Flyer staffers Chris McCoy and Bruce VanWyngarden went out to get some fresh views of the shrinking Mississippi River on Thursday. Here are some of their shots. VanWyngarden hitched a boat ride from local river expert John Gary. McCoy and several friends hiked along the Arkansas side.
On Sunday, former President Donald Trump attacked American Jews on his Truth Social platform. His message: Jews in the United States need to “get their act together” and show more appreciation for the state of Israel and Donald Trump “before it is too late.”
That concluding sentence caused a lot of blowback from Jewish groups, who saw Trump’s post as a veiled threat and a thinly disguised message to his MAGA and white supremacist base that Jews were a problem. It was remarks like these that got Trump banned from Twitter and led to his forming Truth Social, where his audience is relatively minuscule but where he can post whatever lies and racist tropes that arise in his addled brain without constraint.
Speaking of addled brains: Earlier in the week, wealthy rapper and confirmed lunatic, Kanye West, offered his own anti-Semitic post on Twitter, stating he was going to “go death con 3 [sic] on JEWISH PEOPLE.” He later posted that George Floyd was not murdered but died of a Fentanyl overdose (a racist trope that was disproved at trial). West was banned from Twitter and restricted on Instagram for his remarks, but he immediately announced that he was going to buy the troubled wanna-be-Twitter social medium, Parler.
Meanwhile, the world’s richest man, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was nearing a final deal to take over Twitter, the most influential social medium for news and opinion in the world. Musk’s recent remarks on the war in Ukraine make it clear he is a Putin enabler, which could be a problem. Musk has also stated that when he takes over Twitter he will “reduce content moderation” and will allow “all speech that stops short of violating the law,” meaning Trump, Kanye, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other racists currently banned from Twitter would be reinstated and allowed to spew whatever garbage they want, as long as it’s “legal.” And meaning that Truth Social, Parler, and Twitter would all be owned by egocentric billionaires. Good times.
This is nothing new, of course. American mass media has long been dominated by wealthy men who used their influential mass-media platforms to further their own ambitions and political views. In the early 20th century, William Randolph Hearst owned 30 influential newspapers that featured lurid stories on crime, corruption, politics, and sex. Hearst controlled the editorial positions and political news in his papers and is considered to have almost single-handedly influenced the United States to declare war on Spain and invade Cuba in 1898.
Little has changed. Consider Rupert Murdoch (Fox News, Wall Street Journal), Michael Bloomberg (Forbes, Business Week), Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, Amazon), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Facebook, Instagram). Throw in Musk and Twitter, and that’s a lot of influence and power in the hands of five* self-interested billionaires.
Republicans, the majority of whom are now election deniers and Trump enablers, are naturally quite happy about the possibility of these three social mediums being owned by their kind of people. The official GOP House Judiciary Committee tweeted last week: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” Not subtle, and even more disturbing when you consider that the anti-Semitic garbage Trump and Kanye posted garnered no criticism from any Republican of note.
We are three weeks out from a midterm election that no one seems to have a handle on. The polls are all over the place, with most indicating the Democrats will hold the Senate and lose the House. Still, no one knows, and accurate polling has never been more difficult. When was the last time you answered a call from an unknown number to take a poll? Democrats can take hope from this summer’s landslide pro-choice vote in deep-red Kansas, which the polls missed by double-digit percentage points. Republicans can take hope from the fact that a hypocritical, prevaricating moron like Herschel Walker is polling competitively in the Georgia Senate race, a staggering indictment of the electorate.
In addition to the election drama, Trump is facing multiple indictments in state and federal courts, with the DOJ hovering, waiting for the election to be over before making any moves in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. What we’ve learned after six years of Trump-induced chaos is that democracy is a fragile thing, and that rough water is likely still ahead. Buckle up.
*Editor’s note: In an earlier version of this story, Warren Buffett was listed as one of the billionaire newspaper owners. Buffett divested his newspaper holdings in 2020.
In the morning, I like to sit out on our little deck. There’s a flower garden, a birdbath, a seed feeder, and a steady stream of feathery friends zipping in and out from the surrounding trees. I enjoy watching them while figuring out the daily Wordle and sipping a Nespresso. And yes, I realize that this is probably the nerdiest possible way to begin a day.
Or so you thought. Now let me crank the nerd-level knob up to 11: I also turn on a Bird Song app on my iPhone that lets me know which birds are within earshot. A couple days ago, the app alerted me to the presence of three birds I’d never seen before: a golden-crowned kinglet, a Kentucky warbler, and the fantastically named yellow-rumped warbler. Maybe there’s a migration happening, I thought, while staring through my binoculars at a golden-headed little bird in the magnolia. Colorful birds were flitting about everywhere. Hummingbirds were buzzing in the salvia. It was like the bird-nerd Super Bowl.
On the Flyer Slack channel a half-hour later, I couldn’t resist letting my co-workers know my exciting news. I even sent a screenshot of my bird app. One of them responded with a meme that read: “One minute you are young and cool, maybe even a little dangerous, and the next minute you are reading Amazon reviews for birdseed.”
Ouch! Why you young whippersnapper! You have no idea how cool and dangerous I used to be. I was once hauled to a cop car wearing zip-tie cuffs and tossed in the back seat. The officer didn’t even do the “watch-your-head” move as he shoved me in. Before that, the police had literally broken down my front door and searched my house room to room, even tossing dresser drawers. Then they hauled me and my roommates off to jail — for the horrendous crime of possessing marijuana.
This was back in the early 1970s, when I was busy cramming four years of college into seven — dropping out to work or travel for a few months, then returning to classes for a semester. I lived with four other guys in a big old dump of a house in Columbia, Missouri. In those days, mere possession of pot could send you to jail, and one of the neighbors had ratted us out. Maybe it was the pungent plumes of ditch-weed pouring off our front porch every night that set her off. I dunno. Either that or the repetitive playing of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” off that Iron Butterfly album. We really dug the eight-minute drum solo. (In retrospect, we should have gone to jail for that.)
Anyway, the cops found some pot in the kitchen, but by the next morning they apparently realized they had no way of determining whose it was — and we weren’t admitting anything, because we were cool, almost dangerously so. Since they really couldn’t charge five of us for possession of a half-bag of weed, the police let us go with a stern warning to lay off the devil’s lettuce. Which we all ignored, even after doing that hard time in the Boone County slammer.
Now, pot is legal or legal-ish in 19 states, with more coming on every year. Everybody from college kids to your great-grandma is gobbling “edibles” and discussing the merits of sativa versus indica. Last week, President Joe “Cheech” Biden issued a blanket pardon for everyone who’d been convicted of marijuana possession under federal charges, which according to The New York Times, is around 6,500 people. That’s a lot of bird-watching geezers, though not enough to swing a national election, as the Foxers are claiming.
The more important part of President Doobie’s statement was his announced intention to get marijuana removed as a Schedule 1 drug. That’s long overdue. Putting pot in the same class with such drugs as fentanyl and heroin has never made any sense.
But I digress. Bottom line: The possession of pot is no longer “dangerous.” It’s not even cool, if everyone is doing it, right? So please, spare me your judgment, kidz. I’ve got some birdseed to order.
When you get your new, blue Tennessee license plates, you can ask for one with “In God We Trust” on it. It doesn’t cost any more and the print is so tiny, you can’t even see it from 20 feet away, but the state of Tennessee has helpfully made it quite easy for you to tell if the car in front of you is driven by a god-fearin’ Tennessean or a heathen: On the “IGWT” plates, numbers are to the left of the center logo and letters are on the right. On the secular plates, the letters are on the left, numbers on the right.
So if, say, a vehicle with license plate BRK-1234 makes an illegal turn from the center lane, it’s probably because he’s going to hell eventually, anyway.
In May, Tennessee counties were surveyed to see which plate their drivers preferred. Some rural counties were more than 90 percent IGWT-ers. Conversely, drivers in big-city counties like Davidson (86 percent) and Shelby (74 percent) favored the secular plate. (Of course, after the incompetent and delayed roll-out of the new plates in Memphis, Shelby Countians can probably be forgiven if they’ve lost their faith.)
All this begs the question: Why is the state mixing religion with license plates? The godly plates are free, so there’s not even a financial reason for it, as there is with other specialty plates you can order.
The answer, of course, is that Governor Bill Lee and our GOP-dominated state legislature would like to push their brand of Christianity on everybody, in any way they can. One has only to look at Lee’s years-long insistence on getting Hillsdale College charter schools established in Tennessee — with our tax dollars, of course.
Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, you may recall, outraged Tennessee educators in August by saying in a speech that teachers are the “dumbest students from the dumbest colleges.” Lee, who was at the speech, nodded calmly, and has yet to criticize Arnn for his remarks.
In response, local school boards in the state have vigorously opposed the granting of charters to Hillsdale, but Lee loaded up the state committee that approves charters with cronies and Hillsdale supporters, so the odds were good that they’d get approved.
That all changed this week, when Nashville television reporter Phil Williams (who’s been all over this story) found a video of Hillsdale professor David Azerrad mocking the achievements of African Americans, including George Washington Carver and the NASA mathematicians in Hidden Figures, saying that putting them in history books kept more deserving white people from being written about.
I wish I were making this up.
Governor Lee, let me remind you, has said of Hillsdale: “I believe their efforts are a good fit for Tennessee.” No, they are not, you mouth-breathing cheeseball. Hillsdale is a racist Christian-nationalist academy whose students’ academic scores are anemic. Last Thursday, Hillsdale withdrew its applications in Tennessee, due in no small part, one assumes, to the racist video being uncovered.
Perhaps, the state can take a lesson from New York. In mid-September, The New York Times broke a story about that city’s Hasidic schools, which get funding from the state, much like what Lee is pushing for in Tennessee. The story revealed that Hasidic schools were flush with government money, but that male Hasidic students were getting only five or six hours a week of secular learning (math, English, history, etc.) and spent 90 percent of the time learning Hebrew and studying religious texts.
The Times also found that rabbis routinely hit students with rulers, belts, and sticks wrapped in electrical tape, and that parents often “tipped” rabbis $100 to keep their boys from being abused. Hasidic boys’ scores in the state’s standard tests were the worst in the city. The state had let the issue slide for years because Hasidic Jews are a monolithic voting bloc that can swing elections in several districts.
There is a reason our Founding Fathers established the separation of church and state. In this country, you have the right to practice any faith you choose, but taking tax dollars to prop up the teaching of religion is patently unconstitutional.
It’s a slippery slope, and it’s wrong. Kind of like providing free specialty license plates for that guy who just cut you off and gave you the finger. Was that you, Governor?
I used to play golf with a regular foursome almost every weekend at Galloway. However, due to injuries, age, and a general lack of desire on our parts to wallow in the Memphis summer heat for four hours, we fell out of the habit. As a result, my clubs have been sitting in my garage all summer, gathering dust.
But last week, when a friend asked me to join a foursome to play nine late-afternoon holes at Mirimichi, the splendid course near Millington that was once owned by Justin Timberlake, I couldn’t resist. I pulled out my clubs and shoes and hosed off the dust — in the process, upsetting a gecko that had taken up residence in my left golf shoe. I drove out to Mirimichi well before our tee time, so I could hit some balls on the practice range. After 15 minutes of hacking, my creaky body finally began finding its way into some semblance of my old swing. This could be ugly, I thought.
It helped that we played from the “old man” white tees, something we used to scoff about, but I was happy to take any advantage offered. A fine time was had by all, and I hit enough decent shots to keep from getting too discouraged — and even made a couple of pars.
At the end of the round, we pulled our carts up to an outdoor bar area for a beer. An older man and his son arrived soon thereafter, and we chatted amiably for a couple minutes about general things — the weather, the course, etc. After a bit, the son said he had to go, but the older fellow (let’s call him Bill) said he was going to hang around a while. “I love you,” they said to each other, as the son walked away.
Bill told us that he didn’t play much anymore and that he just enjoyed riding around the course with his son. Then the conversation took an unexpected turn. Bill let us know that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer and was going regularly to MD Anderson Hospital for treatment. I’m no doctor but I know that prognosis is not a good one. We all offered our sincere wishes for good luck in dealing with his condition, but Bill casually moved on to other subjects: Where do you fellas live? What do you do for a living? That kind of stuff. Then, somehow, the conversation got around to how generally “crazy” things were in the country today, and I started to get a little nervous.
This is precarious conversational turf among strangers these days. You never know who’s going to pull a MAGA rant out of their butts. In fact, earlier in the week, I’d been subjected to a surprise diatribe about how the war in Ukraine was “fake” and was being promoted by the Democrats to help President Biden. This cockamamie spiel, I might add, came from a man whose name every Memphian would recognize. The crazy can come from anywhere, and I certainly had no interest in getting into a political argument with a possibly dying stranger at a golf course bar.
But one of my friends (thanks, Sam) said something to the effect of, “Well, Bruce writes about that stuff every week for the Flyer, you should ask him what he thinks.” I was stuck. And Bill didn’t mess around. “You write for the Flyer?” he asked. “Well, what do you think about Trump?”
I took a sip of my beer and said: “Well, I think he’s a crook and a conman. And I think it’s obvious he stole top-secret government documents and he should be prosecuted for a federal crime, like anyone else would be.”
There was a brief pause, then Bill said, “My son works over there at the naval base in Millington, so I asked him what would happen if he took any documents home. He said they’d arrest him so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him.”
“Well, I think that’s what should happen to anybody who does that,” I said.
Bill didn’t say anything, but he nodded his head a little. I got the feeling he’d been a Trump supporter, but that we were now playing from the same tees.
Memphis experienced some difficult days in early September. It began with the news of the shocking early morning murder of Eliza Fletcher, who was jogging near the University of Memphis. And then, just as we were trying to wrap our heads around that heinous crime, the city was terrorized for hours by a raging gunman who drove around hijacking cars and shooting random people, killing three and wounding four. What the hell was going on?
Predictably, such spectacular crimes made the national news for several nights, helped in no small part by the fact that there were videos and photos available to more easily whet the interest of a national audience. Even British papers were reporting from Memphis.
And everybody had an opinion. Fox misinformation maestro Tucker Carlson weirdly laid the blame on “Liberals like Governor Bill Lee,” which gives you an idea of how accurate Tuck-em’s typical takes are. This is a pundit, after all, who just a couple days earlier claimed that “by any actual reality-based measure, Vladimir Putin is not losing the war in Ukraine.”
But still, Memphis was in the news, and not in a good way. On social media, the “I’m so glad I got out of that hell-hole” crowd was having a field day, which always makes me wonder: If life is so great in Keokuk, how come you’re still wasting your day bitching about Memphis on Facebook? But I digress.
Then the 96-year-old Queen of England did Memphis a solid by dropping dead in Scotland. (Surprisingly, despite the presence of Scotland Yard — which should be nearby, if it isn’t — there are still no suspects.) At any rate, thanks to the long and winding royal drama, Memphis was immediately off the national news radar, for which we were all grateful. As I write this, after 27 days or so of shuttling Queen Elizabeth’s coffin around the country, the Brits are about to have a funeral, it appears. By all accounts — including the Beatles’ — Her Majesty was a pretty nice girl. Godspeed. Now it’s up to King Chuck and Queen Camilla to begin performing the arduous duties of being gratuitously rich, entitled, and powerful for absolutely no reason.
Meanwhile, back in Memphis, as the heat of the national news spotlight cooled, we learned more about the crimes that galvanized us in early September. The Daily Memphian reported Monday that more than a year ago, a young black woman named Alicia Franklin reported a rape by the same man who is alleged to have murdered Fletcher. Her rape kit sat in limbo at a lab in Jackson, Tennessee, for months, and even after repeated calls from Franklin, police apparently felt no urgency to pursue the evidence. It was only when the Fletcher case arose that analyzing the earlier rape kit was expedited. Blame is being cast in several directions, including toward the undeniable fact that the state’s three forensics labs are woefully understaffed and under-budgeted. But the bottom line is, if police had pursued the evidence of the earlier rape with the same urgency they did with the Fletcher case, Fletcher might still be alive.
The Commercial Appeal reported on Sunday that the average time for a rape kit to be processed in Tennessee is 34 weeks. This is absurd and unacceptable. The state legislature needs to address this situation, and quickly. Rape kits should be processed within weeks, not months. And there should be no difference in urgency between a case of “just an average Black girl,” as Franklin described herself in the Daily Memphian, and a wealthy white woman.
All this, I suppose, is something of a prelude to this week’s cover story, “370 Great Things About Memphis.” The city has had some tough going lately and it’s easy during times like these to lose sight of the fact that good things — big and small — are happening every day in Memphis; that good people and caring organizations are doing great things to move us forward, to bring us joy and a sense of pride. We stopped counting at “370 great things” only because of space limitations. We could have listed hundreds more. At any rate, sometimes, it’s good to take a few minutes to count your blessings. It couldn’t hurt.
The Memphis Flyer is now seeking candidates for its editor position. Send your resume to hr@contemporary-media.com.
From the airplane window at 15,000 feet on this sunny August morning, Spain is all shades of brown, skirls of scrubby vegetation and trees on the hilltops, open beige-and-yellow fields on the plains. (Where the rains in Spain fall, mainly, I’ve heard.) We are descending into Madrid on the first day of a 12-day vacation that will take us to places in this country where neither my wife Tatine nor I have ever been.
Madrid is not on the agenda for this trip, except for the airport and Hertz office, where we’re assigned a Lynk & Co SUV, which we’re told is a Chinese/Volvo hybrid. Whatever. It works and rides nicely. And soon we’re off to the country home of Tatine’s sister, a couple hundred miles away, just north of Valencia, near the Mediterranean. Siri gets us to A-3, the main highway south, and we’re off.
It feels like we’re driving through West Texas, except with no billboards to distract from the rolling vistas of dry mountains and green valleys and olive and sunflower fields. The high ground is often covered with windmills. We counted hundreds during our stay. And the south-facing slopes often feature arrays of solar panels. A high-speed train passes us as though we are standing still instead of going 120 kilometers per hour. No monster trucks, no asshole drivers, just small-to-average-sized vehicles zipping along on a perfectly maintained four-lane highway. Did I mention there were no billboards?
Tatine’s sister’s house is set on a couple of acres filled with fruit and olive trees. They have a big garden and chickens for eggs, and the house is cooled and heated with solar power. They are not field hippies, just ordinary people living comfortably in ways that preserve energy costs and help the environment. It’s a way of life here, not a political statement.
Valencia, 20 miles south, has a population of 800,000 or so. The murder rate averages six to eight people a year. In similarly sized Memphis, we had more than 340 murders last year, more than in the entire country of Spain. These are difficult things to justify or explain. But nobody walks into a super-mercado carrying a gun, so there’s that.
I don’t have space in this column to recount all of our further adventures driving around Spain. It was something of a family reunion, with grandchildren showing up from Brooklyn and Tatine’s mother coming over from a nearby village. We managed, in various combinations, to visit some spectacular mountainous country with ancient villages where many of the buildings were erected in the 11th century and where there were cathedrals with Moorish influences from 1,000 years ago. It was a life-affirming, eye-opening visit. Returning to the U.S. after a couple weeks in a country where there is literally no litter, where there are no vile accusations and blatant lies muddying the daily political discourse on television, where people of all races appear to live in harmony, was something of a shock.
No unbiased observer dropping into Memphis (or Nashville or Atlanta or any major American city, to be honest) and spending a few days would have a problem identifying which country was more civilized, more advanced, more livable, less polluted, less worrisome to visit.
We have made a mess of things in the United States, created a political logjam — in our states and in Washington, D.C. — that prevents us from being able to legislate the most logical and basic modern improvements to the country, such as an efficient high-speed rail system, or universal healthcare, or hell, just removing the prolific visual pollution of billboards from our beautiful landscape. We’re still fighting over oil prices and who’s to blame for them, while Spain (and Portugal) have moved ahead into a world where they don’t worry about the whims of a Saudi prince or Vladimir Putin buckling their economy or leaving them in the cold.
We are so far behind. We can do so much better here. Or can we? I guess that’s the question, isn’t it?
Someone I’m close to inadvertently let their Tennessee vehicle tags expire. Since I have more time on my hands to deal with such situations these days, I decided to help out by tackling the project of getting them one of those snazzy new blue license plates. I didn’t expect to have much trouble, even given the recently well-publicized problems of Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert’s bureaucracy. My optimism was based solely on the fact that in early August I ordered a new plate online and it arrived within a week. Maybe, I told my friend, things are improving. Ha. Ha. Polly? Meet Anna.
Let me review the situation for those of you who haven’t been paying attention — and that includes all of you grossly uninformed Shelby Countians who just voted to reelect Halbert despite well-publicized reports on her many problems in executing the duties of her office. To enumerate: There’s an enormous backlog of ordered license plates that has resulted in thousands of people being at risk for being pulled over for expired tags; the local Auto Dealers Association has complained (and complained) that they aren’t getting temporary (or new) plates for their vehicles; the state comptroller has criticized Halbert’s performance, which opened the possibility of a state takeover; Halbert announced that the clerk’s office would close for two (non-consecutive) weeks to “catch up”; and finally the state comptroller confirmed that in the midst of all this chaos and public uproar, Halbert decided it was a perfect time to take a vacation trip to Jamaica.
Still, since I’d had no issues getting my own plate and tags, I was hopeful I could handle all of this online and be done with it. So I went to the county clerk website and typed in my friend’s address and the plate number. Oops. “No such plate number exists,” it said. What? After a little reading, I figured out the issue. The person in question had allowed their tags to expire more than 90 days ago, meaning I had to “contact the county clerk’s office.” Ugh.
So I called. The voicemail, which helpfully let me know that Wanda Halbert is the county clerk a couple of times, explained that “wait times may be longer than usual” and suggested that I write an email to explain the situation. Dutifully, I shot off an email explaining the situation, giving the address and vehicle license number, and hoped for the best, even though It felt a bit like tossing a sacrificial pineapple into an erupting volcano. Then, in the interest of science (and maybe getting a column out of it), I decided to try to get through by telephone. What’s the worst that could happen? At 9:17 a.m., I plugged my phone into a charger, put it on speaker, and dialed back into Wanda World.
I got the opening voicemail, clicked through to make a call, then soothing music began, kind of like what you’d hear if Kenny G played guitar through a Jell-O tube amp. (What, no reggae?) Anyway, every 30 seconds I heard: “Your call is very important to us and will be answered in the order it was received. Please continue to hold.” After the voicemail recording told me this 290 times, I heard a click and someone answered. THANK JESUS, a human! I explained the situation to the person on the phone and she said the issue could not be resolved without the license holder coming into the county clerk’s office in person.
“How long is the wait for people when they come into the office?” I asked.
“Sir, I’m at a call center,” the person responded. “I have no idea.”
A call center. Perfect.
I decided to drive to the county clerk satellite office at Poplar Plaza. The line to get into the office snaked around the corner, maybe 100 people deep.
Friends, Shelby Countians deserve better. Halbert needs to own this, but she won’t. Her response to all of these issues has been that it’s someone else’s fault. She claimed any criticism of her ill-timed vacation is a “personal attack.” No, it is not, Ms. Halbert. You don’t leave your troops — or your constituency — in the middle of a crisis. You were elected to do a job and you’ve failed. All of this is on your plate.
I’m not as old as Donald Trump, but I’m no spring chicken, either. In fact, I’m probably an October chicken, prone to all the maladies of we elder fowl. One of these maladies — very common among my friends, I’m told — is waking up and worrying about stuff in the middle of the night. And I’m not talking about the big issues — politics, climate change, mortality. No. My life is easy. I work a little, I mess around in the yard, I exercise, I see my kids and grandkids when I can. Still, there are nights when I’ll lie there and fret about pointless stuff — when to clean the gutters or do we have enough guacamole for Friday night or should I get up to pee or can I make it till morning? (I can’t.) This phenomenon is so common that I can now say to myself at, say, 1 a.m., “Hey, this is just the midnight worries. It won’t mean anything in the morning. Go to sleep, idiot.” Sometimes, that works. Sometimes, I pop a melatonin.
So, I find myself wondering how former President Donald J. Trump is sleeping these days. A week ago Monday, he was deposed in New York by the U.S. attorney who is investigating potential tax crimes by the Trump Organization. His former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, has already testified extensively as to the company’s financial practices (aka, shenanigans), basically flipping on his old boss. In his own testimony, Trump pleaded the Fifth Amendment 440 times. That seems like not a good sign, and the kind of thing that might keep you up at night. But Trump’s week was just getting started.
Down in Florida, at Trump’s hotel/home, Mar-a-Lago, federal agents were going through boxes of material the former president had had delivered to his home from the White House upon his departure from office in January 2021. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had determined that among the materials that Trump took were classified documents. After some negotiations with NARA, Trump allowed some of the material to be returned, and his lawyers signed a release stating that there were no more classified documents in his possession. After examining the documents they’d received, NARA determined that was likely untrue and turned over the dispute to the Department of Justice in June. After an investigation, the DOJ became convinced that more classified information was being stored at Mar-a-Lago and conducted a raid, which uncovered lots more classified and top secret information. Oops.
Trump initially claimed the FBI was planting evidence, which indicates that he knew some of the material in his home was likely to get him in trouble. Then he bleated on Truth Social that in January 2021 he’d issued a blanket statement that “declassified” all the material taken from the White House. One assumes this would include what the FBI “planted,” though I’m not sure how that would work.
But, of course, this is not how government records and archival material are declassified. Paperwork must be filed. And further, a president does not have the right to declassify nuclear material or material relating to spies or undercover operatives. The Washington Post reported that nuclear-related documents were found in Florida. Newsweek.com reported that the material seized by the FBI also contained the CIA’s “NOC list,” which identifies the agency’s covert operatives around the world. No other media organization has reported this, but if Newsweek’s reporting is correct, we’ve moved into Julius and Ethel Rosenberg territory.
And we haven’t even gotten to the revelations that could emerge about Trump in the DOJ’s January 6th investigation, or the ongoing grand jury investigation into Trump’s possible election tampering in Georgia. Tennessee’s GOP toadies like Marsha Blackburn, Bill Hagerty, and David Kustoff rushed to categorize all of this Trump bad news as a Joe Biden-led assault on a potential presidential rival. But they are fools, panderers, and liars. The truth is, with any luck, we may finally be seeing the end of Donald Trump’s lifelong extra-legal dalliances, the dozens of crimes he’s skated around using high-priced lawyers and well-connected friends. These latest charges are much more serious than paying off a porn star or setting up a fake university or selling cheap steaks — or even laundering Russian mob money in real estate deals. Donald Trump is dancing on the edge of a very high cliff without a net. Sweet dreams, old man.
Welp, here I am, back on page 3, writing the Letter From the Editor. It’s weird, sure, but I’ve only done this 837 times in the last 20 years, so I think I can handle it. The Flyer staff is rotating this column until we hire a new full-time editor, and this week, the honor is mine.
As most publications do, the Flyer keeps close track of its internet traffic. Editorial staffers get a read-out each week of which web posts drew the most readers. Food stories get a lot of action. So do breaking news posts and oddball stories, like, say, a wallaby escaping from the zoo. My “At Large” column typically makes it somewhere into the top 10, though not every week. I don’t say this to brag, but to help illustrate the following point: Facebook literally shapes what you read. Here’s a real-world example:
On Wednesday morning, when the weekly Flyer issue goes online, I post my column on my Facebook page. Within two hours, I know whether or not Facebook approves of the content. Most weeks, by noon, I have 75 to 100 “likes.” Over the course of the rest of the week, I usually hit 120-140 likes and 40 or 50 comments. Several people usually “share” my post, which also helps get it out into the world. Facebook is a big driver of readers to the Memphis Flyer site, and not just for my column.
But then there are those weeks when Facebook apparently decides that nobody needs to see “At Large.” Two hours after I post it, the column will have two or three likes. At the end of the week, maybe 20 people will have seen the story link on Facebook. My friends say they don’t see it in their feed, even though they “follow” me. I can’t figure out what negative algorithms are being triggered on these off-weeks, but it’s frustrating as hell, knowing Facebook is “curating” my audience. And, sadly, it’s about to get worse.
In late July, Meta, er, Facebook announced it was moving entirely to algorithmic, “recommendation-based” content rather than that of a true social media platform based primarily on friend/acquaintance-based content. Instagram, owned by Meta, has already made the switch, which is why you’re seeing tons of “reels” from strangers on IG, instead of pictures of your friend’s vacation. Instagram’s algorithms are prioritizing content based on your browsing habits and geo-fenced locations, not your social media contacts.
All this is helping further de-platform and destroy local news-media operations. Facebook has since its founding used content from news operations without paying for it. News is just another piece of “content,” along with cat videos and comely “influencers” dancing on TikTok.
There is a bipartisan bill called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) that’s been floating around Congress for months. It would provide a temporary, limited-antitrust, safe harbor for local news publishers to collectively negotiate with Facebook and Google for fair compensation for the use of their content. The act is tailored to ensure that coordination by news publishers protects trustworthy, quality journalism and rewards publishers who invest in journalists, giving them a higher portion of the funds that result from the negotiations.
If you value trustworthy local news produced by legitimate journalists, I urge you to learn more about the JCPA and bring it to the attention of your congressperson.
And on that note, if you’re reading this online, I urge you to scroll down below this column, read the text in that big yellow box, and then click the black bar that reads “donate.” You’ll learn how to support the Flyer’s work by chipping in any amount you’d like. You’ll also see a list of the hundreds of folks who already support us as part of our Frequent Flyer program.
If you’re reading this in print, we thank you, as well! We take pride in being one of the very few progressive voices in the Mid-South, and we’d appreciate your help in keeping that voice alive and free to the public. Facebook sure isn’t going to provide original local news or content. … And they’re probably going to make it really difficult for you to read this column.
The Memphis Flyer is now seeking candidates for its editor position. Send your resume to hr@contemporary-media.com.