@betsyphillips.bsky.social tears into TN Gov. Bill Lee's proclamation of Nuclear Family Month: "Can you even imagine the delusional gall it takes to sit in a state built through the enslavement of people talking about how Tennessee was built on one man, one woman and their kids?"@nashvillescene.com
Great conversation this week with @emyellin.bsky.social! She co-wrote the new memoir NONVIOLENT, with the late Rev. James Lawson Jr., who trained generations of civil rights leaders and activists. His life and guiding ideas provide a through-line of fights for justice, from the 1950s to the 2020s.
Young Democrats in the South? They're not mythological beasts. This week: talking to the leaders of the newly organized Knox County Young Democrats, in one of the most Republican parts of Tennessee. Also: those slippery Texas social studies standards, and Florida's war on sociology.
Virginia will no longer issue Robert E. Lee commemorative license plates. Democratic Del. Dan Helmer of Fairfax: "The Confederacy and its leaders do not deserve our commemoration, and its adherents certainly do not deserve taxpayer dollars.”
This week: a pleasure to talk with journalist @jazmineulloa.bsky.social about her excellent new book on the past and present of El Paso. Also: Dems flip two legislative seats in Florida; Louisiana leads the way in forcing schools to post the 10 Commandments; and a purse museum in Little Rock.
How bad is the air in Louisiana's Cancer Alley? Even worse than you think. Johns Hopkins scientists Peter DeCarlo and Keeve Nachman sampled the 85-mile corridor and found toxin levels up to 10X higher than previously reported. They walk through the findings on this week's episode. (link below)
Tennessee has two school voucher programs. The older, smaller one requires state testing and reporting of scores. The newer, statewide one does not. The older one has shown underperformance by voucher students. So now the Legislature is getting ready to scrap those test requirements too.
Some prominent Republican sheriffs in Florida are questioning Trump's mass deportation program.
floridaphoenix.com/2026/03/16/f...
This week: Talking immigration politics and more with Georgia state Sen. Kim Jackson @kimforgeorgia.bsky.social. Plus: rising right-wing radicalism in Florida and Texas, and a look at the multicultural work of Ballet Nepantla.
theprogressivesouth.org/headlights-e...
William Wolfe and the Center for Baptist Leadership are bringing MAGA politics and ethno-nationalism into the heart of the Southern Baptist Convention.
baptistnews.com/article/sbc-...
A raft of primaries and one special election in the South brought new faces into the spotlight and offered clues about this fall’s midterms. We take a look at the U.S. Senate race in Texas, anti-establishment votes in both parties in N.C., and an Arkansas state House district that flipped blue.
This week, we're letting the private prison profiteers speak for themselves — with some annotations. You can hear the leaders of CoreCivic brag about their 2025 contracts with ICE. And also some things about their prisons that they forgot to mention to shareholders.
sites.libsyn.com/576820/ep-43...
That created the Jim Crow system, which lasted most of a hundred years and oppressed millions of people for generations.
The centrist impulse to offer up the LGBTQ community as a sacrifice in order to achieve "peace" in the wokeness wars is exactly the sentiment that led to the industrial north giving up enforcement of racial equality in exchange for getting the country back humming again after the Civil War.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn is a cheerleader for ICE and the mass detention and deportation of immigrants. But she has made sure ICE won't put a detention camp of 16,000 prisoners in white, affluent, Republican Wilson County.
On back to back days, the Tennessee Valley Authority reversed course on plans to close two massive coal-fired power plants, and the Trump administration abandoned federal regulation of greenhouse gases. We talked about it with Steve Smith of @cleanenergy.org.
“They’re very intentionally staffing the Department of Education office with these ultraconservative ideologues.”
www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...
Terrific reporting from @nashvillebanner.bsky.social.
"Footage also captured a pattern of demeaning conduct from law enforcement, who used a mix of pejoratives to describe the targets ... as teams of law enforcement apparently competed to detain the most people."
The great @jimhightower.com recalls his work with Jesse Jackson. When we talked to Hightower last fall, he said that Jackson in 1988 ran "the only intentionally racially inclusive populist campaign in recent American history."
This week: How the @selc.bsky.social is fighting for environmental protections in the South. We talk to Program Director Geoff Gisler about the first year of Trump 2.0, and what's ahead. Also: more on the FBI's seizure of Georgia ballots, and a look at Ella Langley's "Choosin' Texas."
Alabama Power produces some of the dirtiest and most expensive electricity in the country. This week, we talk to @insideclimatenews.org reporter @dennispillion.bsky.social about why that is. Also: What does Taylor Rehmet’s win in a red district mean for Texas? sites.libsyn.com/576820/ep-40...
