The Evolution of Jeff Jackson

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U.S. Rep. Jeff Jackson stayed up all night on the Sunday after Hurricane Helene’s landfall, producing a video for TikTok. He wore a khaki green polo shirt and looked directly into the camera. His brows were animated, but his eyes looked tired.

“It’s pretty late, but here’s the situation,” said Jackson, the Democratic candidate for state attorney general. “Western North Carolina was just smashed by a flood that tore through everything, and a lot of people are stuck and running low on supplies. If that’s you, I want you to know what is happening.”

Jackson laid out the storm’s impact: damaged water treatment plants, flooded electrical substations, hospitals working on backup power. He also detailed the mobilization to deliver food, water, and medicine to the mountains. Thousands of utility workers, he said, had arrived from across the continent to restore power. There were 700 people deployed for search and rescue. 

“Please know you are the primary mission,” he told storm-battered residents. “Help is coming.” 

Videos like these have propelled Jackson to fame well beyond his Charlotte-area district. He has amassed 2.2 million TikTok followers, making him Congress’ biggest celebrity on the platform. His videos feel more like fireside chats than the usual fast-cut fare. His voice is calm, like a schoolteacher trained in de-escalation, as he talks about the issue of the day: Ukraine, government shutdown threats, the Silicon Valley Bank failure. (The last of these got 30 million views.) He rarely criticizes colleagues by name. He ends his videos with the phrase, “Keep you posted.”

He says these videos are designed to maintain an honest relationship with voters. “There is no trust without transparency,” he told Roll Call magazine in 2023.

Jackson’s Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, views them more cynically, as do some other elected officials. Last month, Bishop mocked the Democrat as a “ladder-climbing TikTok influencer.” 

But behind Jackson’s social-media persona lies a more complex personal story. The 42-year-old candidate’s relentless effort to communicate with the public has its roots in a political evolution that began in the 1990s. 

Jackson has talked occasionally about his early life, particularly his service in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2006, but rarely in much depth. This summer, he talked with The Assembly at length about the politically formative years leading up to, and including, Operation Enduring Freedom. 

His memories, plus interviews with his peers, chart his transformation from a teenage libertarian to a Democratic lawmaker whose frank, quiet commentary about congressional politics has garnered him a national following.

The Randian Years

He’s hard to overlook in the Chapel Hill High School yearbook picture. A scrum of student government leaders squeeze into the corner of a classroom, most wearing T-shirts and casual sweaters. 

Jackson, the student body president from 1999 to 2000, seems like part of a different photograph altogether, leaning forward in an Oxford shirt and skinny tie a la Blues Brothers. He sports a Beatles haircut and a smile that voters would still recognize almost a quarter-century later.

He stood out in other ways, too, as a teenager in Orange County, one of the bluest patches of the state. “Jeff was kind of like the only Republican I knew,” said Derek Ehrman, Jackson’s oldest friend and debate team partner.

The son of divorced parents, Jackson spent summers with his paternal grandparents on their Vermont farm. His grandfather, Walter Neale Jackson, was a former pastor and conscientious objector who had studied nonviolent resistance with Mahatma Gandhi. Then he became a stockbroker and embraced conservatism; inside his barn hung a Ronald Reagan poster that Walter’s daughter had banned from the house. Jackson and his grandfather, who shared a middle name, used to talk over blueberry doughnuts on summer mornings, and Walter’s politics came to inform his grandson’s.

Back at home, a teacher recommended Ayn Rand, the Russian-born author whose work celebrates industrialists and entrepreneurs acting in their own self-interest. (Rand once described altruism as the “cancer” that destroyed capitalism.) Jackson stumbled on a used copy of Rand’s novel The Fountainhead at Chapel Hill’s Nice Price Books. He devoured it, followed by her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged. 

“If you put those two books into the hands of a 16-year-old boy, it’s going to leave a mark,” he said. “Because they’re books that tell you that, ‘Hey, 16-year-old boy, all these urges that you have, all these aggressive and self-centered thoughts that you have, those are all virtues.’”

Jackson was known as a forceful high school debater. “He was sharp, and he could shiv you pretty well,” said a classmate. He used that skill to promote his political views. He supported Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, on the grounds that the president had lied to the country. Under his yearbook portrait, there’s a quote attributed to John Galt, the philosopher-inventor in Atlas Shrugged: “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.”

The ‘Harder Right’

Jackson majored in philosophy at Emory University, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in four years. One reason for the major, he said, was that he wanted to hear the counterarguments to the libertarianism that had enchanted many a Rand devotee, including himself.

What he learned shook him up. One philosophy professor argued that history consists of constructed narratives and that there are often multiple truthful (if inconsistent) narratives that can be told for a single complex event. 

“Jeff came in libertarian and had this view that, ‘Well, if what I said is technically true, then that’s the entire ballgame,’” said his college roommate, Kurt Kastorf. “[Then he] started to learn that there are an infinite number of facts, and the things that you focus on, what you notice, and what you prioritize are part of the political and philosophical and ethical story of your life. I think that probably changed him a fair bit.”

Jackson was also influenced by another of his Emory teachers, Ted Westhusing, an Army lieutenant colonel who was working on his doctorate in philosophy. Westhusing wrote his dissertation on military honor and often emphasized the “harder right” over the “easier wrong.” (In 2005 Westhusing killed himself while serving in Iraq, leaving behind a note that said, “I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars.”)

“They’re books that tell you that, ‘Hey, 16-year-old boy, all these urges that you have, all these aggressive and self-centered thoughts that you have, those are all virtues.’”

Rep. Jeff Jackson

Jackson adopted Westhusing’s commitment to the “harder right,” said Kastorf, now an Atlanta attorney. That shift eventually led Jackson to Afghanistan.

He could still be a provocateur. He would show up at a campus libertarian group to spar with his former allies. He became the editorials editor at The Emory Wheel, the student newspaper, and wrote some signed columns that were not particularly altruistic. In one, he bragged about using his student loan to buy a new wardrobe and motorcycle, then took aim at his anti-materialist peers. 

“You are not Gandhi, and try as you may, renouncing your material possessions will almost undoubtedly make you a less happy person,” he wrote. “Feel guilty if you want, but I’m going to Best Buy.”

Kastorf was surprised by that one and said his former roommate might have been “projecting.” The Jackson he remembers had to be persuaded to buy himself decent furniture. “I wonder if he was figuring out, ‘Why don’t I care about these things?’”

More indicative of Jackson’s changes were his conversations with Andrew Ackerman, his editor at the Wheel (and a journalist today), who had also read Ayn Rand. Jackson had developed an argument, Ackerman said, debunking Rand’s premise that personal freedom was the loftiest value: “Basically, there are other values that we have. We don’t want people to die in the street as senior citizens, and so you have to have a social safety net.”

Did that amount to a repudiation of his earlier libertarianism? “Yeah,” Ackerman said. “A hundred percent.”

The Good War

Jackson’s computer was broken on September 11, 2001. He was working on a borrowed laptop, he recalled, when an AOL instant message popped up: Can you believe what’s happening in New York? He flipped on the TV.

The first tower had been hit. Jackson was alone in the dorm, and his room overlooked a parking lot where construction was going on. Just as the plane flew into the second tower, he said, a dump truck outside his window backed up and struck a power line. Jackson saw the sparks fly. Then the building went dark.

It had been a decade since the First Gulf War, which took place when Jackson was in elementary school. He felt certain another conflict was inevitable. “That was the first time in my life … that war was a piece of my conception of what it meant to be an American,” he said.

Jackson had never considered joining the military. Now, he said, it felt imperative. “If I didn’t go, somebody might get hurt because of that decision that I made, and I couldn’t live with that,” he said.

He enlisted in the Army Reserve in September 2002, did his basic training the following summer, and deferred the rest of his service until after graduation. “We all had respect for Jeff for being one of the only people at the time that was already donning the uniform,” said Lyle Jeremy Rubin, who worked alongside Jackson on the campus paper and later served in Afghanistan.

By the time Jackson graduated in 2004, it was becoming clear that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, the pretext for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, didn’t actually exist. The revelation altered Jackson’s view of his commander-in-chief, President George W. Bush. “I had had a lot of respect for the way he initially responded after September 11,” the congressman said. “That was shattered once I realized he had been dishonest with us about the core rationale for invading Iraq.” 

Jackson discussed this with other soldiers, too, during their pre-deployment training at Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty). But they were headed for Afghanistan, not Iraq. “We felt like it was the good war,” he said.

The Information Economy

“We arrived at Bagram four nights ago in the middle of the night. The landing was unlike anything you’ve ever experienced in regular commercial flight. Suffice to say it was highly tactical, and some (not I) got sick.” – email to friends and family, June 29, 2005.

Jackson was part of a three-man team that was choppered out to a remote base near Kandahar, the first of two sites where he’d be stationed. The desert into which they descended seemed inhospitable to human survival. “It looked exactly like the surface of Mars,” he said. “And you just think: How can anybody live here? And then you go to these villages where there’s somehow like a trickle of water, and the entire village is subsisting off of this little stream. And you realize whoever controls that little stream controls everybody’s lives.”

The three newcomers were attached to a small Special Forces unit, which was training a company of Afghan soldiers who lived just outside the base’s razor-wire fence.

A big part of Jackson’s job was helping build local support for the Afghan government in its fight against the Taliban. His team would arrive at a village and set up a security perimeter. Often, Jackson would pass his helmet and rifle to a buddy, then approach with his interpreter, palms facing out. He’d wait until an elder came out and then ask permission to distribute supplies. Once permission was granted, someone would bring out chai tea, which the soldiers and residents would drink together. Then the Americans would hand out some valued item: soccer balls, T-shirts, coloring books, solar-powered radios. Many of the items had Afghan flags printed on them.

The team also did veterinary missions, where a medic would immunize the village’s livestock. (Extending the life of a goat, Jackson said, had real value.) They would provide medicine and first aid for children, too.

In photos from that period, Jackson is often surrounded by children. “He talked to a lot more people than I did,” said David Warford, who served alongside him. “He was getting pictures of everybody, smiling with them, giving them the thumbs-up. … A lot of kids wanted to trade him sunglasses and gloves and things like that.” 

Those interactions built goodwill, Warford added, and often ferreted out information about, for example, strange nighttime vehicle movements: “He found a lot of key intel passively.” 

Warford remembered Jackson as “the smart guy” who read books while others watched movies or listened to music. When they deployed, he said, most soldiers brought items like blankets from home. “He took a library,” Warford said. “A whole library. It was insane.”

“He talked to a lot more people than I did. He was getting pictures of everybody, smiling with them, giving them the thumbs-up.” 

David Warford

The others would mess with Jackson by slipping pages from adult magazines into his books and gear. And they would mess with their higher command by making Jackson–who arrived a specialist and was later promoted to corporal–write the daily situation reports. “He would use words that nobody else knew,” Warford said. “About four months in, we got an email back saying, ‘Stop using words that are above my pay grade’ from our captain. He said he was tired of looking through a thesaurus to figure out what Jackson was trying to put in the report. That’s where I learned the word ‘schadenfreude.’”

Pranks aside, the others appreciated those smarts, Warford said. When they arrived at the base, they found a bunker’s worth of posters and other handouts. Under Jackson’s influence, he said, the soldiers did a more strategic analysis of which items the local population actually valued.

One important commodity, they concluded, was information. Jackson’s team procured a radio station kit in a box, then worked with nearby residents to build it and provide content in Pashto. They broadcast health and safety advice, Warford recalled: when to boil water, or what to do if you stepped on a land mine. Jackson programmed the music, local tunes he got from Afghan soldiers and vetted with his interpreter.

“It was a super-audacious plan that we weren’t certain was going to work. And then somehow, it magically did,” Jackson said. “It turned out to be a wonderful way to build trust with the local community because we would bring in their elders and … hand them the microphone and let them speak.” After the station went online, the solar radios that the Americans distributed became even more valuable.

But not all their work involved winning hearts and minds.

The base had spent a couple of days training for a foray into what Jackson called “bad guy land.” He would drive a Humvee and help secure the perimeter while others raided a compound. As usual, he received almost no explanation of the mission’s rationale.

Shortly before departure, Jackson said, “Captain walked in and said, ‘Hey, we thought there were X number of bad guys in this place, but now we think it’s X plus 10.’”

Still, the officer said, the mission would proceed.

The soldiers sat in silence, absorbing the new risk calculus and watching a music video that, to Jackson, felt “emotionally a billion miles away”: Corinne Bailey Rae pedaling through the South African winelands, singing “Put Your Records On.” Then they got in their vehicles and left.

Jackson wore night-vision goggles; the convoy would make the entire trip in darkness, zigzagging off-road and fording creek beds. “That was the part that sucked the most,” he said, “knowing that I had to wear these shitty [goggles] for the next six hours and try not to rear-end the guy in front of me because it’s so hard to see.”

They reached the target compound before daybreak: Americans in Humvees and their Afghan partners in Toyota Hilux trucks, about 60 or 70 soldiers in all.

Jackson compared what ensued to the compound raid scene from Zero Dark Thirty, albeit with more rudimentary architecture. Soldiers penetrated the exterior walls, and then the interior ones. From his position outside, Jackson heard gunfire and then learned that some of the enemy had been killed.

He felt relieved that his side didn’t take casualties. During his year in Afghanistan, Jackson was more consumed with surviving than with geopolitics. “The main motivation is just to watch out for your buddies, and you layer some training on top of that,” he said. “Most of it is just an instinct to make sure your friends don’t get hurt.”

But he did lose a friend: a soldier who was shot while walking through the door during a compound raid. It was Jackson’s final week before flying home, and he was out on a different mission at the time. “He was the most tragic person we could have lost on that base,” Jackson said. “Just the best. Who did nothing wrong.”

One of the scariest moments involved no deaths at all. It was a night when Jackson had to climb a river embankment, by himself, with a heavy speaker on his back. The plan was to broadcast a prerecorded surrender appeal—if only Jackson could get up the embankment. But it was slick; it was pitch black; and the night-vision goggles limited his depth perception. “Nobody there to help him,” Warford said. “He was just kind of on his own.”

Climbing took all Jackson’s strength. He had to plunge his fists into the mud of the embankment and hoist himself over the top. Afterward, he had to guess which of the groups in the distance was his team and which was the enemy. He guessed correctly and reunited with the other soldiers.

The surrender appeal worked. “No shots were fired that night,” Warford said.

Mission and Brand

A month into his deployment, Jackson sent an email home. “It’s probably too early to tell how the battle for hearts and minds is going,” he wrote, “but the complete lack of civil infrastructure makes it very difficult for our three-man team to cover the region. We can meet people and disseminate product all day long and we’ll still only make a small dent in general sentiment.”

This was the start of a bigger epiphany: that a 7,000-mile chasm separated the political rhetoric in D.C. from the reality on the ground. President Bush, in 2006, described “a vibrant young democracy” taking hold in Afghanistan.” What Jackson saw was an impoverished country bereft of strong political institutions and a limited number of available tools for changing that. “You got some soldiers. You got some Humvees. And you got some money,” he said. “Those are your ingredients for building a flourishing democracy here in this rocky desert that’s never had one.”

Instead it became a 20-year war that cost the United States almost $1 trillion and ended in defeat. The death toll topped 100,000, including more than 2,400 U.S. troops. And the Taliban retook power in 2021.

It might have been different, Jackson believes, if Bush had leveled with voters after 9/11. He imagines what might have happened if the president said something like this:

Here’s the situation in Afghanistan: This country’s hopelessly poor, and for the rest of our lives it is going to remain hopelessly poor. But there are some low-hanging pieces of fruit that I think we can go in there and establish. We can get the worst of the bad guys, and we can build a couple of key pieces of infrastructure that will at least allow them to have the most minimal imaginable economy and trade network, like some roads.

“I think the whole country would have said, ‘OK, great,’” said Jackson, who is now a major in the North Carolina Army National Guard. Voters might have supported a limited effort with a realistic goal, rather than a costly, generation-long pursuit of an unattainable democracy.

Almost two decades after his homecoming, leveling with voters has become a part of Jackson’s mission and brand, first in the state legislature and now in Congress. It helps explain all those informational videos on Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, YouTube, and especially TikTok. It even explains his increasingly relaxed dress, which lately has trended toward T-shirts. 

“The whole idea with the use of social media is to reduce the number of barriers between me and the crowd,” he said. “At a certain point, I saw a dress shirt as another barrier.”

When he was a state legislator, from 2014 to 2022, some of Jackson’s colleagues considered him an attention seeker. Politico reporter Michael Kruse wrote about him in 2021 and noted that some lawmakers privately called him a “show horse” who used social media as a springboard to higher office. According to Kruse, some Democrats referred to him behind his back as “Baby Jesus.”

Jackson’s GOP opponent in the attorney general race has tried to use Jackson’s success on TikTok, which is Chinese-owned, to discredit him. Last October, Bishop issued a parody press release ostensibly declaring Jackson’s candidacy in English and Chinese. “I’m a TikTok star who wants to make North Carolina soft on crime,” it said. “Now back to stupid videos of me helping China spy on North Carolina and cats.” 

More recently, Bishop criticized Jackson for supporting legislation that would ban TikTok if its owners don’t sell it by 2025. “Jeff, having assiduously cultivated a following on there and used it for his political purposes, voted to ban it,” Bishop said during a June debate. “I’ve never used TikTok, but I value the First Amendment right of Americans to speak.” (Jackson explained that he supported the company’s sale after hearing “genuinely alarming” information during private congressional briefings but believed there was “practically zero” chance of a ban.)

Beyond the political dustup, Jackson thinks he knows why 2.2 million viewers follow him: They crave the same candor from politicians that he wishes President Bush had offered about Afghanistan. 

“How many elected leaders do we have who we can trust to tell us the way things really are? Aren’t people dying for it? Aren’t we all hungry for it?” he asked. “Imagine what an upgrade it would be in American politics if politicians simply started being honest but improved in no other respect. It would be night and day.”