Lyncherdom

 Sometimes, I realize I am somewhat sheltered within my New York Times–reading cocoon. You could keep up with that paper all week, after all—and I did—and come away with only the barest glimpse of the fact that the entire American right has spent the last few days foaming at the mouth and obsessively ginning up a lynching posse to inflict mob violence on a man accused in a North Carolina stabbing attack. 

The blatant racial overtones here would make the creative minds behind the Willie Horton ad blush. To be sure, the stabbing appears, from all we know publicly, to have been a horrific and unprovoked crime. But the right seized on this one incident—out of all the random acts of violence that occur in a nation of three hundred million people—for perfectly obvious and unsubtle reasons. 

One: it has a Willie Horton–esque quality that works for right-wing messaging, in that the alleged killer had a previous criminal history. Thus, the right can cry that if he had never been released from prison, this crime would not have occurred. 

Apparently—the right-wing position is that anyone with a prior criminal history should be re-incarcerated preemptively and permanently—beyond the judicially- or statutorily-imposed penalties for his earlier offenses—in case he might happen to commit more crimes in the future. 

(The logic of this argument would seem to imply that no one should ever be released from prison for any reason, since it's the only way—in light of human free will—to ensure that no one who's been in prison ever commits another crime. Indeed, if we simply incarcerated disfavored populations from birth—or exterminated them—then to be sure, ipso facto, none of them would commit further crimes.)

Two: Making a political flashpoint of this stabbing served as a perfect distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein revelations that were otherwise dominating the news at the start of the week. (This appears to be why Charlie Kirk, for instance, was intent on ginning up outrage about the stabbing attack, before his murder earlier this week; it was a handy way to deflect attention from his own conspicuously-timed volte-face on the Epstein issue.)

Three—and most importantly: the victim was a young, blonde white woman—and the alleged perpetrator is a Black man. 

Shades of Willie Horton again. You will recall that the brains behind the notorious Horton ad memorably called him—in not-so-subtly-coded terms: "every suburban mother’s greatest fear." Charlie Kirk and his friends appear to have spent the last week trying to gin up the same level of hatred and vitriol against the alleged perpetrator in this case: unapologetically exploiting American race hate. 

A fictionalized George H.W. Bush protests in a satirical short story by Joseph Heller, speaking of the Willie Horton ad: "We didn’t really run an antiblack hate campaign, Charlie [....] All we set out to do was reach those white people in the country who hate blacks." Perhaps Charlie Kirk would defend himself in the same terms. 

But I'm not sure it makes it more defensible to draw from the deepest, rankest cesspool of racism in the American collective psyche, just so long as you're doing it to win elections and bridge a divide within your own political coalition by shifting attention from Jeffrey Epstein to something that all MAGA can agree upon: namely, anti-Black hatred. 

(Let us recall that the man who did this is the same man for whom we have been enlisted in a period of collective national mourning all week. Buildings across the country are flying flags at half-staff right now for Kirk—the wunderkind who did more than anyone to introduce antisemitic conspiracy theories like the "Great Replacement" canard into the mainstream of the Republican party.)

The way in which right-wing politicians and influencers have talked about this case seem overtly to invite comparison to the het-up lynch posses of the Jim Crow South. One prominent MAGA influencer reportedly opined, of a photo of the victim: "This image provokes deep visceral rage in every father who sees it. I can’t even fully articulate it. It’s primal. We want scalps. We want heads on pikes."

I was reminded of the passage in Carson McCullers's Clock Without Hands, in which the central character of the Judge—a prototypical Southern patriarch—explains that, while he used to believe in such abstract ideals as "justice"—he eventually learned to believe in "passion" instead: "something in my bloodstream sickened" at the sight of a Black man and a white woman sitting together, he says. 

Something "primal," one might say. 

Trump, of course—much as he did during the Central Park Five case—rushed to immediately call for the death penalty for the accused—before there has even been a trial or any due process. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced federal charges against the suspect—even though state prosecutors are already charging him for the more obvious state-level offense of murder. 

It is impossible to mistake in all this the element—not only of racism—but of sexual sadism too; which has also never been far from uppermost in the lyncher's mentality. The same MAGA Right that is slavering over photos of the crime victim and imagining putting "heads on pikes" to avenge her, let us recall, is also ideologically committed to defending every act of sexual aggression committed by powerful white men. 

The President himself—who has repeatedly been accused of sexual assault—of course made a point of commenting (as he always does) on how "beautiful" the victim was. 

The possessive bloodlust that the lynch mob has for stringing up alleged Black perpetrators always has as its corollary a belief in the eternal right of the white man to monopolize the prerogative of sexual violence against white women. As one member of a lynch posse puts it in Faulkner's novel Sanctuary: "We got to protect our girls. Might need them ourselves." 

So there we have it. The long, uninterrupted continuity of the lyncher brain, the lyncher mentality in U.S. history—from the troglodytic murderers of yesteryear, whom Richard Wright unforgettably described in his poem "Between the World and Me"—right up to the current occupant of the Oval Office, in this Year of Our Lord 2025. "The United States of Lyncherdom," as Mark Twain once bitterly called us. 

But at least we can comfort ourselves with one thing: it's not just us. We're not the only country that does this sort of thing. Instead, there is "a kind of family circle," as Nabokov once put it, "[...] linking [...] jolly empire-builders [...] the unmentionable German product, the good old church-going Russian or Polish pogromshchik, the lean American lyncher"—in short, an international fraternity of far-right thugs. 

Let him who would take comfort from that dare. "Creep, wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind," to borrow a line from G.M. Hopkins. Woe to us if the best that we can say of our country's long history of violent racism is that other people do it too...