FAFO FRIDAY (Ep #1,311) W/ SHAUN YURTKURAN & CRESTON BERCH

Friday’s Clay Edwards Show, with Creston Birch in studio and Shaun Yurtkuran back for hour two. Weather’s coming, the culture riders are still in the comments, and Jackson’s usual suspects are still trying to run the clock.

Clay opens on hunkering-down season and a Facebook post tying Hurricane Asai to “justice for Nolan Wells” in Ocean Springs. From there it’s the morning rant: secondary accounts, comment-section energy, and why matching somebody’s tone is not the same thing as saying the word they keep begging you to say. Screenshot first. They delete after you answer.

Nolan Wells stays on the table. The cause-of-death wording does not mean what the truthers want it to mean. Sarah Fields is doing real work calling out the liars, then got sideways when Clay beat her to the Crump / phone story by a couple hours. Clay walks back the cocaine claim that came through Officer Tatum: it did not make the toxicology, and he’s fine being wrong on that one. He’d rather it was a tragic accident than a murder or a drug death. The people who got cease-and-desists and doubled down anyway are about to meet the lawsuit. Ben Crump is not coming to save them. Free speech covers you from the government. It does not cover you from the people you lied about.

Pops Around the Corner was on fire overnight. No real update yet. Clay wants one.

Shaun joins for the Lumumba sentencing delay. The motion to continue is going under seal, which reads less like a calendar problem and more like cooperation still being built. Clay and Shaun run the low-hanging fruit: city contracts, the old garbage deal, the campaign-donor overlap, and who should be sleeping light if the FBI is still pulling threads. Shaun’s guess is he’s already in on the deal and looking for more to trade. Clay’s joke is he doesn’t want to miss football. Neither of them buys that he’s a fan.

Belhaven bar talk: Finian’s still isn’t open. September ’24 close, bought the next year, December, St. Patrick’s, August 15, all come and gone. Construction isn’t finished, the outdoor stage is butting up against houses, and the neighborhood rumor is they’re building it to sell. Clay’s not bashing it. He’s surprised anybody’s investing in another Fondren/Belhaven bar at all, which says more about the last eighteen months than the delay does.

Capitol Police closes it. CJ LeMasters is still floating the line that the drop isn’t theirs. Shaun’s lived in Belhaven long enough to call that nonsense: carjackings, porch robberies, kids casing