Tennessee State Representative Andy Holt (R-Dresden) fired back at so-called “fake news” regarding a report by News Channel 5’s Ben Hall.
In a statement, Representative Holt shot down the local reporter’s implication that Holt – a notorious and outspoken opponent of automatically operated “red light cameras” by third-party vendors as a revenue generator for the state – somehow hid his record of unpaid traffic citations.
Hall’s report is literally the definition of fake news. There’s a very simple reason I refused to talk to Mr. Hall about my traffic camera tickets. He’s a known peddler of fake, biased news. It’s actually funny that he fell right into the trap by writing a misleading headline and creating a fake story because I wouldn’t talk to him. The truth is, I’m more than happy to talk about my unpaid traffic camera citations, and I have been very public about that. I welcome any real journalist to come in my office, sit down with me, and report on the real story.
Instead, Representative Holt said Hall’s story was a massive missed opportunity for the journalist to expose a very serious and corrupt operation.
Mr. Hall really dropped the ball here. He let his hatred of conservative legislators lead his reporting, which is typical of biased yellow-journalism. Rather than exposing a massive, illegal operation where government has privatized police powers for profit. Mr. Hall chopped together a hilariously ineffective ‘investigative’ hit piece exposing what millions of people already know: Andy Holt refuses to pay illegally issued traffic camera citations.Â
Holt put out an open invitation to any and all serious investigative reporters who want to expose what he considers to be a massive abuse of power by private companies in bed with government lobbyists using law enforcement to make millions by violating the rights of Tennesseans in a policing for profit scheme.
If any real journalists out there want to know why I have 10 unpaid traffic camera violations, and nothing has happened to my credit, driver’s license, insurance costs, and so on, even though cities are knowingly lying to people by telling them there are serious repercussions for not paying the citations, they’re welcome to come to my office. I’ll spend as much time with them as they want and walk them through every last detail of the scheme that includes federal bribery charges, which include Tennessee officials, those same officials proudly, knowingly violating state law, and so on.
A handful of different vendors operate red light and other camera-based traffic monitoring and enforcement systems in the Volunteer State, including RedFlex, American Traffic Systems, Nestor Traffic Systems, and TraffiPax.
Red light and speed cameras are government-run for-profit rackets that should be illegal in every state, as they are in some already. Representative Holt understands the rackets that are literally highway robbery and wants to see them ended in Tennessee forever. See our website for how the rackets work with posted speed limits improperly and less-safely set far below the safest 85th percentile speed levels and traffic lights deliberately and less-safely mis-engineered with yellow intervals too short for the ACTUAL perception/reaction times and ACTUAL approach speeds of at least 85% of the drivers (safest timing method).
James C. Walker, National Motorists Association
I seem to remember a group of young scamps who used similar make cars and paper printouts of license plates to send floods of red light tickets to individuals they disliked. Not that I would encourage anybody to do such a thing to this reporter. Nope. Please don’t. I’m begging.
We got rid of ours when the police started getting tickets.