Hey there, Dreadheads, it's Brian. A quick note, positively dreadful will be dark next week

while I take a little vacation, but we'll be back for the last week of April. I'll catch you then. Bye.

Hello, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyler. Since last week, you've probably seen or heard or read about the news out of Tennessee.

And if so, you know that over the course of several days, Republicans in the state assembly there tried to expel three of their democratic colleagues, the so-called Tennessee three, for joining a protest for new gun laws at the Capitol, after a nearby school massacre.

We're voting on House Resolution 63. All those in favor vote I, in the bow rings, those opposed, vote no, as every member voted, as any member was to change their vote.

When it came time to vote though, they were only able to expel two of them, the two who were black. Those two 27-year-old legislators are Justin Jones and Justin Pearson or the Justin's for short.

Hi, everybody, Claire Repsident of Justin J. Pearson of the 86 Representative District of Spell.

I hear about a Claire Repsident of Justin Jones of the 57 Representative District of Spell.

They recently became avatars for a whole generation of young Democrats or young progressives who are eager to lead but are also there exhausted by gun violence, by powerlessness, by Republican scapegoating and abuses of power and bad faith, simply by standing up for themselves so they were able to make Republicans regret the whole stun.

I'd even say it blew back at them righteously. Both of the Justin's have already been awarded their seats back, been reappointed by their local councils. Whereas Tennessee Republicans, well the whole country got to see what they're all about.

This is clearly an overreach by the Republican Party to exercise their racist actions to silence voices and divide democracy.

And even those Republicans seem to get that the country doesn't like what they saw.

The country saw a party that responds to children getting slaughtered at school by imposing maximum punishment on gun control supporters or black protesters anyhow.

And that's bad for them. In the short term, it's probably also bad for Tennessee, which isn't going blue any time soon.

It's also obviously unpleasant to watch a bunch of bull Connor wannabes condescend to and try to make examples of young black protesters.

But beyond that, I think what happened in Tennessee will be remembered as a clarifying moment.

When we're even cross pressured voters, voters who maybe like their guns or don't like rowdy progressive protesters had to pick a side and cited against reactionary politics or authoritarian politics or racism.

And there's a lot of that going around. The dust up in Tennessee came right on the heels of important elections in Wisconsin and Chicago in Wisconsin.

Janet Proto-Sewitz, a judicial candidate supported by the State Democratic Party, crushed her MAGA rival Dan Kelly, giving liberals a majority on the State Supreme Court.

And that leaves the State poised to uphold women's reproductive freedom and impose nonpartisan legislative maps and even protect the will of voters in 2024 from another attempt to overturn the presidential election.

In Chicago, a labor organizer won the race for mayor against the kind of centrist opponent that a bunch of national Democrats believed better represents the party's base.

And all of that comes on the heels of the midterms where Democrats more than held their own and even swept elections against authoritarian Republicans and basically wherever abortion rights were meaningfully on the ballot.

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