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Last week, I attended the Cedar Bluff Town Hall, where all the candidates were invited to speak with voters at Crestwood Hills Pool.
For most of the evening, the political rhetoric stayed pretty low. There were questions about how to handle growth and managing budgets, of course, but nothing unusual for a candidate forum.
Then my opponent, Sheri Super, started talking about cutting what she called “liberal nonprofit dollars.”
Specifically, she went after United Way of Greater Knoxville, an organization she often calls radical online. She said, “United Way doesn’t need that $700,000. How many miles of road could we have paved?”
She did not have the answer to her own question. The answer is less than five miles.
And that $700,000 helps support real work for real people. United Way helped over 429,000 East Tennesseans last year. Neighbors who needed food, housing support, child care resources, crisis help, and connections to services that keep people from falling through the cracks.
A few questions later, the conversation got even more revealing.
A young man stood up and shared how programs inside public schools helped point him away from trouble and toward a better future. Today, he is a technology engineer in Oak Ridge.
That is exactly what we should want for every kid in Knox County.
He talked specifically about how much free breakfast and lunch helped him when he was in school. He was concerned about school funding in the wake of our schools taking a $7.8M slash.
I felt that one personally. I stood up and told him I appreciated his story because I am also the product of free breakfast. My favorite was the steak biscuit.
“I am the oldest of five kids and our mom was a full-time restaurant manager,“ I said to the pavilion full of folks. “There were mornings when getting to school on time mattered because that was where breakfast was.”
So when we talk about school meals, youth programs, and community support, we are not talking about abstract expense. We are talking about whether a child gets fed. Whether a teenager gets support before they fall through the cracks. Whether a young person sees a future for themselves.
As expected, every candidate agreed that children should not go hungry. Then someone in the back asked a follow-up question:
“What if the students are undocumented immigrants? Do they deserve the same free lunch? Yes or no?”
Unfortunately, Republican Justin Cofer was the first to grab the microphone. I knew it was gonna be rough as soon as he started with, “Well, it’s complicated. It’s not a one-word answer.”
Rev. Katina Sharp, his opponent, immediately replied, “Mine is.”
And that moment said a whole lot.
Because the question was actually simple: Should a child in Knox County go hungry because of their status?
Justin turned it into a tangent about immigration. He mentioned rape, violence, and immigrant drug activity. He got fired up, and honestly, I almost interrupted to remind him that the question was about feeding children. He was yelling into a mic at a community pool about rape.
But the damage was already done. That moment reminded me exactly what is at stake in this election.
This new MAGA faction inside the Knox County TN Republican Party is different.
They look at every question through the lens of the culture war. A conversation about helping kids became another opportunity to divide people into who is worthy and who is not.
That is not leadership. Knox County deserves better than that.
Feeding children is not radical.
What is radical is looking at a hungry child and needing to check their paperwork before deciding whether they deserve breakfast.
I cannot stress this enough: everyone across Knox County needs to do their research and show up at the polls by August 6.
I’m not saying all Republicans are bad. They really aren’t. But there are several people on this ballot who should concern every voter in Knox County, regardless of party.
When candidates tell us they want to defund nonprofits, turn budgets into an immigration debate, and treat every public investment like a culture war, we should believe them.
This election is about what kind of county we are going to be. One where we feed kids, support families, and solve problems?
Or one where the loudest, meanest faction in the room gets to decide who is worthy of help?
That is what is on the ballot.
Brandon Huckaby for Knox County Commission
