I lived in Nashville for just shy of four years. I moved there when the New York Times declared it an “It” city, a marker that I have come to loathe as it is an assignation that means a city is doomed once declared as such. I currently live in another at the present time, Jersey City, I can attest it is undeserved in the same ways Nashville was and frankly is worse if that is possible. That Jersey City is literally across the the “street” aka river from Manhattan does little to put lipstick on this pig. What I have come to learn that “It” Cities is a moniker to alert those not in the know that the City was a dump, its infrastructure, housing, businesses, schools and basic services were shitholes. I can literally say this is true as last week in a Jersey City School, Ferris High, two classrooms were closed due to raw sewerage leaking into the rooms.
And yes I subbed for one of the Teachers assigned to said rooms and we were relocated to the Library main floor, where it is devoid of books but has desks and chairs, one PC which I immediately claimed and two cross doors that were locked and yet were used as pass through doors all day by Workers, Teachers and a few Students. And when I tried to at least give them some prop to remain ajar once, I managed most of the day in a dreary space that was freezing cold when as once before when I had to do the same during the Pandemic, the Bitch Admin admonished me about this, taking one of my door jambs away and giving it to the Librarian upstairs to keep from me. (And yes I heard it actually telling her this while shouting out that I cannot do this despite my request on how I was to manage… again not the first time with this bitch) As soon as she left and the Librarian went to lunch I found it “hidden” under her desk, retrieved it to put into the door and upon end of day, immediately threw it away as well no one should have it then. This is what it is like working in the schools here and Nashville is barely above the rung when it comes to similar issues. Poverty is a level-izer in ways that I had no understanding of until I lived there and in turn relocated here in 2019. The schools here had been under a 33 year takeover by the State for failing to provide equity in Education and it is clear the State did little to nothing to change that, so an entire generation plus have suffered from the neglect which I equate with abuse to provide any basic skills that enable those who live and work here to have a chance to rise above their circumstances. I speak to the varying Employees of my building at is distressing to realize how fucking stupid they are. I had to explain to one what a CD was in banking. Another about how to find a job as a Border Patrol Agent as clearly even finding the info on a Government website was a challenge. I get why the Grift Economy exists here as they have no skills other that to beg borrow or steal.
Now Jersey for now is a blue as you can go but it is not always that way. The Politics here are corrupt and run by machines of both parties. The current state of the Ballots are established by the Parties and are listed by the demonstrated chosen as the heir. So outside Candidates are often relegated to the bottom regardless. The current Senate race for the sitting Senator Bob Menendez was between the Wife of the Current Governor and the fine Representative Andy Kim. Despite that Ms. Murphy was a Republican for years, has no Governing experience she was designated the “it” candidate and would have been placed number one on the Democratic primary ballot. And given what I have learned about Voting and Education and how they go hand it hand it basically literally hands the election to the #1 position. Thankfully she dropped out and it appears that despite Menendez’s demand for justice on this his second time at the Goat Rodeo of Federal Charges, he claims he is not leaving his job and will run as a third party candidate. Okay then. Meanwhile Nepotism continues on with his Son running for the State House. Perhaps this time he will take the hint and people actually realize there are other qualified candidates on the ballot where his prominence may hurt him.
That said, Tennessee was an outlier when it came to fucking with Voter Rights among other issues when it comes to control. I moved there and they had already established Voter ID laws, made it challenging to Vote by Mail and were already a State where the Minority controlled the Majority with only a third of registered voters actually voting in less than qualified Candidates. Corruption scandals and Racist accusations were a part of the norm and once the Plumber got elected it has only gotten worse. And when I read this story in the Guardian, a foreign press, it tells you all you need to know about where we are heading in general. And by general I mean both the National Election and States that have been moving into this direction for quite some time. Florida gets a lot of attention for this but they are not the only ones.
‘You have imprisoned our democracy’: inside Republicans’ domination of Tennessee
A year after the Covenant school shooting in Nashville – and a mass movement for gun control – Republicans have accelerated their attacks on democratic norms
George Chidi The Guardian in Atlanta, Fri 5 Apr 2024
The murder of six people at a church school in an affluent, largely white enclave of Tennessee’s largest city one year ago sparked a mass protest movement for gun control by Nashville parents. The Republican-dominated legislature met that movement with some spending on school police officers as a gesture to the outrage, a law shielding gun and ammunition manufacturers from liability as a gesture to Tennessee’s powerful gun lobby and the expulsion of the two Black lawmakers as a gesture of warning to people causing too much trouble.
Other antidemocratic displays over the last year would be just as outrageous, if people outside of Tennessee were still paying attention.
The temporary expulsion of Representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones was only the first cautionary tale in a saga of retribution that has continued apace, activists say. Conservative domination – maintained by gerrymandered districts, disenfranchised voters and an increasing sense of political despair – insulates Tennessee Republicans from political consequences for unpopular decisions. Challenged in public by increasing activism on the left and apocalyptic rhetoric on the right, Tennessee Republicans stopped just chipping away at democratic norms and began hammering full-on like coalminers on Rocky Top.
Republicans rode the Tea Party wave of 2010 into a dominant position in Tennessee. Bit by bit over the last 14 years, they have turned Tennessee into a one-party state. About 37% of Tennesseans vote for Democrats in national elections, but Republicans hold a 75-24 supermajority in the Tennessee house and a 27-6 supermajority in the state senate – enough to override a veto and propose constitutional changes. Tennessee fails Princeton’s report card on gerrymandering. Only seven state house seats are considered competitive. No state senate seats are competitive.
The last Democrat to win a statewide office in Tennessee was Governor Phil Bredesen, who left office in January 2011. All five state supreme court justices are Republican appointees.
The leadership in the state is not the old guard
Dr Sekou Franklin, Middle Tennessee State University
Only one of Tennessee’s nine members of Congress is a Democrat: Steve Cohen of Memphis. In 2021, Republican legislators cracked Nashville’s longstanding fifth district – held continuously by a Democrat since 1875 – into three pieces. Jim Cooper, one of the last Blue Dog Democrats, was replaced in 2022 by Andy Ogles, a Freedom Caucus Republican who denies that Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election and was one of 19 lawmakers to initially break against Kevin McCarthy’s speakership in 2023.
Historically, Tennessee Republicans had a tradition of bipartisanship and relative moderation typified by former senators Lamar Alexander or Bob Corker, said Dr Sekou Franklin, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. That’s long gone now.
“The leadership in the state is not the old guard,” Franklin said. “They’re an extreme version of conservatives who believe that they have broad sovereignty to govern, in many respects irrespective of what goes on in the national government.”
Voter disenfranchisement drives some of this political advantage.
About 9.2 % of the adult citizen population (and 21% of Black adults) in Tennessee are barred from voting because of a felony conviction.
Tennessee has one of the strictest and most opaque rights restoration processes, said Blair Bowie, director of the Restore Your Vote initiative at the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington DC-based voting-rights advocacy group. In addition to having to pay all court costs and restitution and being current on child support payments, disenfranchised voters must obtain a certificate of restoration from a probation or parole officer, or a court clerk … if they know how to do it. “There’s no application,” Bowie said. “You end up with a system where even if someone meets the criteria, they couldn’t restore their voting rights because the process is broken.”
The process became even more difficult last year. Now voting rights can only be restored after clemency granted by the governor’s office or citizenship rights restored by a circuit court judge.
Then in January, the Tennessee secretary of state added one new criterion: a judge must also restore a disenfranchised citizen’s right to carry a gun in order to regain the right to vote.
As thousands of people began to descend on the capitol after the Nashville shooting last year, conservative lawmakers really didn’t want to endure another round of rowdy protests. The Republican majority didn’t really want to be there at all, Pearson said.
“The call, or the orders from the governor about what we could do to address the issues of gun violence, was very narrow,” he said, describing a special session called by Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, to address criminal justice issues for mental health, public safety and – potentially – a law to take guns away from someone ruled an extreme risk.
So, on day one, Republicans changed the rules.
“You couldn’t have a sign in a committee room. You hear me? A piece of paper is banned,” Pearson said. “You know what you can still have in a committee room? A gun.”
Guns are prohibited in the capitol, but not in the committee buildings where hearings are held, a rule the Republican-led legislature did not change despite the presence of rifle-bearing second amendment activists and far-right Proud Boys confronting gun control supporters on the street.
Outside the capitol, thousands of people, including traditionally Republican voters, attended rallies, said Maryam Abolfazli, a 45-year-old international development executive who founded the civic engagement non-profit Rise and Shine Tennessee after the shootings. Parents were aghast at a legal environment that made it impossible to disarm people with mental illness before they hurt someone.
“Moms came to me to tell me that they’ve never attended anything like this in their life,” she said. “This issue and this moment mobilized people in a way that they had never been mobilized.”
Polling by Vanderbilt University supports Abolfazli’s observations. Three-quarters of poll respondents – including majorities of “Maga” Republicans and NRA members – expressed support for laws requiring the safe storage of guns in vehicles.
At a hearing in August, Tennessee highway patrol officers began dragging out women holding up signs that said “1 KID > ALL THE GUNS” at the order of the civil justice subcommittee chair, Lowell Russell. Abolfazli was one of them.
The ACLU sued on first amendment grounds to block the rules on signs after the event. The parties dismissed the suit as moot after the end of the special session.
The special session ended with laws to speed up background checks and to provide free gun locks. Lawmakers also appropriated $100m in one-time spending for community mental health agencies and other mental health services, and to provide more school resource officers. But “red flag” laws and other gun safety measures were off the table, despite polling, protests and prudence.
The session ended cattywampus, with Pearson and the House speaker, Cameron Sexton, shoving into one another on the floor, a sign in Pearson’s hand: “Protect Kids Not Guns.”
The jostling itself was a sign of things to come.
Rafiah Muhammad–McCormick’s son, Rodney Armstrong, was shot and killed in 2020 in his backyard in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, during a pool party. The murder turned her into a political activist. She wanted to talk with a Republican lawmaker in the halls of the Tennessee legislature last year, she said. It did not go well
“I introduced myself as the mother of a gun violence victim. His immediate response was, ‘Well let me stop you right there: the gun did not kill your son.’ I wasn’t even talking on a gun deal. He stopped me immediately to correct me, as a mother who lost her child.”
“I felt like I was punched in the face,” she added. “You’re so adamant about being right that they ignore what you’re saying.”
Getting in front of legislators isn’t hard, she said. Getting them to listen is difficult.
Mary Joyce links arms with her husband and daughter as people form a human chain to mark the first anniversary of the Covenant school shooting, in Nashville, on 27 March. Photograph: Seth Herald/Reuters
Republicans abandoned the new sign rules at the start of the legislative session in January. Instead, they restricted visitors without tickets from sitting on the side of the house gallery where they can observe Democrats, Pearson said.
Republicans also changed the rules for debate in the house. On paper, it allows for equal time for Republicans and Democrats, but in practice it allow the house speaker to ignore requests to be recognized and for Republicans to end debate as they see fit.
“The speaker does not have to recognize the person whose hand’s raised first,” Pearson said. “He gets to choose whoever he wants. He can choose a Republican who’s going to end the day by calling the question.”
Lawmakers took steps to block courts from reviewing their chamber rules. In February, the house passed a bill to remove jurisdiction from circuit, chancery and other lower state courts over cases involving house and senate rules . If enacted, it would require challenges to rules like the ban on signs to go to the Tennessee supreme court or a federal judge. The bill has, so far, failed to get out of a senate committee.
The Tennessee house also passed a measure in February to make the expulsion of legislators permanent, despite concerns raised by the house legislative attorney that the bill was not constitutional.
Pearson was stopped mid-comment from arguing against the bill. Jones was not permitted to speak about it at all.
In a conversation leaked to the Tennessee Holler of a Tennessee Republican house caucus meeting recorded after the vote to expel the Tennessee Three last year, Republicans framed their opposition in apocalyptic terms.
Justin Jones is sworn in on 10 April 2023 after being reinstated days after the Republican-majority Tennessee house voted to expel him and Justin Pearson for their roles in a gun control demonstration on the statehouse floor. Photograph: Cheney Orr/Reuters
“Everyone should recognize that the Democrats are not our friends,” said Representative Jason Zachary. “They destroy the republic and the foundation of who we are, or we preserve it. That is the reality of where we are right now, and if these last three days have not proven that, you need to find a new job.”
Other Republicans shared similar sentiments.
“I think the problem I have is if we don’t stick together, if you don’t believe we’re at war for our republic, with all love and respect to you, you need a different job,” said Representative Scott Cepicky in the leaked video. “The left wants Tennessee so bad, because if they get us, the south-east falls, and it’s game over for the republic.”
Those same Republicans are targeting perceived centers of progressive power in the interest of advancing conservative orthodoxy, even when that runs against public sentiment.
Since the Covenant school shooting, Tennessee Republicans have passed laws to fund pro-life “crisis pregnancy centers”, to ban gender-affirming care for minors, to define male and female in state law in a way that makes it impossible to change gender on driver’s licenses or birth certificates, and to bar lawsuits against teachers who do not use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns. Federal courts have blocked new laws restricting drag shows.
Republicans are increasingly targeting municipal government. In the wake of the fatal police beating of Tyre Nichols in 2023, Memphis and other communities created police oversight boards with the power to investigate and punish misconduct. Last week, Lee signed legislation blocking those boards and any local ordinance that limits the ability of a law enforcement agency to take all necessary steps “to prevent and detect crime and apprehend criminal offenders”.
Nashville’s 40-member metro council declined to host the 2024 Republican national convention after Republican lawmakers shattered its congressional district. Republicans responded with legislation to cut the council’s numbers in half, to take over its airport authority and to replace nearly half of the local sports authority with state-appointed members. All these moves have been blocked in court.
Tennessee activists have increasingly focused on local politics, observers say.
“We are seeing folks show up at the school board meetings,” Abolfazli said. Democratic voters will also cross party lines in races they can’t win to keep extremists out of office, she said. “We will pick the more moderate Republican to prevent book banning.”
But at the state level, the net effect of conservative power plays has been to inculcate a sense of despair on the left. This diminishes political activism and voter participation, she said.
“You have so many folks who, whatever they’re being fed about it, think their vote doesn’t count,” Abolfazli said. “Nothing changes. The picture is bleak. You have imprisoned our democracy, and we can’t get the shackles off, because of the gerrymandering, the lobbying and the extremist politics.”
Much has been discussed regarding Jason Aldean’s song about a Small Town. Whatever who cares? Well those who love a Boss Baby sing poorly written songs in a poorly tuned Guitar with a gravel rough voice with no tone nor gravitas such as Johnny Cash, then yes you care. Aldean is one of the many white males who dominate Country Music Radio and fill the bucket at the honky tonks that align Broadway in Nashville when the drunks tip the “Bands” for what is ostensibly their pay for the night to sing bad cover tunes. Gone are the days of Hank Williams slipping out the back alley between sets at the Ryman to swill a few at the then seedy bars that aligned the strip.
The Aldean family are new Country, White, Rich and as Red as the State’s politics. I bet you cannot name who Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Patsy Cline or George Jones voted for or care. They were of another time and today the women would be relegated to the new Country aka Americana as they are not of the new Bro mold of what defines Country and Western music of today. To think they came up with this formula before AI shows how much a prototype on top of an archetype can make music and in turn money as that it the only thing in today’s contemporary Country music matters.
I reprint the article below about a type of “new” Country music crew that defy that logic but are finding themselves shut out of a City and State that defined Rhythm, Blues and Country; and in turn brought legends of all kinds of musicians, Bob Dylan for one, to record with the greats and learn the art of what was called “Country” Music. That time is memorialized in the Country Music Hall of Fame and to neglect the role of the Blues in the careers of Elvis and the Rolling Stones and Memphis is a disservice to all those Black Musicians in that scene but that too is again how the divide rules the State of Tennessee, two cities, two kinds of music, two kinds of crowds. Country has never been known for its Black Artists but they did and do exist as no one type or genre of Music is owned by anyone but it is often a reflection of a larger culture and audience who subscribe. That could go with regards to Hip or Rap but that too has been long associated with Black Urban Culture. So there equivalent to Aldean would be “Big City Living” I guess. What.ever.
Living in Nashville I knew what was already there and what was coming down the pike and I met the “resistance” and with that I knew they were way out of their league in that fight that I suspected was coming. Money is so important to the area and that Med and Ed was redefining it was the real deal maker but that Hospitality was in fact the draw and it enabled the power brokers to manipulate the many in making that the defining industry in which to bring the aspirants, the wannabees and the never wills to the area. Much is made of the migration to the area but it is largely in migration or from the surrounding regions, some from longer distances do relocate there but that is again for tax purposes or political reasons as the article discusses. But much like the famous in any place they live a bubble existence and their influence and interests are aligned with the larger picture for financial reasons only. They do not care about the workers, the rights of Gays, Women, People of Color or even the music industry unless they work in it. They have no need and when the times comes, checks are written and influence peddled. The State is rife with one corruption story after another it is how it works in politics. Buy some you get some. And with the focus on the issues of the Gay Community as a nice distraction, you get liberal gun laws, city takeover bills passed, poor funding for Education and the infrastructure goes ignored as you are busy fighting the new culture wars over Queers and Books. Not that they are not important but they area distraction and nowhere I have ever been does Nashville do the shiny key thing better. The only other matter of import are the function and role of Churches throughout the area, Nashville no exception and that truly is the real outlier in which to be concerned and this article has no mention of that or of the role of the Southern Baptists whose headquarters sit not far from the same honky tonks she visited. Be afraid, be very afraid when it comes to that cohort as they are hands out, buckets out more than any busker or band on stage.
I am glad I am gone and while I go back to visit Nashville in September for the Americana convention it is a way more mellow and music oriented crowd than those who come from CW fest. The definitive expression “White Trash” really fits but I am going with no boots nor hat, just a knowledge that the same city had January 6th rioters working in those same bars and hotels while they too waited at the trough for their turn for whatever brought them to the “It” town that Nashville still refused to relinquish.
Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville
Tennessee’s government has turned hard red, but a new set of outlaw songwriters is challenging Music City’s conservative ways—and ruling bro-country sound.
By Emily Nussbaum The New Yorker
July 17, 2023
Broadway, formerly a rough neighborhood with a handful of honky-tonks frequented by locals, has become NashVegas, a strip lined with night clubs named for country stars.Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The New Yorker
On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.
The singer-songwriter Allison Russell watched them, smiling. In just three weeks, she and a group of like-minded country progressives had pulled together “Love Rising,” a benefit concert meant to show resistance to Tennessee’s legislation targeting L.G.B.T.Q. residents—including a law, recently signed by the state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, barring drag acts anywhere that kids could see them. Stars had texted famous friends; producers had worked for free. The organizers had even booked Nashville’s largest venue, the Bridgestone—only to have its board, spooked by the risk of breaking the law, nearly cancel the agreement. In the end, they had softened their promotional language, releasing a poster that said simply, in lavender letters, “a celebration of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—no “drag,” no “trans,” no mention of policy. It was a small compromise, Russell told me, since their goal was broader and deeper than party politics: they needed their listeners to know that they weren’t alone in dangerous times. There was a Nashville that many people didn’t realize existed, and it could fill the biggest venue in town.
The doors were about to open. Backstage, global stars like Sheryl Crow, Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, and Julien Baker, the Tennessee-born member of the indie supergroup boygenius, milled around alongside the nonbinary country singer Adeem the Artist, who wore a slash of plum-colored lipstick and a beat-up denim jacket. The singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires walked by, swinging their seven-year-old daughter, Mercy, between them. There were more than thirty performers, many of whom, like Russell, qualified as Americana, an umbrella term for country music outside the mainstream. In the Americana universe, Isbell and Shires were big stars—but not on Nashville’s Music Row, the corporate engine behind the music on country radio. It was a divide wide enough that, when Isbell’s biggest solo hit, the intimate post-sobriety love song “Cover Me Up,” was covered by the country star Morgan Wallen, many of Wallen’s fans assumed that he’d written it.
Shires, overwhelmed by the crush backstage, invited me to sit with her in her dressing room, where she poured each of us a goblet of red wine. A Texas-born fiddle player who is a member of the feminist supergroup the Highwomen, she had forest-green feathers clumped around her eyelids, as if she were a bird—her own form of drag, Shires joked. Surrounded by palettes of makeup, she talked about her ties to the cause: her aunt is trans, something that her grandmother had refused to acknowledge, even on her deathbed. Shires’s adopted city was in peril, she told me, and she’d started to think that more defiant methods might be required in the wake of the Tennessee legislature’s recent redistricting, which amounted to voter suppression. “Jason, can I borrow you for a minute?” she called into the anteroom, where Isbell was hanging out with Mercy. “The gerrymandering—how do we get past that?”
“Local elections,” Isbell said.
“You really don’t think the answer is anarchy?” Shires remarked, bobbing one of her strappy heels like a lure.
“Well, you know, if you’re the dirtiest fighter in a fight, you’re gonna win,” Isbell said, mildly, slouching against the doorframe. “You bite somebody’s ear off, you’re probably gonna beat ’em. And if there are no rules—or if the rules keep changing according to whoever won the last fight—you’re fucked. Because all of a sudden they’re, like, ‘Hey, this guy’s a really good ear biter. Let’s make it where you can bite ears! ’ ”
That night, the dominant emotion at “Love Rising” wasn’t anarchy but reassurance—a therapeutic vibe, broken up by pleas to register to vote. Nashville’s mayor, John Cooper, a Democrat, spoke; stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” showed up via Zoom. The folky Americana singer Joy Oladokun, who had a “keep hope alive” sticker on their guitar, spoke gently about growing up in a small town while being Black and “queer, sort of femme, but not totally in the binary.” Jake Wesley Rogers, whose sequinned suit and big yellow glasses channelled Elton John, sang a spine-tingling version of his queer-positive pop anthem “Pluto”: “Hate on me, hate on me, hate on me! / You might as well hate the sun / for shining just a little too much.”
Before Adeem the Artist performed “For Judas,” a wry love song to a man, they summed up the mood nicely, describing it as “a weird juxtaposition of jubilance and fear.” Backstage, however, they struck a bleaker tone: Adeem was planning to move to Pittsburgh—“the Paris of Appalachia”—with their wife and young daughter. In Tennessee, the rent was too high, and the politics too cruel. As much as Adeem appreciated the solidarity of “Love Rising,” they viewed its message as existentially naïve: as Shires had suggested, the state was already so fully gerrymandered—“hard carved”—that, even if every ally they knew voted, the fix was in.
Only one mainstream country star played that night: Maren Morris, a Grammy-winning artist whose breakout 2016 hit, “My Church,” was an irresistible pro-radio anthem that celebrated singing along in your car as a form of “holy redemption.” Morris, who has had hits on terrestrial radio—the regular, non-streaming kind that you listen to on a road trip—was an exception to the rules of Music Row, where liberal singers, even supernovas like Dolly Parton, kept their politics coded, supportive but soft. Performers who were too mouthy, particularly women, tended to get pushed off the Row—and often turned toward the more lenient world of pop, as had happened with Taylor Swift, Kacey Musgraves, and Brandi Carlile (who, along with Amanda Shires, Natalie Hemby, and Morris, is a member of the Highwomen). Decades later, everyone in Nashville still spoke in whispers about what had happened to the Dixie Chicks, in 2003, when they got blackballed after speaking out against the Iraq War.
Morris had recently had a few skirmishes online with right-wing influencers—notably, Brittany Aldean, the maga wife of the singer Jason Aldean. Morris had called her “Insurrection Barbie”; in response, Jason Aldean had encouraged a concert audience to boo Morris’s name. Both sides had sold merch off the clash. The Aldeans hawked Barbie shirts reading “don’t tread on our kids.” Morris fans could buy a shirt that read “lunatic country music person”—Tucker Carlson’s nickname for her—and another bearing the slogan “you have a seat at this table.” (She donated the proceeds to L.G.B.T.Q. charities.) A few months before “Love Rising,” Morris had done an interview with one of the event’s organizers, Hunter Kelly—a host on Proud Radio, a queer-themed channel on Apple Music—and had told him that she wanted to be known for her songs, not her Twitter clapbacks. But, she added, she wouldn’t apologize for having political opinions: “I can’t just be this merch store on the Internet that sells you songs and T-shirts.” Within the context of Nashville, she explained, “I come across a lot louder than I actually am, because everyone else is so quiet.”
Near the end of the concert, Morris, a petite brunette in a floor-length tuxedo coat with a tiny skirt, sang “Better Than We Found It,” a protest song, inspired by her newborn son, that she’d written after the death of George Floyd. During her opening banter, she had told a sweet, offhand story about watching her now three-year-old boy standing in awe as drag queens got ready backstage, amid clouds of glitter and hair spray. “And, yes, I introduced my son to some drag queens today,” Morris added, sassily. “So Tennessee, fucking arrest me!” The next day, Fox News fixated on the moment.
After the concert, Adeem’s Realpolitik echoed in my head. For all its warmth and energy, “Love Rising” hadn’t sold out the Bridgestone Arena. And Adeem wasn’t the only one leaving Tennessee: Hunter Kelly was moving to Chicago with his husband, frustrated that artists whose work he had celebrated for decades, like Parton and Miranda Lambert, weren’t speaking out. That night, I caught a glimpse of the other side of Nashville, down the street, at the honky-tonk bar Legends Corner. A rowdy crowd was dancing and drinking, screaming the lyrics to Toby Keith’s old hit “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”—an ass-kicking, jingoistic number that, twenty years ago, had helped knock the Chicks off the radio.
You notice certain things about a city when you’re an outsider. There was the way everybody ended their description of Nashville the same way: “It’s a small town inside a big city. Everyone knows everyone.” There was the fact that every other Uber driver was in a band. There were the pink stores, with names like Vow’d, selling party supplies for bachelorettes. Above a coffee shop with a #BlackLivesMatter sign was a taunting billboard flacking a proudly “problematic” weekly. I had originally come to the city to meet a set of local singer-songwriters whose presence challenged an industry long dominated by bro country—slick, hollow songs about trucks and beer, sung by interchangeable white hunks. This new guard, made up of female songwriters, Black musicians, and queer artists, suggested a new kind of outlawism, expanding a genre that many outsiders assumed was bland and blinkered, conservative in multiple senses. What I found in Nashville was a messier story: a town midway through a bloody metamorphosis, one reflected in a struggle over who owned Music City.
Every city changes. But the transformation of Nashville—which began a decade ago, and accelerated exponentially during the pandemic—has stunned the people who love the city most. “None of this existed,” the music critic Ann Powers told me, pointing out swaths of new construction. There had been a brutal flood in 2010, and early in the pandemic a tornado had levelled many buildings, including music institutions like the Basement East. But the construction went far beyond rebuilding; it was a radical redesign, intended to attract a new demographic. In hip East Nashville, little houses had been bulldozed to build “tall and skinnies”—layer-cake buildings ideal for Airbnbs. The Gulch, a once industrial area where bluegrass fiddlers still meet at the humble Station Inn, was chockablock with luxury hotels. Broadway, formerly a rough neighborhood with a handful of honky-tonks, had become NashVegas, a strip lined with night clubs named for country stars. Only tourists went there now. Mayor Cooper, meanwhile, wanted to host the Super Bowl, which meant building a domed football stadium big enough for sixty thousand people, which meant that the city needed more parking lots, more hotels—more.
This physical renovation paralleled a political one. The city, a blue bubble in a red state, had long taken pride in its reputation for racial comity, for being a place where people with disagreements could coexist: the so-called Nashville Way. Then, in September, 2020, the right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro and his media empire, the Daily Wire, moved in from Los Angeles, followed by a large posse that included the online influencer Candace Owens, who left Washington, D.C., for the wealthy Nashville suburb of Franklin. This crew, along with other alt-right figures—the commentator Tomi Lahren, executives at the social network Parler—joined forces with maga-friendly country stars, such as Kid Rock and Jason Aldean, who owned clubs on Broadway. Under Governor Lee, who took office in 2019, Tennessee politics were blinking bright red: abortion was essentially banned; gun laws were lax; Moms for Liberty was terraforming school boards. Now the state wanted to ban drag acts and medical care for trans youth. When Nashville’s city council, which leans liberal, refused to host the 2024 Republican National Convention, Lee vowed payback—and tried to cut the size of the council in half. A week after the “Love Rising” concert, a shooter—whose gender identity was ambiguous—murdered six people, including three children, at a local Christian school. The gun-control protests that flooded the Capitol felt like a cathartic expression of a population that was already on edge. At one rally, the country singer Margo Price played Bob Dylan’s “Tears of Rage.”
All through the pandemic, newcomers kept pouring in—a thousand a month, by some calculations. Sometimes it felt as if California had tilted, sending refugees rolling eastward like pinballs, and although some of these new Nashvillians were wealthy Angelenos fed up with living in a fire zone, there were more complex attractions. Tennessee had no state income tax, and Nashville had dropped its mask mandate. It was now possible to work from home, so why not try Music City? When Shapiro announced his move, he called himself “the tip of the spear”—and, if your politics leaned right, Nashville was a magnetic force, with the whiteness of country music part of that allure.
For Nashville musicians, 2020 became a dividing line. Big stars died, among them John Prine, the flinty songwriter, and Charley Pride, the genre’s first Black star. With tours cancelled and recording stalled, artists had time to brood and reconsider. Some got sober, others got high, and many people rolled out projects reflecting the volatile national mood. After Maren Morris wrote “Better Than We Found It”—which has charged lyrics such as “When the wolf’s at the door all covered in blue / Shouldn’t we try something new?”—she released a video featuring images of Black Lives Matter posters and Nashville Dreamers. Tyler Childers, a raw, bluegrass-inflected singer-songwriter from rural Kentucky, made a video for his song “Long Violent History” in which he encouraged poor white Southerners to view their fates as tied to Breonna Taylor’s. Mickey Guyton, just about the only Black woman on country radio, released a song called “Black Like Me.” The Dixie Chicks dropped the “Dixie”; Lady Antebellum changed its name to Lady A. Everywhere, cracks were appearing in the Nashville Way.
The same year, Morgan Wallen—a native of Sneedville, Tennessee, who had been signed by the bro-country institution Big Loud Records in 2016, when he was twenty-three—got cancelled, briefly. In October, Wallen had been due to perform on “Saturday Night Live,” but after a video showed him out partying, in violation of covid restrictions, the invitation was revoked. Then, after he apologized and appeared on the show, a second video emerged, in which he used the N-word. Country radio dropped him; Big Loud suspended his contract; Jason Isbell donated profits from “Cover Me Up”—the song that Wallen had recorded—to the N.A.A.C.P. And then, in a perfect inverse of what had happened to the Chicks, Wallen’s album “Dangerous” shot up the charts. When I asked an Uber driver, a woman in her sixties with a scraped-back ponytail, what music she liked, she said, “Morgan Wallen, of course.” Asked what she thought about the scandal, she said, in a clipped voice, “He come back up real quick. They didn’t get him for too long. He’s No. 1 again.” When she dropped me off, she added, sweetly, “You have a blessed day, Emily.”
Leslie Fram, a senior vice-president at Country Music Television and a former rock programmer who moved to Nashville in 2011, put it plainly to me: Wallen had split the city. To some, he was a symbol of Music Row bigotry; to others, of resistance to a woke world. He’d apologized, sort of, but he hadn’t changed—not changing was a big part of his appeal. There was no denying his success, however, or the savvy of his handlers. His songs, starting with the 2018 hit “Whiskey Glasses,” which opened with the line “Poor me—pour me another drink!,” were all about the desire to drink the past away. His latest album, “One Thing at a Time,” thirty-six songs deep, with lyrics by forty-nine writers—which followed a stand-alone single called “Broadway Girls,” a collaboration with the trap artist Lil Durk that contains repeated mentions of Aldean’s bar—ruled the charts. In March, a few weeks before the “Love Rising” concert, Wallen announced a pop-up concert at the Bridgestone; it set an attendance record for the arena. In January, Wallen had headlined Governor Lee’s inaugural banquet.
When Holly G., a flight attendant, was grounded by the pandemic, she sank into a depression. For nine months, she holed up at her mother’s house in Virginia, soaking in bad news. In December, 2020, she found herself watching a YouTube video of a shaggy-haired, sweet-faced Morgan Wallen, seated on a rural porch and crooning the song “Talkin’ Tennessee” to an acoustic guitar: “What you say we grab some tailgate underneath the stars / Catch a few fireflies in a moonshine jar.” Holly played the video on a loop, soothed by its gentleness. “It was what got me out of that funk, listening to music,” she told me. “And then, in February, he was caught saying the N-word.”
Before 2020, Holly had never thought deeply about what it meant to be a Black fan of country music: it was just a quirky taste that she’d picked up as a kid, watching videos on CMT. Now the national racial reckoning had her questioning everything. Wallen’s behavior felt like a personal betrayal; she’d started reading widely, learning more about the history of country music. The genre had started, in the early twentieth century, as a multiethnic product of the rural South, merging the sounds of the Irish fiddle, the Mexican guitar, and the African banjo. Then, in the early twenties, Nashville radio producers split that music into twin brands: race records, marketed to Black listeners (which became rhythm and blues and, later, rock and roll), and “hillbilly music,” which became country-and-Western. By the time Holly started listening, the genre had long been coded as the voice of the rural white Southerner, with a few Black stars, like Pride or Darius Rucker or Kane Brown, as exceptions to the rule.
In the spring of 2021, Holly created a Web site for Black country fans, Black Opry, hoping to find like-minded listeners. Unexpectedly, she discovered a different group: Black country artists, a world she knew less about. Among them was Jett Holden, whose song “Taxidermy” was a scathing response to hollow online activism, sung in the voice of a murdered Black man: “I’ll believe that my life matters to you / When I’m more than taxidermy for your Facebook wall.” Holly became an activist herself—and then, to her surprise, a promoter, compiling a list of hundreds of performers and booking them across the country, as a collective, under the Black Opry brand. On Twitter, she embraced her role as a mischief-maker—and when she moved to Nashville, in 2022, she changed her Twitter bio to “Nash Villain.” By then, she was embedded in the politics of Music City, meeting with executives at labels and at the Country Music Hall of Fame. Long-simmering debates about racial diversity had intensified in the Trump era. At the 2016 C.M.A. Awards, a week before the election, Beyoncé and the Chicks performed their red-hot country collaboration, “Daddy Lessons”; Alan Jackson, the traditionalist curmudgeon who popularized the nineties anti-pop anthem “Murder on Music Row,” walked out.
In January, I visited Holly’s home, in East Nashville, where members of Black Opry were gathering to pregame before heading to Dee’s, a local music venue. We sat on an overstuffed couch, and Holly showed me some videos on her TV. One was a song called “Ghetto Country Streets,” by Roberta Lea, a warm, twangy portrait of a Southern childhood. (“I can hear my momma say, get your butt outside and play / And don’t come back until those lights are on.”) We all laughed and swayed to “Whatever You’re Up For,” an infectious dance-party number by the Kentucky Gentlemen, stylish gay twins who shimmied around a stable wearing leather pants and leopard-print shirts. The twins had the commercial bop of country radio, Holly said, but they were in a definitional bind. White stars often fold trap beats or rap into their songs, but, as the scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom has noted, the music still counts as country—it’s “hick-hop.” When Black men sing that way, their music is often characterized as R. & B. or pop. And gay stars—particularly Black gay stars—are a rarity, even in the wake of a trickster like Lil Nas X, who hacked the country charts in 2019, with “Old Town Road.”
After we finished some videos, a singer named Leon Timbo picked up his guitar. A big, bearded man with a warm smile, he harmonized with the Houston-raised singer Denitia on a slow version of a classic R. & B. song by Luther Vandross, “Never Too Much.” The cover, which he performed at Black Opry events, had been Holly’s suggestion: an object lesson in musical alchemy. Timbo said, “It’s difficult to take the song from its former glory, because in my house we know it by the beginning of it.” He imitated Vandross’s original, with its rowdy disco bounce—boom, boom, boom.
Holly said, “To me, a cover like this is bridging the exact gap that we need. Because Black people love some fucking Luther, and to take it and make it Americana—it takes it to a place they wouldn’t have thought of. And, then again, it is also an example to white people, wondering what our place is in the genre.”
If genre distinctions weren’t so rigid, Timbo said, people might see Tracy Chapman—who was inspired to play the guitar by watching “Hee Haw” as a child—and Bill Withers as country legends. They would know about Linda Martell, the first Black woman to play at the Grand Ole Opry. A purist nostalgia about country music was ultimately indistinguishable from a racist one: both were focussed on policing a narrow definition of who qualified as the real thing.
After the show at Dee’s, the group—several of whom were queer—hung out at the Lipstick Lounge, a queer bar with karaoke and drag shows. The queens did a rowdy call-and-response with the crowd: “Lesbians in the room, raise your hands!” In the vestibule to an upstairs cigar bar, I spoke with Aaron Vance, the son of a preacher with a radio ministry. Vance, a lanky man in his forties with a low drawl, was one of Black Opry’s more old-school members. A Merle Haggard-influenced singer, he’d written droll numbers such as “Five Bucks Says,” in which he imagined drinking with Abe Lincoln at a dive bar, talking about the racial divide. When Vance moved to Nashville, in 2014, he had been treated as an oddity, but in the farm community he came from, in Amory, Mississippi, it wasn’t unusual to be a Black man who loved country. His grandfather, a truck driver, had introduced him to Haggard. Vance considered his music his ministry, he said, and the Black Opry collective had freed him to pursue his mission on his own terms. “You can’t tell a wolf he’s too much of a wolf,” he said with a laugh—in other words, you couldn’t tell Vance that he was too country. When I asked him what his karaoke song was, he smiled: it was “If Heaven Ain’t a Lot Like Dixie,” by Hank Williams, Jr.
On a bright spring morning, Jay Knowles picked me up in his red truck and drove us to Fenwick’s 300, a diner where Music Row executives take meetings over pancakes. A Gen X dad with messy hair, Knowles had grown up in Nashville, with country in his blood. His father, John Knowles, played guitar with the legendary Chet Atkins, who helped pioneer the Nashville Sound—the smooth, radio-friendly rival of Willie Nelson’s gritty “outlaw” movement. In the early nineties, when Jay went to Wesleyan University, he felt inspired by the rise of “alt-country” stars, such as Steve Earle and Mary Chapin Carpenter, who had clever lyrics and distinctive voices full of feeling. It felt like a golden age for both mainstream and indie musicians, as each side sparred over who was a rebel and who was a sellout—a local tradition as old as the steel guitar.
Knowles returned home and went to work on Music Row, becoming a skilled craftsman who joked, in his Twitter bio, that he was “the best songwriter in Nashville in his price range.” He had scored some hits, including a 2012 Alan Jackson heartbreaker, “So You Don’t Have to Love Me Anymore,” which was nominated for a Grammy. But, looking back, he was troubled by how the industry had changed since marketers rebranded alt-country as Americana, in 1999, and bro country took hold, a decade later. The genre’s deepening division had been damaging to both sides, in his view: Americana wasn’t pushed by the market to speak more broadly, and Music Row wasn’t pressured to get smarter. It was a split that replicated national politics in ugly ways.
Knowles’s job was, in large part, still a sweet one: he met each day with friends, scribbling in a notebook as younger collaborators tapped lyrics into the Notes app. His publisher paid him monthly for demos, and arranged pitches to stars. But no writers got rich off Spotify royalties. Knowles had watched, with frustration, as the tonal range of country lyrics had shrunk, getting more juvenile each year: for a while, every hit was a party anthem, with no darkness or story songs allowed. Recently, a small aperture had opened for songs about heartbreak, his favorite subject. But after years in the industry he was wary of false hope: when his friend Chris Stapleton, a gravel-throated roots rocker, rose to fame, in 2015, Knowles thought that the genre was entering a less contrived phase. But on the radio sameness got rewarded.
One of the worst shifts had followed the 2003 Dixie Chicks scandal. At the time, the group was a top act, a beloved trio from Texas who merged fiddle-heavy bluegrass verve with modern storytelling. Then, at a concert in London, just as the Iraq War was gearing up, the lead singer, Natalie Maines, told the crowd that she was ashamed to come from the same state as President George W. Bush. The backlash was instant: radio dropped the band, fans burned their albums, Toby Keith performed in front of a doctored image showing Maines alongside Saddam Hussein, and death threats poured in. Unnerved by the McCarthyist atmosphere, Knowles and other industry professionals gathered at an indie movie house for a sub-rosa meeting of a group called the Music Row Democrats. Knowles told me, “It was kind of like an A.A. meeting—‘Oh, y’all are drunks, too? ’ ”
But a meeting wasn’t a movement. For the next two decades, the entire notion of a female country star faded away. There would always be an exception or two—a Carrie Underwood or a Miranda Lambert, or, lately, the spitfire Lainey Wilson, whose recent album “Bell Bottom Country” became a hit—just as there would always be one or two Black stars, usually male. But Knowles, now fifty-three, knew lots of talented women his age who had found the gates of Nashville locked. “Some of them sell real estate, some of them write songs,” he said. “Some sing backup. None became stars.”
Knowles felt encouraged by Nashville’s new wave, which had adopted a different strategy. Instead of competing, these artists collaborated. They pushed one another up the ladder rather than sparring to be “the one.” “This younger generation, they all help each other out,” he said. “It feels unfamiliar to me.”
Whenever I talked to people in Nashville, I kept getting hung up on the same questions. How could female singers be “noncommercial” when Musgraves packed stadiums? Was it easier to be openly gay now that big names like Brandi Carlile were out? What made a song with fiddles “Americana,” not “country”? And why did so many of the best tracks—lively character portraits like Josh Ritter’s “Getting Ready to Get Down,” trippy experiments like Margo Price’s “Been to the Mountain,” razor-sharp commentaries like Brandy Clark’s “Pray to Jesus”—rarely make it onto country radio? I’d first fallen for the genre in the nineties, in Atlanta, where I drove all the time, singing along to radio hits by Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire, Randy Travis and Trisha Yearwood—the music that my Gen X Southern friends found corny, associating it with the worst people at their high schools. Decades later, quality and popularity seemed out of synch; Music Row and Americana felt somehow indistinguishable, cozily adjacent, and also at war.
People I spoke to in Nashville tended to define Americana as “roots” country, as “progressive-liberal” country, or, more recently, as “diverse” country. For some observers, the distinction was about fashion: vintage suits versus plaid shirts. For others, it was about celebrating the singular singer-songwriter. The label had always been a grab bag, incorporating everything from honky-tonk to bluegrass, gospel to blues, Southern rock, Western swing, and folk. But the name itself hinted at a provocative notion: that this was the real American music, three chords and the historical truth.
The blunter distinction was that, like independent film, Americana paid less. (The singer-songwriter Todd Snider has joked that Americana is “what they used to call ‘unsuccessful country music.’ ”) Not everyone embraced the label, even some of its biggest stars: five years ago, when Tyler Childers was named Emerging Artist of the Year at the Americana Awards, he came onstage wearing a scraggly red beard, and growled, “As a man who identifies as a country-music singer, I feel Americana ain’t no part of nothin’ ”—a reference to the bluegrass legend Bill Monroe’s gruff dismissal of modern artists he disdained.
Maybe, as Childers later argued, Americana functioned as a ghetto for “good country music,” letting “bad” country off the hook. Or maybe it was a relief valve, a platform for musicians who otherwise had no infrastructure, given the biases of Music Row. Marcus K. Dowling, a Black music journalist who writes for the Tennessean, told me that, not long after the death of George Floyd, he’d written a roundup of Black female country artists, highlighting talents like Brittney Spencer, a former backup singer for Carrie Underwood, in the hope that at least one of them would break into mainstream radio. “Almost all of them ended up in Americana,” he said, with a sigh.
Getting signed to Music Row demanded a different calculation: you became a brand, with millions of dollars invested in your career. The top country stars lived in wealthy Franklin, alongside the Daily Wire stars, or on isolated ranches whose luxe décor was shown off by their wives on Instagram. This was part of what made the bro-country phenomenon so galling to its critics: white male millionaires cosplayed as blue-collar rebels while the real rebels starved. The comedian Bo Burnham nailed the problem in a scathing parody, “Country Song,” which mocked both bro country’s formulaic lyrics (“a rural noun, simple adjective”) and its phony authenticity: “I walk and talk like a field hand / But the boots I’m wearing cost three grand / I write songs about riding tractors / From the comfort of a private jet.”
When Leslie Fram first moved to Nashville, a decade ago, to run Country Music Television—the genre’s equivalent of MTV—she studied Music Row like a new language. “I understand why people who aren’t in it don’t get it,” she told me, over a fancy omelette in the Gulch. “I didn’t get it!” Fram, who has black hair and a frank, friendly manner, was born in Alabama but spent years working in rock radio in Atlanta and New York; she arrived in Tennessee familiar with Johnny Cash and a number of Americana types, like Lyle Lovett, but few others. It took her a while to grasp some structural problems, like the way certain songs never even got tested for airplay if the men in charge disapproved. Unlike a rock star, a country star required a radio hit to break into the touring circuit—so it didn’t matter much if CMT repeatedly played videos by Brandy Clark or the African American trio Chapel Hart. Most maddeningly, if women in country wanted to get airplay, they needed to be sweet and bat their eyes at the male gatekeepers at local radio affiliates. According to “Her Country,” a book by Marissa R. Moss, Musgraves—who had made a spectacular major-label début in 2013, with her album “Same Trailer Different Park”—saw her country career derailed when she objected to a creepy d.j. named Broadway ogling her thighs during an interview. Then the nation’s biggest country d.j., Bobby Bones, called her “rude” and a “shit head.” After that, her path forked elsewhere.
In 2015, a radio consultant named Keith Hill gave an interview to a trade publication, Country Aircheck Weekly, in which he made the implicit explicit: “If you want to make ratings in Country radio, take females out.” For a station to succeed, no more than fifteen per cent of its set list could feature women, he warned—and never two songs in a row. He described women as “the tomatoes of the salad,” to be used sparingly. Fury erupted on social media; advocacy organizations, like Change the Conversation, were formed. In 2019, the Highwomen released “Crowded Table,” a song that imagined a warmer, more open Nashville: “a house with a crowded table / and a place by the fire for everyone.”
Fram, who had recently launched Next Women of Country, a program aimed at promoting young female artists, was initially excited by what became known as Tomatogate. The controversy at least made the stakes clear. For the next decade, she met with other top brass, working to solve the gender puzzle. Did the proportions shift when Taylor Swift left the format? Was it residual resentment over the Chicks? Nothing that Fram or the others did made a difference—and radio play for women kept dropping. Finally, a top radio executive told Fram, “Leslie, A—the program directors are tired of hearing about this. Right? B—they don’t care.”
Hill, who started working in country radio in 1974, has moved to Idaho, where he is thinking of retiring. During a recent phone call, he presented himself, as he had in the past, as the jocular id of country radio—the last honest man in a world of “woke jive.” The demographic for country stations was narrow, he told me: white, rural, and older, skewing female. He conducted focus groups in which he pinpointed people from specific Zip Codes who listened to at least two hours of a given radio station a day. Based on their feedback, his advice to programmers was firm: no more than fifteen per cent women, never two in a row. Country music was a meritocracy, Hill insisted. He was just presenting data.
Hill did love one hip-hop-inflected new artist, he told me: Jelly Roll, a heavily tattooed white singer from Nashville who had a moving life story about getting out of prison, kicking hard drugs, and finding God. He was country’s “most authentic” new artist, in Hill’s estimation, with an outlaw story to rival Merle Haggard’s. Could women be outlaws? “You know, in central casting? I have my doubts,” Hill said. He blamed one woman after another for blowing her chance at success. The Chicks had “opened their big mouths.” Musgraves had “self-inflicted wounds.” Morris had “injured herself significantly”—she’d shift to pop, he predicted. He saw a cautionary tale in the divergent careers of two Black artists, Kane Brown and Mickey Guyton: Brown, a shrewd bro-country star, knew how to play the game, but Guyton had “hurt herself by being a complainer.”
The longer we talked, the more elusive Hill’s notion of merit became. When he praised someone’s authenticity, he didn’t mean it literally—everybody faked that, he said, with a laugh. It wasn’t about quality, either. Even if an artist was generic, and sounded like “seven Luke Bryans slurried in a blender,” his songs could become hits—if he knew how to act. “Repeat after me: ‘I wrap myself in the flag,’ ” Hill said. “Whether you are religious or not, when there’s September 11th or when train cars overturn, you better be part of the damn prayer.” He could have saved the Chicks’ career, he bragged: they should have talked about bringing the troops home safely. Such constraints applied only to liberals, he acknowledged. If you had “South in your mouth,” the way Aldean did, your highway had more lanes.
Eventually, Hill stopped speaking in code: “You got thugging in the hood for Black people, and you got redneck records for white people.” That was just natural, a matter of water flowing downward—why fight gravity? “Your diversity is the radio dial, from 88 to 108. There’s your fucking diversity.”
Jada Watson, an assistant professor of music at the University of Ottawa, began studying country radio after Tomatogate. What Hill called data Watson saw as musical redlining. The original sin of country music—the split between “race records” and “hillbilly”—had led to split radio formats, which then led to split charts. Never playing women back to back was an official recommendation dating to the eighties, formalized in a training document called the “Programming Operations Manual.” The situation worsened after 1996, when the Telecommunications Act permitted companies to buy up an unlimited number of radio stations; the dial is now ruled by the behemoth iHeartRadio, which has codified old biases into algorithms.
Since 2000, the proportion of women on country radio has sunk from thirty-three to eleven per cent. Black women currently represent just 0.03 per cent. (Ironically, Tracy Chapman recently became the first Black female songwriter to have a No. 1 country hit, when Luke Combs released a cover of her classic “Fast Car.”) Country is popular worldwide, performed by musicians from Africa to Australia, Watson told me. It’s the voice of rural people everywhere—but you’d never know it from the radio.
All parties agreed on only one point: you couldn’t ignore country radio even if you wanted to—it drove every decision on Music Row. As Gary Overton, a former C.E.O. of Sony Nashville, had put it in 2015, “If you’re not on country radio, you don’t exist.” Not enough had changed since then, even with the rise of online platforms, like TikTok, that helped indie artists go viral. Streaming wasn’t the solution: like terrestrial radio, it could be gamed. When I made a Spotify playlist called “Country Music,” the service suggested mostly tracks by white male stars.
One day, I walked down to Music Row, a beautiful, wide street of large houses with welcoming porches. On every block, there was evidence of prosperity: a wealth-management company, a massage studio. I passed Big Loud, which had a sign outside touting Wallen’s hit “You Proof”—one of the street’s many billboards of buff dudes with No. 1 singles. Nearby, I wandered into a dive bar called Bobby’s Idle Hour Tavern, which seemed appealingly ramshackle, as if it had been there forever. In fact, it had moved through the neighborhood; it was torn down to make way for new construction and then rebuilt to maintain its authentic look, with dog-eared set lists pinned to ratty walls. It felt like a decent metaphor for Nashville itself.
Inside, I ran into Jay Knowles, the Music Row songwriter. (It was a small town in a big city.) We talked about Nashville’s recent reputation as “Bachelorette City,” for which he offered a theory: although more than a quarter of Nashville was Black, the town was widely seen as “a white-coded city.” “I’m not saying this is a good thing,” he emphasized, but tourists viewed Nashville as a safe space, a city where groups of young white women could freely get drunk in public—unlike, say, Memphis, New Orleans, or Atlanta.
At the bar, I also met two low-level Music Row employees, who worked in radio and helped companies handle V.I.P.s. They happily dished, off the record, about clashes on the Row, but added that there was no point bringing their own politics into their jobs. It was like working for Walmart—you had to stay neutral. The problem with country radio wasn’t complicated, one of them said: the old generation still ran everything and would never change its mind. When I explained that I was headed to Broadway to meet bachelorettes, they rolled their eyes. Avoid Aldean’s, they said.
They weren’t alone: every local I met had urged me to go only to old standbys like Robert’s Western World, where I’d spent a wonderful night with Tyler Mahan Coe—the rabble-rousing son of the outlaw-country artist David Allan Coe—who hosts a podcast about country history called “Cocaine & Rhinestones.” “I hate nostalgia,” Tyler told me, spooling out a theory that true country music derived from the troubadours, whose songs had satirical subtexts and were meant to be understood in multiple ways. Bro country lacked such nuance—and so did the new Broadway.
Even so, Broadway charmed me, for a practical reason: there were no velvet ropes. Each night club had at least three stories. On the ground floor, there was a bar and a stage where a skilled live musician covered hits. On the second floor, there was another bar, another musician (and, in one case, a group of women toasting me with grape vodka seltzers). Above that, things got wilder, with a rowdy dance floor and, often, a rooftop bar. There was a campy streak to the scene which sometimes echoed the Lipstick Lounge: when the d.j. played Shania Twain’s classic “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!,” he shouted, “Do any of the ladies feel like a woman?” Loud cheers. “Do any of the men feel like a woman?” Deeper cheers. Call me basic, but I had a good time: in Manhattan, a slovenly middle-aged woman in jeans can’t walk into a night club, order a Diet Coke, and go dancing for free.
Everywhere, there were brides in cowgirl hats or heart-shaped glasses, and in one case a majestic rhinestone bodysuit worthy of Dolly. On a bustling rooftop, I chatted with a group holding fans printed with the face of the groom—who, they insisted, looked like Prince Harry. At a club named for the band Florida Georgia Line, a screaming woman threw silver glitter into my hair. Every local whom I’d spoken to loathed these interlopers, who clogged the streets with their party buses. But when you’re hanging out with happy women celebrating their friends, it’s hard to see the problem.
The bar at the center of Jason Aldean’s was built around a big green tractor. The bathroom doors said “southern gentlemen” and “country girls.” The night I went, the crowd was sedate—no bachelorettes, just middle-aged couples. The singer onstage was handsome and fun, excited to get a request for the Chicks’ “Travelin’ Soldier.” When someone asked for “Wagon Wheel,” a 2004 classic co-written by Bob Dylan and covered a decade later by Darius Rucker, the singer spoke nostalgically about passersby requesting the song when he busked on Broadway years ago, before the streets were jammed with tourists. “It just goes to show you that with a lot of dedication and hard work and about eleven years’ time, you can go about a hundred feet from where you started!” he said. “So here’s a little ‘Wagon Wheel’ for you!” Feeling affectionate, I looked up the singer online. His Twitter page was full of liked posts defending anti-vaxxers and January 6th rioters.
Taylor Swift got discovered at the Bluebird Café. So did Garth Brooks. A ninety-seat venue with a postage stamp of a stage, it’s tucked between a barbershop and a dry cleaner, but it’s a power center in Nashville—a place ruled by singer-songwriters. In January, Adeem the Artist wore a flowered button-down over a T-shirt that said “This Is a Great Day to Kill God.” They were playing their first Bluebird showcase, performing songs from their breakout sophomore album, “White Trash Revelry.” Some were stompers, like the hilarious “Going to Hell,” in which Adeem fact-checks the lyrics to Charlie Daniels’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” with the Devil himself: “He seemed puzzled, so I told him the story, and he said, ‘None of that shit’s real / It’s true I met Robert Johnson, he showed me how the blues could work / But white men would rather give the Devil praise than acknowledge a black man’s worth.’ ” Other songs were reveries about growing up amid “methamphetamines and spiritual madness.” They were folky tunes played on acoustic guitar, with witty, pointed lyrics. The people in the crowd seemed to be into it, even when Adeem took jabs at them.
Adeem grew up in a poor evangelical household in Locust, North Carolina, singing along to Toby Keith—the self-declared “Angry American”—on the car radio, in the wake of 9/11. They dreamed about becoming a country star, but as their politics veered to the left they felt increasingly at odds with the genre. Then, in 2017, they won a ticket to the Americana Awards, and were struck by the sight of the singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra, of the band Hurray for the Riff Raff, sporting a hand-painted “Jail Arpaio” shirt, and by the Nashville bluegrass performer Jim Lauderdale taking shots at Trump. “I was just, like, ‘Man, maybe this is it. Maybe this is where I belong,’ ” Adeem told me. Americana had another source of appeal for Adeem, a D.I.Y. artist with a punk mentality: you could break in on a shoestring budget. Adeem, who was barely scraping by painting houses in the Tennessee sun, had spent years building a following by uploading songs to Bandcamp. They budgeted what it would take to make a splash with an album: five thousand dollars for production, ten thousand for P.R. They held a “redneck fund-raiser” online, asking each donor for a dollar, then recorded “White Trash Revelry” independently. (The album was distributed by Thirty Tigers, a Nashville-based company that let them retain the rights.) Adeem’s strategy worked astoundingly well: in December, Rolling Stonepraised “White Trash Revelry” as “the most empathetic country album of the year,” ranking it No. 7 on its year-end list of the twenty-five best albums in the genre. This year, Adeem was nominated for Emerging Act of the Year at the Americana Awards, and had their début at the Grand Ole Opry.
After the Bluebird gig, I joined Adeem at an Airbnb nearby, where they were experiencing some “visual distortions” from microdosing shrooms. Over pizza, they spoke about their complicated relationship with their extended family, back in North Carolina, some of whom believed in QAnon conspiracy theories. Adeem’s relatives were thrown by, but not unsupportive of, their choices: when their uncle insisted that Adeem’s gender identity was a rock-and-roll performance à la Ziggy Stardust, Adeem’s father defended his child’s authenticity, in his own way. “He said, ‘No, no, I think he really believes it!’ ” Adeem told me, with a laugh.
There had always been queer people in country music. In 1973, a band called Lavender Country put out an album with lyrics like “My belly turns to jelly / like some nelly ingenue.” But there were many more ugly stories of singers forced into the closet—and even now, after many top talents, including songwriters such as Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, had come out, old taboos lingered. You could be a songwriter, not a singer; you could sing love songs, but not say whom you loved; you could come out, but lose your spot on the radio. When T. J. Osborne, of the popular duo Brothers Osborne, confirmed that he was gay, in 2021, his management company arranged a careful campaign: one profile, written by a sympathetic journalist, and one relevant single, the rueful but vague “Younger Me,” which felt designed to offend no one.
Adeem, who is inspired as much by Andy Kaufman’s absurdism as by John Prine’s smarts, was part of a different breed. Queer Americana had plenty of outspoken artists, from River Shook, whose signature song is “Fuck Up,” to the bluegrass artist Justin Hiltner, who wrote about AIDS in his beautiful single “1992.” These artists, all left-wing, came from backgrounds like Adeem’s—small towns, evangelical families, abuse and addiction. It was Adeem’s biggest gripe: Music Row was marketing a patronizing parody of their “white trash” upbringing to the poor. Adeem’s own politics weren’t a simple matter. When they objected to Tennessee laws against trans youth, it wasn’t as a liberal but as a parent and a redneck suspicious of government control: “It’s, like, stay away from my kids! Stay out of my yard, you know?”
At the Airbnb, Adeem’s transmasculine accompanist, Ellen Angelico, known as Uncle Ellen, pulled out a deck of cards: a beta version of Bro Country, a Cards Against Humanity-style game based on actual country-radio lyrics. The group got loose and giggly, shouting out clichés—“tin roof,” “red truck”—to form silly combinations. In one way, the game mocked country radio; in another, it paid tribute to it—you couldn’t play unless you had studied it. Like hip-hop, country had always been an aggressively meta-referential art form; even bro country had become increasingly self-aware.
On bad days, Adeem had told me, the two sides of Nashville seemed locked in a “W.W.E. wrestling match,” playing cartoon versions of themselves. Adeem had engaged in a few bouts themself, lobbing attention-getting songs online, such as “I Wish You Would’ve Been a Cowboy,” which slammed Toby Keith for wearing “my life like a costume on the TV.” Still, Adeem sometimes fantasized about what it would be like to meet Keith. They wanted not a fight but a real conversation—a chance to tell Keith how much his music had meant to them, and to ask if he had regrets.
In mid-May, at the Academy of Country Music Awards, Music Row was out in force. Bobby Bones, the d.j. who’d insulted Musgraves, was backstage, interviewing stars. Wallen won Male Artist of the Year. Aldean sang “Tough Crowd,” dedicated to the “hell raisin’ . . . dirt turnin’, diesel burnin’, hard workin’ nine-to-fivers” who “make the red white and blue proud.” (A few weeks later, he released the repellent “Try That in a Small Town,” an ode to vigilantism.) The show’s highlight was a fun come-on called “Grease,” by Lainey Wilson, who won four awards, including Female Artist and Album of the Year. Wilson, a farmer’s daughter from Louisiana, was Music Row’s latest female supernova, a devotee of Dolly Parton (one of her early hits was “WWDD”) who’d moved to Nashville after high school. A decade of hustle had paid off: by 2023, she had a role on “Yellowstone” and a partnership with Wrangler jeans. Maren Morris wasn’t around: that week, she was in New York, accepting a prize at the glaad Awards. On Instagram, she’d posted a video of herself in a recording studio with the indie-pop guru Jack Antonoff. At a concert a few weeks later, she sang a duet with Taylor Swift.
The A.C.M. Awards’ final number was the live première of Parton’s new single, “World on Fire,” from an upcoming rock album. When the lights came up, Parton was wearing an enormous, rippling parachute skirt printed with a black-and-white map of the globe—and then, when it tore away, she was in a black leather suit, chanting angrily as backup dancers strutted in Janet Jackson-esque formation. For a moment, it felt like a shocking departure—a political statement from a woman who never got political. Then that impression evaporated. Politicians were liars, Parton sang; people should be kinder, less ugly. What ever happened to “In God We Trust”? Four days later, on the “Today” show, Jacob Soboroff asked Parton which politicians she meant, and she replied, breezily, “All of them, any of them,” adding that if these unnamed figures tried “hard enough” and worked “from the heart,” matters would surely improve.
The performance reminded me of Keith Hill’s advice to the Chicks: they should have sprinkled some sugar. Parton had been the biggest letdown for Allison Russell and the organizers of the “Love Rising” benefit, who told me that they’d “begged and begged” her to sing at the Bridgestone, or plug the event, or Zoom in. She’d performed with drag queens many times; she’d written an Oscar-nominated song, “Travelin’ Thru,” for the 2005 film “Transamerica.” As Parton herself had joked, she was a kind of drag queen—a “herself impersonator,” as Russell had put it. If the most powerful country star on earth wouldn’t speak out, it was hard to imagine others taking a risk.
Another song performed that night had a different feel: “Bonfire at Tina’s,” an ensemble number from Ashley McBryde’s pandemic project, a bold concept album called “Lindeville,” which featured numerous guest artists. The record had received critical praise but little radio play. During “Bonfire at Tina’s,” a chorus of women sang, “Small town women ain’t built to get along / But you burn one, boy, you burn us all.” In its salty solidarity, the song conjured the collectives emerging across Nashville, from “Love Rising” to Black Opry, groups that embodied the Highwomen’s notion of the “crowded table.” You could also see this ideal reflected in “My Kind of Country,” a reality competition show on Apple TV+, produced by Musgraves and Reese Witherspoon, that focussed on global country acts and included the gay South African musician Orville Peck as a judge, and in “Shucked,” a new Broadway show with music by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, which offered up a sweet vision of a multiracial small town learning to open its doors. Mainstream country radio hadn’t changed, but all around it people were busily imagining what would happen if it did.
McBryde, who grew up in a small town in Arkansas, had spent years working honky-tonks and country fairs, a journey she sang about in the anthemic number “Girl Goin’ Nowhere.” She was a distinctive figure in mainstream country, a brunette in a sea of blondes, with arms covered in tattoos. When we met backstage one night at the Grand Ole Opry, she was playing in a memorial concert for the character actor and pint-size Southern sissy Leslie Jordan, who had created a virtual crowded table during the pandemic, through ebullient Instagram videos, then recorded a gospel album with country stars such as Parton.
Unlike Jordan’s joyful quarantine, McBryde’s pandemic had been “destructive,” she told me: unable to work, she drank too much, feeling like a “sheepdog that couldn’t chase sheep.” “Lindeville” had been the solution. During a weeklong retreat at an Airbnb in Tennessee, she had written for up to eighteen hours a day with old friends, among them Brandy Clark and the Florida-born performer Pillbox Patti. The result was a set of songs about distinct characters—songs that were blunter and less sentimental than most music on country radio. The album, which was named for Dennis Linde, the songwriter behind the Chicks’ feminist revenge classic “Goodbye Earl,” had a spiritual edge, McBryde said. She had grown up in a “strange, strict, rigid” place where she was taught that “everything makes Jesus mad,” and it felt good to envision a different kind of small town. “The fact that God loves stray dogs, people like me, is so evident,” she said. “There are things that I’ve survived, especially where alcohol was involved, that I shouldn’t have.”
McBryde, who called herself as “country as a homemade sock,” had no plans to shift to pop, as peers had done. But she had a pragmatic view of the industry to which she’d devoted her life. Making music in Nashville, she joked, could feel like adopting a street cat, only to have it bite you when it turned out to be a possum. “He’s a shitty cat, country radio—but he’s a good possum,” she said. To build a big career, you had to keep a sense of humor: “I won’t name her, but there’s another female artist who has a very vertical backbone, like I do. And we joke with each other and go, ‘What are they gonna do— not play our songs?’ ”
I’d attended a staging of “Lindeville” at the Ryman Auditorium a few weeks earlier, shortly after Tennessee’s first anti-drag ordinance passed in the State Senate. The event was framed as an old-fashioned radio show, with an announcer and whimsical ad jingles. T. J. Osborne and Lainey Wilson were among the guest stars, creating a feeling of Music Row camaraderie. During McBryde’s hilarious “Brenda Put Your Bra On,” in which women in a trailer park gossip about neighbors—“Well, did you hear that? There went the good dishes / I hope they don’t knock out the cable”—fans threw bras onstage.
At one point, McBryde serenaded a small child, who was seated at her feet. The show’s climax was “Gospel Night at the Strip Club.” Sung on an acoustic guitar by the Louisiana musician Benjy Davis, the tune was about having a spiritual experience in an unexpected place. As Davis sang the key line, “Jesus loves the drunkards and the whores and the queers,” spotlights illuminated part of the audience. The congregation of the Church of Country Music looked around for what had been revealed, then gasped: five drag queens, scattered among the Ryman crowd, stood up, their gowns glittering like sunlight. ♦
A narrative is always told by someone. The narrator is not necessarily the same as the author of the book which contains the narrative: the author is a real person; the narrator is simply the ‘voice’ to whom the words of the narrative are attributed; a single novel may contain several narrators…We might think of the narrator as a point of view embodied in a character, who can, if wished, represent the author; although sometimes the voice of a narrative or its point of view are not clearly expressed as a character. Montgomery, Durant, Fabb, Furniss, Mills: Ways of Reading – Narrative. Questions to consider: who is the narrator or voice of the novel Consider her point of view Is she clearly expressed as a character Extra challenge: who is the narrator of The Great Gatsby What is his point of view Is he clearly expressed as a character
When one writes either fiction or non the idea is that there is purpose, point, thesis or theme behind the work. It can be to inform, enrage, engage or just entertain. All Writers try to retain a sense of Voice, the Author’s tone that is a consistent presence in all their works. Some writers remain in their lane with Horror, Romance, Historical or whatever genre of writing they have taken on and in turn established a presence within that genre. That said many Authors do push that boundary and take on new types or forms of writing and often due using a nom de plume or pseudonym as to enable this experiment without affecting their primary sources and criticism that too can be biased. And we all bring that to our own work be as Reader or Writer.
With that many other Writers arrive to the yard and try to take on the qualities and characteristics of those whose success and recognition is worth emulating. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery right? But that voice and that narrative approach is not a singular one owned and trademarked by the Author. The work is Copyrighted to insure that one cannot present a duplicate work under another name or effectively copy sections of the work and incorporate that into their work and claim it is their original thought. But to be honest finding that requires serious reading of the numerous works published over time and in turn means that one is familiar with every single book published regardless of its genre. I assume Chat AI will be the one taking on the vetting and validating origin of work and in turn take away that from Editors and Fact Checkers desks. We shall see.
But when it comes to Journalism we assume that this is an objective set of facts that has no intent other to inform. Be that positive or negative is is as they used to say on varying Cop shows, “Just the Facts, Ma’am” The idea that you keep opinion, judgement, observations and assessments out of it unless they are quoted, cited by secondary sources or interviews. And that is where the gap enables many in the Media to step aside and not be accountable to keep it to the facts and avoid bias. And they fail to do this repeatedly. In fact now more than ever opinion is now considered more significant and essential to bring readers and viewers to the yard. I see more quotes and citations from Social Media, often as sources or as comments to the piece without any intent of actually vetting, validating or knowing if this comment is true. It is what is giving rise to fake news, conspiracy theories and other misinformation that often becomes the headline itself.
Nothing defines this more than the most recent shooting in Nashville. The GOP have found a new Strawman argument, one that fits nicely with regards to the laws and bills currently either passed or in process to do harm to the LGBQT community in Tennessee and other States that are run by the GOP. This is the culture wars, the priority to ban books, curriculum, health care, voting rights, women’s rights to choose while doing little to nothing about serious issues such as Gun Control, Infrastructure improvements, Climate Change and Equality of Pay and improving Poverty resources that can enable families to have the resources they need to maintain their families without Government assistance in the forms of Medicaid or SNAP or Housing Vouchers, all done with massive restrictions and covenants that further discriminate and decimate families, especially those of color. From the moment the shooter arrived on the scene until the shooter was shot and killed by Police (if that was in fact the end result) the Police have dictated that information flow and left the media to do the searching for the how and the why this occurred. Start with Guns and the laws and access to guns that allow anyone to purchase and carry weapons of mass destruction without permits, licensing, mandatory insurance and keep in vehicles unsecured, enabling Nashville to be on the front page of the New York Times discussing how most guns are secured by the young via theft from vehicles. And with that the Shooter be it there or in the last major 22 shootings purchased them legally without incident. No, we need to instead create a narrative that is the new Boogieman – the Trans person.
Without substantiation or any actual confirmation the Police announced after the shooting that Audrey Hale identified as Male as on Facebook they used the “He/Him” pronouns. Later they added that Audrey was being treated for an “emotional disorder”; a diagnosis so vague it applies to a large chunk of America at any time and with that it was Game On. The innuendo and suggestion was that a Trans Man is crazy, bought a bunch of guns and planned a violent assault on a Christian School that was perhaps (again inferred not substantiated) a former Student who hates God and Religion. When the Police arrive they are seen in video that they immediately released to confirm how on top of it they were are saying “they” in the belief there is more than one, not in a way to be socially politically correct. We do not see the final shot of Audrey and can assume again they killed the Shooter or not as this was a person who was on a Suicide Mission as had texted a former Middle School Classmate whom Audrey had reconnected with after the deaths of two former Middle School Classmates the past year. With that the media when in search of the “real” motive and in turn the real true story of the person known as Audrey Hale.
There were the former Teachers and Classmates. There was a former Pastor from Covenant who was hauled out to speculate or comment that Hale was being “counseled” by the current Pastor for said “emotional disorder” and hence on a vengeance tour, only to retract that as he admitted it was from Social Media he got that idea. And yet he was put on the air without picking up a phone to check that fact. Okay then.
Former classmates whom Audrey had not seen or spoken to since moving on to Nashville School of the Arts which would have been at age 14-15 and Audrey is now 28. So in other words over 10 years ago. It appears they were unaware of the pronoun change despite only seeing Audrey at the two funerals and one other event in the past year and then from that concluded that “she was stalkerish” in her behavior and obsessive for showing up to the events that she had not been invited. I am sure the info was posted on Social Media and with that it appears that following them was not reciprocated or they would have known about the transitioning or at least that pronoun “thing.” In fact one source is a former Teacher whom was recently picked up for a DUI an irony that she could have died the same way the other two had – via crashed vehicles. These are not sources I would put a great deal of weight or import on. In fact few of the sources that had contact with Audrey in college, the most recent of Audrey’s academics only spoke briefly about talents and skills not on the mental health or behavior as a person.
I was not aware of the Nossi School of the Art in Nashville, I see it has about a 50% graduation rate which is not a good sign but then again a conventional one in Tennessee by the home grown population who overall have a poor graduation from higher education rate, with the state repeatedly in the bottom five of overall academic achievement. It appears that Audrey Hale like many Artists were freelancing their work and with that no clients have spoken about Audrey and more importantly should not. That said NO ONE should who has not had frequent and recent encounters with Audrey regarding anything about Audrey and his/her mental health, sexual identity or gender identity. They do not have the consent nor authority to do so despite Audrey Hale”s death as frankly who would want that? Hey I am sure my Ex Husband whom I have not seen in over 15 years is sure he can provide insight on me in my present state of mind. I doubt he could have during our marriage of a decade as I lied repeatedly in that and spent most of the time doing what I have promised I would not do so again – compromise. In other words suppress and oppress my feelings for fear of having conflict. I have spent the better part of 63 years avoiding it and with that when it is presented I do what I do best, leave. This week again tested that and with that I realized that it is is a fortune of luck and sense of worth that has allowed me to do so. I am LUCKY folks I can and have. Is that an emotional disorder? Hell probably. Ask someone I went to College, High School and Middle school with over 50 years ago. I look forward to their insight.
And for some that is the major event and promise in life. The time they were on the winning team and their favorite Teacher and the best time and with that can look back in fondness. I do not and do not try to reminisce or recall any of it. I have no strong opinion in one way or another. And do I think that those that do, that can recall every little detail odd? Hell yes. Would I armchair that diagnosis to the Media? Hell no. This is not helping folks and with that the motive and explanation that led Audrey Hale on this mission of Murder Suicide died with Audrey Hale and whatever “manifesto” and writings left behind may or may not lend to that but then again just like the body’ cam videos we will get that information heavily edited into which to fit the narrative.
And with this in mind, the FBI this week finally released the motive behind the Las Vegas Shooter from several years ago, yes several, that he was mad about how he was treated by the Casino. That took several years of intense investigation folks!
All sources of information during a time of crisis can lend itself to the hysteria or in fact amplify it but it is the last time one should make conclusions or decisions. A clear head is a wise head. A still tongue is another. Shut the fuck up. Wait this out. We may find out the truth or not for years. This story right now fits an agenda and a purpose. Gun control is the least of it nor ever is. In a country that has more guns than does individuals with smart phones or with registered vehicles tells you all you need to know. Guns are not the problem they are the obsession.
Tonight begins the move to Daylight Savings Time, where we turn the clock forward. Meaning longer days and of course more challenges with regards to how that affects us physically, emotionally and financially. I find the longer days much more taxing as the costs to heat or to cool rise. But I do laugh as frankly the move to South and to the better weather regions is showing that it is the most insane and least affordable option in which to undertake. But in all honesty it is as if we are all turning our clocks backwards and the South is bringing that to fruition. They said they will rise again, and yee haw they certainly have!
Floriduh, which is my new name for the State as you have to be a raging idiot to move there continues to fight for its quest to be the most extreme participant in the contest between Governors of Republican led States to be the most Conservative aka Facist. I still lean to Tennessee as the current Anti Drag Law is so vague, so poorly written it literally outlaws many Halloween costumes. This is the contest between a bunch of White men who can be the biggest asshole with right now the loudest, Ron DeSantis, is running a close number one. But that is because he has his “woke” eye on the White House, but to ignore Governor Abbott of Texas and Lee of Tennessee is at one’s peril. Missouri is not far behind, Arkansas with the wonderful former Trump Employee, Huckabee-Sanders making sure that no one is using LatinX as the standard bearer name regarding those of Latin descent. But in very blue Connecticut they are not having it either. Next up Cisgender. That will show them Mx Lindsay Graham!
While Florida is busy burning, banning books and curriculum they are ignoring how the State coming after Ian is struggling to recover thanks to Insurance companies denying and downgrading claims. Well get your big boy white boots on there Rhonda and help them! But to the people of Florida, to Tennessee and other states moving in the same bootstrap nations, YOU ELECTED THEM. Not just the Governor but the majority of State offices that have in turn enabled if not encouraged these hate laws into passing. So you did this to yourself. It is called Self-fulfilling prophecy. Some education there for you.
My personal favorite story of the week is the spin on January 6th and the framing of that message from the King of White Supremacy, Tucker Carlson, spinning it as Tourists Gone Wild. Irony that as his emails/texts regarding Trump and the “stolen” election are anything but flattering; actually saying in one that he hates Trump’s guts. Well go figure and welcome to the club.
Then we have another milestone, the third anniversary of Covid. This is usually marked by a gift made of Leather. Oh lord let’s not let the GOP know that brings all sorts of Gay connotations to mind. Well whips and chains ,aside the Republican investigation into this has stumbled on the conclusion by the Department of Energy and the CIA that is was a lab leak. Again for many, myself included I did think it was just sloppiness that led a worker into the wet market with a special treat attached to a shoe or garment and then in such a perfect breeding environment it was a delightful take home treat to the family. China’s endless secretiveness and their initial denials about what was transpiring in said lab regarding Gain of Function research is a clue that not all was what it was claimed to be. Do I think Fauci and his own NIH role in that was another coverup? No, but it was a contributory factor as again funding this and denying you are is not helping matters. This was written in 2021 the fall of our season of discontent and I feel that little has changed when it comes to understanding Covid, its origins or even how to combat it. The vaccines have not stopped the spread and it is “believed” to prevent serious illness or death and that is again a hard to measure factor, but Big Pharma made Billions. I had the first two vaccines, stayed largely masked and had one booster. I contracted Covid in September and with that took Paxaloid and recovered in a week to the day. I was all over the map that week with varying symptoms each day a new treat but never truly ill enough to seek medical care. We do know now that most deaths were elderly and those with health risks, such as Asthma, Obesity, etc. So with that the question remains how will we handle the next pandemic. Well sure as fuck not like this one.
The current economy aside it is a confusing one. The runaway inflation that seems to have the Fed giving literally mixed signals, while job growth is continuing at a record pace the same while layoffs as well as a Bank closure in the Tech Sector seemingly contradicts this is again a head scratcher. You cannot solve a New Math problem using Old Math techniques and there are many factors here that now must be considered. The Global Economy, the shutdown of China and the shortages that enabled if not allowed prices to rise and some of it gouging. The war in the Ukraine now at over a year and its affect on Europe cannot be ignored. The ongoing political struggles in Africa and Israel are lending to further confusion. Do I think it is bad? Yes and No. What I think is that this is a massive reset and this is the “new normal.” For now. The rich are still very rich, the working poor still poor and facing massive evictions, foreclosures will also rise trust me on this, and repossession of cars another; all of this , along with rising wages but failed tax credits, the cost of health care, child care will level those out and we are back to square one. I have yet to factor in the Immigration net role of those who have made it here, versus those leaving by choice or by force with the H1B1 tech workers and their Visa’s expiring if they do not find another job when laid off. That too will be a must watch in the year ahead. And yes it is just still March, talk about Madness!
As I move into a new week I am hoping for a wearing of the green in a way that will change my outlook and enable me to have a better perspective and outlook. The weather has been coming in like a Lion the last two weeks and with the Amateur Night of Drinking happening on Friday I am not sure the week will end on a high note. Well for some.
And with that I conclude with an article about Education. As I have written about for quite some time my experience in Education and my observations moving about the Country and finally realizing how bad it is, here there and everywhere all at once, I used to beat myself up quite a bit about my work and place in this institution. I have been numerous times been proven right but again this may be the most significant work to finally prove to others how bad Teaching and Schools really are. And no the solution is not Charters or Vouchers that is kicking the can and just re-gifting, it is about a system that deprives well Educated individuals the opportunity to earn a living, have a great work-life balance, bring Children a well developed learning plan and a place to learn not just the Three Rs, but find social skills, athletic ones, learn diversity and acceptance and tolerance of the differences of others – be that of Race, Gender, Culture, Sexuality and more importantly Abilities. That last one is the key and we often overlook this when we speak of the broad concept of diversity.
I hate my job and I have said many time it is not the children. The adults are horrific and that includes Teachers, Aides, and more importantly Administrators. The fish stinks from the head and that fish is well passed the three day sell by date. I have not known one in my entire 30 years, I have heard of one or two but actually met them? NO. And I will say the same with Teachers, the good ones are few and far and nowhere between. They hide in their classrooms, you do not see them much and have few words to offer than Salutations. It is a profession where one keeps one head down. This week walking in the snow and rain the lack of Teachers was so severe that I had to cover numerous classrooms over four floors. I went to each, dropped the rosters for the periods I was covering, opened a window a crack and the doors also open to ventilate, then left my coat, gloves and warm gears on a seat next to the desk, nicely folded. As I roamed the building, leaving each class early so to make it down the stairs, back up the stairs and somehow fit a toilet break in there I returned to the last room, the doors slammed shut, the jambs missing and my coat thrown on top of a bookcase, my gloves and scarf shoved beneath, the rosters missing and all the windows closed. Gee thanks. Oddly this Teacher forgot his laptop and came back to retrieve it and asked me how my day was. My response: “It was until I came in here and found all my personal belongings thrown about and the roster missing for attendance otherwise the same.” He walked out without a word. Two Students informed me he is a well known asshole whom no one likes and it explains also why during the middle of the day I will get a sudden switch in plans and must cover for him as he often leaves midday claiming long Covid. Okay fuck off then. I then went to the office and said, “My Tummy is bothering me so I won’t be here for the rest of the week, see you Monday.” And I walked out. And I came home to read about this Teacher of the Year. And thought about Teachers who were murdered by their Students or attempted murder, not via a mass shooting but by direct assault and thought, they will never be Teachers of the Year. One murdered for tutoring an angry kid, another for bad grades. I have said repeatedly that Children learn this at home no school can compensate or even remotely repair this damage.
So with this I am looking forward to reading this book and hope it comes with a trigger warning alert on the inside cover. I suspect it will be traumatizing but for me at least somewhat exonerating.
An inside look at the brutal realities of teaching
In ‘The Teachers,’ Alexandra Robbins tells the stories of educators and their successes, stresses and burnout
Review by Melanie McCabe
March 8, 2023 The Washington Post
Anyone contemplating going into teaching might be dissuaded after reading Alexandra Robbins’s latest work, “The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession.” That is not a disparagement of her book but rather a testament to its scope, accuracy and unflinching honesty. Never before have I read any work that so clearly depicts the current realities of teaching in America’s public schools, a subject I have followed closely as a recently retired teacher with 22 years of experience.
It isn’t that Robbins fails to shine a light on the considerable joys and rewards of working with young people. She herself took on a long-term sub gig in a third-grade classroom and writes movingly about the impact these students had on her life. And the book abounds with heart-tugging stories of students struggling because of a disability, an emotional issue or a situation at home, who were able to make a breakthrough or considerable gains thanks to the teachers profiled in the book. It is impossible to read about these students without being drawn into their stories and the efforts to reach them: Eli, a bright but volatile student whose mother shows little interest in his schooling; Zach, a selective mute whose past trauma has kept him from speaking to adults; Robert, a boy on the autism spectrum who finally achieves success by passing a state exam. The hope of experiencing moments like these was what attracted me and my former colleagues to teaching.
But the realities of teaching in 2023 are considerably different from when I entered the profession in 1999. Robbins notes that pressures on teachers began to shift in 1983, with the publication of the Department of Education’s report “A Nation at Risk.” Not long after, teachers found that their jobs now also required the management of high-stakes tests and the incorporation of new pedagogical practices and curriculum. Over the years, teachers were required to takeinstruction in social-emotional learning and accept an increase in mandated compliance training to monitor for neglect and child abuse. A sharp surge in school shootings brought a significant rise in lockdown drills.
As the duties placed on teachers piled on, no extra time was built into their day to manage them. Robbins cites several studies revealing that as teachers struggle to keep up, forsaking their evenings, weekends and lunch hours, the result is often burnout, exacerbated by “inadequate workplace support and resources, unmanageable workload, high-stakes testing, time pressure, unsupported disruptive students, lack of cooperative time with colleagues, and a wide variety of student needs without the resources to meet those needs.”
The result of these pressures is depicted in brutal detail in Robbins’s reporting on three teachers. There is Rebecca, an elementary-school teacher, whose high expectations of herself and lack of support from the school system have left her so exhausted that she is unable to manage any kind of a social life. She startsthe school year with plans to begin online dating and get involved again with musical theater, a pastime she has forsaken, but school demands on her time have her working straight through most weekends, making her plans all but impossible. Further complicating her life is a year-long mystery in her classroom: One of her students is stealing Rebecca’s possessions, as well as her students’, and she has devoted herself to trying to get to the bottom of it. She finally discovers the culprit, a girl named Illyse, whose mother agrees to get her daughter into counseling.By year’s end, Rebecca resolves to give up the social life she attempted, at least for the short run, and concentrate only on teaching, which takes all the energy she has.
Penny is a sixth-grade math teacher who struggles to maintain her high standards in the midst of a toxic workplace environment and the breakup of her marriage. Her school’s faculty is cliquish and unwelcoming, and Penny often draws the ire of a few women who see her as a threat. Penny seems to succeed with students the others can’t manage, and her colleagues’retaliation is to make her life as miserable as they can. As if this weren’t stressful enough, Penny spends much of the year sick with recurring respiratory infections caused by unaddressed mold in her classroom. Her complaints about it are ignored.
Especially unsettling is the experience of Miguel, a middle-school special-education teacher, who is teetering on the brink of leaving the profession because of the excessive requirements placed on him without adequate time and resources. His previous school year was a nightmare of abuse, with his students frequently attacking him; every few months he had to get HIV and hepatitis tests because of student bites. Complaints to a district administrator resulted only in Miguel’s being told, “That’s part of the job.” Ultimately, Miguel sued the district because of permanent disabilities caused by the attacks and won lifetime medical care.
Teachers nationwide endure similar scenarios and are leaving the profession at an alarming pace. Robbins reports that demand for U.S. teachers outstripped supply by more than 100,000 in 2019, while graduates from teacher prep programs plummeted by a third between 2010 and 2018. Along came the pandemic in 2020, and a serious teacher shortage became dramatically worse.
At first, when schools moved to online instruction in the spring of 2020 and parents saw firsthand the hardships teachers were enduring, plaudits poured in for the educators showing remarkable commitment to their profession in a difficult situation they had never trained for. Virtual teaching took much more time to prepare, execute and evaluate. And because students were often not required to turn on their cameras, it was a lot like teaching into a void. But as time crawled on and schools remained closed to in-person instruction, parents became critical, even angry. The hostility parents leveled against teachers was astonishing. In September 2021 alone, 30,000 public school teachers nationwide gave notice. Between August 2020 and August 2021, Florida’s teacher vacancies surged 67 percent, according to a count by the Florida Education Association. In 2021, California’s largest district, Los Angeles Unified, had five times the number of vacancies as in previous years, according to Shannon Haber, a spokeswoman for the district. The number of retirements skyrocketed, and I joined the exodus.I was within a couple of years of my target retirement date, but I left earlier than planned because of the mounting stress around the pandemic and an ever-increasing workload. My colleagues who remained have said that the 2021-22 school year was unbelievably hard.
One of these colleagues, who was named 2019 Teacher of the Year by my school in Arlington, Va., spoke recently before the school board to detail how her experience highlights some of the inequities facing teachers. Based on her careful record keeping, she stated that she expects to work a staggering 454 hours outside of her contract hours in any school year. “My job is impossible to do well in the time you pay me to work,” she told the board members. “I couldn’t even be average in the time you pay me.”
Almost every page of my review copy of “The Teachers” is marked with my comments and exclamation points as I encountered situations and circumstances remarkably similar to those I experienced myself. This is an important book that will come as no surprise to the nation’s teachers. But for those who seek a fuller understanding of what educators are coping with these days, it should prove invaluable. And for those who most need to read it — those in a position to effect change in the lives of conscientious and talented teachers who are considering abandoning the profession — one can only hope that its message will be heeded before it is too late.
Literally. Being away for a couple of days gave me a break from the news but then immediately I had a lot to catch up on. So this is a brief review of some of the insanity or is that inanity that defines the American way.
First up: The Kentucky Millionaire who built a bunker and it failed to do what he built to do – keep his family safe. One dead and the family now lives in an expensive RV for reasons unclear, but it is clear that being crazy is not defined to the unhoused. Oh wait…..
Next:Sex Ed is Grooming. Okay this is now Q’Anon on steroids. I was sure that the original basis of much of this Q person was in fact a woman as she worked for the group behind the “chan” sites and then as the male personas picked up on the bizarre messaging and in turn grew their business from it, the Q thing sort of blossomed into this monolith that fueled much of the Trumptards. The fear of sex and information is a commonality in the South thanks to the Church. And that is the real reason behind the push to end abortion, there has never been a predominant interest in the life of children or these same whack jobs would be advocates for child care, maternity leave, health care and other post natal programs that promote life. It is about sex and the idea if you are fucking you will confine it to marriage and keep your sinning filth in the home. These are people who hate sex, and yes even I am bored with it but hey don’t let me stop you fucking! And with that fear that sex and intimacy is an effort, which they want no part of. Note that they are either breeding maniacs or have two kids which means they fucked themselves out. And I have never met a religious crackpot group that were not one or the other. Birth Control is sex control and sex is the predominant reason behind marriage. Trust me this is the real issue, fucking.
I have always found it interesting that many States take the forefront with regards to these issues, but Tennessee was always just ahead of the curve; however, they don’t get the news coverage on these culture firebrands as does Texas or Florida and I suspect it is because of Nashville. The state is very tied to that city for its income and with that the powers inside that city, while they may share their values fear the loss of money more, so with that much of the oppressive crazy shit is buried. When I lived there the issues surrounding sex abuse, largely in the schools was a major issue and with that the City Prosecutor rarely prosecuted said cases, blaming the Police for their poor investigation skills. But Nashville Schools were dumps and many times focus of investigation after investigation and little was ever done. Look at the timeline of the great reporter, Phil Williams, and his endless investigations in the school district and realize the problems there are serious and they do little more than cover it up. That is the South, hide, obscure and lie if you have to. Do as little as possible take as much credit as possible, that is their mantra. Mine is – What.ever.
Rounding to Third: Guns and more guns. After seeing Damon Wayans at Carolines a week ago where he brought a baseball bat to the stage with him a day later a comedy club in North Carolina found themselves closing early when a patron showed up with a shotgun; then a shooting at a mall in Indiana food court where the mythical good guy with a gun shot and killed the bad guy with a gun. (Some of this needs further investigation and I suspect as in all of these mass shootings, the truth is buried there) A shooting in Houston at an Apartment Complex left four dead; a shooting in a campground left three dead, one being only six; a woman dead after an altercation in a parking lot in Oklahoma; and more heinous facts regarding Uvalde continue to be released that again demonstrate how all of these shootings do not have the full information until investigations are completed. There is nothing in that particular story that has any good element in what.so.ever. And with that one of the few survivors of the Parkland shooting, meaning the shooter himself, is undergoing a sentencing trial which led one of the victims parents to scream out STOP and leave the courtroom. What is Justice in this case? That is not a decision anyone can make easily.
And lastly: I am exhausted with America right now. The endless one upmanship, the belittling and condescension that passes as an arrogant way of telling someone you are smarter and better than they are. I sat in Saratoga listening to the most boring people and I said little other than to remind them as I am on my own I have only myself to be responsible for and be concerned with. I am out to enjoy as a much of life as I can and with that do it as safely and as easily as I can. My conversations that once were as interesting as they were random have been relegated to largely message posts and those who serve me… the coffee person, the Front Desk Clerk, the Concierge at my building. These are not conversations they are more monologues and lectures where I either inform and attempt to have a teachable moment or be funny and witty without much of challenge or intellect. Even podcasts I am finding deeply redundant. Listen to Marc Maron WTF and it is him discussing his anxiety and frustrations about food and his family. In the beginning of the pandemic he lost his partner and his grief and pain coupled with the fear of the future were fascinating studies in how one copes and evolves when you are alone and working through it. I connected to that and much of his pain resonated, his humor not lost on one who feels much the same way, being over 55, being alone, having no kids and facing this odd future did make me laugh and cry. Today I get through maybe the first 5 minutes and unless he is speaking to someone I know and care about I wipe it out. The show with Nikki Glaser was both sad and funny as it was two neurotic comics who are successful and have good lives wax on about their eating disorders, their sexual confusion and fear of relationships. It should be a must listen for anyone going into the therapy business.
I had not known Ms. Glaser until FB Island where that thankfully is a delight of idiocy and moron supremacy that I need right now. So to listen to her comedy and in turn her own personal struggles I got much of what she said about sex and connection and how women view their sexuality and their intimacy tied to sex itself and men do not, they in fact disconnect from the two and immediately disengage once the act is complete. She insisted and I agree that women should not have sex until they are friends and familiar with the man and then have sex as they will find it by far more satisfying. She even feels girls should resort strictly to giving blow jobs or hand jobs if they feel compelled to offer sex to a boy as a means of building attraction. There is a big no from me on the sucking dick and fine with the hand job as it is utterly disease free and safe sex in every way. I am sorry but not getting oral cancer to suck a dick and the same goes for men, just finger bang or hand jobs or mutually masturbate. The era of sex is over and clearly we are going to have to start at square one to educate and inform and if you cannot love yourself you cannot love anyone else.
And with that Marc shared that he was in a friendship with a woman, and I recall this discussion at Red Bank when I saw him there, about wanting a “girl” friend who fucked him, had dinner with him (maybe not in that order) and then left and did not stay over, see him every day and remain monogamous in that type of arrangement. He is now in that that type of arrangement and he acknowledged that she is younger, he did not say how young but if she stays over she sleeps in another room. She has to be 30 as no woman over 35 would put up with that bullshit. Again it is challenging when you have no kids, no real baggage to find partners on the same page but even that would be stretch for me. I might do the dinner part, maybe even the fucking and would leave but I doubt that. I did that and hated it so I am over it. The reality is that while I was hit on by a man that night at the restaurant I and oddly Marc ate at after the show (although given his food issues that must have been interesting) I felt nothing, kissing this man, nothing. I wanted to go to my hotel room and sleep. I am not sure I will ever feel anything for a man again. So there you go folks note that again most of the Pro Life/Anti sex crew are all well into their 60s and cling to the past as a part of the problem. They still blame the Hippies! The observations I made at Saratoga with these couples in their 50s only made me feel relieved that I was not a part of this. I recall my ex husband and his theory that the Moon landing was a Conspiracy, the fame obsession aka the asspirational (intentional misspelling) that he carried with him. He is like many I meet, toting their fake or real Vuitton bags or wearing their Gucci shoes and the insatiable need to be “famous” be that on social media or just someone who matters. I have all of those things but rarely use them and feel compelled to let everyone know I have them, I get it. I really do. With that I seek respect and dignity and to speak and be spoken to in a manner that reflects that. And with that I am so grateful to not be married as I suspect I would be like one of the couples, parroting my Husband’s idiotic viewpoints and beliefs. I recall when I realized I had married a jerk I began to spend less time at home, and when he was there I wasn’t and so forth. My dog was the one thing that I truly loved during that time.
In my conversation with my Concierge yesterday he was shocked how few people actually speak to people professionally and they have college degrees! He is from Africa and migrated here years ago and was educated in his country but like many many Immigrants his degrees could not be substantiated as he was designated a refugee and this led him to working here. His story is not different than many despite the shortages of medical professionals, they are forced to return to school to get an American degree. Or what I call the most expensive piece of paper you will ever buy. I am sure that most if not many who possess a degree, myself included, have found it utterly useless and utterly a waste of time and money. Others and those are largely the graduates of “elite” Universities who are not any smarter but are better connected and in turn have better opportunities in which to work. The endless studies that profess that those with a degree earn more in a lifetime needs a little more detail there as it is based on Social Security data. And again women are fucked right there as many take time away from the workforce and may end up in work that will often pay less. This does not paint the full picture as it is frankly all theory as we know that flows in economics and trends dictate the pursuit of a degree but that degree may not be what the field you end up in and with that make even more so does degree and type matter? What school? What was the base salary? What profession? What was the network connection that enabled the gig, and so forth. The reality is that connections matter more and the doors are open via an alumni association or through a friend and family. So say Bob goes to University of Illinois and gets a Business Degree, with that where does he go to work out of school? What was his base salary? (Cause it ain’t what you think) If Bob was named Jane was that the same salary? How did he find said job? Recruited or applied? But that fact is shoved down our throats to the detriment of many who have expensive degrees and are Barista’s at Starbucks. Hence the union drive. We often equate worth with one’s financial stability. They are not the same.
We have no way of knowing details about anything unless we ask and we dig and we do neither. We talk at each other and not to or with each other. We are busy drawing our dividing lines and that seems to be with regards to how one votes. Funny I don’t have a problem with whom you vote for, I do if you do not read, listen to music, watch a movie, go on a trip and have a thought that isn’t your own.
Since the national nightmare of the slap heard and seen round the world (unless you lived in the US and the vitriolic rants of Will Smith were bleeped out) has not ended until President Biden weighs in with his thoughts, we must continue to talk about this forever or until a new absurd scandal about rich entitled privileged people hits the news; the only difference was that was about two Black men. Again not news in most communities where a great deal of violence is Black on Black crime largely committed by men. So news it is not.
But as we have worn out discussing the pandemic, Covid, Vaccines and the other social issues of being Gay, reading books or voting let’s go back to my personal favorite – Religion. I have said repeatedly that all of the above subjects and the controversy surrounding them are due to one thing only – Religion.
I read this about a Pastor in where else, Nashville, who is doing his part to continue the spread of misinformation and rile up the base. These are people poorly educated, employed in very blue collar service related work and have no concept of a world outside the parameter of the church. These are the same people who believe the Big Lie and still believe in the bullshit Trump and his acolytes push as fact. Again, I need to remind you that when you believe the Bible as a book of facts and truths you are already proving to me that you are a flaming moron. I have no problem with those who take scripture and text out of context in which to find words of restoration and hope but that of late seems few and far between. Most use the book to fuel their rage and defend their negative beliefs that enable them to remain ignorant. See Marsha Blackburn and her question to Judge Jackson, “Define Woman.”
So read and realize that this Pastor, Greg Locke, is just another cog in the wheel of the Southern Baptist cohort of churches; Nashville is the home of that organization and where they have their annual meet and hate. Just in the former shadow of where once the Lifeway Christian Publishing House was also a dominant figure in the skyline. Thanks to declining sales they have relocated and we can only hope that continues in the future to be so small a strip mall office will suffice. But there are still many trailer parks that can house these ramshackle Churches and they will continue to peddle their snake oil for the power of the God on the Dollar is in what they believe and stand for, your salvation not so much.
A Jan. 6 pastor divides his Tennessee community with increasingly extremist views
Annie Gowan The Washington Post March 31, 2022
MOUNT JULIET, Tenn. — The pastor promised his followers that this church service would be like no other, and the event on a cold Sunday in March did not disappoint.
“Devil, your foot soldiers are coming out tonight, they’re coming all the way out. We will expel them,” Pastor Greg Locke howled from the stage in a crowded white tent. “You gotta leave, Devil,” he shouted, “you gotta get out!”
Wielding a microphone as he paced the stage, his wife, Tai, at his side, Locke called out “spirits” of anger, rage, bitterness, lust and envy.
“Spirit of molestation, spirit of abuse, get out right now!” Locke commanded.
“Every spirit of homosexuality, lesbianism, come out, come out,” his wife ordered. “Transgenderism, gender dysphoria, come out.”
“We rebuke it, we rebuke it!” Locke yelled.
The tent slowly took on a spirit of its own. Worshipers began writhing as if in pain. Others waved their hands in the air in benediction. “Amens” began to mix with the guttural sound of growling, moaning and praying in tongues.
“If you’ve had the covid-19 shot, I’m telling you you’ve got poison in your veins,” Locke thundered. “We call out the covid-19 vaccine out right now. Keep that demonic spirit out of you right now in the name of Jesus!”
Some fell to the ground, pawing at cedar chips, or retched into silver vomit buckets that had been set at the end of each row of white folding chairs.
To those unfamiliar with charismatic worship style, the scene might be easily dismissed or mocked. Yet Locke, 45, head of the Global Vision Bible Church, boasts millions of followers, many of them online, gaining national attention during the coronavirus crisis when he kept his church open and defied the mask mandates of the “fake pandemic.”
But to his critics, he is spreading a dangerous message of hate that is taking root in someconservative churches. His rising prominence also comes as many mainstream faith leaders and experts on extremism grow increasingly concerned about the spread of White Christian nationalism, the belief that patriotism and love of America are explicitly intertwined with White evangelical Christianity.
Locke is an “ambassador” of a movement where he and other pastors around the country appear at rallies and tent revivals preaching Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen as a new holy war, according to Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, an organization dedicated to religious freedom.
“If someone is convinced that God has preordained an election result for a messiah-like candidate and is told over and over that the election was stolen, that erodes trust in elections and democracy,” Tyler said.
Locke, in an interview, was defiant that he is not a Christian nationalist, but he makes no apologies for bringing politics into the pulpit. He was on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and has continued to preach the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Locke and his ministry have divided this quiet town on the outskirts of Nashville with many residents distressed at the thousands who flock here to hear him and the attention he attracts, most recently with a book burning where he and followers threw copies of the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” series and Disney villain merchandise into a giant bonfire. He has declared he now wants to “deliver” people from demonic influences and witchcraft.
Nashville resident Leyna Davis, along with other members of a loosely organized group of citizens who have been closely watching Locke and trying to combat misinformation he spreads, began seriously following him after her uncle, a member of his church, refused to get the coronavirus vaccine and died of covid-19 last year.
While Locke was casting out demons, the mother of four was at home using the gaming console of her kids to play recordings of his Sunday sermon, rewinding to watch it and texting others as she went through it.
During the sermon, Locke made no apologies for speaking about demons and witchcraft. “I love you enough to make sure I’m hated for telling the truth,” he told his congregation. Davis sighed and pressed pause.
“We kind of understand why people got into him. He goes so far off the deep end,” Davis said. “But how do they still listen to this? This is a whole new level of crazy.”
Locke is well known throughout Mount Juliet, a mostly White and affluent community of39,000, with an exurban mix of churches, farmettes and subdivisions long home to stars from the Nashville country music scene, including the late Charlie Daniels.
Neighbors have complained to authorities about noise, growing crowds, unauthorized construction and public safety threats that accompany events run by Locke, including two for which members of the neo-fascist Proud Boys provided “security.” Locke blessed the members from the pulpit and later posed for pictures with them as the Proud Boys flashed white-supremacist symbols.
The Wilson County sheriff’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment about Locke and his activities. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack listed Locke on a request for documents to the National Archives.
A spokesman for the House committee declined to comment. Spokespeople for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Middle District of Tennessee and the FBI said they do not confirm or deny the existence of investigations as a matter of policy.
When Brian Larson took over as the administrator of one of the town’s unofficial Facebook pages in February, he went through and deleted all posts either by or about the pastor. He set new terms and conditions that forbade any mention of the church or Locke: “Any promotion of Global Vision Bible Church will result in suspension or ban,” citing “hate speech toward mental disabilities, culture/beliefs and sexual orientation.”
Larson said he is concerned that Locke could encourage his followers to attack those he has deemed evil. “He rode on the Trump train and attracted followers with Donald Trump’s strategy of shock and awe,” Larson said. “If you look back at the Salem witch trials you know what I mean. You’ve got a guy telling people there are witches and demons out there and to go and get them. If he claims somebody is dangerous and needs to be taken care of, something bad could happen.”
Locke called Larson’s concerns “utter nonsense” and said the town’s Facebook group, with posts on healthy brunch options and trivia nights, is run by “a bunch of witches.”
“I could care less what they think about me to be honest with you,” Locke said in an interview in his remodeled office, which includes artwork of the prophet Elijah before flames and a tattered American flag. “Jesus said, ‘Beware when all men speak well of you.’ I’m not trying to make friends in this town. I’m trying to preach the truth,” he said.
“We’re definitely the most polarizing church in town,” Locke added. “Either you love us or you hate us. There’s no middle ground.”
Locke has a social media following of 4 million across multiple platforms, and attendance at Sunday services has grown from 200 before the pandemic to more than 1,000, spilling out of the church building and into an enormous climate-controlled tent, which Locke calls a “canvas cathedral.”
To accommodate the growth, the church went on a buying spree last fall, spending nearly $2 million on four adjoining and nearby properties, land records show. One of those parcels has already been resold, the church said.
Locke said the church raised more than $4 million last year and gave much of it away, handing out $100 grocery cards to the needy and hosting a “reverse offering” at Christmas where they gave away $66,000 in five minutes.
Those who attend the church say they were drawn to his style of preaching, “verse by verse” straight from the Bible, as well as his outspokenness.
“You’ll never find a better man who speaks the word of God than Greg Locke,” said Thomas Nightingale, who drives 80 miles from his home in Scottsville, Ky., to attend services. Of Locke’s controversial statements, he said, “We’ve seen it all. That’s every church in the world but we seem to top ‘em sometimes. Never a dull moment.”
Davis and the group of watchers, both local and around the country, monitor Locke closely, reporting misinformation he posts on social media, calling out churches that host him and alerting authorities to potentially dangerous activities. Davis said she believes their repeated reporting of Locke to Twitter contributed to the company banning him in September for his tweets spreading misinformation about covid-19.
Locke’s church had already divided the Davis family into camps of those who attended services and those, like Leyna and her father, Chip, who oppose it, before her uncle, Coburn Kennedy, died at age 79 last year.
Kennedy was a former gospel and country music singer who had given up his career to raise a family but always encouraged his nephews to follow their musical dreams. Chip Davis credits his uncle’s encouragement as the reason he and his brother Billy are still in the music business, Chip as a vocalist for the country group Alabama, Billy as a music producer.
The Davises watched in dismay as their relative repeated Locke’s vaccine misinformation and refused to get the shot. There is “stuff in this vaccine” such as “aborted fetuses,” Coburn Kennedy wrote in a family group chat that Chip saved, saying he’d put his trust in God rather than get the shot.
Two months later, their beloved “Unc” was dead from covid-19. “It says volumes about the state of our country” that Locke “has a big-ass circus tent and it’s filling up with 3,000 people a week coming from all over the United States,” Chip Davis said. “When I look at it, I’m afraid for our country.”
Samuel Perry, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma and an author of the forthcoming book “The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy,” said he was not surprised to see Locke veer into portraying what’s happening in America in apocalyptic terms as a grand battle between the forces of good and evil.
“Greg Locke has tapped into what is currently selling within that group at the moment, angry White evangelicals responding to talk of persecution, talk of political chaos and the need to rise up, get organized and be militant,” Perry said. “That’s what’s working, so he’s going to give that message.”
Locke rejects the label of Christian nationalist saying, “I don’t want a theocracy. I love America, but I also love Jesus. I don’t think that makes me a Christian nationalist.” But, he said, he does believe politics has a place in church.
“I think we’re in the mess we are in because cowardly pastors won’t talk” about politics, which has “100 percent got a place in the church. Jesus was very political, John the Baptist, every preacher in the Bible was extraordinarily political,” he said.
Locke grew up in the area. He was a troubled teen who was arrested five times for theft, reckless endangerment, and breaking and entering, before finding Jesus while in a local home for troubled boys. He completed his bachelor’s degree from Ambassador Baptist College in North Carolina and claims a master’s degree from a theological school that has a Facebook page but no website. He founded what is now Global Vision Bible Church in 2006. The church moved to its location on Old Lebanon Dirt Road in 2008.
Locke first garnered some national attention back in 2016, when a video rant about unisex bathrooms at Target went viral. But his fame rose during the pandemic as he held church services in defiance of shutdown orders, falsely claimed the coronavirus vaccine was made from the tissue of aborted fetuses and posted a sign outside the church that read, “This is a mask free church campus. We celebrate faith over fear.”
He said he still “1000 percent” believes the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and he spoke at a rally in Washington the day before the insurrection where, according to a published report, he told the crowd, “I declare unto you that President Donald Trump is gonna stay for four more years in the White House,” adding, “We’re a mighty army. They’ve gotta listen. They can’t ignore us. Our churches have been backed into a corner.”
Locke gave “one of the clearest and most violent prayers of the day,” noted the report, a joint project released last month by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Freedom From Religion Foundation that detailed Christian nationalism in the insurrection.
Since then, he has found allies in Trump supporters like former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and conspiracy theorists like Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” guy, and flies around the country giving speeches at political rallies and church events where speakers mix Christian ideology with anti-big-government rhetoric and unproved claims about election fraud. Former Trump adviser Roger Stone has twice spoken at the church.
Alarm about Locke within the group coordinated by Davis rose significantly last month, when Locke posted on Facebook that he would be having a “massive burning” after the Feb. 2 evening service, noting: “We’re not playing games. Witchcraft and accursed things must go.” Locke said his inspiration came from the Bible, in Acts Chapter 19, where disciples of Jesus burned books on the “curious arts.”
More than 200 people attended, under the watch of local law enforcement, gathering around a bonfire and tossing books, movies and games into the flames, blowing horns and chanting “burn it, burn it.”
In another episode, Locke expelled a couple from his church, accusing them of witchcraft. Gina Guy Warren and Brian Warren had been serving as his personal trainer and volunteer security detail. Gina, a speaker and author, and Brian, a mixed martial arts fighter, run a ministry they call “The Word and the Workout,” that brings “church and gym together as one.”
After Locke accused them publicly in a sermon last month of “full blown witchcraft,” the couple claimed they received threats and said in a statement to The Washington Post they do not feel safe. Locke said the expulsion stemmed from a dispute over whether to charge for counseling sessions related to exorcisms, which he opposed.
Clint Mahoney and his partner Chris Hardin were on their way to visit relatives in the area from their home in Indiana when they heard about the bonfire. They decided to stop by and wage a counterprotest. Mahoney threw a Bible into the flames, waved a copy of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,″ the dystopian tale of a society where books are outlawed, and mockingly yelled “Hail Satan.” He and his partner then kissed at their car to howls of disgust from church security trying to evict them.
“We’re going to send a statement. This is not going to stand without some opposition,” Hardin said. “You can’t operate with impunity. We are watching you.” Mahoney, who said he was expelled from a church and from his family when he came out as gay, agreed. “There are so many people in churches like Locke’s flying under the radar and fomenting radicalism all over this country,” he said.
Back underneath the big tent, the exorcising of evil spirits continued with a Kentucky teen who had been brought to the service by his grandfather, Nightingale, a church attendee. The boy, Bronson, had been writhing on the ground, beset, when he suddenly got up and sprinted for the door.
Volunteers from the church, in black hoodies, tackled the teen in the back of the room. They held him down, rubbed his back with Bibles, prayed in tongues and exclaimed, “Out, out, out!” One blew a shofar, the ram’s horn normally used in Jewish religious ceremonies that some Christians also use.
The two had watched Locke together online, but it was Bronson’s first time at a service, Nightingale said. The boy, who had never sworn before, according to his grandmother, was now cussing at the volunteers and growling.
“This is what happens at a deliverance service,” Locke said from the pulpit. “Cry it out, shout it out, weep it out, snot it out. We’re going to set people free tonight.”
Suddenly Bronson’s tight body went limp. The volunteers huddled over him. When they helped him to his feet, he was smiling and calm, ready to be baptized. “Amen, I never had to chase nobody before,” one of the volunteers told the teen.
“There’s a first time for everything,” Bronson said. They went up to the front of the room, where a livestock watering tank painted sky blue inside awaited and the Praise band began softly playing the worship song “No Longer Slaves.”
“I’m no longer a slave to fear, I am a child of God,” they sang. Locke came down from the stage all smiles. Bronson stepped gingerly into the tank.
“Upon your confession of faith in Jesus Christ, the power and glory of the Gospel and this beautiful deliverance we have seen tonight, I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” Locke said, dunking Bronson into the water as the music swelled.
Bronson came up, water sluicing from his jeans and shirt, smiling radiantly. His grandfather wrapped his arms around his neck from behind and crooned into his ear along with the music, “You are a child of God.”
This is America, shoot first ask no questions later. That applies to the Police who have not discontinued their random need to shoot anyone down in the street, in their car, in their home or anywhere they are when the Police feel “threatened.” From what it appears they feel threatened 24/7.
One of the reasons, aside from their screaming racism and endless poor training on handling issues without violence, is that they are kinda, sorta right, because when it comes to guns and gun violence we have a major problem in this country. Thanks to the 2nd Amendment, everyone who also feels threatened can buy a gun and head home with little to no training, no requirement to maintain a skill set and have no limit on how many guns one can own. So you can pretty much have an arsenal in your home and not even know how a specific weapon works let alone the type of bullets one uses, as well as alter said weapon to make it even more powerful. And with that you got a problem folks and yes we all should feel afraid to some extent as you never know who is packing heat and what they can do with it as they too are afraid. In other words this is always a lose-lose situation. I believe this is an other example of guns and the harm they bring.
On Feb 14th at about 9:45 p.m. at a Chase bank in southwest Houston, Tony D. Earls, 41, who had just been robbed at an ATM, took out his gun and began shooting at a pickup truck carrying a family of five, including the 9-year-old girl, who was later identified as Arlene Alvarez.
The girl’s father, Armando Alvarez, saw the shooter just 10 feet away as the man continued to “spray the vehicle,” he said. One of the shots struck Arlene in the head and he watched his child “go down immediately” Armando said, adding “I immediately stopped, pulled her out of the vehicle. “I hope nobody ever has to go through this.”
Earls is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and was released on $100,000 bail. Rick Ramos, an attorney for the Alvarez family, said Earls does not have a valid case for self-defense because there was no “immediate threat or fear” for his safety when he opened fire because the robbery suspect had already fled the scene.
This was the second recent shooting of a 9-year-old girl in the Houston area. Last week 9-year-old Ashanti Grant was shot in an alleged road rage incident while watching cartoons in the back seat of the family car, according to her family. Ashanti Grant remains in critical condition
And this week began a motion to keep the most recent insane school shooter into an adult prison as he awaits trial. I agree with the Prosecutor that he should not be named as much of his motive was to be infamous with others who have been convicted of heinous crimes. Wow Stephen Sondheim called that one with his musical, Assassins. And we can thank his parents for buying him a gun the day prior. Thanks, Mom!
However, much gun violence is self directed. Since Covid gun ownership has risen and in states with Stand-your-ground laws they are finding a rise in both self harm and homicides. A recent study has concluded as such and once again the South shall rise again in that number.
Texas is also turning towards legalizing vigilantism and with that California is taking a tack from the same ideas in Texas regarding Abortion and doing so with guns. So we are a nation divided and we use laws to cover our assess when compromise and conversations about resolutions to the subject would do so much more. But again I look to my last place of residence and see that they love being on lists top or bottom, they will be on them.
And to ensure that they continue to be the most terrorized State in the Nation, Tennessee is stepping up their gun laws. They are not at the level of Missouri which is ranked with Kansas for having the least effective gun laws in the country, and with that the higher ranking on gun violence. But Tennessee is not a state to sit anything out, they are not called the Volunteer State for nothing. And it is why I ran for the exit door, Tornados and Covid on my heels, not a day goes by where I don’t thank the stars or whoever that I am not there any longer. I think about visiting and dismiss that as absurd but I also know my way around there and feel confident that as long as I avoid the ones I know I also can avoid the ones whom I don’t. As neither are really anyone I want to see. I did laugh when in my old hood they build a Soho House, talk about pretentious and idiotic but then again that is Nashville.
But this new tentative law, which I believe the Plumber/Governor will sign into law is just insane. Street cops, really? This week brought the federal convictions of the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery for Hate Crimes. These charges often hard to prove had no shortage of information regarding these assholes racist beliefs and the trial was so devastating to the Jurors, one asked for counseling and two cried as the verdict was read, so imagine this coming to a town near you. These men claimed to be acting as Police, and they have been convicted of his murder in State courts. They were too “vigilantes” And this is quite possible in Nashville and the surrounds. I have driven all over the state and it is quite a mecca to the home of the founder of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Guns, guns and more guns. We are a nation addicted to violence.
Fury over ‘reckless’ Tennessee bill that would class some gun owners as police
Gun safety advocates condemn proposal introduced in state legislature as ‘blatant attempt to legalize armed vigilantism’
Gun owners at an NRA meeting in Nashville. A separate bill would allow 18-year-olds in Tennessee to apply for concealed-carry licenses. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Adam Gabbatt The Guardian Thu 24 Feb 2022
Gun safety advocates have condemned Tennessee legislation which would designate some gun owners as police, allowing civilians to carry firearms in locations usually reserved for law enforcement.
The proposed law, introduced in the Tennessee house and senate this month, “expands the definition of ‘law enforcement officer’” to include civilians who hold an enhanced handgun-carry permit – earned by taking an eight-hour handgun safety course and paying a $100 fee.
It comes as a separate bill which would allow 18-year-olds to apply for concealed-carry licenses was approved by a Tennessee house subcommittee on Tuesday.
Shannon Watts, founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, told the Guardian: “Encouraging people to arm themselves and play police puts everyone at risk while making the jobs of actual law enforcement much more difficult.
“The process of obtaining a handgun permit doesn’t come anywhere close to the extensive training that real officers go through, and it’s ridiculous to equate the two. Extremist and dangerous bills like these are part of the gun lobby’s blatant attempt to codify and legalize armed vigilantism.”
She added: “Tennessee has the 14th highest rate of gun violence in the country, and lawmakers should be focused on passing policies that will actually make communities safer, not reckless bills like these.”
The proposed bill was introduced in the state senate by Joey Hensley, a Republican, who told ABC News that the aim of the bill was to allow people with an enhanced handgun carry permit to carry their guns into locations where off-duty law enforcement are allowed to enter, including a store or restaurant that prohibits firearms.
“This is trying to open it up so that people who go to the extreme to get this extra permit can have the right to defend themselves in more places,” Hensley said.
Hensley’s plan has not just alarmed those who advocate for better gun safety. The Tennessee State Lodge for the Fraternal Order of Police, the state’s largest police union, said that it is “adamantly opposed to this bill in its current form.”
Scottie DeLashmit, the president of Tennessee State Lodge for the Fraternal Order of Police, told ABC that officers “spend countless hours” honing their skills, and must qualify annually with the same weapons. DeLashmit added that officers also spend hours training in “driving, criminal law, defensive tactics, etc.”
“These vigorous standards are in place to ensure officers are familiar with their weapons,” DeLashmit said in the statement. “The enhanced handgun carry permit training is far less demanding than anything required from a cadet attending a basic law enforcement academy.”
The bill was introduced in the Tennessee House by Chris Hurt, who did not respond to a request for comment.
Hensley, who was a member of the House for ten years before he was elected to the state senate in 2013, has a history of supporting extreme legislation, including anti-LGBTQ laws. The Tennessee firearm association donated to his reelection campaign in 2020.
I wrote extensively about how Evangelical Ministries are complex and broad across the religious spectrum. And this pretty much crosses all Religions as there are sects and other factions within a faith itself. Looking at Islam there are two major sects, Shia and Sunni. Within Hindu there are four primary denominations; and with Judiasm there are three major factions – Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. And with Catholicism and Protestant faiths there are as many divisions and ways in which to practice the faith, some more conservative and traditional, others less so. But as I said yesterday, the Evangelical movement which has extended its efforts into political mainstream decisions has made it their mission to ensure that their “type” of Christian based teachings are at the forefront. This could mean decisions about prayer in school, teaching sexual education and of course other topics that are now part of the culture wars. With that we are seeing many States elect to ostensibly pass “hate laws” as Bills and statues that are repressive if not discriminatory in nature.
I have written about Tennessee a great deal as my three years affected me deeply. What I experienced and saw truly was something I thought no longer existed in America and there it was on full display, hate, judgement, racism, and poverty; all masked in a biscuit and a smile, called Southern Hospitality. I want to point out the root word is hosSPITality and that is likely the secret ingredient in the Sweet Tea they proffer with said biscuit. I get them in a way few do and when the New Yorker’s and such relocate there for the tax incentives and cost of living reduction they should know they are going to have to live in a bubble the rest of their lives as little is done to accept and integrate those who are not of the root of the tree – Southern. And with that the checks will clear and the smiles offered but acceptance not. I have met many a transplant who have returned with similar comments but family and work obligations tie you to an area long after the realization that comes with being a perpetual outsider in a place you call home.
And then I read the below story and of late there has been much made of the rise of Anti-Semitism with the rise of assaults and shootings of those who are Jewish. And in Tennessee there was a great move to prevent Gay couples from adopting or fostering children, well surprise, that includes the faith you practice. Gosh hate laws you say? Again the logic or reasoning behind much of this is under the guise of being able to secure the right to pursue religion as guaranteed by the Constitution, they just mean one kind, their kind, the Christian kind. And in some sects of Evangelical faith they recognize that Jesus was a Jew; they disregard that as Jews refuse to recognize Christ as a Savior. So that twain is never going to meet; however, they are fiercely protective of Israel. Why? Because Jesus lived there, it is Holy land and with that the belief in the book of myths that the Jews are the chosen people despite the whole Christ denial thing. But are they engaged with Jews as a faith and people? I don’t believe so and this story affirms it. That and my conversations with Ethan the Zealot who said Jewish faith is not true but he said that about Catholics as equally culpable as it came from Romans, the murders of Christ. It is always about Jesus with these people.
Tennessee-based adoption agency refuses to help couple because they’re Jewish
Tyler Whetstone/Knoxville News Sentinel
A Knoxville couple is suing the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, saying a state-sponsored Christian-based adoption agency refused to help them because they are Jewish.
It is the state’s first lawsuit to challenge a new law that allows religious adoption agencies to deny service to families whose religious or moral beliefs aren’t in sync with the provider’s, the family’s attorney told Knox News on Wednesday.
The adoption agency, the Holston United Methodist Home for Children based in Greeneville, Tennessee, denied Elizabeth and Gabriel Rutan-Ram from acquiring Tennessee-mandated foster-parent training and a home-study certification as they attempted to adopt a child from Florida last year, the Rutan-Rams say.
The organization was previously but is no longer an arm of the Holston Conference of the United Methodist Church. A spokesperson for the conference directed questions to the home.
In that lawsuit, the organization said it receives public money to provide foster care placement and training, among other services, for the state Department of Children’s Services.
The Home for Children’s president and CEO Bradley Williams could not be reached for comment Wednesday. Instead, a receptionist at Home for Children told Knox News to email the organization’s law firm, Alliance Defending Freedom, which bills itself as “the world’s largest legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.” Representatives of the firm did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday by Americans United for Separation of Church and State on behalf of the Rutan-Rams in Davidson County Chancery Court. A spokesperson for DCS declined to comment on pending litigation, as did a spokesperson from the state Attorney General’s Office.
The lawsuit comes nearly two years to the date that Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a measure that allows religious adoption agencies to deny service to same-sex couples. The law allows adoption agencies to refuse to participate in a child placement if doing so would “violate the agency’s written religious or moral convictions or policies.”
I wanted to write a thoughtful piece about the working poor. We have so many grades and levels on this mythical ladder of meritocracy that in reality most of are, we are the 99% who are one disaster away from poverty. And here we are in the middle of the most significant disaster in my lifetime and thanks to the acts of Congress with the support of both Presidents, Trump and Biden, we have lifted many out of that ranking. Most of it thanks to Biden and his actions to extend rental relief, unemployment relief, child care tax credit, the pandemic relief, stimulus checks, change the food stamp program, open the health care portals to offer enrollment in health care and in turn extend a credit there to offset enrollment costs, and overall the endless monies extended to States for their own use to do much of the same to offset Covid related expenses and liabilities; In other words, Big Government. Some states are running in the black and then there are the RED states that are of course eliminating if never having any options to enroll in Medicaid, Food Stamps, cutting Unemployment Benefits and of course never having a functioning rent relief/eviction plan in place. They are the up by the bootstraps and sure that there is a job for you out there while eschewing mask mandates, vaccine mandates nor even encouraging any of their residents to save their health by saving their community or vice versa and yet nothing changes. Covid up, employment down. The individual freedoms have now contributed to rising deaths, hospital overflows and of course shortages now of drugs not ventilators in which to treat patients. Let them eat cake! Oh whoops we ran out!
The situation is now 566 days in just the same as it ever was, but different. Schools are open only to close due to Covid outbreaks as there is no vaccine available for children and if one understands how children are walking Petri dishes of germs then you would understand why this is happening. We have Teachers, Child Care workers, Nurses, Aids and others who work in the field of care be that elderly or youth and they are as anti vaxx in the same percentage of the general population, their access and availability to appropriate and actual information aside, they choose not and hence the elderly and the young are back to day one of Covid is coming. The only saving grace is most elderly are vaccinated and hence that is what explains what is happening in Israel, the elderly got the vacc, the young people did not but they changed their behavior, opened the doors and the Covid came in, and that is the breakthrough cases we keep hearing about. The death rates and level of illness is never mentioned but in reality this is again highly a small cohort but within that means shit folks that is a lot. Paranoia it will destroy you and it is why they continue to cite that idiotic study to invoke a Moral Panic as a way of encouraging others to get vaxxed. It parallels the nascent days when they did the same to get people to quarantine and when that failed remember the curfews and state line watches to stop cross contamination. Those bring good laughs now, and we really have no idea what worked or didn’t but it didn’t stop Covid’s spread, that much I do know.
And we have the new migrants who relocated the RED states, Texas, Arizona and Tennessee. And while the States are thrilled to have the new residents this time not fearing the Covid spread, they forgot to tell them they are RED states and are busy trying to remove civil rights . prevention of masks and vaccine mandates, and access to abortion and of course making guns available in every home. A new kind of reverse access and availability plan when it comes to individual freedom except for women and pro mask/vaccine folks. And as for that bathroom access that will be back, if it ever left, right North Carolina?
What I love is that we here in the ‘North’ are not sorry to see you go as you are as stupid as your new neighbors so have a good time. I love the dude moving from Seattle to Austin to avoid income tax. For Brian Harden, 47, it was the taxes that made him consider leaving his home outside Seattle for Texas. “They don’t have a state income tax,” he noted. Besides, “My wife and I are both gun owners, and we’re big Second Amendment advocates.” Uh Seattle is in Washington State and they don’t have income tax either. And like Tennessee make it up in excessive taxes on food, gas, property, goods and services. Oh wait the gun thing, I see.
Understanding money is a common problem among the poor, we have failed to teach them basic micro economics so they confuse macro with the same, shouting out about the Debt and the other issues that have nothing to do with their own ability to pay rent, buy a car, feed their family and are sure that “others” are getting free stuff so no way are they supporting a federal safety net, neglecting to mention that they are also getting free stuff but that is different right?
Having a discussion with someone about buying a home here I spend most of my times looking at taxes, costs of maintenance, of course now flood zones and how the property will serve my needs to age in place and yet I hear that I must buy now while rates are low or I will miss out. No mention that I have a lease, it does not end for six months and I have to time this correctly to have a minimum 90 day close regardless to do a thorough inspection, research the books if the building is multi housing and see if there are upcoming assessments or debts that may arise post closing. It will take me at least the next six months to find a home, get the mortgage folder I need and from an appropriate lender. But you see many just buy shit without doing their homework in the same way the move to Florida and buy a Condo that then collapses to the ground. I think the loss of a 1/4 point on a interest rate is worth it. Call me crazy but call me alive and with money in the bank.
And there is lastly the issue of health care and costs. I pursue acupuncture for supplemental health care, it worked on my cyst on my scalp and right now I have a small one on my face. True i could go to the Dermatologist as it is not covered on my policy or be treated in a manner I like and in a way I prefer. It takes longer but by far more relaxing and supportive. Then the last time I went she asked me to get a drug panel. For a pimple that is stress related and there is a lot of stress around, my storage unit flooded two weeks ago, and the damage to the building was significant, my property was damaged and I am working through that rage of declined insurance and support by the company and the lack of overall support via the community to understand why this happened and why nothing is being done to prevent it in the future. That is enough to cause an outbreak of anything so this demand was utterly absurd and once again infuriated me to the point I have one or two more appointments left and I will stop going. I just once would like someone to give a shit about me where an exchange of a check or offer of a fuck is not involved. What happened to lunch no stings, no blame, no fault and just a laugh? Oh that is what everyone is talking about when they say they are so over Covid. Honey that never happened pre Covid why should it now?
The debate of what will happen with regards to the working poor, the return to the workplace and the general way of living that existed prior to Covid is moot at this point. Covid is with us for now, forever and we either get with the program, get vaxxed, wear masks, keep things cleaner than before, less crowded than before, have better ventilation and of course have access to quality health care, paid sick leave and better child and elder care, this will not change.
Get over yourselves I think is the message here. The poor well I get it they can go fuck themselves. I get it I really do.
We all need said time outs, either by choice or by assignment. The reality is that we have been living under extraordinary pressure and fear that has only accelerated for some as they live in seclusion, isolation or in a small cohort or pod. The mirror held is one that reflects much of the same dynamics that enables one to thrive and succeed when times are tough. I am one who thrives on my own, I have always known that and now this has only confirmed it in ways that have made me relieved, sad, glad and whatever the day brings I ultimately know that I am on my own and I must do what needs to be done to get through it; whatever it is.
The past year has demonstrated Biblical proportions of all that defines the Apocalypse – as defined by the Book of Revelation. This from James Tabor on a Frontline discussing this issue:
If you open the Book of Revelation and simply begin reading it as an unfolding scenario, it goes something like this. There will be wars and famines and disease epidemics and heavenly signs that will alert the world to some sort of crisis. Then will come an Antichrist as he’s called, or a political ruler, that will establish control over the whole earth. He’ll be backed up with a religious ruler, who’s called the false prophet. They together establish a unified social, economic and religious system that dominates the world. The only thing opposing them are the people of God and these two prophets, they’re called the two witnesses, who appear in Jerusalem, and begin to speak against this power. The rest of the book, really the last half of the book is about the overthrow of this system. The beast, the false prophet, who has the number 666, the Antichrist, is overthrown with judgments and plagues. Most of them are very cosmic. Asteroids hitting the earth. The water turning to blood and that sort of thing, until finally, Jesus Christ returns as a warrior on a white horse and sets up the kingdom of God. ...
And with this comes the Four Horsemen with their signs, which we can see as War/Unrest, Plague, Pestilence, Floods/Tornados, Starvation and of course the Met Gala. Seriously what the fuck was Anna Wintour thinking dressing adults in ostensibly overpriced Halloween Costumes, calling it fashion to descend upon New York City and paying for the privilege of looking like idiots? Talk about out of touch. When a self described Socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is wearing a six figure gown with the message, “Tax the Rich,” folks the irony is not lost there, it is fucking buried. I think someone needs a time out!
Then we have the denial and claims that the current state of affairs with regards to the weather as a 500 year flood. From Alabama, Texas and Tennessee to here in Tri-State area that is some 500 year spread as Sandy was just nine years ago. At least I can do the math. As one clean up begins another continues. This is climate change folks and if you are denying it at this point it may be time for a time out for you!
As for the Covid vaxx deniers. Let’s start with the South, the region of the country going out of its way to deny voting rights to ensure that the majority is ruled by the minority. Again, going with that math thing – when you have 70% of your population not voting by choice or because of convoluted laws to ensure that you have a minority, 30% of the population deciding who will represent you and create said laws that are equally convoluted about a myriad of subjects. Such as the weird ass Abortion law of Texas, written by a religious zealot, male of course. And the equally wierd ass gun law in Missouri which is the Abortion law only about guns. So this is why the South gets the stereotype notion they are hicks and dicks. Well that is partially true but they are the loudest voices in the room and that dick swinging takes up a lot of energy. Yet they are also the biggest liars and hypocrites I have ever met. The Southern Conundrum I call it where they say one thing, do another and blame Jesus. Tennessee has quite restrictive mandates when it comes to vaccinations as does Mississippi. Why? Well the issues are racist and public health in mind, the priority is of course neither it is about the most critical thing – money. The reason being is that these are states with poor public health programs and hospitals and why? Black people. The poor in the South are by far largely faces of color but they are not the majority: however, the largest driver in their economies are jobs without insurance and deceent wages and the reality is that by having everyone inoculated it saves medical care costs if a pandemic arises. Covid is such an example as right now Tennessee has the largest cases of Covid per capita.. As a result profitable and needed surgeries and treatments that keep hospitals going (I was going to say alive but felt it was an inappropriate pun) cannot schedule them, as in this case. So it is time for the Legislatures to wake up and take a time out on this bullshit.
Be that it was MANDATED to be vaccinated at the Met Gala last night, Nikki Minaj, apparently missed out, the story being something to do with the mandate but also with some family members testicle, but she is like many in the Black community – unvaxxed. Hey folks, if Little Nas X, or whatever his name is, can show up, wear three outfits it says that yes it is fine to be vaccinated as I am sure he is not risking his balls. He is our new Gaga. And on that I can make even an exception for him but the others not so much. He gets no time out!
And the last time out I want to give is to the uneducated. A week ago the Wall Street Journal did an article about how men, across color lines, are dropping out of College and joining a long line of those who are uneducated and in turn working for less and feeling isolated as again women are, across color lines, attending college in 2:1 ratio. That said it has been like this for decades and little has changed with regards to pay equity for women, regardless of color and with women of color making substantially less that their white counterparts in same said jobs. But overall the reality is that women are still picking up the check and paying for it. As pink collar jobs still require licensing and credentials and still pay shit. The equivalent blue collar ones for men do not. Time out on that!
We are a stupid lot of sheep. We are afraid and we take no for an answer quite often and yet when you choose not, including Ms. Minaj, you are mocked, derided and often “canceled.” What we have is a culture of talking AT you not WITH you. Active listening, asking questions is not wrong as that is how you grow. Take a Time Out and try it, you may be surprised.
Off the Rack Publishing 