton. After declaring himself Emperor, he issued several fun Imperial Decrees (now known as Executive Orders) during his reign from 1859 to his death in 1880. He issued his declaration of Emperorship announcing to the Citizens of the Union: “At the request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I declare and proclaim myself Emperor of the United States and direct the representatives of the different States to assemble in Musical Hall to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which this country is laboring.” Norton didn’t need no stinking elections to be Emperor. He saw his duty, and he did it. He was restrained only by his own sense of morality.
One of Norton’s first Imperial Decrees was to abolish Congress. He issued a Decree to the US Army to arrest and remove all members of Congress. A little martial law is like eating peanuts. It’s hard to stop at just one Imperial Decree or Executive Order. Bet you can’t Decree just once. His next Decree abolished the United States, making America a temporary monarchy with him as Emperor. He directed the Catholic and Protestant churches to ordain him as Emperor. Sadly, neither the Army nor the churches followed his Decree. He abolished both the Republican and Democratic parties as he was “desirous of allaying the dissensions of party strife now existing within our realm.”
Norton was not going to suffer lightly any insults to his Capital city of San Francisco. He issued a Decree that anyone who “shall be heard to utter the abominable word ‘Frisco’ shall be deemed guilty of a High Misdemeanor and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars.”
Like our current President, Norton was not just a builder of dreams; he saw the need for infrastructure as well. Norton decreed that a bridge should be built between San Francisco and Oakland. Eventually, his architectural imagination came into fruition in the form of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges. There remain current but unsuccessful efforts to rename the Bay Bridge the Emperor Norton Bridge.
Norton dressed as an Emperor. Military friends donated a uniform to him, which he decorated with various unearned medals, a beaver hat festooned with ostrich feathers, and a fancy walking stick that Bat Masterson would have envied. He roamed the streets, accepting free meals, having edicts printed in the San Francisco paper, and meeting with his subjects to discuss matters of the day. In 1867, he was arrested and underwent an involuntary commitment to determine if he was insane. His arrest caused a huge backlash from his subjects.
A local paper opined: “He has shed no blood, robbed no one, and despoiled no country; which is more than can be said of his fellows in that line (of politics).” The uproar was so great that the San Francisco police chief ordered him released and issued a public apology for the indignity heaped upon the Emperor. Showing regal mercy, Norton issued an Imperial Pardon to the policeman who arrested him.
Unfortunately, even benevolent Emperors cannot live forever. Norton 1 collapsed on a street corner and passed away before he could be taken to a hospital. Now, like Abraham Lincoln, he belongs to the ages.

(Illustration by Pitt Dickey)

Three Wishes for the Telehealth Genie

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Tuesday, 10 February 2026

Written by John Hood

According to folklore, extraordinary beings resent being confined within ordinary spaces. In “The Fisherman and the Jinni,” one of the stories Sheherazade tells her misguided husband in One Thousand and One Nights, the being in question is so angry at being imprisoned for centuries in a bottle that he has to be tricked into granting wishes rather than killing his lowly liberator outright. In Disney’s Aladdin, the genie isn’t so vengeful but still describes his confinement as “phenomenal cosmic powers” uncomfortably crammed into an “itty bitty living space.”
The real world isn’t teeming with mystic flasks or misty sorcerers. But to the people who first told fairy tales around campfires, our modern abilities to tame the elements, construct labor-saving devices, cure diseases, and fly through air and space would look an awful lot like sorcery. And, truth be told, our real world is teeming with would-be heroes trying desperately to bottle up disruptive discoveries and technologies.
Take artificial intelligence. Might it displace workers, deform journalism, debase literature, and place destructive new weapons in the hands of diabolical foes? Yes. Caution is warranted. It cannot, however, be un-invented, permanently stunted, or monopolized by a few self-appointed guardians. To believe otherwise is, indeed, to remain in a fantasy world. As a practical matter, we have no choice but to develop and use AI, as prudently and productively as we can, so as to maximize its benefits and minimize its risks.
I feel the same way about a less “gee-whiz” innovation that nevertheless presents promise as well as some peril: telehealth.
Although the digital technologies and practice models behind telehealth services predate the COVID-19 pandemic, it catalyzed a dramatic expansion. Patients needed help. Hospitals were, by necessity, limiting exposure. Physicians, therapists, and other providers were, too. So, barriers to telehealth fell. Only some were reinstated after the crisis.
Over the past five years, this innovation has proven itself to be cost-beneficial. “Telehealth is not a silver bullet,” wrote Josh Archambault and Joshua Reynolds, coauthors of a new report on the subject, “but it remains one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to expand access to care, particularly in underserved rural communities.”
Published by the Massachusetts-based Pioneer Institute and Texas-based Cicero Institute, the report grades the 50 states according to how much they’ve adjusted their administrative and regulatory policies to facilitate provider and patient use of telehealth.
North Carolina, I’m sad to say, fares poorly in the Pioneer-Cicero study. We earn, and I do mean earn, one of the 10 failing grades Archambault and Reynolds assign. We make it too difficult for North Carolinians to obtain services from medical providers in other states. We don’t explicitly define telehealth in a neutral manner, allowing for a range of time sequences and modes (live vs. prerecorded, audio-only vs. full video, live check-ins vs. remote monitoring of conditions, etc.) based on patient and provider preferences. And we don’t allow nurse practitioners to deliver the full range of services for which they are licensed — whether remotely or in-person — without the costly and largely superfluous oversight of physicians.
Before reading the report, I was generally familiar with the case for telehealth reform and expansion. I’ve written about it before. What I didn’t yet know, however, is that the federal government has created new financial incentives for the practice under its Rural Health Transformation Program. About half of the $50 billion in grants will be awarded according to policy mix, not just baseline need, with access to telehealth represented in the grant formula both directly and indirectly.
The A-plus states of Arizona, Colorado, Delaware and Utah know what North Carolina has yet to accept: telehealth is here to stay. It’s never going back in the bottle. So let’s grant it three wishes: 1) define telehealth properly, 2) permit patients to use it freely, and 3) empower nurse practitioners to deliver it efficiently. The results won’t be miraculous. But telehealth can expand access while moderating costs. That’s good enough.

Editor’s note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).

Publisher's Pen: The remarkable journey of Joe Thigpen

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Tuesday, 03 February 2026

Written by Bill Bowman

For nearly five decades, the beverage industry in our region has been shaped, strengthened, and elevated by the steady hand and generous spirit of one remarkable man.
This month, it is both an honor and a privilege to celebrate the career and character of someone who has served our community with distinction and earned the admiration of everyone fortunate enough to work alongside him.
Healy Wholesale’s Joe Thigpen is a name that carries weight in Cumberland County—not because he ever sought recognition, but because he lived his career with humility, loyalty, and an unwavering commitment to doing “the right things, for the right reasons.”
It’s a philosophy that resonates deeply with us here at Up & Coming Weekly. From his early days delivering Pepsi Cola in 1977 to his final chapter with Healy Wholesale, Joe has embodied the values that make Fayetteville’s business community strong: honesty, integrity, hard work, and genuine care for people.
On page 14 of this issue, we share Joe’s extraordinary story—a story of perseverance through change, of friendships forged over decades, and of a man who turned competitors into colleagues and customers into lifelong friends.
It is also a story of grace, reflecting how Joe handled both success and setbacks with the same quiet dignity that has defined his entire professional life.
As Joe steps into retirement after 48 years of service, we invite you to join us in honoring his legacy. His impact reaches far beyond the daily duties of beverage sales. It lives in the relationships he built, the trust he earned, and the countless people he encouraged along the way.
On behalf of the entire Up & Coming Weekly team—and a grateful community—we extend our deepest appreciation to Joe Thigpen. May his next chapter be filled with the same joy, friendship, and purpose he has given to all of us. Our city, state, and nation would be a far better place if we had more people like Joe.
Thank you for reading Up & Coming Weekly.
—Bill Bowman, Publisher

Special Note: On Sunday, February 15, from noon to 6 p.m., Gates Four Country Club will host a retirement celebration in Joe’s honor featuring the band RIVERMIST.
The public, friends, and family are invited to this ticketed event. Proceeds support Kidsville News! and its mission to provide reading and educational resources to Cumberland County elementary schools. For ticket information, visit https://bit.ly/46sPvNF, scan the QR code, or call 910‑391‑3859.

(Photo: Joe Thigpen has been a staple of the Fayetteville community for 48 years in the beverage business. This February, he retires after a 48 year career. Photo courtesy of Bill Bowman)