Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti speaks at the Franklin Theatre, May 8, 2023
After we learned that the state attorney general’s office has asked for and received patient records of state employees — records that may include pictures of their genitals, among other things — AG Jonathan Skrmetti sat down with Phil Williams over at NewChannel 5 to try to reassure Tennesseans that he is not some pervert abusing his position.
Listen. I am square in the camp of this particular records request being very shady, but I’m going to first say some nice things about Skrmetti. Gov. Bill Lee's administration normally does a pretty bad job at messaging, and it has utterly failed at making the governor come across like a normal human being with regular emotions. Y’all may remember how Lee’s director of communications Casey Sellers didn’t even have a bio on the state’s website for the longest time. She does have one now. It ends: “A native of Memphis, she and her husband, Douglas, live in Nashville and are members of Covenant Presbyterian Church.”
Lord almighty. Not only is Bill Lee about to fail to enact meaningful gun reform in the wake of his friend being killed in the Covenant School shooting — he is also going to fail people in his cabinet directly affected by the event where his friend died. I get that Republicans aren’t going to suddenly start voting for Democrats, so this is the world they are choosing, but how is Casey Sellers going to continue to work in state government in September, after she spends August trying to spin the fact that our Republican state legislature expects even the most well-connected Republicans in the state to just accept that sometimes their kids are going to be murdered in school and that’s the price of “freedom”? Lee might as well be standing there with his pockets turned out like the dude from Monopoly, because he has nothing to offer real-life, actual Republican people with their real-life struggles. Well, thoughts and prayers. I guess he has that to offer them. Good luck to Casey Sellers, who has to live with the fact that the people she’s thrown her lot in with think she and the people in her congregation are expendable.
Anyway, back to my point. Our most prominent Republican, Gov. Bill Lee, has a public persona that is basically like a deer caught in headlights who is petulant about the fact that people are mean to him when they tell him to move. And here comes Skrmetti, sitting down with a journalist, looking thoughtful and caring. He sounds compassionate: “It's hard out there for transgender people, and I don't want to persecute them. I just want to make sure that our laws are enforced in the appropriate constitutional way.” He comes across as a real person with an ethos and well-considered positions. He probably should loan his comms person to everyone else in the party.
If you just looked at this snippet without all the other context, it would be easy to feel like this is all pretty reasonable. Unfortunately, I am burdened with knowledge of history, so I still have questions. First, do the medical records that Skrmetti's office now has contain pictures of people’s genitals? I know Skrmetti can’t talk about and shouldn’t talk about specific safety protocols, but are there steps in place to prevent this stuff, should it exist, from leaking or being accessed by unauthorized people? If VUMC transgender clinic founder Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor made the video that brought the potential fraud to Skrmetti’s attention back in 2019, why does the investigation’s timeline seem to fit more with the publicity around Matt Walsh’s Proud Boy-attended anti-trans rally last year? Is it possible that Skrmetti didn’t know about the 2019 video until Matt Walsh found it and brought it to a wider audience in 2022?
If it was Matt Walsh’s activism that brought this to Skrmetti’s attention, could we get some clarity about which other fascists Skrmetti listens to? Should we be worried that, when Alex Jones launches into some rant about how the globalists are using hospitals to take human tissue and make soulless clones of real people to do the bidding of demons, Skrmetti is going to demand the medical records of all state employees who are twins to see if they’re the “real” person or the soulless clone? Joe Rogan had a guy on his show who says nuclear weapons are fake. Is Skrmetti going to file lawsuits on behalf of the people who lost their land to the Manhattan Project site in Oak Ridge because the property was taken under false pretenses, because Joe Rogan’s guest has “proof” nuclear bombs aren’t real, and therefore whatever the feds were doing at Oak Ridge couldn’t be real?
Hell, y’all. I’m dogsitting my brother’s elderly, somewhat agoraphobic dog and she pees in my house all the damn time. It’s fraying my nerves. If I were to say to a group of people — say, you, dear readers — that I am carjacking a TDOT truck and forcing the driver to take this dog to a pet psychic so that I can gain some understanding of why she hates the outside, would Skrmetti pull TDOT records to see which trucks I’m taking? If he’s directly reading this column and he sees that I’m being hyperbolic, of course not.
But here’s my concern. If Matt Walsh goes on his show and says, “I have found evidence of Betsy Phillips kidnapping TDOT drivers. Let me read you her confession straight from the Nashville Scene website: ‘I am carjacking a TDOT truck and forcing the driver to take this dog to a pet psychic so that I can gain some understanding of why she hates the outside’” — would Skrmetti launch an investigation into me? And how many TDOT workers’ lives would he upend to do it?
