'Deafening outrage': How the 'right-wing noise machine' is inciting 'racist paranoia'

25 April

On Wednesday, April 2 in a Dallas suburb, 17-year-old high school student Austin Metcalf was fatally stabbed at a track meet by Karmelo Anthony, also 17. Anthony, who admitted to fatally stabbing Metcalf, is facing murder charges but says he acted in self-defense when they got into a fight.

In an article published on April 25, Salon's Amanda Marcotte details the ways in which Jake Lang — who was among the January 6 Capitol riot defendants and is now running for the U.S. Senate in Florida — and right-wing media outlets are exploiting the case and turning it into a racial issue.

"Metcalf was white. Anthony is Black," Marcotte explains. "Lang saw an opportunity and leapt into action. After circulating a flyer with Metcalf's face labeled 'Protect White Americans,' Lang descended on this Texas suburb to lead a rally painting Black Americans as a near-existential threat to white Americans. When Jeff Metcalf, the victim's father, called Lang during the rally, the former inmate now running for State Secretary Marco Rubio's Florida Senate seat, got visibly excited."

According to Marcotte, Austin Metcalf's father, Jeff Metcalf, was not impressed by Lang's "racist stunt" and asked him to stop using photos of his son.

"Lang is a clown, but he is not an outlier," Marcotte laments. "The whole of right-wing media, including Fox News, has decided to make a spectacle of this case, with endless, breathless coverage painting this single situation as symbolic of what they view as a racist war on white people. It's useful agitprop for MAGA, which desperately needs a distraction from (President Donald) Trump's failures and falling approval ratings."

Marcotte continues, "It's gross, and it's coming at a high cost for the families involved and the larger community, ratcheting up racial tensions and sowing paranoia, all over a case that is already heart-wrenching enough…. Tellingly, the right-wing noise machine can't even articulate the injustice that needs to be remedied here. Anthony was arrested and is being held accountable. There is not a smidgen of evidence that police and prosecutors aren't taking this case seriously…. The deafening outrage is about shutting off the brains of the audience, keeping MAGA audiences in a state of racist paranoia, so they don't think about how Donald Trump's incompetence is hurting the economy and national security."

Lang, according to Marcotte, "did not react well to Jeff Metcalf telling him to step off."

"After the grieving father embarrassed Lang in front of reporters," Marcotte observes, "Lang posted on X that Metcalf is an example of 'White Weakness & Submission' and that Metcalf would 'hand his daughter over to be raped.'"

Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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