Tennessee
By Bruce Bialosky
Whenever one blinks these days, there is a new story about which people get hysterical. Tennessee has always been best known for Nashville country music and Memphis barbeque. But it has become focused currently on two cultural events that are related, but in their own way completely separate.
You certainly are familiar with the fact a transgender individual entered a Christian day school and killed six people – three older adults and three young children. If you read the “wrong” news service, there is no mention the shooter was transgender. Or you might read seven people were killed due to the fact that the Nashville police did their job and killed the shooter –possibly saving many lives. That is not the topic of this column. It is another incident.
A gun control proposal was put forth in the Tennessee State Legislature. Everyone I know is in favor of gun control. It is just the Left wants to control guns for law-abiding citizens. They cite countries that have confiscated guns from their citizens, and you pretty much saw what happened during the pandemic where these countries ran roughshod over people’s rights in ways Americans could not imagine.
Republicans and Conservatives want to control guns in the hands of people who are most likely to commit crimes and punish those who use guns in the commission of a crime. There is an argument that reasonable procedures should be analyzed to see if that would help in controlling incidents like what happened in Nashville at the day school.
That is where the story goes off the rails. The Tennessee legislature is a part-time bicameral body. It meets 90 days a year. The Senate voted in a committee to floor any gun laws until 2024 to give people a chance to analyze what might be best. The Left wanted to “strike while the iron is hot” and move legislation now. The Republican-controlled legislature paused on the issue until 2024.
That was not good enough. I previously stated: “It never fails to amaze me how focused or preoccupied some get on issues like this that they cannot accept reasonable boundaries. And then they call the opposition zealots.”
The first moment I became aware of the issue continuing was when I read the Assembly was moving to expel three members. My initial thinking was that was an extreme action. I knew nothing of the three members other than they were Democrats. This to me was an over-the-top reaction.
Then I read up on the facts and not the slanted press that omits facts. I found out two of the members had not only goaded a crowd to disrupt the Assembly, but they had also used a bullhorn on the floor of the Assembly. One of the two expelled said he was not educated on the decorum of the Assembly. He asked how he could be tossed for being ignorant. If he was ignorant, it was willful ignorance. When I found out the two had used a bullhorn, I knew nothing about the two — sex, ethnicity, etc. I just knew they were either idiots, zealots, or both.
I found out Justin Jones in his short 27 years has been arrested multiple times for his political activism. He ran for office before but this time he beat another Democrat in the primary and received 8,596 votes (100%) in the general election. He appears to never have had a job in private industry. His running mate, Justin Pearson, bills himself as a “community organizer.” He is currently 28 years old. Pearson won his special election with 52% of the vote (1,235 votes). None of these facts were known to me when I decided they were justifiably expelled. They apparently think they can harass the other members of the Assembly into complying with their policy wishes.
Here is a fun fact: The leadership of their caucus told them to stop their errant behavior. They “walked off the House floor after a heated confrontation with their own Democrat leadership.” BTW, the white woman who was the third protester did none of this extreme behavior. She survived the expulsion vote because of that, but not by much.
It was pointed out to me that if the two were expelled then the third person should also have been because it now seems it was based on race. I responded that it would then be characterized as being racist and sexist. Sure enough, Rep. Gloria Johnson argued the expulsion was racist despite arguing in her own defense that she did not participate in the same activities as Jones and Pearson. Then she claimed the action was sexist and racist. She invoked possibly the stupidest expression in history (and it’s a high bar), “I was talked down to as a woman and man-splained to.”
This isn’t about race, ethnicity, or sex. But that does not matter to some as race-baiters like Kammy Harris rushed to Tennessee to assuage the wounded miscreants. While Democrats in the Assembly understand the proper conduct of a legislator, the band of “everything you think is based on race,” jumped in to defend these two juveniles in men’s clothing.
The problem we have in this country is there is a lack of boundaries. No sense of propriety. Even the Three Stooges would have understood you don’t whip out a bullhorn on the floor of a legislature and start having a rally.
Members of their community have stated they will reinstall these two knuckleheads into their seats. My question is, don’t you have anything better to offer? A wise man once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
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This article was published in Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.
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