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WWE wrestler fights new federal indictment in welfare scandal, which his attorney calls ‘armchair quarterbacking’

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WWE wrestler fights new federal indictment in welfare scandal, which his attorney calls ‘armchair quarterbacking’

Former WWE wrestler Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr. was sitting on the front row behind former Mississippi welfare director John Davis while the now disgraced government bureaucrat testified before Congress in 2019.

Davis, who was at the time admittedly orchestrating a stunning welfare fraud scheme, was telling members of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture about the supposedly life changing work his department was conducting instead of making food assistance available to more Mississippians.

“We know that it takes investment in our staff through things like Law of 16,” Davis told congress members, “which is our personal and professional development programs for our staff members, to then replicate that over with our clients to make sure that they are empowered to be whom they have been called to be.”

Nancy New and Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr. listen as Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes testifies before Congress about why eligibility for food assistance should remain expanded to serve more low-income people on June 20, 2019. Then-Mississippi Department of Human Services John Davis was also testifying that day, explaining why Mississippi eliminated this expanded eligibility. He justified the policy decision by saying the state helps poor residents in other ways — by offering self-help courses taught by DiBiase, a retired WWE wrestler. In a sprawling scandal, DiBiase earned over $3 million in welfare funds for this programming, most of which the state auditor has demanded be returned to the state.

Law of 16 was DiBiase Jr.’s nebulous motivational speaking series, one of the projects for which he received roughly $3 million in federal welfare funds from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and The Emergency Food Assistance Program.

Today, nearly four years after the director spoke openly in the nation’s capital about his work, DiBiase Jr. is facing criminal charges for the first time within the larger unfolding welfare scandal, in which officials stole or misspent tens of millions of federal public assistance funds. 

He pleaded not guilty and if convicted on all counts in the indictment unsealed Thursday, DiBiase Jr. faces a maximum penalty of up to 175 years in prison.

“It was the government that chose to run this program this way. And it was not a secret. This was done in front of everybody. It was done in front of the United States Congress. This was not a secret. This was not, as the federal law would say, a scheme or artifice to defraud,” Scott Gilbert, DiBiase Jr.’s criminal defense attorney, told Mississippi Today two weeks ago. “So what we’re doing now, for the most part, is second guessing and armchair quarterbacking the way government was run. And that’s not what the criminal law is for.”

This indictment, handed down by a federal grand jury, is the first that the U.S. Attorney’s Office has secured in the welfare case. Each of the other five federal defendants pleaded guilty to bills of information, which are used when a defendant chooses to plead guilty without the case going to a grand jury.

READ MORE: The Backchannel Series

DiBiase Jr. joins his younger brother Brett DiBiase, who also received hundreds of thousands in welfare funds, to become the eighth person to be charged criminally within the scandal, including those only charged in state court. DiBiase Jr., his brother and their father, former WWE star Ted “The Million Dollar Man” DiBiase, are all facing civil charges in a parallel lawsuit Mississippi Department of Human Services has filed against nearly four dozen people or organizations. DiBiase Sr. has not faced criminal charges.

Under the new indictment, DiBiase Jr. faces 13 criminal counts under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, the main criminal code of the federal government, ranging from conspiracy, wire fraud, theft of federal funds and money laundering.

“It’s ironic that he was involved with the Law of 16, a questionable program at best, because he’s now going to get familiar with the Law of 18, which is Title 18 of the U.S. Code,” quipped current Mississippi Department of Human Services Director Bob Anderson, a former prosecutor tapped by Gov. Tate Reeves to lead the welfare agency after the scandal broke in 2020.

Anderson has said he is cooperating with the federal authorities in their ongoing investigation for his entire tenure at MDHS. 

“I believe they will do everything to bring all additional charges they think are appropriate in this case,” he added after DiBiase Jr.’s arraignment Thursday.

Prosecutors say DiBiase Jr. secured at least five “sham contracts” in 2017 and 2018 with two nonprofits, Mississippi Community Education Center and Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, who were receiving tens of millions of federal welfare funds to run a statewide anti-poverty initiative called Families First for Mississippi. The directors of those nonprofits, Nancy New and Christie Webb, have both pleaded guilty within the scheme.

Davis and DiBiase Jr. met after the director initially hired his younger brother, Brett DiBiase, in an executive level position at MDHS in 2017, despite him lacking qualifications for the job. Davis became close with the DiBiase brothers, first Brett and then Teddy. Their communication reflects a familial relationship in which they discussed their faith, hardships, and told each other, “I love you.”

Davis retired from office in mid-2019, shortly after the D.C. trip, after his deputy, Jacob Black, who is facing his own charges in the parallel civil suit, brought a tip of suspected fraud to former Gov. Phil Bryant. In the months leading up to his ousting, Davis expressed concern that his relationship with DiBiase Jr. had weakened.

“I hate that you feel that way,” DiBiase Jr. wrote to Davis in a March 2019 text message. “… You definitely don’t have to ‘chase’ after me … Just want you to know I love you dearly, and I’m so grateful for your friendship.”

In its civil suit, MDHS alleges DiBiase Jr. “exploited his close relationship with John Davis to further enrich his family and friends.”

Under Davis’ direction, the nonprofits made up front payments to DiBiase Jr. “regardless of whether any work had been performed and knowing that no work likely ever would be performed,” the new indictment alleges.

The nonprofits hired DiBiase Jr. to perform vague services — such as leadership outreach, addressing the needs of inner city youth and assessing the need for emergency food assistance — with little requirement of outcomes.

But according to audit reports, interviews and a review of communication, Davis frequently required DiBiase Jr. to accompany him in his day-to-day executive meetings and tasks, interrupting DiBiase Jr.’s duties under the contract.

Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr. appears in a 2019 internal Mississippi Department of Human Services video message to agency workers.

“It’s just sort of bizarre to think of the executive director of the Department of Human Services actually conducting himself on a regular basis in ways that thwart and interfere with the ability of the contractor to do the work. But that’s exactly what went on, on a regular basis,” Gilbert said.

“You’ve got a guy who’s here that’s trying to perform and do what he’s supposed to do, and to a large extent he does,” Gilbert said. “And then you’ve got this person running MDHS that for whatever reason feels like the best use of Teddy’s time is not to perform his contracts, but to follow him around to meetings and to other events and things like that. And it just, it’s nonsensical. … I don’t know of anybody that understands really what that was about other than just, it’s just pure absurdity.”

The indictment alleges that the money that went to DiBiase Jr. “were diverted from needy families and low-income individuals in Mississippi.”

However, states have long legally diverted funds from the national Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program away from families in need. Since welfare reform in the 90’s, when TANF was created, states have used the lax guidelines in federal statute to shrink the side of the program that provides monthly cash assistance, known as the welfare check, and put the money instead into other programs or pet projects. 

Even today, Mississippi’s welfare agency uses only about 5% of its TANF block grant on the welfare check. 

While the other TANF programs are supposed to serve one of three other goals — promoting job preparation and marriage, preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies and encouraging two-parent families — the federal government provides virtually no oversight to ensure that the programs supported by these funds actually correspond with these goals.

In the case of the Mississippi welfare scandal, which involves officials using $5 million in TANF funds to build a volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi, the spending had become especially egregious.

The indictment alleges DiBiase Jr. used the federal funds he received to buy himself a vehicle and a boat and to put a down payment on a roughly $1.5 million lakeside home in the Madison community of Reunion, which the federal government has since seized.

Gilbert is confident the federal government doesn’t have a viable case against his client. He says there are several problems with the prosecution’s legal theory. In the welfare fraud case, prosecutors have used a specific theft or bribery statute, 18 U.S. Code § 666, which applies to agents of an organization or agency that receives federal funds obtaining funding by fraud. Two of DiBiase Jr.’s 13 counts fall under this statute. Gilbert said his client cannot be charged with this crime since he was not an agent of an organization that received federal funds. He makes the distinction that because DiBiase Jr. was a contractor under the nonprofit, not the state agency, he was never an agent of the federal funds.

Gilbert also contests the government’s claim that DiBiase Jr.’s contracts were a “sham.” DiBiase Jr. did conduct work under the contracts, Gilbert said, and any work he did not conduct was as a result of Davis’ interference.

“The big issue from a criminal defense perspective is: Did someone obtain money or property from the government by being dishonest? And what I can tell you in this case is, these contracts, the work that was done, I’ve yet to see a single shred of evidence that would show that Teddy DiBiase was dishonest with anybody about anything in order to get these contracts. These contracts were awarded to him. They came to him. He didn’t solicit anything from MDHS. He undertook these contracts and attempted to perform the work.”

“So what this boils down to is do people feel like this was an appropriate use of TANF money or other money to carry out the function of government?” Gilbert continued. “That’s a fair question, and that’s a question that reasonable people absolutely can disagree about. But it’s not a crime. You resolve your dissatisfaction with the way the government functions at the polling place.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

This superintendent took a failing Delta school district to a ‘B’ rating. Now, she’s leaving

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mississippitoday.org – @devnabose – 2025-08-20 04:55:00


Miskia Davis transformed the Sunflower County Consolidated School District in Mississippi from failing to a “B” rating during her tenure as superintendent starting in 2018. Growing up in the Delta, Davis related to the community’s struggles and emphasized strong relationships, discipline, and data-driven accountability. She fostered a culture of celebrating small wins with initiatives like the #WINNING campaign and improved teacher support. Despite initial resistance, her leadership led to improved academic performance and community investment, including a $31 million bond for school renovations. Davis announced her departure in 2024, leaving a legacy of hope and progress for the district’s future under new leadership.

INDIANOLA — The top of the Jeep was down, and Miskia Davis was behind the wheel, leading a parade through downtown Indianola.

It was 2019, just two years after the now 50-year-old Davis became superintendent of Sunflower County Consolidated School District. Back then, she wasn’t sure this moment would ever come. 

She recalled feeling the first cool breeze of October as she waved at people who lined the street, smiling and celebrating.

Sunflower County Consolidated School District teachers and students celebrated their first “C” rating from the Mississippi Department of Education with a parade in October 2019.

But it had — the district’s first “C” rating, its first passing grade, and the community had shown up to a parade to celebrate the achievement. Generations of teachers and Sunflower County graduates stood on the sidewalk, proudly cheering the assembly of cars and students.

“It was … Oh my God,” Davis said. “My children were like, ‘We did something.’”

The work hadn’t been easy, but it had been worth it, Davis thought — the number crunching, the doubt and lukewarm welcome she felt from the community, the tough decisions she’d had to make.

Now, she’s ready to move on.

Daughter of the Delta

From starting kindergarten to subbing for elementary classes, Davis’ childhood and career in Sunflower County and her identity as a daughter of the Delta were her strengths in the classroom, she said.

“I grew up in Drew, poor and with two young parents,” Davis said. “We didn’t have elaborate meals, and when I went home, the lights may have been off. But it made me who I am, and these children were experiencing the same things I experienced as a child.”

So Davis was relatable. But as a young high school teacher at Ruleville Central High School, some of her students looked older than her and many were taller than she was. She was forced to learn how to command respect, too. 

One particular child taught her an invaluable lesson. He was a star football player in her biology class, and he was failing the course by two points. He caused trouble in class and Davis was determined to fail him, despite more experienced teachers prodding her not to, to look past her own ego. 

So Davis gave him another chance. She had him do extra work and spent hours talking to him. She learned why he behaved poorly in class — he was one of seven children to a young, single mother. 

“He was angry at the world, and I just happened to be in the world,” she said. “It taught me the power of relationships. I think that’s the most important catalyst in transforming education.”

It was during that time that her superintendent “saw something” in her and pushed her to become a school leader. That kickstarted her journey in administration. 

Sunflower County Consolidated School District Superintendent Miskia Davis discusses the district’s academic turnaround at Zoe Coffee Co. in Cleveland, Miss., on Friday, July 11, 2025. Under Davis’ leadership, the district rose from an F rating to a B.

Davis soon learned she had a particular gift for turning failing schools around. Under her leadership as principal, Ruleville Middle School went from failing to an “A” letter grade in three years. 

Her school improvement strategy began to take shape, similar to her teaching style. Davis was both a disciplinarian and someone to whom teachers and students could relate. She prioritized building strong relationships with teachers who were invested in their students. But she didn’t shy away from making controversial decisions, either. In Ruleville, she fired nearly all of the staff when she arrived. 

But as Davis was gaining her footing as an administrator, Sunflower County School District was struggling. 

After consistent failing grades resulted in the state takeovers of Indianola, Sunflower and Drew school districts, the Legislature decided to consolidate the three systems in 2012. 

District consolidation is a massive undertaking for any community, but especially for Sunflower County — smack dab in the middle of the Delta, an under-resourced region with a shrinking population, high poverty rates and a deep history of racial exploitation.

Davis arrived in 2014 to a school district that had lost hope — a district that she didn’t recognize.

All Sunflower knew was ‘failure’

Davis never wanted to be superintendent. 

She spent three years working under the leader of the consolidated district. But when the superintendent was dismissed in 2017, Davis was appointed to the head role in an interim capacity. She got the job in January of 2018 without ever applying.

So with another state takeover looming, Davis went to work. The biggest challenge? The district and the community seemed resigned to failure. 

“We had been failing so long, that’s all we knew,” she said. “No one was even sad.”

Early on, Davis visited a school to discuss recent test results. She was so struck by teachers’ apathy that she stopped the meeting midway and had them tear off a scrap of paper and write “yes” or “no” to a question: Did the teachers believe their school could ever be successful? 

More than half said no.

“They were teaching my children,” Davis said, tearing up. “And they didn’t think they would ever be successful.”

Davis went to the school board to tell members that she wouldn’t be renewing many of those teachers’ contracts. That’s when she realized she didn’t just need to boost test scores — she needed to change attitudes. 

The hashtag #WINNING, pictured here in a parade in October 2019, was coined by Superintendent Miskia Davis. Under her leadership, it was used to celebrate every win in Sunflower County Consolidated School District. Davis hoped it would change the district’s culture and propel teachers and students toward academic achievement.

The hashtag #WINNING was born.

“We started to celebrate every little accomplishment,” Davis said. “We got T-shirts, shades, whatever. That was our mantra.”

Children received certificates for a week of perfect attendance. When students did well on benchmark assessments, teachers were ushered into the hallway to be celebrated by students and colleagues. Davis created the “Killin’ It” awards, given to students and teachers for meeting their testing benchmarks. 

They were just certificates, at the end of the day. But it led to a changed school culture, a renewed belief that they could succeed. 

As an administrator, Davis leaned on what she knew worked as a teacher, relationship-building and strong discipline (she even sent her nephew to alternative school for fighting), and combined it with a data-driven approach and an eagle-eyed focus on testing. 

She put an academic coach in every building, whose sole responsibility was supporting teachers. 

Davis took teacher Dylan Jones out of the classroom and put him in the central office, where he was tasked with tracking district metrics. 

Jones uncovered which consultants were working and which were uselessly costing the district millions. The district went from contracting with 30 firms to just four. 

Jones also created an accountability system for teachers. With one click, Davis could see how each teacher’s students were performing, and she gave everyone access to the data. If teachers weren’t meeting their goals, Davis hosted regular meetings and had them explain — in front of everyone — what they needed to succeed. 

Davis’ methods weren’t popular at first. Educators went to the school board and complained that the system was “punitive.” Some even quit. But Davis was steadfast and implored board members to see the work she and her team could do, if given the chance. 

The district’s rating didn’t budge in 2018. 

But in fall 2019, after Davis’ first full year as superintendent, Sunflower County Consolidated School District had earned its first “C” rating.

What happened after the first ‘C’

Those early years were difficult, Davis remembered, because she felt so isolated, just her and her team “in the trenches.”

She hosted community meetings, imploring local parents, leaders and business owners to support the district. 

“They told me to come back when we were no longer failing,” Davis said.

So after that first “C,” when she started seeing the district’s hashtags on Facebook, when more people started coming to school events, when she started to get invited to speak at the local Rotary Club, it was bittersweet. 

Teachers, too, took a while to come around. Their performance was being closely monitored through the accountability system, but soon they realized that Davis wasn’t giving them mandates outside of improving test scores. She gave them autonomy in their classrooms. Teachers had the final say on how to improve their students’ achievement. That kind of trust isn’t common, Sunflower County teachers told Mississippi Today.

It wasn’t until 2021, when voters passed a $31 million bond issue that would pay for major school renovations, that Davis felt the full support of the community. 

Davis even won over Betty Petty, a local matriarch and fierce advocate for kids and parents. 

“She has actually shown a presence at the schools, constantly meeting with teachers and making sure all children are learning,” Petty said. “We had community meetings where she would actually come out and listen to our concerns.”

Petty attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony at Gentry High School last July. Before renovations, plumbing problems caused flooding when it rained, so students had to wade through water to get from class to class. Davis said she’d never forget the sight of generations of Gentry graduates in the school atrium, looking around in wonder at the new facility.

“At first, I chose the community,” Davis said. “But eventually, the community chose me.”

Gentry High School in Indianola, Miss., on Friday, July 11, 2025. The school is part of the Sunflower County Consolidated School District, which improved from an F to a B rating under the leadership of Superintendent Miskia Davis.

The legacy she leaves behind

Strong schools make strong communities, but it can take time for results to show. Indianola Mayor Ken Featherstone hopes to see the dividends soon. 

Featherstone took office four years ago, around the same time the district got its first “B” grade. It has maintained the grade ever since, the highest in the entire region.

He, like Davis, was reared in the Delta, but empathizes with her struggle garnering the support of a community deeply impacted by gun violence and low investment from state officials. 

Ken Featherstone, mayor of Indianola, Miss., speaks about Superintendent Miskia Davis’ impact on local schools during an interview in Indianola on Friday, July 11, 2025. Featherstone praised Davis for leading the Sunflower County Consolidated School District from an F to a B rating.

“People are very result-oriented,” he said, leaning back at his desk in city hall. “You till the soil, but it’s not until you start your seed breaking the ground do you see other people starting to water it. That’s just human nature.”

He’s hoping the district’s academic gains will be a boon for Indianola’s struggling economy.

“We’re seeing things slowly come to our area,” Featherstone said. “To get manufacturing jobs to come to our area, we have to improve our public school system. Directors and presidents of manufacturing plants … they need to know where their kids are going to attend school.”

Davis announced in October 2024 that she would be leaving the superintendent job at the end of the school year. Now, she travels the state, consulting with other districts on how to replicate what she did in Indianola, as a director of District and School Performance and Accountability for The Kirkland Group, an education consulting firm based in Ridgeland. 

Her departure was a tough blow, Featherstone said, and leaves the district’s hard-fought success hanging in balance. 

Petty and her network of parents are concerned, too. 

“I don’t think any of us know what will happen moving forward,” she said. 

Davis said there was no big epiphany. She just felt her mission was accomplished. She said she’s adamant that the district’s “best days are ahead,” under new superintendent James Johnson-Waldington. 

Johnson-Waldington, who was most recently serving as superintendent of Greenwood Leflore Consolidated School District, is also Sunflower-grown, and he was Davis’ principal when she taught at Ruleville Central High School. He plans on employing strategies similar to Davis: holding teachers accountable and celebrating their achievements. 

After all, if it’s working, why change it?

“I feel a good kind of pressure,” Johnson-Waldington said. “I like challenges, and this is a new challenge for me. I’m not taking a failing school district to success. This is about maintaining and growing, and I accept that challenge for the very reason that this is home. I’m going to work very hard to maintain what Miskia has done.”

Davis leaves behind a legacy, Featherstone said, that makes her hometown proud. He was in the crowd that day at the parade. He remembers the excitement, the pride. 

“Older teachers were there, and you could see the look on their faces that they knew they had reared someone who threw the oar out to a sinking district and brought it back up,” he said. 

“She made us see ourselves in a better light, and we can’t thank her enough.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post This superintendent took a failing Delta school district to a ‘B’ rating. Now, she’s leaving appeared first on mississippitoday.org



Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This article presents a positive and detailed profile of an educational leader working to improve a struggling school district in a historically under-resourced and economically challenged region. The focus on community uplift, education reform, accountability, and addressing systemic challenges aligns with themes often emphasized by center-left perspectives. However, the article maintains a largely neutral and factual tone without overt political framing or partisan language, emphasizing pragmatic solutions and community collaboration rather than ideological positions.

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Mississippi Today

Theology student’s ‘brain drains back home’ despite economics, safety concerns

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mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-08-19 12:17:00


Theology student Romy Felder reflects on leaving Mississippi for New York in 2015, driven by values, politics, and opportunity, while grappling with guilt, family distance, and safety concerns. Since transitioning in 2024, she has not returned home, though she maintains a complex, loving relationship with her mother. Romy’s journey includes AmeriCorps service, activism, worker-cooperative development, and advanced theological studies at Yale and Union Theological Seminary, where she now pursues a PhD and the Episcopal priesthood. Despite economic hardship and uncertainty, she finds meaning in communities that blur boundaries between work, life, and faith, shaping her evolving identity and vocation.

Editor’s note: This Mississippi Today Ideas essay is published as part of our Brain Drain project, which seeks answers to why Mississippians move out of state. To read more about the project, click here.


Though I imagine I’ll never return, more often than not, my brain drains back to Mississippi. My whole adult life has been a journey up and down the Hudson River, from New York City to the Adirondacks, but inevitably, I find my thoughts leaking toward another river.

I grew up fearing being left behind in the Rapture, but in earnest, it feels like I’m the one who left everyone behind. I’m not proud of this, but I’m certainly not ashamed. I have roots in the Northeast now, and a life that isn’t easily transplanted elsewhere, especially to the Red Clay Hills of Neshoba County. Life took me from Mississippi, and life keeps me away.

I left Mississippi for New York in 2015, and I estimate that I’ve returned only 11 times. My sporadic trips home have been mostly because I’m consistently broke, but now it’s a combination of that and concerns for my safety.

My mother, also limited by finances and Mississippi’s minimum wage, has visited me twice in 10 years, once in the spring of 2016 and then when I graduated from Yale Divinity School in 2023.

I haven’t been back since I came out as a trans woman and began medically transitioning in the winter of 2024. I try not to be overwhelmed with guilt or grief for the imagined, shared life I don’t experience with my mother. Rather, I’ve learned to cherish what we do have.

Romy Felder

It’s strange to be who I am, mostly for her but also for me. She has learned to love me regardless of whether or not she understands what I’m doing. In her mind, if you go to college, you become a nurse or a lawyer. You settle down, probably in Jackson, maybe Oxford, most likely in my hometown of Philadelphia, and commute by car more than an hour to work. You probably see your mom weekly. She sees her grandkids as often as possible.

That is not how life turned out. We do talk on the phone. Sometimes we get into once-a-week phone call sprees, other times, I drop off for weeks, maybe a month, when I’m depressed.

When I come home, she picks me up from the airport and drives me back a few weeks later. We crack the windows, smoke cheap Mississippi cigarettes and try to cram 10 years of a strange-to-us mother-daughter relationship into a 90-minute ride to the airport in Jackson. Usually, we talk about suffering, death, sin, God, the end of the world, and what the hell I am doing with my life.

You go to college to get a job, to make more money than your parents and to buy a strange suburban-but-rural McMansion just beyond city limits where you start a family around the age of 25 at the latest.

According to my mother, I went to the University of Mississippi and got brainwashed. She tells me often that it’s like she doesn’t know who I am, and she’s mostly right. She hasn’t met anyone I’ve dated in person since high school. She hasn’t seen me in person since transitioning, and I changed my name to Romy. I explain my relationship with my family to friends, peers, new partners and congregations, always with an articulate sense of heartbreak that I’ve learned to intellectualize and package up in a story of “working-class origins,” single motherhood, a white Christian nationalist rural community and my stumbling through adulthood “refusing not to live by my values.”

I originally left Mississippi to be an AmeriCorps Vista volunteer in the Capital Region of New York. I’d never been there. I took a Greyhound from Memphis to New York City to Albany, New York  with two large suitcases and a backpack. Several of my friends from college had moved to New York City, and their couches and shared beds provided a safe launching pad for more of us. I had also fallen in love with a fashion student turned designer that I met on a trip to the city the year prior. Though that romance flamed and flickered for many years and ultimately flamed out, my reason for staying in the North was the life I was increasingly stumbling into.

I went there because, at the time, I had an insatiable desire to live out my values and politics. After all, I was maybe one of two socialist public policy majors at the Trent Lott Leadership Institute at the University of Mississippi, and I didn’t want to be a lawyer, a lobbyist or a policy wonk.

I wanted to be poor and engage in building sustainable autonomous communities. I wanted to learn how to be a person who had no work/life distinction, but a vocation and calling.

Through AmeriCorps, I luckily found a small group of activists, urban homestead types, organizers and ex-social workers living together helping others at the margins and themselves start businesses and worker-cooperatives while struggling through mental health crises, and taking on an impossible but seemingly always plausible dream of a directly democratic community owned, operated and governed only by those who live there.

This was my first “job” out of college. It was my dream come true, and the most difficult thing I’d ever done. I burnt out pretty hard after two years, and probably made somewhere between $25,000  and $30,000 during that whole time. Since then, the most I’ve made in a year is my current PhD stipend of about $34,000.

I was, however, helped along by friends, colleagues and the activist communities that I was stumbling into. Through them, I was encouraged to go to Union Theological Seminary, land a job at a prestigious artist residency in the mountains, go to Yale Divinity School, discern that I was called to be a priest and come to know myself as a trans woman.

My life outside of Mississippi has been sustained solely by relationships that transgress the boundaries between work and life, co-workers and friends. I regularly reflect on and often worry about how fragile this all is, and if my own vocational and intellectual pursuits have been worth what I’ve left behind or never had.

I’m not sure I’ll ever know. However, I’ve managed to find profound meaning in it all so far, and it keeps me digging myself into this hole in which I will hopefully find what I am  looking for, or dig my own damn grave.


Originally from Philadelphia, Romy Felder (she/her) is currently a PhD student at Union Theological Seminary. She is also pursuing the priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of New York. She has a background in worker-cooperative development, community organizing, popular education and arts management. Romy lives cavalierly but contentedly in Brooklyn, New York. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Theology student's 'brain drains back home' despite economics, safety concerns appeared first on mississippitoday.org



Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning

This essay reflects a distinctly personal and ideological perspective rather than neutral reporting. The author frames Mississippi as economically limiting and socially unsafe, particularly for marginalized identities such as transgender individuals, while presenting Northern activist and academic communities in a sympathetic and aspirational light. References to socialism, worker-cooperatives, and critiques of conservative Mississippi culture suggest a worldview aligned with progressive or left-leaning politics. The tone is introspective and critical of traditional Southern expectations, while valorizing alternative, activist-driven lifestyles. As such, the piece is less about balanced reporting and more an expression of lived experience through a progressive lens.

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Mississippi Today

‘Get a life,’ Sen. Roger Wicker says of constituents

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mississippitoday.org – @GanucheauAdam – 2025-08-15 09:40:00


Thad Cochran, a longtime Mississippi senator, valued constituent feedback deeply, emphasizing respect and service to the people in a 1973 memo he shared with staff throughout his career. In stark contrast, current Senator Roger Wicker recently dismissed constituent concerns, telling a room of Mississippians to “get a life,” a comment his office later claimed was self-directed. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith also minimized constituent worries. This shift from Cochran’s servant-leader approach to dismissive attitudes alarms many and raises questions about whether current senators remember their duty to represent and respect their constituents. The article urges reflection on expectations for elected officials today.

A note from Adam Ganucheau: A couple hours after this column published, Sen. Roger Wicker’s office reached out and demanded a correction, saying the senator’s “get a life” comment was directed to himself and not to constituents. That’s certainly not how I nor hundreds of Mississippians who commented on and shared the viral video heard it. Mississippi Today has updated portions of this column to reflect concerns raised by Wicker’s office. Here’s a link to the video/audio of his response to the question about constituent concerns. Mississippians can decide for themselves what Wicker meant.

When 34-year-old Thad Cochran arrived in Washington after his first election in 1972, the Republican felt it important to document what he’d heard and learned from Mississippians on the campaign trail and share it with his young staff.

He sat down at a typewriter and wrote a memo titled “General Responsiveness” and dated March 14, 1973:

During the campaign I detected a very strong animosity among the people toward government and those associated with government bureaus and agencies. This included elected officials and those associated with them. Part of the cause of this attitude was due to a lack of feeling or understanding by government people for the needs and opinions of the average citizen. We are all in a job to represent all our constituents. We are not the bureaucracy. A constituent who asks us for help should be assured to be in need of help with our office as his last resort. A constituent who writes a letter should be made to feel by our response that he is glad he wrote us. A constituent who claims to have been wronged by the government should be assumed to be correct. Everyone should guard against developing the attitude that we are better than, smarter than or more important than any constituent. We do not hold a position of authority over any constituent. We are truly servants of the people who selected us for this job.

Every year from 1973 through 2018, over his three U.S. House terms and six U.S. Senate terms, Cochran shared that memo with every staffer who worked in his offices. The guidance, he said all those years, was a necessary reminder to show respect to the people who offer feedback or need help. He never wanted his staff or himself to forget who sent them to Washington.

The memo, like so many other things, serves as a stark reminder that Cochran was among the last in a bygone era of American politics. The perspective he wrote and shared is a far cry from what Mississippians have been getting recently from our current U.S. senators.

“Surely everybody else has better things to do with their time,” senior U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker said to a room full of constituents earlier this month when asked about calls and emails his office has been getting. After half-heartedly explaining that he does see a list of names of people who reach out to his office, he quipped: “Get a life.”

Wicker’s office said Friday that the senator directed “Get a life” to himself, not to constituents.

Wicker, who typically chooses his words a little more carefully, perhaps has been trying to match his junior colleague’s energy.

“Why is everyone’s head exploding?” U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said in April to Mississippi constituents who had expressed concerns over slashing federal Medicaid spending. “I can’t understand why everyone’s head is exploding.”

There are many kind staffers working for Republicans Wicker and Hyde-Smith who are helpful to Mississippi constituents in any number of ways privately or behind the scenes. These people care deeply about serving their home state and they do it well, and they cannot help how their bosses address the public. But, boy, their phones must be blowing up more than ever since the senators made these comments.

Consider, for a moment, what it means that we have devolved from having a leader who believed that “a constituent who claims to have been wronged by the government should be assumed to be correct” to one who thinks telling constituents to “get a life” is appropriate. Think about the fact that we replaced a leader who regularly reminded his staff that “we are truly servants of the people who selected us for this job” with one whose gut response to legitimate concerns from constituents is that their “heads are exploding.”

Just … wow. To call it alarming doesn’t fully encapsulate the gravity of their behavior. It’s enough to discourage even the most optimistic among us about the present and future of our state and our nation.

It’s enough to inspire you to ponder, in this intense political climate when unprecedented and harrowing federal government decisions are being made and going largely unchecked every day, whether our current U.S. senators even remember why they’re in Washington, why we sent them there.

It is necessary, in the shortest possible order, to ask and answer for ourselves what we should expect of our elected officials and whether we should feel OK about being dismissed or ignored outright like this.

You don’t have to be a Democrat to think that this behavior is out of line. Plenty of Republicans — some publicly and many privately — are increasingly disturbed by what’s happening in Washington. Regardless of your own personal political beliefs, be honest with yourself about whether you can read these comments from our senators and still feel that your best interests are being represented.

Sadly, we can no longer ask Cochran to help us answer these questions, but it sure seems clear where he’d stand. What about you?

READ MORE: Mississippi, where ‘We Dissent’ means nothing to elected officials

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post 'Get a life,' Sen. Roger Wicker says of constituents appeared first on mississippitoday.org



Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The content critiques Republican senators for their dismissive attitude toward constituents, contrasting them with a more respectful past leader. It highlights concerns about current political behavior and governance, emphasizing accountability and responsiveness to the public. While it acknowledges that some Republicans privately share these concerns, the tone and framing suggest a leaning that favors more progressive or reform-minded perspectives, typical of center-left commentary.

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