A rural Tennessee region was rocked this week after thousands of homes received mailers encouraging them to join the local Young Republicans chapter with a campaign platform including “No wars for Jews.”
Tennessee
In-N-Out lines in Tennessee are so long there’s now an app to track wait times
In-N-Out Burger expanding to Tennessee
The beloved California burger chain announced Tuesday its plan to open future restaurants in Tennessee in addition to an Eastern territory office in the city of Franklin.
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. – Hoping to get in and out of In-N-Out Burger quickly? There’s an app for that.
The arrival of the beloved California burger chain in Tennessee has sparked such intense demand that fans have turned to technology to manage the hours-long lines.
How ‘The Wait App’ tracks massive burger lines
What we know:
Tennessee’s first three In-N-Out locations—situated in Lebanon, Antioch, and Murfreesboro—opened their doors in mid-December to massive crowds.
To combat the resulting congestion, a web-based tool called Thewaitapp.com was launched to provide real-time data on how long it takes to order both inside the restaurant and at the drive-thru, WSMV reports.
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The app relies entirely on crowdsourcing, meaning users visiting the restaurants input their own wait times to keep the data current for others.
Timeline of In-N-Out’s Tennessee expansion
Timeline:
In-N-Out’s rapid expansion into the Midstate occurred over the course of a single week in December 2025:
December 10: The first two Tennessee locations officially opened in Lebanon and Nashville’s Antioch neighborhood, drawing immediate, multi-hour lines.
December 12: A third location opened in Murfreesboro, further expanding the brand’s footprint in the region.
Mid-December: “The Wait App” launched shortly after the initial openings to help customers find the shortest lines among the trio of restaurants.
The In-N-Out effect
Why you should care:
For Tennessee residents, the arrival of the California-based chain is a significant cultural and economic event, but it has also created localized traffic issues.
The launch of a third-party app highlights the “In-N-Out effect,” where brand loyalty is high enough to drive secondary technological solutions.
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For the casual diner, using the app can mean the difference between a quick meal and a three-hour commitment, as it even provides a “confidence level” for the accuracy of the reported times.
The backstory:
In-N-Out heiress and CEO Lynsi Snyder announced in 2023 that In-N-Out planned to open future restaurants in Tennessee in addition to an Eastern territory administrative office in the city of Franklin.
Earlier this year, Snyder revealed she and her family were relocating to Tennessee.
“There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here,” she said on an episode of the podcast Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey. “Doing business is not easy here now.”
Snyder said the majority of In-N-Out restaurants would still be in California.
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“Moving into Tennessee provides our In-N-Out Associates wonderful opportunities to buy a home and raise a family and be a part of our expansion in a different part of the U.S.,” she said in a separate video clarifying her statements made on the podcast.
“It’s tough here in California, and this doesn’t have to do with my love or loyalty to the state and our customers,” she said. “But I love our associates and I [want to] offer them this.”
Big picture view:
In-N-Out was founded by Harry and Esther Snyder in Baldwin Park in 1948 as California’s first drive-thru hamburger stand.
The chain expanded to locations across the Golden State and in 1992, it opened its first restaurant outside California in Nevada.
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In-N-Out currently operates more than 400 locations across California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, and Tennessee.
Future of the franchise
What’s next:
While the initial “grand opening craze” has settled slightly, wait times are expected to remain high through the holiday season. The success of the Tennessee wait-tracking tool may set a precedent for future In-N-Out expansions into new territories.
This story was reported from Los Angeles.
The Source: This report is based on local coverage of In-N-Out Burger’s expansion into Middle Tennessee and technical specifications from Thewaitapp.com. Data regarding restaurant opening dates and location details were verified through official company announcements and local news reports from the Nashville and Murfreesboro areas.
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (WSMV) – Traffic on Interstate 24 will be impacted Sunday as Middle Tennessee Electric crews conduct electrical line work.
MTE said crews will be performing electrical line work across I-24 near Exit 76 in Murfreesboro Sunday, June 28.
“The project will require one full interstate traffic stoppage and multiple rolling roadblocks beginning at sunrise,” MTE said. “The work is expected to take approximately five to six hours to complete.”
MTE said Guardian Traffic Control will assist with traffic management.
The work could be rescheduled in the event of inclement weather.
Copyright 2026 WSMV. All rights reserved.
BRISTOL, Tenn. (WCYB) — Kids in Bristol got the chance to climb in some of their favorite trucks on Saturday.
Bristol Parks and Recreation hosted “Big Truck Day” at Bristol Tennessee City Hall.
The event included some of the kids’ favorite big trucks, a Bristol Motor Speedway pace car, face paint, and free popsicles.
Organizers say it’s great for kids to be able to see who’s behind those big trucks.
Parks and recreation officials say you can keep updated with their events on their Facebook page by clicking here.
The flyers led to a dramatic showdown at a local GOP meeting, including a state lawmaker’s cry of “I am a Jew!” and a rejoinder from Austin Lee, the young man behind the flyers: “We will not fight wars for you.” Cops escorted the provocateur out.
“Let’s face it, we read about antisemitism and anti-Black or white nationalism, right?” the lawmaker, State Rep. Scott Cepicky, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We hear about this stuff, and people are like, ‘Well, you know, that’s over there, or that’s in another state, that’s not here.’ Let me tell you something. It came to Maury County.”
The mailers, which encouraged recipients to “support” Lee, also said “Stop the Great Replacement” (a reference to the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory), “Ban Islam and Hinduism” and “Men in charge.”
“Nonwhite foreigners have invaded our country and are replacing White Americans,” read the flyers, viewed by JTA and reportedly sent to around 2,000 households with young white men. “Efforts at mass deportations have failed. No one is coming to save us; we must solve this problem ourselves.”
The flyers were mailed mainly in Maury County, 50 miles south of Nashville, as well as some surrounding counties. In addition to Lee’s name and an invitation to join the Maury County Young Republicans, they contained the prominent logo of the Tennessee Young Republicans – invoking broader concerns that a younger generation of Republicans are trending toward antisemitic and white nationalist ideas.
Mailers reportedly sent out without permission
However, local Republican leaders told JTA the mailers were sent out without permission; that Lee holds no formal leadership role in the county GOP; and that the county’s Young Republicans chapter is currently inactive.
The county GOP chair strongly denounced the content of the mailers to JTA.
“It’s appalling that somebody would send this out,” Jason Gilliam told JTA about his reaction to the flyers. “This kind of thing really disgusts me. I mean, I have an Israeli flag on my bumper – not that that means anything.”
Gilliam said he first became aware of the flyers on Sunday, after households had begun receiving them. At a local GOP meeting the next day, Cepicky condemned the flyers by invoking his own Jewish ancestry.
“I’m a Jew, I’m an Ashkenazi Jew,” Cepicky told the crowd at the GOP meeting in a video taken and later posted by Lee himself. “My family left Israel, moved to Central Europe. In the 30s, you know what happened in Central Europe with Jews. My family immigrated to the United States.”
After Cepicky threatened to “pursue the law on these individuals” who distributed the mailer, Lee, who was also in attendance at the meeting, identified himself.
Cepicky accused Lee of spreading rhetoric “espoused in Europe” in the 1930s. Lee responded, “It was right then, and it is right now. We will not fight wars for you.” Lee was later escorted from the event by law enforcement. Lee has on social media cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “war for Jews.”
Cepicky told JTA he felt compelled to denounce Lee’s antisemitism in part because he was standing in front of a replica of the preamble to the US Constitution at the meeting.
“It was behind me, and it spurred me to say, ‘That doesn’t say, “We the Christians,” or, “We the Jews,” or, “We the Islamics,” or, “We the men, we the women.” It doesn’t say that,’” he said. “It says, ‘We the people.’”
Cepicky told JTA that he is a practicing Christian who discovered his Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on 23andMe. He said his family arrived sometime after the 1917 Russian Revolution. He made his first trip to Israel in 2024, to visit the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and helped found the Tennessee Israel Caucus in the state legislature shortly thereafter.
Gilliam and Cepicky both described Lee to JTA as an infrequent attendee at county GOP meetings who holds no leadership role with the party, and said the county Young Republicans chapter was inactive. They added that they would be pushing for an investigation into what they said was his unauthorized use of the county and state Young Republicans’ name on his mailers.
In social media posts and other interviews following the meeting, Lee continued to assert that he was the president of Maury County Young Republicans. He also referred to Cepicky multiple times as “Jewish Representative Scott Cepicky.”
“I took over that chapter,” Lee said in an interview on Wednesday with a local radio station, claiming he had used a “process” to reactivate the local Young Republicans group. He declined to answer questions about who funded his mailers.
In a statement to media, the statewide Tennessee Young Republicans said the use of their logo “was not authorized” and said the group “did not, and does not, authorize, endorse, or support the recent communications published by the Maury County Young Republicans.”
Young Republicans chapters across US plagued with antisemitism
As of press time, the Tennessee Young Republicans list Maury County as an active chapter on their website. Efforts by JTA to contact the group’s statewide director were unsuccessful. In recent months, official Young Republicans chapters across the country have become embroiled in antisemitism controversies.
Whether Lee has any more solid connections with local GOP officials was a matter of dispute. Gilliam claimed he had first been introduced to Lee by Aaron Miller, a local elected GOP county commissioner with whom Gilliam has since had a falling-out over unrelated matters. Asked about his relationship to Miller on the radio, Lee declined to comment.
Reached by JTA on Friday, Miller denied he had any connection to Lee beyond that “we had beers a couple of times.”
“I don’t agree with his politics. I don’t agree with his approach,” Miller told JTA. “I got a mailer and I was like, ‘Oh, OK, this is interesting.’”
Lee did not respond to a JTA request for comment.
Miller did say that young men, feeling unrepresented by the current Republican Party, are seeking out “alternatives to liberal democracy.” He has advocated for the county GOP to reach out more to the population, he said.
“Anything where you’re going to approach an entire group of people with a blanket mindset, I think that’s wicked,” he said. “We’re all made in God’s image.”
Gilliam and Cepicky told JTA that, in addition to the antisemitism, they strongly objected to the mailers’ anti-immigrant rhetoric and misogyny. At a time of Republican-led immigration crackdowns on the national level, and as national figures including Vice President JD Vance have downplayed the rise of antisemitism within the party, these local GOP leaders loudly insisted such forces should be stamped out.
“This kind of stuff is absolutely not going to be allowed. I will not stand for it,” Gilliam said. “If you don’t cut the head off the snake, it’s going to come back, right? It’s not going to stop. It’s only going to fester. It’s going to grow. And this kind of thing, the roots need to be yanked out of the ground.”
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