NPR Says Memphis 'Sees Opportunity' In Trump's Fascist Invasion, So It's All Good, We Guess!
Oh for God's sake.
To be clear, it’s difficult for journalists to just parachute into places they’re not from, do a couple days of reporting (if that) and produce something that’s worth reading, that captures the nuance of the place they’re reporting on. (“Parachute journalism,” they call it, because self-explanatory.)
That said, there are better and worse examples of the genre, and NPR has just produced one of the worst we’ve ever seen. Check it out.
Oh does it? Is that what “Memphis” sees, Kat Lonsdorf of NPR, whose bio says she is from small-town Wisconsin, and is currently a Middle East reporter based in Tel Aviv? Did Ms. Lonsdorf actually visit Memphis to report this, or did she just Google a few Memphis names, shoot off a couple emails and call it a day?
The article is illustrated with a photograph of a Black barber in Memphis, who serves as the the “human interest” hook that begins the piece. He lost his sister to violence in Memphis, and he says he hopes this latest solution works, since nothing else has.
And that’s … about it! That’s pretty much the depth of proof on offer for the thesis that “Memphis sees opportunity in Trump’s plans for federal intervention.” (Granted, Lonsdorf almost certainly didn’t write her own headline, but it accurately represents what she wrote.)
The piece quotes Tennessee Democratic state Rep. Antonio Parkinson, who says he wouldn’t have asked for a federal invasion of Memphis, but “I don’t care what they throw at us, we will always take the lemons and make the best tasting lemonade that you’ve ever tasted out of it. And that’s honestly the spirit of Memphis.”
Sure thing. Let’s make lemons out of Donald Trump’s Gestapo. You bet.
The piece goes on to quote 1) a former cop, who says he’s trying to keep “cautious optimism” about this, and 2) a county commissioner who voted for a resolution opposing the federal invasion, but now she is also hoping for the best.
Somewhere in there NPR manages to brush up against the suggestion that actually a lot of “Memphis” is fucking pissed and horrified by this, but only lightly:
That’s not to say everyone in Memphis is on board. Many have been protesting, arguing that the federal deployment is unnecessary, and that the city needs more funding to address poverty, jobs and education.
But those protests have been muted, especially compared to those in other cities facing National Guard deployments.
Oh really? “Those protests have been muted”? Is the reason for that worth exploring, or were we just trying to file this real quick?
Would five more minutes of reporting have produced a different story?
What about talking to more than four people?
This writer is a Memphian, as many of you know. And yes, parachute journalism is most noticeable and grating when you live in the place being parachuted.
I follow and talk to people from all over this city, people who are tracking the invaders, people who tell me what’s going on where they are, how they’re feeling. I talk to random Uber drivers, like the one who drove me the other night, a Black guy I’d describe as seemingly pretty disengaged from politics, who was maybe also “cautiously optimistic,” but he also expressed that this ICE brutality against Latino people really sickens him. Uh oh, the plot thickens!
Perhaps NPR could have tried to talk to more people like that. Perhaps they could have explained, as I did on Facebook the other day, that one reason things might look “muted” here, why things will look different here from how they look in Chicago, is that Memphis is a very blue city in a very red state, and therefore doesn’t have a lot of the built-in protections Chicago has, which come from having a governor and senators who have your back, who want to protect their citizens from the Nazis, instead of serving them up. Memphis has a white Republican MAGA racist governor, senators and a state legislature who have decided to use Memphis as a prop — as they so often do — for their tough-on-crime bullshit, by volunteering it to be the next guinea pig in Donald Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s attempted ethnic cleansing of the country.
Also, Memphis’s Mayor Paul Young is kind of a bootlicker and a disappointment. NPR could have found a shitload of Memphians who would say that, especially after a year of watching him suck up to Elon Musk and his xAI project that’s straining Memphis’s resources so that Elon can build an emotional support robot prone to spending weekends calling itself “MechaHitler.”
NPR might have noted something — anything — about the history of the feds being deployed against Memphis, the history and root causes of poverty in the city, and how that’s directly related to the aforementioned racist Republican legislators in Nashville who love to kick this city in the face and then ask why it’s covered in unsightly bruises.
Memphis-based journalist and author Emily Yellin, who’s extensively covered Memphis and Southern issues for the New York Times, suggested a few other missing elements on Facebook:
She missed the fact that this is the only Southern city to be terrorized by MAGA troops so far. She missed the fact that state and federal funding for social services and education have been under seige for decades and this is the city with the highest poverty rate in the nation, and of any city being invaded by MAGA troops. So it follows that what is called crime has its roots in the fact that “many” here have no stake in the community or this nation. Maybe politicians and city officials are stuck between withdrawal of more funding if they tell the MAGA troops to eff off and the misappropriation of federal funds in this siege. And she missed the fact that Memphis has a strong and vibrant resistance movement and tradition that doesn’t look like the other cities under siege.
Yellin added that she had “[spoken] to an airport worker yesterday as I was getting off my plane, a Black man, who told me about how afraid he is to drive his seven minutes to and from work because he has seen people being pulled over and surrounded. And he said troops are going to peoples’ home who have outstanding warrants and they are getting the addresses wrong. He knew someone who wouldn’t open his door when agents arrived because he had his children inside and he had no warrants. I wasn’t even trying and I found this person who was a good source for reporting.”
Tennessee Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson — known to national readers as one of the Tennessee Three who stood up to that same racist Republican legislature on gun violence on behalf of their constituents, who along with Rep. Justin Jones was kicked out of that body for speaking while Black, and then promptly placed right back there by voters — noted in a Facebook comment on Yellin’s post that NPR “[didn’t] mention authoritarianism nor Trump’s sycophants saying ‘you are unleashed.’”
Ah yes, the day at the beginning of the invasion when some of Trump’s most vicious fascist enforcers, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Pam Bondi, came to town for a photo op so they could spit bile upon Memphis’s law enforcement and call it an anointing. Miller basically ordered the police and the feds to terrorize people. Wonkette reported on it. Here’s what Miller said:
“I see the guns and badges in this room. You are unleashed. Whatever you need to get done, we are gonna get it done. This is Memphis. This is the United States of America. All that bullshit is done! It’s over! it’s finished! The gangbangers that you deal with — they think they’re ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough? They have no idea how tough we are. They think they’re hardcore? We are so much more hardcore than they are. And we have the entire weight of the United States government behind us. When President Trump makes a decision, this team behind me executes.”
Context! All this missing context!
Want some more context from a local? Well, you got one right here.
Every day since the invasion started, Pam Bondi releases numbers — which the corporate local media repeat mostly uncritically — of how many arrests have been made by Operation Little Man Syndrome, and immediately locals fill the comments sections to make fun of her for not even reaching the Memphis Police Department’s typical daily arrest average. She announced this week that pretty much all last week’s arrests were warrant pickups. (They were really going hard against people who forgot to turn on their headlights in the rain yesterday.)
But if you look at a map of where Trump’s MAGA thugs are swarming, a new picture of what’s really happening here emerges. This picture comes from the Vecindarios901 page, which monitors ICE threats to Memphis’s immigrant communities in real time. (Another source the NPR reporter might have found if she’d spent any time on it.)
Take a look, and then I will Memphis-splain:
Ok, so in Memphis, Latino people live all over the city, but if there is one street that people hear and think “Latinos” it is Summer Avenue, which is also known as Memphis’s most wonderful, quirkiest five- or eight-mile stretch of absolutely everything from antique malls, flea markets, funky shops and stores to every kind of restaurant you can imagine, including about 400 incredible real, wonderful Mexican restaurants and bakeries and groceries. It’s not a “no crime” area, but if you are going after The Crime in Memphis, Summer is ... not it. (Large parts of it are getting downright gentrified, which is whole other story.)
See the long horizonal red stripe in that picture? That’s Summer. Ever since they got here, the feds have been swarming all over Summer like gnats or mosquitoes or flesh-eating bacteria or choose your metaphor. All the red areas on that map have varying levels of crime, but one thing in common, and it’s high Latino populations.
See, that’s what’s really happening here. As enthusiastic as Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi are to terrorize Memphis’s Black residents — we’d never want to sell them short in that department! — their cops-with-daddy-issues seatbelt-enforcement brigade is the window-dressing to keep stupid, scared white Republicans (many of them live in the white parts of that map, some in the blue part toward the southeast) convinced that “somebody” is “doing something” about “all of this.”
Meanwhile, know what reporting we’re not getting? How many people they’re terrorizing, kidnapping and disappearing out of their homes and cars as part of Stephen Miller’s Nazi crusade against Latino people.
Not that the stupid, scared white Republicans would care about that either. They’re getting off on watching Black and brown people being terrorized, just like they always do. And if you don’t like it, then you must be guilty just like them!
After all, they say, if you are here legally and/or haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. Those who are arrested/rounded up/disappeared? They probably have it coming to them, according to these people.
Those are the vile, deplorable people in Memphis who are actually cautiously optimistic about this, NPR. The white Republican cowards terrified of their own shadows, terrified of anybody who’s different from them, terrified of their own fellow citizens, who desperately psychologically need to believe their Nazi daddies in DC are doing something to protect them.
Now there’s a group of people where you can phone in your parachute journalism all day long, because those garbage motherfuckers are the exact same everywhere you go.
[NPR]
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Meanwhile, federal resources have been directed against country singer Zach Bryan, who joined the Navy at 17 and trained to be a SEAL, because Bryan sang a song critical of ICE.
Fascism’s here, folks.
“Abused Wife Sees New Opportunity in Violent Beatings”