It is a truism these days that social media, for better or for worse, plays a significant role in the dissemination of political messaging.
The Elon Musk-owned X platform continues to carry a lot of contributors’ political weight online, much of it MAGA-inflected, though other points of view are still to be found there.
Many centrists and left-leaning posters, meanwhile, have gone over to a rival platform, the fledgling Bluesky, which aspires to be something like the MSNBC of online commentary and, at this point, is still struggling to establish itself.
And there is talk radio, which is still pretty much the province of the political right. Mike Fleming, yesteryear’s voice of conservative discontent, has gone to his reward, but radio station KWAM (“the Mighty 990,” alternately billed as “the Mid-South’s conservative blowtorch”) still keeps the sound of it alive.
Monday morning was a case in point. Station proprietor Todd Starnes (who, famously, can boast a recent call-in from Donald Trump, no less, followed by a sit-down interview with the president in Washington) turned the prime drive-time hour of 7 to 8 a.m. over to Memphis Police Association director John Covington, now a declared contestant for the District 1 (outer Shelby) position on the county commission.
After lamenting some troubling recent crime incidents (e.g., a gunfight at the Waffle House in Arlington), Covington devoted most of his time to what arch-conservatives see as the takeover of the venerable Cracker Barrel dining franchise by creeping Woke-ism. Covington went beyond the right’s complaints about the purge of an actual cracker-barrel and an adjacent country gent from the establishment’s logo.
His chief complaint seemed to be that patrons failing to successfully complete a table puzzle involving proper location of golf tees on a grid are no longer greeted with a folksy message calling them “Ignoramus” but a gone-soft one merely urging them gently to try again.
Covington then introduced Shelby County Republican chair Worth Morgan, who reported on the state GOP’s annual Statesman’s Dinner, held last weekend in Nashville. The keynoter this year was Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and Morgan spent some time rhapsodizing on Johnson’s inspirational value.
Next up was state Senator Brent Taylor (introduced by Covington as “the hardest working man in show business”), who had his usual harsh words for “restorative justice schemers” and, in particular, condemned the fact of a credit course being offered at Rhodes College under the auspices of Just City head Josh Spickler.
The noon hour featured Starnes himself, from Washington (“broadcasting live from the White House,” he boasted), giving his enthusiastic approval of the ongoing federal takeover of police functions there and chatting it up with second-tier administration officials. He, too, fulminated against the Cracker Barrel “rebrand”which he characterized as “trying to make Cracker Barrel cool for the Gen Z intellectuals.”
He and a conservative interlocutor agreed that the availability of beer at various Cracker Barrel franchises was a no-no. Beer doesn’t go with biscuits and gravy, they agreed, but they entertained — presumably facetiously —the idea of the establishment’s offering some authentic country moonshine instead.
Another well-known institution, the National Football League, came in for dispraise — in the NFL’s case, for the increasing tendency of various teams to employ male cheerleaders, wondering aloud if this move presaged an effort to make the sport itself “a little less masculine.”
Like it or not, Starnes’ blowtorch is extending its reach — to some 169 radio stations, he claims, and one of his on-air guests on Monday, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin, made a point of congratulating him for “going national.”
In the proverb of the day, it is what it is.