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    Eastern Tennessee Officials Brace Residents for ‘Life Lost’ After Helene

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    There has been “life lost” in Tennessee, an emergency official in the state said on Saturday evening, making it the sixth state where people have been killed by Hurricane Helene, which ravaged the Southeast and left more than 50 dead this week.Jimmy Erwin, the director of emergency management in Unicoi County, Tenn., fought back tears at a news conference as he said there had been some deaths in the storm. He declined to say how many people had died, and the police chief in Erwin, Tenn., Regan Tilson, said no bodies had yet been recovered.Mr. Erwin said five or six people remained missing — a list winnowed significantly from more than 30 missing people earlier in the day — and that search and rescue teams would be looking for people along the Nolichucky River until nightfall. They would then pick back up first thing in the morning.A shelter has been set up at Unicoi County High School.David Kasnic for The New York TimesIn Erwin, Tenn., officials said it could be a week before some in the area have electricity again. David Kasnic for The New York Times“We didn’t think we’d be here today,” Mr. Erwin said. Many residents are without water or power, and he said it could be a week before the electricity returns for some. The county also lost its water treatment plant, and he said anyone with water should boil their drinking water. Showers are being set up at a shelter at a local high school for residents to use.Scenes of devastation abounded throughout the hilly, green Appalachian county of 17,000, particularly in and around Erwin, where a baptist church was surrounded by rubble, and a crumpled R.V. sat in a parking lot filled with debris. Downed trees lay on an impassable highway that cuts through the town.Cody Scott, a Unicoi County commissioner, said he had never seen flooding in the county this bad. His brother had checked on the family’s farm on Friday afternoon and been shaken by what he saw.The Nolichucky River in Erwin, Tenn, contained trees that drifted downstream. David Kasnic for The New York Times“He couldn’t believe his eyes,” Mr. Scott said. “It’s devastated the community.”He said he and his family were evaluating how many trucks, tractors, pumps and other farm equipment they had lost, as well as how much of the farmland was flooded, but that he was most worried about his constituents who had lost homes. He said he was holding out hope that those missing would be found.“The longer it goes, in any type of search and rescue situation, that’s not what you want to hear,” he said. More

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      Why fascists hate universities | Jason Stanley

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      In Bangladesh, something remarkable has happened. Initially in response to a quota system that reserved the majority of government jobs for specific groups, university students initiated large-scale non-violent protests. Bangladesh’s increasingly autocratic prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, responded essentially with “let them eat cake.” Instead of calming the protests down, Hasina’s response made the protests grow nationwide.In mid-July, the government responded with extreme violence, with police gunning down hundreds of students and shutting down the internet across the country. Scenes of extreme police brutality flooded social media. By the end of July, the protests had grown into a nationwide pro-democracy movement. Eventually, the military joined the students, and Hasina fled the country. A nationwide student-led democracy movement successfully challenged a violent autocratic leader, and, at least for now, appears to have won.Bangladesh’s non-violent student movement has not gone unnoticed in neighboring countries. In Pakistan, the popular former prime minister and leader of the opposition party, Imran Khan, was jailed a year ago, an act dictated by Pakistan’s military. Media companies were instructed not to mention his name, quote his words, or show his picture. Members of his opposition party were imprisoned. But something astonishing has begun there. Motivated by the success of the student-led pro-democracy movement in Bangladesh, the Pakistan Students Federation declared an ultimatum for the government: free Khan by 30 August or face nationwide student protests.What has happened in Bangladesh and now could happen in Pakistan is the nightmare of every autocratic regime. Authoritarians and would-be authoritarians are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent. Attacks on universities are the canary in the coalmine of fascism.Narendra Modi, India’s autocratic Hindu nationalist prime minister, has ruled the country since 2014. Attacking India’s elite universities as “anti-India” is a hallmark of his government. Similarly, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, started a political campaign with an attack on Central European University in Budapest, with demagogic rhetoric directed against its supposed spreading of “gender ideology”. With the use of legislation, Orbán’s government went so far as to drive the university out of the country.The situation is structurally the same in the United States – would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, is an aspiring autocrat who has used the myth of widespread voter fraud to severely restrict minority voting. (Voter fraud practically never happens in the United States; rigorous investigation estimated it as between 0.0003 and 0.0025%.) DeSantis also created an office of election crimes and security, to pursue supposed cases of voter fraud.Besides minority voting populations, DeSantis has focused on public and higher education as central targets. According to an AAUP report by the special committee on political interference and academic freedom in Florida’s public education system in May 2023, “academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history.” The committee’s final report reveals an atmosphere of intimidation and indeed terror, as the administrative threat to public university professors has been shown to be very real.Even more so than Florida, Tennessee is a one-party state, with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature. The Tennessee house and senate passed a resolution to honor the Danube Institute; on the floor of the Tennessee house, the state representative Justin Jones questioned why the state was honoring the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s thinktank. Tennessee has a state ban on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, one that includes public universities. To report a professor for teaching such a concept (such as intersectionality), Tennessee provides an online form.Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably center on universities, and vice versa. The Yale Law School graduate and current Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has claimed that the 2020 election should not have been certified because of suspicion of voter fraud. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, Vance also proclaimed, echoing Richard Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.”In the fall of 2023, in response to Israel’s brutal retaliation in Gaza for Hamas’s terrorist attack, anti-genocide protests erupted in American universities, with the active participation of a significant number of Jewish students. These anti-genocide protests were labeled as pro-Hamas and used as a basis to attack elite universities, their students, their professors and their administrations, verbally, politically and physically. It is not implausible to take the goal to have been, at least largely, a preliminary show of police power to university students.In the United States, the Republican party has long been aware of the democratic potential of student movements. As it lurches closer and closer to authoritarianism, it will, like all rightwing authoritarian movements worldwide, seek to crush dissent, starting with university students and faculty. With great courage and determination, the students in Bangladesh have shown that this strategy can be made to backfire.

      Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and author of Erasing History: How Fascists rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Gun reform advocates embrace a new tactic: running for office

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      After losing her son to gun violence, Shaundelle Brooks knew she had to do something big.Brooks’ son, Akilah DaSilva, was killed in a mass shooting at a Nashville Waffle House in 2018 that left four dead and two wounded. His death launched Brooks into advocacy.While still mourning, Brooks fought for gun reform at the Tennessee legislature. Testifying in front of lawmakers, she evoked DaSilva in her demands for more restrictive gun laws. “I realized quickly that I had lost my child, but didn’t want to lose any more children or see another mom go through what I’ve been through,” she said. “I learned to channel my grief into action.”While Brooks felt empowered as an organizer, she also faced real challenges. Lawmakers shut down her proposals. Gun owners harassed her, claiming that if DaSilva had been carrying a gun, he would have been able to protect himself. Brooks would leave the statehouse in tears, heartbroken by the lack of accountability she witnessed. “I thought: ‘I have to do more than what I’m doing. I have to find ways to get through,’” Brooks said.So in February, Brooks announced her bid for a seat in the Tennessee state House of Representatives. On 1 August, she’ll be vying in the Democratic primary.View image in fullscreenPropelled by and fed up with what they see as a lack of progress when it comes to addressing America’s epidemic of gun violence, many activists like Brooks, who have felt the effects of gun violence first hand, are embracing a new tactic: running for elected office. For political organizers, this group represents a promising new cohort, whose members, if elected, may finally move the needle on gun reform.“There is a new wave of activists-turned-candidates, particularly among women and mothers, who are no longer willing to stand by,” Brooks said. “How can we not think about our kids?”Pinpointing the moments that led them to run for office comes easily to these candidates.For Emily Busch, who is running for a US congressional seat in Michigan, it was the November 2021 mass shooting at Oxford high school, where her son was a freshman, that propelled her to action. The event left four dead and seven injured. “My son ran for his life with 1,700 other kids,” Busch said. “It’s something that you never ever want to experience, which is why I’m running.”At a school board meeting held shortly after, Busch was appalled that masking received more attention than gun safety. “It wasn’t until the third or fourth person got up to speak that they actually addressed that four children had just been murdered two weeks before,” she recalled.Busch began organizing, urging neighbors and fellow parents to support gun reform legislation like universal background checks and safe storage requirements. She was then asked to run for state representative in a heavily Republican district in 2022 – but lost. Undeterred, her eyes are now set on Washington, as she readies for the Democratic primary on 6 August.For those who have lost loved ones, championing gun reform has served as a way to carry grief.Rhonda Hart, who is running in Texas’ 14th congressional district, “went full tilt into volunteer and activism” after her daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was killed. Vaughan was one of 10 people murdered in the 2018 Santa Fe high school shooting.“You can sit here and be sad 24/7 and twiddle your thumbs, or, for me, I needed to get up and do something,” Hart said. So, in 2019, Hart began working on a bill in her daughter’s name that focused on preventative measures, such as safe storage and gun safety educational programs.View image in fullscreenThe US House passed the Kimberly Vaughan Firearm Safe Storage Act last session, but Hart, a disabled veteran, was surprised by the amount of resistance she faced along the way. Her own congressman, Republican Randy Weber – now her opponent – refused to support it, even after she and other advocates traveled to DC to meet with him after the 2022 Uvalde mass shooting. Weber has a record of supporting pro-gun legislation, including bills that would increase police presence at schools and allow gun owners to carry a firearm on school grounds.An enraged Hart knew then and there that if she wanted effective legislation to be passed, she would have to do it herself. “If anybody has an axe to grind and a story to tell, it’s me,” Hart said. “We don’t want these people to go uncontested.”Brooks says gun violence survivors and their loved ones are in a unique position to convince others of the pressing need for reform.“I think we’re going to be more passionate because we’ve experienced it,” she said, emphasizing the growing need for “leaders who understand this issue on a personal level and who can bring authentic, passionate advocacy to the legislative process”.That same vision is driving progressive groups to find more candidates who are willing to run for office on gun violence platforms. Last February, nearly 50 new candidates gathered in Las Vegas with Demand a Seat, an initiative to train gun safety advocates to run for office and work on campaigns offered by advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety. At the four-day boot camp, participants received mentorship from veteran politicians, training in the fundamentals of campaign building and guidance in how to effectively elevate a gun safety platform.The program capitalizes on a trend that gun safety advocates have been witnessing for several years. “Gun safety is actually good politics now, it’s not just good policy,” said Moms Demand Action’s executive director, Angela Ferrell-Zabala. “Folks [are] choosing to run and win on gun safety.”View image in fullscreenSince 2021, more than 250 volunteers from Everytown alone have been elected into office, and the organization has a 58%-win rate, said Ferrell-Zabala. And while a decade ago, half of congressional Democrats had A-ratings from the National Rifle Association (NRA), today, that number is zero. Down-ballot races are especially important to this electoral strategy, with almost 95% of the program’s volunteers-turned-candidates running in state and local elections.Participants in the program – and gun reform candidates more broadly – share more than their experiences as gun safety advocates and gun violence survivors. They are also connected by gender and parenthood: the cohort is “overwhelmingly” made up of women and mothers, explained Ferrell-Zabala. “We intentionally aim to empower people who may never have thought they could run for office, like women and mothers – especially Black and brown survivors of gun violence,” she said.Members of the so-called “mass shooting generation” themselves are also entering races, taking inspiration from young progressives who won seats during the 2022 midterms. Most notable is Florida’s Maxwell Frost, the first member of gen Z to be elected to US Congress after serving as national organizing director for March for Our Lives, the gun control advocacy group founded after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.Earlier this year, 19-year-old Navian Scarlett, a vocal gun safety organizer just two years out of high school, ran for school board in Frederick county, Maryland. While she lost her bid in April, Scarlett’s candidacy offered insight into how violence prevention policy is felt by youth on the ground.As an adolescent, she felt the ripples of gun violence on numerous occasions: first when members of her high school basketball team were shot and wounded on campus, and again when shots rang out at a prom after-party that her brother attended. Days after that party, her school ran an active shooter drill that she says traumatized the student body. “I witnessed students having breakdowns. Some of them were curled up with their knees to their chests rocking back and forth and crying,” she said. “It wasn’t as effective for students as [school leaders] may have thought.”For her, that disconnect speaks to the importance of having youth voices in the movement.In Nashville, Brooks says that when the the race catches up with her, she remembers why she is running in the first place.She’s proposing expanding background checks, striking down laws that allow gun owners carry without permits and elevating red flag laws, something she said could have saved her son. “Akilah could have been here,” she said, explaining that the man who killed him had a mental illness and had previously had his gun taken away.“The journey has been transformative. It has shown me that from immense loss can come a powerful drive to create a better world.” More

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      City Illegally Fined Woman Over Profane Political Yard Sign, U.S. Judge Rules

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      A federal judge in Tennessee said that it was unconstitutional for the City of Lakeland, Tenn., to fine Julie Pereira for the sign she posted expressing disapproval of President Biden and Donald J. Trump.A federal judge in Tennessee ruled this week that it was unconstitutional for a city to fine a woman who had displayed a sign in her yard that used profane language to express disapproval of both President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.The woman, Julie Pereira, 40, of Lakeland, Tenn., who posted the sign, which said “Fuck Em’ Both 2024,” in January, was fined hundreds of dollars by the city. It told her that the political sign violated its municipal code because it was obscene.In June, Ms. Pereira sued Lakeland in federal court, arguing that she had a First Amendment right to post the sign in her yard.Judge Mark S. Norris of U.S. District Court in Memphis, said in an order issued on Tuesday that Ms. Pereira’s yard sign was not obscene, and that it was unconstitutional for the city of Lakeland to take action against Ms. Pereira over the sign.Judge Norris ordered the city to reimburse her for nearly $700 in fines and pay Ms. Pereira damages of $1 for violating her First Amendment rights, according to the order. Ms. Pereira was also awarded legal fees of $31,000. The judge also barred the city from taking any additional action against her.Julie Pereira’s sign in her yard in Lakeland, Tenn. She won her lawsuit against the city of Lakeland after they fined her hundreds of dollars for putting up the sign.Julie PereiraWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Tennessee Law Banning Transition Care for Minors

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      The move comes as states around the country have pushed to curtail transgender rights.The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a Tennessee law that bans certain medical treatments for transgender minors violates the Constitution.The move means the court will for the first time hear arguments on the issue of medical care for transgender youth.The Biden administration had asked the justices to take up the case, United States v. Skrmetti, arguing that the measure outlaws treatment for gender dysphoria in youths and “frames that prohibition in explicitly sex-based terms.”In the government’s petition to the court, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote that the law bans transgender medical care but that it “leaves the same treatments entirely unrestricted if they are prescribed for any other purpose.”Federal courts have splintered over laws aimed at blocking transition care, intensifying pressure on the Supreme Court to intervene. The justices have considered whether to take up the appeals at their private conference each week, but they had repeatedly postponed making a decision.The move comes as states around the country have pushed to curtail transgender rights. Conservative lawmakers have prioritized legislation in recent years that targets gender-transition care and at least 20 Republican-led states have enacted measures restricting access to such medical care for minors.It is also part of a broader effort at legislation aimed at regulating other parts of life, including laws about which bathrooms students and others can use and which sports teams they can play on.This spring, the justices temporarily allowed Idaho to enforce a state ban that limited medical treatment for transgender youth. The law, passed by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature, makes it a felony for doctors to provide transgender medical care for minors, including hormone treatment.The decision in that case, which came to the justices as an emergency application, appeared to split largely along ideological lines, with the court’s liberals dissenting.Along with Idaho, the justices had been asked to weigh in on legislation in Kentucky and Tennessee.The Tennessee measure bans health care providers from offering transition care to minors, including puberty blockers and hormone treatments.The Kentucky law, known as S.B. 150, bans doctors from providing gender-transition surgery or administering puberty blockers or hormone therapy to people under 18.In June 2023, federal judges in both states, in separate rulings, temporarily blocked the laws days before key parts of the laws were set to go into effect.Shortly after, a divided panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned the lower court decision, reinstating the bans. Plaintiffs in Kentucky and Tennessee appealed to the Supreme Court. More

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      How Trump’s Most Loyal Supporters Are Responding to the Verdict

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      Many saw in the jury’s finding a rejection of themselves, of their values and even of democracy itself. The sense of grievance erupted as powerfully as the verdict itself.From the low hills of northwest Georgia to a veterans’ retreat in Alaska to suburban New Hampshire, the corners of conservative America resounded with anger over the New York jury’s declaration that former President Donald J. Trump was guilty.But their discontent was about more than the 34 felony counts that Mr. Trump was convicted on, which his supporters quickly dismissed as politically motivated.They saw in the jury’s finding a rejection of themselves, and the values they believed their nation should uphold. Broad swaths of liberal America may have found long-awaited justice in the trial’s outcome. But for many staunch Trump loyalists — people who for years have listened to and believed Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the system is rigged against him, and them — the verdict on Thursday threatened to shatter their faith in democracy itself.“We are at that crossroads. The democracy that we have known and cherished in this nation is now threatened,” Franklin Graham, the evangelist, said in an interview from Alaska. “I’ve got 13 grandchildren. What kind of nation are we leaving them?”Echoing him was Marie Vast, 72, of West Palm Beach, Fla., near Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. “I know a lot of people who say they still believe in our government,” she said, “but when the Democrats can manipulate things this grossly, and use the legal system as a tool to get the outcome they want, the system isn’t working.”Among more than two dozen people interviewed across 10 states on Friday, the sentiments among conservatives were so strong that they echoed the worry and fear that many progressives described feeling after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade almost two years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Keep the door open’: Nashville’s mayor on governing a blue island in a sea of red

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      Tennessee’s legislative session concluded in late April with some laws that alarm liberals, such as a bill to arm teachers and school staff. But the relatively progressive city of Nashville emerged largely unscathed by the GOP-dominated legislature.In fact, Nashville’s legislative fortunes improved markedly this term, with approval for a massive redevelopment project, created at the behest of the mayor, Freddie O’Connell, to accompany the construction of a new stadium for the Tennessee Titans across the river from the city’s tourist-friendly downtown.Nashville is “the San Francisco of Tennessee” in some quarters of the state’s conservative commentariat. The red-state, blue-city dynamic has grown toxic at times. State legislators have sought to chastise Nashville’s leaders – consider the temporary expulsion of state representative Justin Jones after gun protests last year – and curtail the city’s authority. Legislators have sought to wrest control from Nashville’s convention center, its sports authority and its airport authority. They redrew congressional maps to take away its Democratic congressperson.But this year, Nashville’s new mayor has been managing this relationship with better results.Born and raised in Nashville, O’Connell is a software developer and former member of the Nashville metropolitan council who was elected the city’s mayor in 2022.The Guardian spoke with O’Connell during the legislative session, discussing Nashville’s occasionally fraught relationship with conservative state leaders. That conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.Do you sense hostility toward Nashville from the state government?No! So that’s what’s interesting. This year, after sensing it strongly last year, I would say our administration and I personally have a sense of relief that the hostility toward the city has maybe subsided somewhat.To what do you attribute this state of detente that you’re describing?We’ve been working on it. I don’t want the city to be at war, right? We know there will be values and policy disagreements, not just between urban and rural parts of the state, but certainly among policymakers at various levels. There’s just no reason to then add to that a permanent posture of war and hostility. If we have a better relationship, these are the places where you can succeed. A lot of times that’s the fundamentals of governance: things like infrastructure and economic development. That’s where city and state succeed together most effectively. So we want to keep the door open to that.Atlanta has had a string of mayors with widely varied relationships with the state of Georgia. The dynamic may be similar to Nashville and Tennessee: a state with a love-hate relationship with its largest city. Does that rhyme with what you’ve got going on?I think it does, to some extent. I’ve said from the get-go that we’re going to defend the city from constitutional overreach in the places where it’s obvious. Our legal department has had a very good track record in defending us in those moments. But this goes to exactly what I’m talking about: we did not stun the state with a lawsuit over the sports authority after I took office. We picked up the phone and said, “We believe we see constitutional issues with this, and our legal department is going to file a suit.” And in that moment, we did two things at the same time: we followed our principles of no surprises and open communication, and we also followed our principles of existential right to exist.The red state-blue city dynamic exists in a lot of southern states. New Orleans and Louisiana. Montgomery and Alabama. Look at Nashville, which was split up into three congressional districts.That’s a big challenge for us when we don’t have a single member of Congress who lives in the city of Nashville right now.So what does that do to Nashville?Well, it’s a little soon to say. I guess the silver lining here is the community-level staff we’ve seen in the congressional offices has actually been fairly present and responsive. So that’s good.But instead of having one easy place to send people for passport services or to talk about federal policy issues, you have to be a lot more mindful of … “wait a second, which district is this again?” I think we’re still waiting to see what it means in terms of the federal appropriations process. Are we going to be seeing partnerships and federal project dollars that come into the city of Nashville, versus trying to redirect those to only rural and exurban areas? We don’t know that part yet. But I think that’s a big concern.View image in fullscreenGiven that Nashville no longer has a Democratic congressperson representing its Democratic political majority, to what degree do you view yourself as a progressive leader in a state that is not politically progressive overall? Do you believe that you have a particular role to play in that regard?I will say, I will spend my time in office trying to make progress for the people in Nashville in places we need progress most desperately. That really is in areas addressing cost of living and quality of life. We’ve seen the city grow tremendously, which on the one hand is exciting, but on the other hand is disruptive and expensive.I would argue that it is very progressive to pursue ambitious transportation and transit. I guess it’s funny, I just learned a new phrase from a friend, who’s a former colleague on the metro council: “blue meat”. I think, maybe, there are people in our progressive ecosystem here in Nashville who would prefer that I throw out more pieces of blue meat.But I feel like, especially in an executive role where our local government is, in fact, nonpartisan, my sense has been that we want to deliver high-quality city services. We want to make sure people have trust and confidence in local government. And that specifically lets us make the kinds of progress people need to drive down their cost of living to improve the quality of city services, to do the things that government is supposed to do.You’re talking about the basics of governance, and not the big political conflicts like the abortion argument or gun rights or whatnot.And here’s the thing: we need people in the partisan fray, and some people enjoy being in the partisan fray. We need to win elections to let us have an easier time defending Nashville’s interests and values. And that’s great, because the nice part is these things aren’t mutually exclusive. I’m here to be very serious about governing, and to try to create outcomes and make it easier to live in the city of Nashville, because we know a lot of people want to accomplish that goal. It’s Music City. It’s a great city. We want to keep it that way.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI love Nashville. This conversation is a privilege for me, in part because I get to tell the mayor of Nashville that I associate Nashville with the sound of wooooh! all the time. Because the last time I visited, I became keenly aware that this was the bachelorette capital of the universe, and every five minutes, I would hear 10 women off in the distance going wooooh! In my household, we can’t refer to Nashville without one or the other of us saying wooooh! [Mildly rankled] Well, I will say it’s not the Nashville of my youth. In some ways, I hope that that limited view is not the Nashville of our future.I think that’s actually where we’re trying to steer the conversation of the east bank. We’d like to develop something that is not a junior version of an entertainment district, but rather something that reflects the best practices of contemporary cities. Something that if you basically get to start from scratch, does it have the principles that will attract locals?So less wooooh! and more, you know, workspace and coffee shops and neighborhood restaurants.Right. Places for people to stroll along the Cumberland River, and the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. Fingers crossed, it will have a beautiful new home over there. And so, yes, the Titans will be playing football over there. But also, there will be all-ages experiences and people living there, which is critically important. Deeply affordable. Long-term affordable.There is a contingent of conservative politicians who get elected by running against big cities, saying: “I am going to keep that liberal city in check.” Does that interfere with the kind of nuts-and-bolts economic development you’re talking about?It could. And we’ll see. I think the state through the years used to respond pretty favorably toward the principles of economic development, but I do think it has come into vogue to run against Nashville, almost as if we were Tennessee’s San Francisco. Maybe that gets you points in a rural Republican primary?It’s a different political environment nationally. And some of that, I think, does trickle downhill to the point where the attention economy says we have to make sure there’s an other out there somewhere. Sometimes I’ve got to be available to do myth-busting and dispel things you might see on Facebook or here at a county commission meeting that just have no reference in actual reality.Do you have a good example of that?I’ve been called comrade by people in Williamson county and Sumner county. It’s like, hey guys: you know we actually have a socialist on the metro council and it isn’t me.There’s a Tucker Carlson-ization of conversation around urban politics and big cities: a general attack on urban America as unsafe and corrupt. It seems off to apply that to Nashville. Do you find yourself fending off attacks like this?I don’t know that it’s an obligation, but it’s truly out there. I mean, you can look at Sumner county commission meetings.If you watch those meetings, they’re absolutely decrying Nashville as just this absolutely absurd … it’s like a fantasia of the most ridiculous types of political rhetoric that are out there right now. And so, I find that being personally involved, being present … There’s value in seeing each other as people.It’s really hard to get all worked up about somebody who’s standing in front of you and is not glowing with demonic energy.The best example is I know is the governor. We are going to disagree on many things about our ideology and political outlook. But I’ve also known him long enough to know I absolutely have a respect for him, because just as I don’t spend my idle time throwing out a tremendous amount of blue meat, he doesn’t spend a lot of his time throwing red meat in that way. He doesn’t spend a lot of time jumping up and down on Nashville. I think that’s a meaningful distinction between some of the other governors we’ve seen around the country who have made that their thing. It’s like the hobby industry of politics is just to see how mean you can be to other people.Do you see any additional pre-emptive threats coming your way?There were bills that entered the discourse this year. I guess the sense of relief I have as the session comes to a close is that nothing materialized there that was specifically anti-Nashville. More

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      Tennessee legislature passes bill banning marriage between first cousins

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      The Republican-led Tennessee legislature has overwhelmingly voted to send the Republican governor, Bill Lee, a proposal that would ban marriage between first cousins.The statehouse cast a 75-2 vote on Thursday on the bill after the senate previously approved it without any opposition.A particularly vocal opponent, the Republican representative Gino Bulso, took up most of the debate time, as he argued for an amendment to allow first-cousin marriages if the couple first seeks counseling from a genetic counselor.In a previous committee hearing on the bill, Bulso lightheartedly shared a story about how his grandparents had been first cousins who came to the US from Italy in the 1920s, then traveled from Ohio to Tennessee to get married. He and other lawmakers laughed, and Bulso voted for the bill in that committee.Then, during Thursday’s floor debate, the socially conservative attorney argued that the risk of married cousins having a child with birth defects does not exist for gay couples. He contended there was no compelling government interest to ban same-sex cousins from getting married, saying that would run afoul of the US supreme court’s gay marriage decision.He also couched his argument by saying that he thought the supreme court decision on gay marriage was “grievously wrong”. Bulso has supported legislation aimed at the LGBTQ+ community, including a bill he is sponsoring that would largely ban displaying Pride flags in public school classrooms, which civil liberties advocates have contended runs afoul of the US constitution.“The question is: is there a public health issue with a male marrying a male first cousin?” Bulso said. “And I think the answer is no.”Ultimately, lawmakers voted down Bulso’s amendment and approved the ban proposed by the Democratic representative Darren Jernigan.“I hope it’s safe to say that in 2024, we can close this loophole,” Jernigan said.Jernigan said a 1960 attorney general’s opinion determined that an 1820s Tennessee law restricting some marriages among relatives does not prevent first cousins from marrying. He responded to Bulso that there was no violation to the gay marriage ruling in his bill.Monty Fritts, a Republican representative, was the other lawmaker to vote against the bill. More