Aaron Gulbransen: The Faith and Freedom Coalition Activates Conservative Voters of Faith

Aaron Gulbransen: The Faith and Freedom Coalition Activates Conservative Voters of Faith

Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Aaron Gulbransen in studio to describe the mission of the Faith and Freedom Coalition locally and nationally.

Leahy: In studio with us, Aaron Gomon, the official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report, is also an all-star panelist and the state director for the State of Tennessee of the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

Aaron, your job as the state director in Tennessee of the Faith and Freedom Coalition is to represent the agenda of the Faith and Freedom Coalition before the Tennessee General Assembly. How’s that going this session?

Gulbransen: Very well. By the way, you can find us on the web at tnffcoalition.com and on Twitter @tnfaithfreedom.

Leahy: Can I just ask you this question first? If you can remind our audience what the Faith and Freedom Coalition is at the national level.

Gulbransen: The simplest thing to do to say is we activate conservative voters of faith. And that’s across all different denominations. And we support Israel. We support traditional marriage. We’re very pro-life. We have an operation at the federal level that does what I do in the state.

There are several different people working in DC in both halls of Congress and at the White House. Of course, when you have a conservative in the White House, you can certainly get a lot more things done, but that’s what we do. We engage in issues and advocacy on a swath of different issues. There’s also some criminal justice reform with a conservative bent on that as well.

A lot of work gets done in other states. And we’ll be dipping our toes into that here pretty soon. Human trafficking and child trafficking issues are very important. And then we will deal with taxes as well. Here in Tennessee, we’re blessed with not having a state income tax.

And the issue of taxes is not as necessarily as big as it is in other states. Check out more about all of this on tnffcoalition.com. I neglect to say that often enough on the air. So I’m just making up for it today, Michael. We’ve been blessed.

An obvious statement, working with The Tennessee Star as I did and working with you was a very good jumpstart to relationships with the General Assembly, and we’ve been able to hop on and support bills and have a say in a number of different issues.

Leahy: I was just going to add that one of the things that we’ve done here at The Tennessee Star, we’ve been up here for six years, and you came in as our Tennessee political editor and did a great job. But one of the things that we’ve done is simply this, the phrase that you coined, left stream media which I love.

Coined that today here. Mark it down, folks. Left-stream media. I’m stealing it by the way. That phrase accurately describes the media in Tennessee. They’re all left-stream. All of them except for The Tennessee Star. All we do is talk to Tennessee legislators, county executives, and local officials.

And we simply report factually what they say. We don’t twist it. We just tell folks what they say. And because of that, members of the Tennessee General Assembly like to talk to us. We just simply report what they say accurately because the left-stream media here in Tennessee, News Channel Five, they’re all lefties.

They all have an agenda. And Tennessee General Assembly members know that. You get straight reporting from us. And that’s why we’ve been able to communicate with a lot of members of the Tennessee General Assembly. That’s why they come in here in studio and talk.

Because we’re not trying to twist things. And that’s one of the things that in your reporting, you got to know a lot of these folks. And that’s why now, not in a reporting capacity, but in another capacity, you’ve been able to develop relationships with people that have come to trust you because of your honest reporting.

Gulbransen: It wasn’t exactly like switching to advocacy was foreign to me. I did that for many years. A vast majority of my career is in campaigns.

Leahy: You worked with the American Center for Law and Justice. ACLJ. Purely journalistic. But for most of your career, you’ve been either a political consultant or an issue advocate.

Gulbransen: Yes. And my first foray into politics at least as a volunteer was with the Long Island Coalition for Life, the oldest pro-life group in the country which actually was started before Roe v. Wade even happened. Obviously, the issue of life is very important to me.

On that note, there’s an important bill that the House local government committee is taking up today, HB 90. The short version of it bans local governments from spending money on abortions or spending money assisting people in obtaining an abortion.

Leahy: There’s a little thing going on here. This is very interesting when you talk about local governments. In Tennessee, the local governments that are in the left-wing centers such as Nashville, Davidson County, and Shelby County, they want to have their own government.

They went out with the sanctuary city thing that a couple of years ago, the Tennessee General Assembly slapped them down on that. But they all want to be their own governments, and they are creations of the state government, and they don’t wanna recognize it pretty much.

Gulbransen: In the wake of the abolition of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, Nashville Metro Council tried to send $500,000 to Planned Parenthood. The mayor’s office, I forget the exact wording of it, but basically, made clear that they would try to help their employees go out of state to get abortions and this sort of thing.

And honestly, I think the most common sense coalition-building side of the abortion debate is no taxpayer money should ever be spent on this. There are a lot of people that will have differing opinions on it. But when you bring up money, there’s a lot more consensus. Unless you’re a far-left Democrat, that’s an elected official, and you’re pandering to your base.

Leahy: What cracks me up about a lot of these far-left, local, folks who run for our office and run for city council, is they misunderstand their base. They think actually if they become a city council member here in Nashville or in Memphis, their job is to set American foreign or national policy. No, your job is to make sure that the streets aren’t filled with potholes, and the garbage gets collected in your neighborhood.

Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:


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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Background Photo “Faith and Freedom Coalition” by Faith and Freedom Coalition.

 

Aaron Gulbransen: The Faith and Freedom Coalition Activates Conservative Voters of Faith

Tennessee Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Director Gulbransen Describes Group’s 2023 Agenda

Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the director of Tennessee’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, Aaron Gulbransen in studio to talk about the group’s 2023 agenda.

Leahy: We’re just having too much fun. In studio, the official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report, Aaron Gulbransen. By the way, Aaron, a programming note. You’re aware of this. Just wanted to share this with our audience. Friday, I’m off to D.C. Doing the CPAC thing.

I’ll probably be on WarRoom with Steve Bannon live, which is always a big adventure. But you are here. You are running the show Friday from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. Don’t you love getting arriving here at 4:45 or 4:30?

Gulbransen: Coffee day for Aaron.

Leahy: But it’s fun.

Gulbransen: It’s a load of fun.

Leahy: And you’ve got a lot of your political pals that you’ll be putting on the air.

Gulbransen: We’ll have a couple of legislators on, and we’ll have some fun guests on the show. I think Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs is going to be joining us as well.

Leahy: Your pals with him because you guys have the WWE thing going on. He was a superstar, and you are a super fan.

Gulbransen: There you go. Exactly.

Leahy: I suppose I ought to go to a WWE just to see the experience. I’ve never done that.

Gulbransen: It would be worth the experience.

Leahy: So talk a little bit about the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s agenda up on Capitol Hill and Tennessee General Assembly of this session. What bills are you looking at?

Gulbransen: There’s a number of bills that we’re fairly certain we’re going to fail, but you want to do your due diligence, one of which is definitely going to fail, but we want to go on record as opposing it. Senator Lamar and State Rep. Camper, which is before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, has what they call the Fundamental Right to Reproductive Health Care Act, which I call a radical pro-abortion bill. So there’s that. It needs to go bye-bye.

Leahy: By the way, just so you know, our lead story today at The Tennessee Star, is an excellent analysis of that bill by Susan Berry, and I think the point that she makes is similar to yours.

Gulbransen: It just needs to go by.

Leahy: But will it?

Gulbransen: Yes. Among the many pieces of ill-advised legislation presented by State Senator Heidi Campbell, along with State Rep. Bo Mitchell, we got SB 1024, which Faith and Freedom are opposing because it repeals the Tennessee Education Savings Account pilot program.

Leahy: Oh, my goodness. By the way, did you see that Heidi Campbell has a new campaign manager, Phil Williams?

Gulbransen: Yes.

Leahy: From News Channel 5? Boom.

Gulbransen: I knew it. He likes to relitigate old campaigns apparently.

Leahy: He would be a great Democrat campaign manager because he’s the only one who can throw a punch, and her previous campaign manager just wasn’t able to throw a single punch. He’s doing a very good job of throwing punches. I think he’s in the wrong career. He should be a Democrat political operative. I think he’d be very successful there.

Gulbransen: Yes, there’s another bit of legislation. I think I’ve mentioned this in the past, but the Senate version is SB 285 by Senator Oliver. The House version is our favorite. I’m kidding when I say this, and very sarcastically.

New State Rep. Justin Jones. They want to get ID cards issued by colleges, which was abolished years ago, so you can use them as your voter ID card at a polling place. Which okay, no! We didn’t see election fraud with that.

Leahy: That’s what ruined Wisconsin, for instance, where they do that in Madison, which is a far-left city in the University of Wisconsin there, by the way. Madison is a beautiful city, and it’s got the most beautiful state capitol in the country, but they’re overrun with left-wing lunatics.

Gulbranen: Another one is, and there are a couple of these by Heidi Campbell. SB 1519 basically targets charter schools and the charter school commission. So, of course, we’re opposing that one. And this is just a silly election one. But you got SB 1483.

The gist of it is, if you’re an independent candidate, she’s forcing your campaign to spend money to hand out information at the polls, that you’re an independent candidate. It’s like, okay. It’s just kind of a silly mandate on campaigns on how they can spend their money.

Leahy: That’s a pretty good agenda. And think you’re going to be busy up there on the Tennessee General Assembly, Capitol Hill today.

Gulbransen: It’s going to be a fun day.

Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:

– – –

Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Background Photo “Faith and Freedom Coalition” by Faith and Freedom Coalition.