Just got off a live interview with Steve Schmidt from the No Kings protest in downtown Knoxville, TN. The cops told me about 5,000 people showed up. In East Tennessee. In a state Trump won by 23 points.
There is energy, folks.
The crowd was wild - not wild like crazy, but wild in it’s energy. People passing would honk and holler in support. It was an amazing mix of people too. You had your old hippies with their fans around their necks and folding chairs (the smart ones). But then you had bodybuilders, construction workers, and college kids. I talked to four or five Trump voters who were out there.
"This isn't what I voted for"
That's what they were telling me. They thought mass deportation meant MS-13 and criminals. Now they're watching ICE raids hit the guys doing sheetrock, the welders putting up steel buildings. I walked by a construction site today - at least half the crew was Latino. These are the people literally building our communities.
Lenoir City, just down the road where I live, is 12-13% Latino. These aren't numbers to people here - they're neighbors.
One guy, WWII vet on a walker, really got to me. Said he fought fascism once and he's here to do it again. Too old to do it any other way, but he showed up.
asked if Democrats could win statewide in Tennessee again. I told him what I think - only if they run against the current Democratic Party.Even with everything Trump's doing - Marines in LA, open corruption, the whole nine - Democrats are still less popular than Republicans. How the hell does that happen?
I'll tell you how. The party has no identity. What does the Democratic Party want to do? I asked Steve and he couldn't tell me. I can't tell you. Democrats can’t tell you until they do a focus group. The only thing they know for sure is that they are not Trump.
That ain’t a plan though. It’s not a vision. That's nothing.
We Used to Build Shit Here
I think people forget - East Tennessee exists because the federal government built things. Real things. The TVA powered this entire region. There's a TVA office 25 feet from where I'm sitting. Oak Ridge is 10 miles from my house - whole city built by the Manhattan Project. Still prosperous, still educated, still wealthy because of it.
The Rural Electrification Act transformed these mountains.
But I'm 44 years old and outside of the interstate system, I've never seen the federal government build anything lasting and useful in my area. Not once.
We Can Build Again
Too many Democrats seem convinced that America's best days are behind us. Like we're just here to manage the decline. That's complete bullshit. It doesn’t have to be that way.
I was talking to a SpaceX engineer the other day. He told me 90% of what SpaceX uses is NASA technology. The math was developed by NASA. Some of it by the Greeks 2000 years ago. We just have better computers now.
We built the TVA. We won World War II with American manufacturing. There's nothing inherently incapable about us as a people. We can build again.
But we need a party that believes that. Not a party trying to "return to normal" - because normal is what got us Trump. He's not the disease, he's the symptom.
So What Now?
2,000 places had protests today. Millions of people. In deep red Tennessee, 5,000 people said "enough."
The MAGA movement needs to be defeated - buried under concrete like the Chernobyl reactor, as Steve put it. But the mechanism we have to do that is broken in places like Tennessee.
And it's not going to get fixed with $20 million studies where DNC staffers observe working men like we're some rare species of chimpanzee. (Steve made that joke but damn if it doesn't feel true sometimes.)
We need to meet people where they are. Speak to what we actually want to build, not just what we're against.
We're not here to manage decline. We're here to rebuild something meaningful.
That's what I saw in those 5,000 faces today. That's what I'm holding onto.
-Corbin
P.S. - Next time somebody tells you what Tennessee Democrats should stand for, tell them to drive through East Tennessee. Look at every dam, every power line, every piece of infrastructure that transformed this region from nothing into something. Then ask why we stopped building. That's where the answer starts.
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