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
Upon Further Review: No. 6 Alabama 37, No. 11 Tennessee 20
Alabama football nabbed its sixth straight win this past Saturday night, beating rival Tennessee 37-20 at Bryant-Denny Stadium for its fourth straight victory over a ranked team (becoming the first SEC squad to ever do that without a bye week in the process).
“Gutty win against a very good team. Well-coached, and they constantly put pressure on you,” Crimson Tide head coach Kalen DeBoer said postgame. “It wasn’t perfect… But our guys did a nice job of continuing to fight just like we have been.”
The victory was only Alabama’s second in the past four rivalry meetings against the Volunteers, but Tennessee was once again left waiting on its first triumphant outcome in Tuscaloosa since 2003. The Crimson Tide (6-1, 4-0 SEC) moved up to No. 4 in the AP Top 25. The Volunteers (5-2, 2-2 SEC) dropped to No. 17.
Player of the Game: Wolf linebacker Yhonzae Pierre has had to step up after long-term injuries to both Jah-Marien Latham and Qua Russaw. The redshirt sophomore has done more than simply fill a void. He’s become a player opposing offenses can only afford to miss at their own immense peril. On Saturday night, Pierre had six total tackles and was credited with 2.5 sacks, one of which resulted in a safety that gave Alabama a lead it would never relinquish.
Play of the Game: There is no doubt about which play in this contest was the most impactful. With nine seconds remaining in the first half, Tennessee ran a play-action that resulted in quarterback Joey Aguilar’s pass being intercepted by sophomore Crimson Tide cornerback Zabien Brown. Apart from the turnover itself, what made that play so remarkable? That query is answered by the fact that the Volunteers were on the one-yard line, and Brown ran the interception back for a 99-yard touchdown to make the halftime score 23-7 Alabama.
Stat of the Game: At no point after the second quarter was this season’s Third Saturday in October a one-possession game. The visitors never led, and a Jam Miller touchdown with just over four minutes to go in the first half brought the score to 16-7. Brown’s colossal interception return created even more separation, and 10 points was the slimmest margin by which the Crimson Tide led during the game’s second half.
Brown co-led the Alabama team with seven tackles in addition to his long touchdown on the interception. It was a game to remember for the sophomore, who’s already had his share of memorable moments on Saban Field in his young career.
Ty Simpson passed for 253 yards against Tennessee. Sophomore Ryan Williams led the receiving group with 87 of those yards, making more than one difficult catch in the process. He didn’t reach paydirt, but Williams had a long of 31 yards and caught all five of his targets, without so much as a single drop.
Volunteers running back DeSean Bishop had 123 rush yards on 14 attempts, good for an average of 8.8 yards per carry. Adding the averages of the three running backs Alabama used in the game provides a yield of 5.5 (Kevin Riley had -2 yards on three carries). Bishop also had two touchdowns.
Before facing Alabama, Aguilar had only been sacked multiple times in a game once, when Mississippi State notched two against him. The Crimson Tide doubled that total, though Aguilar has still not taken more than one sack in a home game.
Redshirt freshman Rico Scott scored for the first time since the season opener in the third quarter against the Volunteers. However, senior Germie Bernard (who was held scoreless in the game) amassed 35 rush yards on the nine-play, 99-yard drive that resulted in Scott’s 11-yard touchdown reception. Bernard was one of the most important playmakers on a drive that gave his team a 17-point lead.
Through two SEC games this fall, Colorado transfer Nikhai Hill-Green only got three total tackles under his belt. In the ensuing two, Hill-Green stepped up his play dramatically. He had six tackles against the Volunteers and is up to 13 in Alabama’s past two SEC matchups.
Bernard has five receiving touchdowns in the 2025 season, but has now gone two straight weeks without adding another one (or more) to that total. By catching the first touchdown pass of Saturday’s game, Horton earned his fifth touchdown catch of the year. He was expected to make an impact upon his transfer from Miami (Fla.), and has done so in more ways than scoring, but his propensity for finding the end zone in big games cannot be discounted.
Daniel Hill has been seen more regularly as of late, with the coaching staff attributing that to the sophomore getting healthier than he was at the start of the regular season. The 34 yards he ran for when facing Tennessee were a career best, and he added a touchdown to go with that. Hill had 29 yards in the 2024 season opener against Western Kentucky; that was his single-game high before Saturday, and he also scored a touchdown in that contest.
Bray Hubbard equaled Brown with seven total tackles, joining defensive lineman James Smith among players who reached that number against the Volunteers. Hubbard led that group with five solo tackles; it is tied for his season-best number in that category, which he accomplished at Georgia on Sept. 27. Brown and Smith combined for five solo tackles in the Tennessee game.
The stable of Crimson Tide running backs minus Jam Miller, who cleared concussion protocol in time to play Saturday, has yet to put its stamp on a game. Hill helped, but once again, the backs didn’t rush for 100 yards or more between them. Even with Miller, three different running backs combined for just 47 yards. Alabama has only reached the 100-yard mark in a Power Four game twice this season, and both times were with Miller on the field, but he had just 15 rushing yards against Tennessee.
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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