John Cole’s Tennessee: Wrecking ball. The Tennessee Legislature gutted the board of Tennessee State University, a historically Black college, over an audit that showed no fraud and less than $4,000 in irregular spending.
The year in Tennessee politics was characterized by conspiracy theories about chemtrails and vaccines delivered in lettuce, a members of the congressional delegation putting their worst feet forward, labor unions making strides in unionizing auto plants, squabbles over funding to help storm-devastated areas of East Tennessee, books being pulled from school library shelves, and lawmakers enacting harsh penalties on the state’s only public historically Black university. Editorial cartoonish John Cole deftly skewered all the issues, and more, week after week.
