Cookeville Mayor Caves to Activist Pressure
Justin Kanew may have intentionally misled readers of The Tennessee Holler in October when he claimed that the City of Cookeville required participants in its annual Christmas parade to sign a statement of faith. But, the state’s most unscrupulous carpetbagger has achieved his endgame now that Cookeville Mayor Laurin Wheaton and the city council have officially taken over the parade and allowed a tiny fraction of local activists to refashion the community event on their own terms.
For years, the Putnam County city’s mid-December parade has been a major draw for families across the Cumberland Plateau. But, as The Pamphleteer reported last month, trouble began in 2023 when the Cookeville-Putnam County Chamber of Commerce rejected the participation of Upper Cumberland Pride because the activist group’s overt political messaging ran afoul of the parade’s family-friendly policy. As a result, the Chamber handed the event off to a group of business leaders and members of Life Church and The River Community Church, who agreed on 2024’s theme: “Celebrating the Light of CHRISTmas.”
Those wokel locals who fell for Kanew’s clickbait initially sought funds and a permit of their own under the moniker Inclusive Cookeville to host a DEI version of the parade, which likely wouldn’t set any attendance records in a county that broke nearly 75% for Trump and Blackburn.
In the wake of Kanew’s willfully inaccurate insinuations that Cookeville was violating the separation of church and state, city council members unanimously voted to take over the parade the week before Halloween. As the Cookeville Herald-Citizen reported, Vice Mayor Luke Eldridge said, “I want you to know that I strongly disagree with any political parties and any other entity using this Christmas Parade to grandstand or push their agendas and ideologies.” Regardless of such sentiments, the council members have created fissures that threaten to undermine the unity they claim to be defending.
Political groups will now be permitted to participate, which has piqued the interest of the county’s Democratic Party according to the same Herald-Citizen article. Likewise, Mayor Wheaton ensured that Sam Raper, president of Cookeville Inclusive, would be on the parade board.
For the last several weeks, Mayor Wheaton’s office has stonewalled The Pamphleteer and its inquiries into whether LGBTQ+ and other activist groups will have a presence in the parade. Our efforts to contact other council members have resulted in the same silence.
Yet, according to Raper, Cookeville Inclusive plans to ensure such organizations are part of the December 14th event. “We will have a float and our group is working hard to be sure that other organizations and clubs that are members of Cookeville Inclusive have the funds and help to have their own floats too,” she told The Pamphleteer.
Though Cookeville Inclusive has attracted 800 members in a college town of nearly 37,000 residents, Mayor Wheaton claimed when the council announced their decision that they were working for the greater benefit of the community. “We're going to see what we can do and hopefully save Christmas,” she said— a statement that’s a shoo-in for the most narcissistic utterance an American elected official has made this year.
However, members of charity and public service organizations who spoke with The Pamphleteer on the condition of anonymity have said they are opting to sit the parade out for the first time since it began because they want to avoid further divisiveness.
Mayor Wheaton and the council may think they have smoothed over Kanew’s meddling by appeasing his local political allies while creating enough distance from the fallout to ask for forgiveness rather than permission for their fundamental reshaping of the event. Regardless, their genuflection has not gone unnoticed.
As Mayor Wheaton and the other councilmembers who were unable to be reached for comment prove, a decisive Trump victory in a Republican supermajority state is no match for the smalltime political hucksters who don’t even try to hide their contempt for the overwhelming majority of their constituents.