Sin Taxer Du Jour
💸 You can sin, but it'll cost you · Council skips · Illegals committing crime · Flight Risk · Much more!
Good afternoon, everyone.
I found a particularly clarifying explanation of how the term “racism” is employed in modern parlance from Dave Greene on Twitter that I thought worth sharing. The term racist or racism is an effective cudgel, so it’s good to understand how it’s evolved and widened in its use over the years.
Greene writes, “Racism” is not some hard but consistent moral standard mankind has always known but failed to follow. It’s a political tool. That’s why the word didn’t exist before 100 years ago.” I’ll let you read the rest of his thoughts here if you’re so inclined.
In other news, the Nashville Ledger published an interesting story on gambling in the state. According to Sports Wagering Council spokesperson David Smith, Tennessee is the world’s largest online-only sports wagering market. Sports gambling in the state has become a $5 billion a year enterprise, yielding around $100 million for the state in taxes—80 percent of which goes to education, 15 percent to local governments and 5 percent to fund mental health programs.
Relatedly, a bill that would legalize pot is up on the docket. Senator Jeff Yarbro is sponsoring it in the Senate. On top of the state sales tax, the state would levy a 15 percent tax on retail sales of the devil’s lettuce and give local governments to add their own tax up to 5 percent.
Yarbro seems to have a thing for taxing sin. He co-sponsored the bill legalizing sports gambling in 2019. In 2020, he sponsored a failed bill that would have levied a tax on vapes. The next year, the state sunset the “stripclub tax” that Yarbro had championed in 2018. The tax charged strip joints two bucks a customer. The guy who ran Deja Vu over on Church Street at the time called it “discriminatory and misogynistic.”
“It was created by people who hate the fact that self-empowered women can earn a lawful living using their femininity,” he continued. “The establishment has always been terrified by women who don't have to depend on men for economic subsistence, and that internalized misogyny is how this tax truly developed.”
I don’t know if the potheads will have the energy or the verve to get up in arms about a tax on their favorite sedative, but I do wonder what kind of language they would use should we ever get there.
Onward.
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🖋️ Edited by Megan Podsiedlik.
🏛️ Spicy Council Topics Deferred On Tuesday, a few discussions were noticeably absent from the Metro Council meeting. Both the Fusus-related bill with guardrails for community safety camera networks and the legislation set to trim down the Nashville Music, Entertainment, and Film Commission were deferred.
During this week’s Public Health and Safety Committee meeting, members approved a one-meeting deferral to give the council more time to submit amendments to the camera surveillance bill. Meanwhile, it seems that Councilmember Joy Styles—who championed the effort to reestablish an entertainment board in Nashville—may be butting heads with the current administration.
During the last Arts, Parks, Libraries, and Entertainment Committee meeting, Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda explained that the Nashville Music, Entertainment, and Film Commission is the first entity being looked at by the new working group formed to assess the efficiency of Metro boards and commissions. The proposed bill would shrink the board to eleven members and put the mayor's office in charge of hiring its director. “It's no secret that we have had issues with specific boards and commissions that have been responsible for hiring their own executive director,” said Sepulveda.
Councilmember Styles finds the changes to be a counterproductive overreach. “We were inundated with support for this office to not be controlled by any mayoral administration,” said Styles, who explained that the reason past entertainment boards have failed in Nashville is due to the shifting priorities of different administrations. Styles and the Arts Committee agreed that a one-meeting deferral would help iron out some of the wrinkles.
🗺️ Crimes Committed By Illegals Last week, the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference released its first Immigration Report, which disclosed data on illegal aliens who have been charged or convicted of a crime in Tennessee. This year’s findings reflect information collected from October 1, 2024-December 31, 2024, but only 71 out of the state’s 95 counties provided proper reports for all three months. According to the TDAG, the Tennessee Sheriff's Association will be working to improve the process over the next year.
In carrying out their duty to comply with state law, Davidson County law enforcement agencies had the highest number of submissions. Coming in at 796 reports, the number not only reflects the present illegal population in Nashville, but the efficacy and transparency of the city’s reporting process. Of the over 3,800 total charges reported across the state, 447 were violent offenses like assault, murder, and rape.
🏘️ Government Sanctioned Rent Control Nashville’s newest state representative, Shaundelle Brooks, filed a rent control bill this week. The legislation would “allow local governments to adopt ordinances and resolutions to control rent for private residential rental units.” Titled the “Affordable Housing and Tenant Protection Act,” it would also create an Increased Housing Program and Increased Housing Fund, authorizing “the Tennessee Housing Development Agency to make grants…to eligible developers and first-time homebuyers to assist in gap financing and down payment assistance.”
DEVELOPMENT-ish
- Major League Pickleball franchise relocates to Nashville for 'fresh start' (NBJ)
- Rosemary & Beauty Queen team plans new East Nashville bar (NBJ)
- Development company pays $1M for Belle Meade land (Post)
✹ REVIEW: FLIGHT RISK (2025)
What’s always separated Mel Gibson from his 80s superstar peers is his penchant for making unparalleled art out of potentially career-ending gambles. He’s the guy who puts up his entire fortune to finance a Jesus movie that no studio would touch, receives a windfall when it grosses more than a Marvel blockbuster, and then follows it up with a film about Ancient Mayans featuring all the dialogue in a dead language. But with his latest directorial effort, Flight Risk, Gibson takes his greatest chance so far: setting an action movie almost entirely in a single-prop plane. And, he totally pulls it off with a nonchalant seamlessness that only the blindest of wokescolds could deny.
Deviating from Gibson’s typical great men terrain, Flight Risk follows a disgraced U.S. Marshal (Downton Abby’s Michelle Dockery) as she escorts a mob accountant (That 70s Show’s Topher Grace) from his hideout in the Alaskan wilderness to testify against his boss. But when Mark Wahlberg’s roughneck pilot trades up his aw-shucks platitudes for deranged hitman psychopathy, she’s forced to keep the plane in the air and protect her charge as they hover above the tundra.
Though its scathing reviews dismiss it as a by-the-numbers action flick, Flight Risk shows that Gibson remains one of Hollywood’s finest directors. Every impeccably framed shot works in the service of creating a sense of volatility and unbroken tension, an effect Gibson intensifies by playing his actors against type. The internet may be in a tizzy over “Baldberg” and his appetite for unhinged delivery, but the movie’s most impressive performances belong to Dockery and Grace, who take the snarky, above-it-all personas that made them TV famous and imbue them with a vulnerability that separates Flight Risk from its rote genre counterparts.
Like all of Gibson’s work behind the camera, the film is a story about grasping at redemption through a cycle of failures. However, his heroes are no longer figures who define themselves through history’s greatest battles ala William Wallace, The King of Kings, and Hacksaw Ridge’s Desmond Doss. They are the put-upon middlemen who finally learn to push back against the mediocre powers that be whose corrupt entrenchment allowed them to orchestrate this situation. Flight Risk is the first movie of MAGA’s second act, and, for the first time, Gibson seems to think there’s something ahead besides pressing on in the face of defeat.
Flight Risk is 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
🎻 Beethoven's Ninth: Ode to Joy @ Schermerhorn Symphony Center, 7:30p, $62+, Info
🎸 Spread the Love Night ft Eric Slick, Marco with Love, and Tower Brothers @ Vinyl Tap, 7p, Free, Info
🎸 Sean Thompson's Weird Ears @ The Blue Room, 7p, $19.41, Info
🎸 Moose Miller @ Station Inn, 9p, $20, Info
🍀 Live Irish Music @ McNamara’s Irish Pub, 6p, Free, Info
🎸 Kelly’s Heroes @ Robert’s Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info
🎸 Open Mic @ Fox & Locke, 6:30p, Free, Info
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