Jesse Fox Mayshark Puts The Progressive South on the Map

Podcasting is a natural fit for Jesse Fox Mayshark. He’s a talker, but it’s the sort of top-shelf pontification that makes you look down and wonder when your beer got warm. After all, Jesse’s built a decades-long career out of saying smart things about important stuff.

Balancing that, he’s also a scary-good listener who asks sharp questions. His journalism brain is wired for finding the through-threads, zooming in and out between the big picture and the most absurdly tiny detail, weaving together past, present and future, and somehow packaging it all into something the rest of us can actually understand.

When Jesse stepped back from a front-facing role at Compass at the end of last year, we all wondered what his next move would be. In April, the mystery was revealed: Jesse launched The Progressive South. 

The nonprofit’s first act is a weekly podcast called Headlights: Voices from The Progressive South. Each of the 15-and-counting episodes feel like riding shotgun on a road trip: always headed somewhere but not opposed to the occasional roadside attraction or stark, sobering, gut-punch of a pit stop. (See Ep. 14: Florida’s War on Immigrants, which takes us to Alligator Alcatraz.) Jesse’s that guy who refuses to take the interstate but still knows exactly where he’s going. The scenic route is more interesting, anyway.

As a diehard Compass Points listener, it was a little disorienting to go from Jesse’s hot takes on the latest local zoning war or City Council dust-up to hearing him dig into partisan gerrymandering in Texas, book bans in Alabama, ICE raids in Louisiana, or grassroots organizing in Virginia. Knoxville is still in the mix—the first episode centers on the Hands Off demonstration downtown last spring, another features local non-binary singer-songwriter Adeem the Artist—but the scope is decidedly regional. There’s current news, interviews, an arts-and-culture segment, and a healthy dose of Jesse’s own interior landscape.

Headlights stands out from other sociopolitical podcasts I listen to, or at least try to listen to, to the extent that my baseline low-grade anxiety allows. The world already feels like it’s teetering on the edge; I don’t need someone screaming “EVERYTHING IS CRAZY & WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE” into my earbuds. Headlights is the opposite: less street-corner apocalypse preacher, more smart friend saying, “Yeah, it’s a dumpster fire out there, but you’re not alone. Here’s what people are actually doing to fix it, and here’s how you can help.”

I met Jesse for coffee earlier this summer for a chat about the new project. Ninety minutes later, we were still going. He had a lot to say which, on brand, meant all of it was interesting, and much of it connected in ways you don’t fully appreciate until you’re halfway home replaying the conversation in your head. 

Believe it or not, this interview was edited for length. 

What is The Progressive South?

The Progressive South is a nonprofit media platform for progressive voices and values across the South. In my mind, that means a mix of original reporting—me interviewing interesting people and covering what’s happening in different places—and aggregation of news from a progressive perspective.

There are a good number of independent media outlets across the South, and I want to highlight and amplify those as much as possible. Right now, the website is bare-bones; it’s basically a home for the podcast. There’s a “Resources” page with a media list of 20+ outlets I rely on to keep up with what’s happening across the region, plus ones I want others to know about.

Some are “pan-Southern” outlets covering the South as a whole, like The Bitter Southerner, Facing South (based in NC), Scalawag (probably the farthest left), and Oxford American (more centrist). Then there are state-based outlets like Tennessee Lookout, part of the States Newsroom network, which has a presence in almost every Southern state.

I link to all of these partly for transparency—this is where I get a lot of my information. Since I’m just one person in Knoxville, “covering the South” really means finding the best resources already out there and amplifying them. Long-term, I’d like the site to be more of an aggregation hub, linking to stories daily and eventually adding other contributors once there’s funding for it.

Why create an openly progressive media outlet?

I live in the South. I’m a progressive-minded person. In the first episode, I described myself as a “left liberal”—farther left than center-left folks, but not as far as radical Marxists—somewhere comfortably in the middle of what I’d call “the left” on the American political spectrum. I always have been, and I’ve never been shy about it.

When I was at Metro Pulse, the paper more or less leaned left. It wasn’t official policy, but being the alternative voice in a fairly conservative area almost guaranteed that, politically and culturally, that’s where we landed. We were writing sympathetically about drag queens in Knoxville 30 years ago. We took for granted that LGBTQ people should have equal rights, and that public education was a net good. Those were baseline assumptions in the Metro Pulse view of the world—broadly progressive values.

Later I worked for a mayor who was basically a liberal mayor. She wasn’t as liberal as some people on the left wanted her to be, and she was too liberal for some in the center—that was part of the dynamic.

Some journalists hold objectivity and balance as almost sacred. They learned that in journalism school, and if you come up through daily papers, you tend to internalize the idea that you can’t, or shouldn’t, ever reveal your opinions. I’ve always rebelled against that. Part of what attracted me to Metro Pulse was that I could be open about perspective. By my twenties, I’d already had enough experience at daily papers to see that strict “objectivity” often meant not telling the full story.

That model can default to “these people say this, those people say that, this study says this,” without ever providing clarity about what’s really going on. In my view, that often benefits the status quo—the local power structure, whether that’s a school board, state legislature, or some other institution. I don’t think traditional journalism is inherently conservative, but it can make it harder to challenge prevailing narratives because so much of the work is done within them. The result is that marginalized voices often remain marginalized.

At Compass, we’ve tried to provide solid, straightforward reporting—talking to all the major players in an issue—but also adding context. Not just “this board made this decision last night,” but why it happened, who is pushing it, and how it connects to bigger issues in the city or state. I haven’t felt a need there to write editorials or declare the county mayor is “good” or “bad.”

So with The Progressive South, I wanted to be more deliberate about the ideological framing. It’s progressive news, from a progressive perspective. I’m talking to broadly progressive people, though I’m not forcing anyone to self-identify that way. They don’t have to call themselves progressive; if they’re willing to talk to someone who does, that’s fine.

If I just wanted to rant about the world, I could start a blog or a podcast for that. I don’t think it would be very successful, and I wouldn’t find it as interesting. What I like about reporting is the reporting part—going places, talking to people. The “progressive” side of this isn’t about endless railing against Donald Trump, though that will come up. The point is to highlight that there are progressive-minded people across the South—always have been—working every day on issues that matter to them.

That includes civil rights, racial justice, environmental protection, healthcare access, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, labor rights and more. I don’t see progressivism as a checklist—it’s more of a worldview. People concerned about racial justice often care about environmental protection. They understand the importance of labor rights, because if you’re serious about social or racial justice, you have to consider how people make a living.

To me, it’s about prioritizing values: equality, baseline access to healthcare and education, institutions with more resources helping those with less, and an honest reckoning with the histories of injustice, especially in the South, that still shape our social, political and cultural reality.

I’m not interested in purity tests or deciding who is or isn’t “progressive enough.” What I want is to ask: From a progressive perspective, what’s going on in the South? Where are people making a positive impact? Where are people, communities or land under threat? And then to talk about those things openly, from an unabashedly liberal, progressive point of view.

Who’s your audience? Do you have a specific listener in mind?

I’m trying to conceive the audience as broadly as possible. I think it’s people who live in the South, are politically and culturally progressive, and who listen to podcasts. 

Not everyone listens to podcasts, but you can look at the statistics—there are clear demographics by age, gender and topic interest. People who listen to political or news podcasts make up one of the top categories. I forget the exact number, but close to half of podcast listeners consume some news or politics content.

In the first episode, I pointed out there are about 22 million people across the South who voted for Kamala Harris. I doubt all of them would self-identify as progressives, but as a shorthand dividing line, it works. At one level, my audience could be any of those 22 million people. More specifically, though, I expect it will be people most engaged with news and politics especially at the local or state level. That could mean people who closely follow local politics, run nonprofits focused on specific issues, or are otherwise engaged in progressive work.

These are also the kinds of people I’m interviewing—so naturally, they’re the ones most likely to find value in it. That’s not to say anyone with an interest in politics and the South couldn’t enjoy it. But the most likely, consistent engagement will come from people who are already active in some way, whether they have a good local news source or not, and who don’t have easy access to a broader sense of where their city, their issues and their work fit into the bigger picture of the modern South.

A few people have asked me whether people really identify with “the South” as a place. I think that’s a fair question—especially on the left. The idea of Southern identity has often been more associated with the right, framed around defending “Southern traditions” or “Southern culture” in a way that excludes a lot of us.

Still, I think most people here identify in some way with the South—whether they embrace it, reject it, or just take it for granted. It hovers over us, and it’s still very present in the broader culture. There’s been a lack of recognition for the many alternative streams of ideas and values that have always existed here. They’ve always been minority perspectives—sometimes literal racial or ethnic minorities, but not only that. You can trace them throughout Southern history: people fighting to improve lives in the South, even in overwhelmingly conservative times.

The Civil Rights Movement is the clearest example. As conservative as the South has been, that was a Southern movement—born and led here, engineered in the South. We tend to romanticize the role of people who came from outside—Freedom Riders, for instance, who absolutely deserve credit—but it was fundamentally Southern-led, by Black Southerners. I’d call it the greatest liberation movement in American history. You could argue women’s rights had broader impact overall, but the racial oppression in the South was distinct in its intensity and in its reliance on state-sanctioned violence.

The Civil Rights Movement was a Southern victory and should be celebrated as a central part of Southern history. We do celebrate pieces of it—you’re allowed to talk about the “I Have a Dream” speech—but going deeper into what was actually happening, the broader project of the movement, and Martin Luther King’s more challenging ideas is still uncomfortable in many places.

The podcast name came from Ida B. Wells. I first learned about her in a college journalism class, but I revisited her story more recently—especially her time in Memphis. She was unbelievably brave: a Black woman writing about lynching in the South in the 1890s, when people were being terrorized and killed regularly. She raised the alarm nationally, at great personal risk. Eventually, a white mob destroyed the newspaper she worked for, and she had to flee the city.

To me, she’s a great Southern figure. She was born on a plantation during the Civil War. Even after moving to Chicago, her perspective remained shaped by the South. But when we think about Southern history, she’s often not included—people slot her into “civil rights figure” or “journalist,” without acknowledging her as a Southerner.

In whatever small way I can, I want to assert the place of progressivism in Southern history, culture and politics. There have always been people here pushing back against injustice and working for the most vulnerable and marginalized. That through-line still exists today, though it remains somewhat isolated, marginalized, and sidelined—especially by state governments. In many legislatures, they literally won’t let dissenting voices speak, even when those voices pose no real threat to their agenda.

Providing a platform where people can talk about where they are, what they’re doing, and how they’re being effective—that’s where I think this project can have value.

How does Knoxville fit into this broader Southern context?

I think part of my impetus for doing this was that I’d already built that sense over time—first working in journalism in Knoxville, but always with an awareness of what was going on at the state level. Everything that happens in our state government affects us locally. Then working for the city gave me a much clearer sense of that. You start to understand the power dynamics between cities and states.

During my time at the city, I went to a lot of conferences. At any of those gatherings, I’d gravitate toward other Southern cities. I wanted to know: What was their relationship with their state legislature? We were clearly facing some similar issues. That gave me a sense of both how Knoxville is unique—every city is unique—but also how the political, economic and cultural forces affecting us are often shared.

Some of these dynamics—like progressive activists versus a more center-left Democratic establishment—exist in every city. In big coastal cities, that gap can be huge between the people running City Hall and the activists on the ground. But what distinguishes Southern cities is that all those urban players are, to some degree, collectively in opposition to the prevailing political winds at the state level. “Opposition” might be too strong, because not everything is controversial—though that list seems to be shrinking daily. Increasingly, it feels like, “If it’s a program that helps people, we’re just not going to do it.”

Over time, cities everywhere have become more diverse—in population, and in the distribution of wealth and power. Inequalities remain, but cities still have the greatest diversity across the board. And you can’t be anti-diversity and happily live in a city—it’s going to bother you to be around people who aren’t like you. That’s true everywhere, but in the South the dynamic is especially fraught because of the history and because state–city tensions here are layered on top of the national cultural and political divides.

It’s not just turf wars between different power bases, which you see anywhere. In the South, it’s also part of the broader national culture war. That’s true in Knoxville. What struck me—working for the city, and later writing for Compass—was how much common ground there is across the South. Yes, Texas is different from Florida, which is different from North Carolina, but politically and culturally, there’s still a lot in common.

Talking to a well-organized group in Richmond made me think about their ability to sustain themselves and score wins versus similar groups in Knoxville that haven’t had the same success or structure. There’s a lesson there for us: learning from places that have figured out sustainable models.

For progressives, it’s easy to feel beleaguered—like you can make noise but the supermajority will never listen. That’s why I want to highlight where that’s not true. I don’t want to encourage defeatism. The weekly news roundup is meant to help people see they’re not alone. There’s a library book fight in Arkansas? We don’t have that here yet, but there are people who would love to start it. Or a story from Louisiana about a problematic state environmental department head—brought in from the Trump administration—that illustrates how power is distributed in states. Tennessee’s last two education commissioners came from Florida and Texas through conservative policy networks, with specific goals like privatizing schools. Understanding those networks makes it easier to strategize in response.

We’re not isolated. The forces affecting us are broader than our own backyard, and there are others facing the same challenges who’ve found ways to push back—or push forward—their priorities. I think of this as creating a conceptual map of the South: illuminating the political and cultural forces at play, the commonalities across places, and the strategies people are using to work within or against them.

I appreciate that you’re presenting real strategies that people can adapt to their own communities. 

On the left, funding and resources are always a challenge. There are rich progressives, but far fewer than on the right, and grassroots work here depends more on volunteer labor and elbow grease. We can wish for a billionaire savior, but most of the time, it’s not going to happen. The question is: what can we do with what we have?

The civil rights movement is an important example—it was a massive Southern achievement for Southern people. And it’s under threat. The current assault on DEI is part of a long-standing backlash to civil rights. Conservative leaders who once fought the Civil Rights Act are now twisting it to argue that protecting marginalized groups is the “real” discrimination—against white men. All those hard-won rights are at risk.

I want to connect the dots for people: we’re linked not just geographically, but historically. These fights aren’t new; they’ve always been here. Bringing in historical context reminds people that we’re part of a long story. Understanding that history can make it easier to anticipate what might happen next.

For people living here, it’s easy to internalize and normalize our circumstances, which benefits the status quo. If you hear a list of problems and think, “That sounds bad,” that means you’re not thinking enough about where you are—it’s not that it sounds bad; it is bad. On most socioeconomic indicators, the South dominates the bottom of the list. That’s not an accident; it’s the product of our history and the way wealth and power have always been allocated here.

One thing I’d like to put on the website is a kind of “misery index” to counter the constant self-congratulation from political leaders who insist we live in “the best place in the country.” There are wonderful things about the South—its natural beauty, cultural richness, and cities I adore. But our politics and economic structures exacerbate historic inequalities. We underinvest in education, infrastructure, healthcare and environmental protection. Many of the things we value are actively being degraded by the same interests that have always done the degrading—often funded from outside the region.

When Southern leaders talk about “freedom,” they usually mean low taxes and gun ownership. On almost any other measure of liberty—abortion rights being a prime example—the South fares worse than most of the country. This has never been a region that prioritizes individual rights, and our legislatures are working to claw back the gains made during the civil rights era.

You don’t have to be “down” on the South to acknowledge these problems. For white, middle-class liberals especially, life may be fine—they have the resources to avoid the worst impacts. But many others don’t. It’s possible to love the South and still keep front-of-mind the political and economic realities that disenfranchise so many and reduce life expectancy, income and access to care.

What in your background led you to this work?

I was raised in a pretty progressive household. I don’t agree with my parents on everything—nobody does—but politically, I’m very much a product of my upbringing. I grew up with a lot of awareness of recent history. My dad was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War and involved in the anti-war movement. Both my parents supported the civil rights movement, though they weren’t active in it; they were at college in California in the ’60s.

Around the time I was born, they converted to Zen Buddhism. Zen isn’t really a religion in the Western sense; it’s more of a practice, and some of its ideas at least are accessible to children. I wasn’t going to “Zen Sunday school,” but I was raised with its basic precepts, especially the idea that all living things are connected, and that this connection creates a responsibility to one another. I was raised vegetarian (now pescetarian), and that idea of mutual responsibility was deeply rooted in me, alongside an understanding that the world has been shaped by injustices and exploitation.

When I was in third grade, my parents gave me a New York Times op-ed about what a terrible person Christopher Columbus was—complete with excerpts from his diary about enslaving native people—to read to my class on Columbus Day. This was the 1970s, and my teacher was clearly surprised when eight-year-old me stood up to read it. I doubt it made much impact on my classmates, but it was emblematic of my upbringing.

That perspective also made me feel like an outsider. In elementary school, living in a rural area, my sister and I were the only kids from a Buddhist family in the entire county. We were extremely “weird” by local standards. Even after we moved to the suburbs, I never felt fully part of mainstream American culture. At the same time, I was acutely aware of my privilege as a straight white man. By my early 20s, I realized that if I put on a suit and tie, I could walk into just about any building in America and be assumed to belong there.

That combination became valuable in journalism. I could use the “generic white guy” disguise to gain access, but I was drawn to stories from the margins and to voices that weren’t being amplified. It’s the same in art and music for me; I’ve always gravitated toward work that challenges the center.

Journalism itself has a complicated history. There’s a romantic idea that American journalism has always sided with the underdog—not true. Newspapers have also been tools of oppression, as in the case of Memphis papers urging the mob that destroyed Ida B. Wells’s press. Powerful publishers have always used media for their own ends. But there is also a strong tradition, going back to the muckrakers, of exposing injustice, asking the public, “Are you okay living in a place where this is happening?” That tradition runs through some of the coverage of McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, and beyond.

I see my work now as part of that tradition. Yes, it’s openly political, but it’s grounded in a worldview that crosses political, economic and cultural boundaries. It’s journalism with a perspective, rooted in fact and research. What I know how to do—talk to people, collect information, synthesize it, and present it with context—is what I can offer. My goal is to help people understand the place where we live, the forces shaping it, and what others are doing or trying to do about it.

Why did you decide to go with a nonprofit model?

One of the big challenges with Compass has always been the paywall. We need it to keep the publication going—money has to come from somewhere—but charging for content inevitably limits reach. But it’s always going to be a niche publication. Even if it were free, there’s only a certain segment of people who want to know what County Commission is doing.

For this new project, I wanted it to be freely accessible from the start. If it’s going to be useful, it has to be open to anyone who might be interested and easy to share. Given that commitment to free content, the nonprofit model seemed like the best fit right now. It’s not the only option—Patreon or other reader-supported models could work—but those also depend on building an audience first. My thinking is: let’s see how this goes for a couple of years, and if the nonprofit structure starts feeling more like a hindrance than a help, I can reassess.

Of course, nonprofits have their own quirks. You have to have a board, for example. I’ve got a great volunteer board of three people now and plan to add more over the next year. The model also comes with restrictions, but the main advantage is keeping the content free. Starting with a podcast makes that easy—you can put podcasts behind a paywall, but it’s clunky, and I wouldn’t want to anyway.

My hope is that somewhere in the 22 million people who voted for Kamala Harris, there’s a small percentage who’ll think, “I like this, I’ll kick in $5 a month” (or $25, or whatever). I’m lucky my wife raises money for nonprofits for a living—she’s not formally involved, but she’s been an invaluable advisor.

What do you envision for the future of The Progressive South?

It’s going to be a slow build. With projects like this, you start small, people share it with their networks, and every so often you get a bump—maybe you interview someone high-profile or with a big social media following, and that brings in new listeners. Over time, that’s how the audience grows.

I want to create a sense of virtual community. That feeling people get at a rally or protest, where you look around and realize thousands of people are on your side, has real value. Even smaller gatherings—20 or 30 people in a coffee shop—can be powerful. I’d like to partner with local organizations in the places I visit, co-sponsor happy hours or casual meetups, and maybe grow into doing panel discussions. Part of my job is covering the whole South, which means there are areas I know well, others I know a little, and some I know almost nothing about. The best way to build that broader understanding is to keep showing up, listening and connecting people, especially folks who feel isolated or marginalized.

I’d also like to add interactive elements. I set up a phone line so people can call in, introduce themselves, and put their town on the map, literally. Eventually, I’d like a website feature with pins marking every place we’ve covered or talked about. It’s a way to help people visualize the region and the work happening in it.

From the start, I’ve seen this as a multimedia project—podcast, website, newsletter, social media. The podcast was the easiest first step, but I’m already thinking about what’s next. That could mean hiring someone to do short-form video or TikTok content. The right has been very effective at using social platforms and building independent media ecosystems; the left hasn’t been nearly as quick to adapt. In the South especially, I think it’s crucial to push back on dominant right-wing narratives with strong, independent progressive voices, ones that are not just extensions of the Democratic Party.

The point is to find ways to advance progressive issues and causes through whatever political means are available. What independent progressive media can do is highlight those issues, highlight the people who are doing the work, and provide a sense of community and connection. 

Learn more about The Progressive South at the website here. Subscribe to Headlights: Voices of The Progressive South via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.