Universal Ring County Rights
⭕️ The Case for Ring County Rights · O'Connell hides on Bluesky · Illegals in Nashville · Saturday night in Music City · Weekly film rundown · Much more!
Good afternoon, everyone. Today, do ring counties deserve a say in what happens in the cities they surround? We consider. Mayor O'Connell continues to hide on Bluesky, but he won't really say why. There's an activism happening in Nashville on Saturday at on MNPS property. And, as is tradition, we furnish our weekly film rundown of all the new movies coming out.
Big Goal 2,000 new newsletter subscribers by September 30. Could you help us get there by forwarding this email to a friend (or five) who cares about independent journalism and tell them to sign up here.
Like what we do? Forward us to a friend.
Though their populations are stagnating, Tennessee’s Blue Dot cities have undue power over the entire state. It’s time to level that playing field.
From Jerod Hollyfield
Less than three weeks after Freddie O’Connell signed a brand new property tax into law, Knoxville mayor Indya Kincannon announced her plan to raise the city’s sales tax. Between now and November, the second-term mayor hopes to hold a referendum to max out the city’s local option with a .5% increase. Of the more than $47 million in revenue the tax increase should generate, Kincannon plans to use $10 million for “affordable housing,” and $12 million for greenways and roads in a city a sixth of Nashville’s size where the crime rate far exceeds the national average. Of course, the sales tax increase is all the fault of Orange Man and his federal cuts, not the financial mismanagement that has plagued her time in office.
Taking its cues from Music City, Knoxville is becoming East Tennessee’s next boomtown with an estimated 75,000 new residents arriving by 2040. It’s even begun attracting the worst specimen of coastal carpetbagging journalists. However, what unites Nashville and Knoxville is that their exponential growth is not occurring within their city limits, but the outlying suburban and rural areas like East Tennessee’s Kingston, Rockwood, Loudon, Powell, and Plainview.
Most ring county communities are lucky to have a Wal-Mart and a Waffle House (we are fortunate to have both in Smith County). Their residents have to pass into the city limits to go Christmas shopping at the mall or see the latest summer blockbuster. In a decade or two, they may begin to resemble Knox County’s Farragut or Middle Tennessee’s Franklin. Until then, they remain beholden to the whims of inept politicians like O’Connell and Kincannon who strain residents’ finances while making their weekly jaunts to the Big City more dangerous, their local streets more congested, and, eventually, their hometowns unaffordable as well as unrecognizable thanks to the mass exodus from city centers.
Knoxville is also an outlier because it’s the only major city in the state from which residents aren’t fleeing. For the past three years, The Pamphleteer has repeatedly reported that Nashville is losing population in droves to those heading for the ring county suburbs. According to Axios, what passes for Nashville’s population growth is now almost exclusively reliant on international migrants, which has likely changed since the article’s publication last spring in the wake of the Trump Administration's immigration reform and the ICE visits that landed Mayor O’Connell in hot water. As expected, Memphis led the entire nation in population decline last year while the independent Shelby County suburb of Collierville has seen a 43% population increase.
⧖⧗⧖ SHOW YOUR SUPPORT ⧗⧖⧗
If you want to support our work at The Pamphleteer, a recurring donation is the best way. We have a $10/month Grub Street tier and a $50/month Bard tier. Membership gets you access to our comments section and free access to upcoming events.
🖋️ Edited by Megan Podsiedlik.
🐦 Blueskies, Nothing But Blueskies This morning, we asked Mayor O'Connell why he doesn't use X anymore. Since December, he’s exclusively switched over to Bluesky—an X alternative favored by the left—to post official city notices and updates. Aside from moonlighting to troll Elon Musk, O’Connell appears to have all but deleted the tech mogul’s social media platform.
The mayor didn’t address the political implications of his decision. Instead, he chalked it up to being a personal choice and said that his comms team is constantly assessing data-driven strategies. Given that X is one of the most widely used social media outlets in the world, with 30 times more daily engagement compared to Bluesky, his decision to ghost the users of the platform doesn’t present itself as a purely logistical one.
“You know, for me, on a personal level, I tend to use X a lot less often now,” said O’Connell, explaining that there is no official Metro policy on how departments or offices should interface with the public through social media. “We measure where engagement is,” O’Connell continued, citing how his comms team has experimented with Threads, generally doesn’t use TikTok, and “is constantly evaluating things.”
This week, the Metro Council Executive Committee discussed its own plan to create an official Bluesky account for Nashville's Metropolitan Council Office. Unlike the mayor’s X account, the Nashville MCO X account is still actively engaged as a resource for the public. It will be interesting to see if the X posts drop off once the Bluesky account is established.
🏠 Illegals Staying In Nashville Yesterday, CBS News released an article highlighting Nashville volunteers who have been delivering boxes of food and other items to families of undocumented immigrants in the area. According to the report, some of the recipients are too scared to leave their homes. Each week, Lynne McFarland drops off about 25 boxes to different households, as do dozens of other volunteers.
After May’s immigration enforcement in Nashville, Mayor O’Connell said that immigrants in Davidson County “are afraid to carry out their normal life activities” due to the ICE operations taking place “under the cloak of darkness.” When asked whether he would encourage those living illegally in Nashville to take advantage of the Trump Administration's voluntary deportation incentives, the mayor said that he would not want to “disrupt” the lives of “foreign-born residents” who “have a very measurably higher level of belonging in this city.”
🗳️ District 7 Election Timeline According to reports by the Banner, the election for Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District will tentatively take place on December 2nd. The governor cannot officially get the ball rolling on the paperwork until Representative Mark Green’s resignation on July 20th. If the election is held in December, the primaries will take place sometime in October.
DEVELOPMENT
- Green Hills office building listed for sale (Post)
- Starbucks plan for Zanies-area site scrapped (Post)
- Reinvented intersection at Belle Meade Publix site to open (Post)
- Start of planned Midtown tower project could loom (Post)
⧖⧗⧖ TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR BITCOIN ⧗⧖⧗
|
Use the form below to schedule your free consultation. We’ll help you store your bitcoin safely and securely — no pressure, no jargon, just real people who know how important it is to keep your bitcoin safe for you and your family. |
✹ SATURDAY NIGHT IN MUSIC CITY
Saturday is a busy day in NashVegas. There’s a UFC fight at Bridgestone in the evening, but before that, Cane Ridge High School in Antioch is hosting an event put on by the Tennessee Federation for Democratic Women at which both state Rep. Justin Jones and Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (who married her brother to hack the American immigration system) will address an audience of lobotomized drones.
An email announcing the event also mentions a protest on July 17 attempting to “Shut America Down.” The poster calls on people to “call in sick to work” and “slow or disrupt traffic” and “get creative with your civil disobedience.”
This would be barely worth mentioning if it weren’t happening after hours on a Saturday at a Metro Nashville Public School. Your tax dollars are undoubtedly paying for this.
Gavin Newsom was here speaking to the East Nashtivists on Wednesday, encouraging similar tactics by celebrating Mandela and Caesar Chavez for their willingness to engage in criminal behavior. After Newsom spoke, Councilmembers Sean Parker, Olivia Hill, Clay Capps, and Emily Benedict participated in a moderated discussion led by Vice Mayor Angie Henderson on more benign matters like sewers and roundabouts.
Yesterday, in California, a federal raid on a pot farm in Northern California resulted in the kind of activism Newsom seemed to celebrate in Nashville, with one protester flagrantly firing a pistol at federal agents as children and workers fled the scene.
This comes on the heels of a recent raid by 12 Antifa activists on an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, and the Los Angeles riots at the beginning of June. Nashville government officials appear to be more than willing to play nice with an increasingly radicalized segment of the population.
For all the shouting about right-wing violence, the most city officials can point to as evidence are the chauvinistic displays of a couple of anti-social rejects on Broadway. By comparison, the left appears to be in the early stages of a coordinated revolt, involving direct, violent confrontations with law enforcement and the disruption of civic order for its own ends. DAVIS HUNT
✹ WEEKLY FILM RUNDOWN: July 11-17
The latest releases and special screenings hitting Music City this week. For a complete list of upcoming titles, check out the 2025 Film Guide.
Superman (Dir. James Gunn) The director of Guardians of the Galaxy moves on to the Man of Steel as he tries to save DC from itself. Reviews indicate it just may be working. Now playing in theaters.
Kill the Jockey (Dir. Luis Ortega) This Argentine crime comedy in the style of Some Like It Hot finds an alcoholic jockey trying to evade the mob and get his career back on track. Now playing at the Belcourt.
Action Distraction: The Belcourt gets us through the Dog Days of Summer with a roster of 20+ classic action flicks from all over the world. Kicking off last week with Independence Day, the series also includes Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Tombstone, Speed, Heat, John Wick, and RRR among others.
Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story (Dir. Natasha Kermani) The sons of fearless vampire killer Abraham Van Helsing discover their dad’s dark past. Now playing in theaters.
THINGS TO DO
View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.
📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.
🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.
👨🏻🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide.
TONIGHT
🎸 Yo La Tengo + Built To Spill @ Ryman Auditorium, 8p, $89+, Info
🪕 The Wilder Blue @ The Basement East, 8p, $27.27, Info
🎸 Boowah @ Dee's Lounge, 9p, $10, Info
🪕 The Shawn Lane Band @ Station Inn, 9p, $25, Info
🪕 The Cowpokes @ Acme Feed & Seed, 12p, Free, Info
🍀 Live Irish Music @ McNamara’s Irish Pub, 6p, Free, Info
🎸 Kelley’s Heroes @ Robert’s Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info
📰 Check out the full newsletter archive here.
The Pamphleteer
The Pamphleteer
The Pamphleteer
The Pamphleteer
Today's newsletter is brought to you by Megan Podsiedlik (Nashville), Jerod Hollyfield (Crowd Corner), Camelia Brennan (Local Noise), and Davis Hunt (everything else).