The Scene Gave a Hackberry Tree More Charity Than It Gave Riley Gaines
Betsy Phillips spent 300 words on why a "trash tree" deserves curiosity and a second look. In the same column, she declared two named human beings incapable of meaning. The weed got the benefit of the doubt. The people didn't.
In her June 22 column for the Nashville Scene, Betsy Phillips pulled off a small feat of modern commentary: she extended more grace, curiosity, and psychological depth to a common hackberry tree than to two living, breathing human beings. She names two real people, Riley Gaines and Josh Hokit, backs away from calling them racist, and reaches for something she considers worse. She decides they are "meaningless." Not that they lack meaning to her. That they are incapable of meaning anything at all.
Then, in the same piece, she spends three loving paragraphs on a tree she calls trash.
Her claim is wilder than the usual. Gaines and Hokit aren't even nihilists, she writes, because nihilism requires having examined meaning and rejected it. Theirs is "a worldview that doesn't construct meaning in the first place." That's a confident diagnosis of two strangers' inner lives from a writer who admits, a paragraph later, that she jumps to "malice or stupidity" because she "can't understand" people unlike her. The failure to understand is hers. She relabeled it a defect in them.
The tree gets the grace
Phillips calls the hackberry a "trash tree." Her words. Then she catches herself. She explains that hackberries grow along old fence lines because birds perched there and dropped the seeds, so the trees trace the ghost outlines of vanished farms. "It changed how I look at hackberries," she writes. "Sure it's just a tree, but also it's a little deeper than that."
That is a genuinely nice paragraph. It is also the entire tell. Phillips can extend curiosity to a weed she despises, assume the trash tree has hidden structure and a reason for being where it is, and hold the thought that her first dismissive read might be incomplete.
She will not offer a 27-year-old woman from Gallatin the same courtesy.
What Gaines actually did
- Gaines tweeted about a highway in her hometown. A stretch of road in Sumner County was renamed for Charlie Kirk. She drives it. She called it a nice tribute.
- She used the phrase "North Nashville." Phillips treats this as proof of a void where a soul should be, because North Nashville is also the name of a historic Black neighborhood Gaines clearly wasn't referring to.
A failure of geography
The charitable read wasn't just available. It was basic Middle Tennessee geography. To anyone living outside the urban core, driving down from Sumner County, "north Nashville" is a literal direction: the upper ring of the metro area. That's how half the region talks. Phillips chose instead to read a directional description as a dog whistle aimed at a historic Black neighborhood. She preferred a complex psychological diagnosis over a map. She gave the hackberry a second look. She gave Gaines a verdict.
You can think the Kirk highway is a bad idea. You can find Hokit's White House vomit stunt as gross as it was. None of that requires deciding that the people involved are sub-human meaning-voids who could just as easily be "pretending to puke at an Aldi."
Two tells she left on the page
First, the monuments. Phillips' frame is that Gaines and Hokit don't respect what symbols mean. A highway renaming is trivial to them; a memorial is just a backdrop. But this is the Scene, the paper whose editorial sympathies have run for years toward taking Confederate monuments down, renaming the buildings, pulling the busts. That can be the right call. You still cannot spend a decade arguing a monument is just a hunk of bronze that should come down when enough people object to it, then scold a young woman for not treating a highway sign as sacred. Monuments mean everything or they mean nothing. The Scene's working position seems to be that they mean everything when they belong to the other team.
Second, the hedge. Phillips writes, in plain text, that she's not going to call these people racist. "They might or might not be racist," she says, before pivoting to her theory that they're meaningless. Two sentences later she refers, in passing, to "the racist Charlie Kirk." That's the oldest trick in the columnist's playbook: disclaim the accusation in the topic sentence so you're covered, then drop the smear two sentences later as casual, settled fact. A rhetorical hit-and-run. You don't have to relitigate Kirk to catch it. She said she wasn't going there, then went there.
Where Phillips is right
The hackberry passage is real and good. Phillips is right that it's all that deep, that there's always more to things, that "it's not that deep" is usually a failure of attention. Hokit's stunt was juvenile and the Lincoln Memorial deserved better; she's not wrong to be disgusted.
But a person who genuinely believes everything is that deep owes a Gallatin woman tweeting about a highway at least as much curiosity as she owes a weed in a fencerow. That's the whole point of the worldview. It doesn't get to switch off when the subject votes the other way.
Why it matters
This is how a chunk of Tennessee decided the Scene wasn't for them. Not any single policy position, but the posture: the serene confidence that the writer is the only person in the room capable of depth, that anyone who disagrees is either a racist or a void, that half her neighbors don't have inner lives worth the curiosity she'd give roadside vegetation. Readers feel that before they can name it, and they leave.
We have seen this move before. In 2016 a presidential candidate put half of one side's voters in a "basket of deplorables," and the line followed her to the end because nothing motivates people like being written off in a single phrase by someone who has decided they aren't worth understanding. Phillips runs the same play one step further. Clinton at least called her targets bad, which grants them moral agency. Phillips won't extend hers even that. They aren't wicked, in her telling. They're empty. That is not a softer judgment. It is a deeper contempt, and Middle Tennessee can read it just fine.
If a hackberry deserves a second look, so does the person you disagree with. The Scene's columnist forgot that between paragraphs.
What you can do
Read the column yourself. Notice the exact paragraph where the curiosity she extends to a tree runs out, and ask why it ran out there. Then decide whether a worldview that says "it's all that deep" means it, or only means it about things that can't vote.