By Robert Dean

Carter County Times

Jeff Bezos doesn’t need your cash. The guy lives on a yacht so big it has a baby yacht inside it to run errands. Bezos’s yacht is so massive it can’t dock at most luxury marinas; it has to park near cargo ships and tankers like it’s an overgrown cruise liner that wandered away from port. It’s a billionaire’s sail-powered skyscraper no harbor knows what to do with.

You know who doesn’t have a yacht? The mom-and-pop restaurant in town that’d love to see you stop in for lunch when you’re out buying gifts. The coffee shop that’d be thrilled if you grabbed two lattes and maybe a gift card as a stocking stuffer. This Christmas, think about looking on Etsy or walking into a real store instead of defaulting to Amazon. Studies show that for every $100 spent at a small business, about $48 stays local, while Amazon leaves behind about zero. Amazon drains a town’s tax base; small businesses fund the schools, parks, and services communities actually rely on. And not for nothing—people work in these places, and if you haven’t noticed, the economy isn’t exactly humming.

Main Street matters more than Walmart. And just like Bezos, the fine folks in Bentonville have plenty of our money. When you shop at a small business, you help keep storefronts filled, sidewalks lit, and downtowns alive. In towns under 50,000 people, locally owned businesses generate two-thirds of the local economy. And when you tell the small business owner your kid’s sick and you need to leave early, you won’t get some corporate nonsense about “scheduling conflicts.”

Look, for working parents, I get it: shopping on your phone is faster. I enjoy scrolling from the toilet myself. But these creeps already have too much of our money, time, and data. Meanwhile, the old lady running the used bookstore will remember your name, set aside the good stuff, and actually care if you come back. She’s part of the community. Amazon isn’t. Walmart has your shopping data. The waitress down at the diner, she knows you hate onions.

Shopping small should be about an address within the community, not just a shipping address. I know money is tight. Amazon and Walmart sell cheaper but what’s more important: a lot of cheap things or a Christmas that’s curated with a few fewer gifts but ones that you can feel good about five years from now? We’ve all got way too much crap, anyhow.

Shopping in person is one of the last social activities we haven’t completely outsourced to our phones. We already stream movies at home, order food from apps, swipe through everything from dates to dog walkers. Don’t let Christmas shopping join that list—go to the mall, go downtown, drop a few bucks in a local merchant’s till. You may run into neighbors or meet someone who makes your heart beat a little quicker. We cannot become slaves to swiping away our lives. The more technology-based we become, the worse off we are for it. I want to be around people who share my experience rather than sit all afternoon on the couch. Do you want to live in a town of warehouses and data centers or places where people can at least look one another in the eye?

Buying small means giving power back to actual people, not to corporations that see you as friction in the checkout process. Supporting small business might mean thinking differently this year: maybe you don’t buy your mom another blouse; maybe you get her a year of lawn service instead. Your old man will probably thank you come July.

Contact us at news@cartercountytimes.com

By Tommy Druen

For Carter County Times

It was a Wednesday night in the fall of 1989. I was twelve years old, sitting in a half-empty sanctuary at our small country church. Midweek services were never well attended—maybe ten or twelve people in total. That particular night our pastor had brought a whiteboard, treating it more like a class than a sermon.

I’ll admit, my attention wandered. I probably thumbed through the hymnal or stared at the ceiling, anything to pass the time. The lesson wasn’t aimed at a middle schooler anyway. But I remember the moment our pastor drew a strange symbol on the board and asked if anyone knew what it was.

I leaned toward my mom and whispered, “Isn’t that Pisces?”

It wasn’t. It was the ichthys—a fish symbol used by early Christians. But in a sanctuary that small, a whisper might as well have been shouted. The pastor heard me and asked me to repeat it aloud. I hesitated, not because I was shy, but because I wasn’t sure. When I finally said it, he didn’t correct me gently. Instead, he turned to the group and launched into a “what’s wrong with our youth today” diatribe.

My wrong answer became his example. I was mortified—but, unintentionally, I had proved his point. The series he was teaching was about the dangers of the “New Age movement.”

The New Age movement had emerged in the 1970s, drawing on astrology, Eastern spirituality, and all sorts of mystical ideas. It spread mostly among the counterculture crowd, particularly along the West Coast. Know where it didn’t take root? Rural Kentucky. And know who wasn’t exactly the target demographic? Twelve-year-old Kentucky kids. My answer may not have been right, but I wasn’t exactly conducing séances while singing “The Age of Aquarius” either.

Looking back, I know our pastor meant well. He truly believed this New Age philosophy posed a threat to Christianity. His concern wasn’t malicious—it was misplaced. His fear was genuine; the danger was not.

Fear itself isn’t inherently bad. At its best, it’s a safeguard—our instinct to avoid real harm. For instance, I have a healthy fear of snakes. Maybe it’s stronger than it needs to be, but it’s kept me from ever getting close enough to be bitten. But irrational fear? That’s another story.

History gives us no shortage of examples. Take Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s. For fifteen months, hysteria swept through the town after a handful of young girls accused others of witchcraft. More than two hundred people were accused, thirty were convicted, and nineteen were hanged. One man was pressed to death under stones for refusing to confess. Five more died in jail. All because of an invisible threat that existed only in fear.

Of course, that was the 17th century—surely we’d grown past such madness, right? Maybe not. Those of us who grew up in the 1980s remember another wave of mass hysteria: the “Satanic Panic.”

It’s hard to overstate how widespread it was. Across the country, more than 12,000 accusations emerged of ritual sacrifice and child abuse supposedly committed by devil-worshiping cults. People claimed Satanic messages were hidden in heavy metal records, comic books, and even Dungeons & Dragons. Talk show hosts stoked the flames, and lives were destroyed in pursuit of a phantom menace.

In the end, no credible evidence ever surfaced. The only real thing about the Satanic Panic was the damage it caused—innocent people accused, families torn apart, and a generation taught to fear shadows.

And yet, the cycle always repeats. In 2016, social media gave birth to another moral panic—“Pizzagate.” This time, it was claimed that high-ranking politicians were running a child trafficking ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria’s basement. The fact that the restaurant didn’t even have a basement didn’t matter. A man from North Carolina showed up with an assault rifle to “rescue” the children anyway.

Fear, when left unchecked, spreads faster than reason. It leaps from Salem to the suburbs, from pulpits to podcasts. It adapts to its time and technology, but its root is the same: ignorance.

The 19th-century writer Christian Nestell Bovee once said, “We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.” That may be the most enduring truth of all.

I’m not suggesting we should be fearless. There are plenty of things in this world worth fearing. But the one fear we should all cultivate—the one that might keep us safest—is fear of ignorance itself. Because if we ever stop questioning, stop learning, stop discerning truth from hysteria, we’re bound to repeat the same mistakes.

The witches of Salem are long gone. The Satanic cults of the ’80s never existed. And the only thing hiding in the basement of that D.C. pizzeria was our own collective gullibility.

When we fear knowledge less and ignorance more, maybe then we’ll finally break the spell.

By Robert Dean

Carter County Times

Every few months, another headline drops and we’re reminded just how deep the rot goes. The Epstein files, once dismissed as rumor, are now public — and the names are exactly who you thought they’d be.

I’ll just add to the social dog pile here and say the quiet part out loud: remember when Pam Bondi said there were no Epstein files but now there magically are? Yeah. I remember that, too. And now we’re watching Trump squirm because he was homies with a known pedophile. The apologists will pretend it’s not a big deal, but it is. The cabal of power above us is real and they’re weirdos living in their own reality. We saw it with Diddy and now we’re seeing it with the Epstein melee. Trump’s hands are dirty. At this point, if you’re defending him, that’s questionable on you.

The Epstein files should be a national crisis. Instead, it’s another tab we scroll past between cat videos and war footage. We’ve seen so many monsters unmasked that it barely registers anymore.

But here’s the kicker — we’ve been here before.

And if you’re reading this saying, “if the Democrats had them, why didn’t they bring them out?” I’m with you on that logic. Everyone involved should have to pay the moral cost of going to some sketchy island. I don’t own Clinton shoes; a Clinton flag doesn’t hang outside my house. I don’t care what happens to Bill Clinton. I know he’s plenty dirty himself.

We were told “the laptop didn’t exist,” or “the flight logs were nothing,” and “there was no list.” This is all part of the disinformation campaign by the elite. And honestly, at this point, we live within a weird, altered reality of who’s to blame — conspiracy feels like the normal mode these days. Clinton, Dershowitz, Trump, Gates — people who built empires off access are all listed as connected. It’s the same set of creeps who toast each other on yachts and lecture the rest of us about morality.

At the root of all this is money. Money buys silence. The more obvious the lie, the less anyone wants to admit it. You don’t send a birthday card to a guy you barely know — Trump’s relationship with Epstein wasn’t casual. And now he’s suing comedians and threatening journalists because that’s easier than explaining why his name’s on the flight logs.

We shouldn’t be taking sides based on political identity but instead maybe asking why the same group of rich freaks are allowed to fly into a known predator’s island. The ruling class treats scandal like it’s something enough propaganda and money can wave away, considering how beaten down we are by their antics and slaps on the wrist. Do I think anything will happen to Trump, Clinton, Gates, or the others? No. I live in reality. Money gets you out of everything.

But you can’t call yourself the party of law and order while defending a guy on the same flight logs as a predator. Either you believe in justice, or you believe in your team jersey. You can’t have both. And if this doesn’t bother you, maybe the problem isn’t the files — it’s us.Email us at news@cartercountytimes.com