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The National Guard occupation that has been brutalizing Memphis must stop 56%
By Sheree Renée Thomas0%
7/10/2026, 10:41:17 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 4 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Politically Left Leaning Bias, and Negativity Bias, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 38.8% saturation with 355 hits. Analysis detected 809 faulty-reasoning hits from 916 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 56.1% and a BS Rank of 56% (6,090 of 13,766 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 55.80% of the article peer group.
To walk through Memphis is to step into an eerie, simultaneous haunting, both visible and invisible.
You see armed soldiers and federal agents everywhere in Memphis: an uncanny, disruptive presence woven into the mundane fabric of our daily lives.
Since they arrived in September , they have become a disturbingly normalized fixture.
Some roll through our neighborhoods in plain clothes, driving ordinary Sprinter vans, looking for all the world like tourists who got lost on their way to Beale Street.
Others are suited out in khaki and camel-colored camouflage, standing like insolent, bored sentinels guarding the food court at the mall, or checking over shopping baskets at local chain stores.
When they first arrived, they stood starkly in front of our small, independent businesses, their heavy presence strangling the life out of local commerce and destroying decades of hard-won community goodwill and trust.
The anger after Johnson’s homicide is an order of magnitude higher.
Even before the National Guard shot and killed 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson July 4 weekend, the reality of this dystopian visitation was laid bare by MLK50, which published dashcam and body camera footage documenting the seemingly pretextual traffic stop of 18-year-old Yasser Lopez Soza and three of his Memphis Business Academy classmates.
The minors were headed to their season-opening soccer game when they were pulled over.
The footage captures a Homeland Security agent riding shotgun inside a Memphis Police Department cruiser, evidence that exposed as a lie the city’s repeated vow that Memphis police would never assist in federal immigration dragnets.
But the anger after Johnson’s homicide is an order of magnitude higher.
It happened at nearly 4 a.m.
Sunday, July 5, the tail end of a weekend where thousands of Memphians were out in the summer night celebrating the Fourth of July.
At the intersection of Ida B.
Wells and Gayoso Avenue, in the literal shadow of AutoZone Park — where the city’s minor league baseball team plays and crowds routinely gather — local police officers and National Guard members reportedly joined a foot pursuit after reports of gunfire.
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Officials say Johnson fled on foot with a handgun and turned toward the soldiers who fired and hit him twice in the chest.
Johnson was a 20-year-old former Tennessee State University student and father with no criminal history.
His grandfather, who’s demanded video of the fatal encounter, told The Associated Press that Johnson started carrying a gun after being “jumped” in Nashville recently.
He was killed while reportedly running through the labyrinth of an occupied city.
Even soldiers within the ranks must recognize the dangerous absurdity of the mission.
They are not trained for this or for de-escalation.
The strategies of a combat theater cannot be translated into civilian law enforcement or community life.
Johnson’s killing is the tragic, inevitable harvest of this tactical mismatch.
Behind this military vanguard lies a broader, bureaucratic travesty of democracy.
Neither Memphis Mayor Paul Young nor the Shelby County Government ever requested these troops.
When local legislators and Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris sued to halt this occupation and won a temporary injunction from a judge who recognized the state’s unilateral overreach as unlawful, the state machine pushed back.
The Tennessee Court of Appeals overturned the block and kept soldiers on our streets against the explicit, legal will of our elected local leadership.
The deployment of troops to Memphis is part of a larger pattern of exploitation.
The deployment of troops to Memphis is part of a larger pattern of exploitation.
The state’s leaders have permitted unchecked corporate overreach.
Thus, we have xAI’s Colossus data center pumping unpermitted pollutants near historically Black neighborhoods in Southwest Memphis, even as the company expands its reach across the state line into Southaven, Mississippi .
Backed by a $20 billion incentive package from the state, they have constructed a massive new facility, provocatively dubbed MACROHARDRR , a juvenile play on a tech competitor’s name that can also be heard as a jarring, phonetic dog whistle that makes local Black communities the victims of the joke.
The 1820 Census registers the baseline human ledger of Memphis’ beginnings as 103 enslaved Africans forced to fell ancient oaks, obliterate ancient Indigenous mounds, pack the heavy mud into bricks and to turn the wilderness of a Mississippi River bluff into an empire of commerce.
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That means ours is a city built on layers upon layers of historical crime, where wealth was extracted from human flesh and auction squares were plotted directly into public parks.
The irony has come full circle, but so has the resolve.
The descendants of the original 103 souls who cleared this bluff will not be quiet spectators to their own disenfranchisement.
Our grief for Tyrin Johnson is inextricably bound to our unyielding demand for autonomy.
True public safety requires investment in our schools, our infrastructure and our collective well-being, instead of sending armed enforcers to occupy our neighborhoods and stamp out our future.
They forgot that the high clay of this bluff belongs to the hands that shaped the bricks.
We are still here, holding the ground we built, waiting out the occupation.
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