The first part of this two-part article discussed the dilemma of having freedom of speech in a white supremacist society, focusing on three historical realities that helped create the U.S. lynching era that killed over 4,400 black men, women, and children; terrorized millions of black people; and helped create current black criminalized stereotypes and a racist criminal justice system. Those three historic realities are:
- A society founded on perpetuating white supremacy
- National stereotypes of blacks as criminals and rapists to justify their oppression after slavery
- Newspapers and politicians distorting facts and fabricating stories to instigate white mobs to lynch
The Modern Lynching Movement
Fast-forward to 2019, and you find a society that has still never confronted/moved beyond its white supremacist founding, people of color are still demonized and criminalized, and right-wing news media and conservative politicians are still distorting facts and fabricating stories to an audience that is increasingly more white extremist, more violent, and more heavily armed.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization that tracks extremist activity, found in 2017, the year President Trump took office, white supremacist murders in the U.S. more than doubled from the year before. White supremacist violence continues to rise as our president and the right-wing media add daily fuel to this racist fire such as:
1. The Trump administration defunding anti-extremist programs
2. The Trump administration creating racist policies to demonize and hurt people of color while legitimizing bigotry nationally, such as the Muslim travel ban and separating asylum-seeking families of color from their children.
3. Trump and right-wing media spreading false stories and incendiary rhetoric for political gain, such as claiming Mexican immigrants are rapists, Islam hates America, protesters of racial police brutality hate our military, and asylum seekers are dangerous invaders and the beneficiaries of a secret Jewish plot. This last lie helped inspire the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooter. “The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a midterm election” (Adam Serwer, The Atlantic).
These realities are fueling a rise of hate crimes and white extremist violence, with the same results as the lynching era: to terrorize communities of color in order to enforce white supremacy. This is our modern lynching movement.
Two of the biggest instigators of the modern lynching movement are President Trump and Fox News. Below are two current examples of how they are instigating racial terror for people of color confronting white supremacy.
Trump and Ilhan Omar
Representative Ilhan Omar has been a target for Islamophobia, sexism, and anti-Palestinian beliefs since the day of her election in 2018. She is the first Somali-American, the first person who was once a refugee, and first hijab-wearing Muslim woman to serve in Congress. And she is publicly critical of Israel’s policies of violence toward Palestinians at a time in our country when the majority of U.S. politicians, media, and citizens don’t understand the difference between anti-Semitism and being critical of Israel. All of these qualifications have resulted in a variety of backlashes over the past year from smear campaigns to death threats.
The latest whitelash comes from President Trump, who tweeted an edited and out-of-context video of an Ilhan Omar speech about the dangers of blaming the world’s Muslims for 9/11—with scenes of the 9/11 attacks—implying she couldn’t care less about these acts of terrorism. This propaganda has caused an explosion of death threats again Omar. Most of her current daily death threats reference Trump’s tweet.
When confronted about the death threats he caused, Trump said he didn’t feel bad at all: “She’s got a way about her that’s very, very bad, I think, for our country. I think she’s extremely unpatriotic and extremely disrespectful to our country.” His comments came at a time when actual people were being arrested for threatening her life. A white man from New York who was recently arrested for making death threats against Omar said he was a supporter of President Donald Trump, a patriot, and someone who “hates radical Muslims in our government.”
During a Progressive Town Hall, Omar shared: “There are cities in my state where the gas stations have written on their bathrooms ‘assassinate Ilhan Omar.’ I have people driving around my district looking for my home, for my office, causing me harm. I have people every single day on Fox News and everywhere, posting that I am a threat to this country. So I know what fear looks like. The masjid I pray in in Minnesota got bombed by two domestic white terrorists.”
Since his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump has been using post-9/11 Islamophobic stereotypes that Muslims are violent, hate America, and are “radical Muslims” connected to terrorism to gain support from fearful right-wing voters at the cost of increasing hatred and violence against Muslims in the U.S. His newest scapegoat is Omar, and the conditions for lynching reemerge as death threats against her increase. These conditions include:
1. Rising support for white supremacy from the Trump administration and white extremist groups
2. False stereotypes demonizing people of color, especially Muslims of color
3. Right-wing politicians and media instigating white fear by spreading false narratives
Fox News and AOC
The same 2018 election that brought in Ilhan Omar and a historic number of women of color also elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC, to New York’s 14th congressional district. As a self-described Democratic Socialist woman of color—known for progressive initiatives such as the Green New Deal and a proposal to abolish ICE—she has attracted the attention of numerous angry white outlets, including Fox News, as far back as June 2018 when she won her Democratic primary. According to a Media Matters study, for a six-week period from February 25 to April 7, Fox News mentioned AOC at least 3,181 times. “Hosts and guests smear and misrepresent Ocasio-Cortez’s agenda, caricaturing it while painting it as dangerous, far-left socialism.” (Media Matters).
In February 2019, a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and self-identified white nationalist was arrested for plotting assassinations of top Democratic congressional leaders and liberal media personalities. Despite AOC being in office for only a month, she made it on the kill list. It’s hard to imagine that Fox News’s relentless daily demonization of AOC didn’t have anything to do with her being on this list.
Despite having a history of expressing extremist views, despite having an online browser history of searches for things like the best guns to kill black people, despite being a huge fan of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto, and despite accumulating an arsenal of 17 illegal firearms while creating a “hit list,” the federal judge released the defendant on bail. According to the Atlanta Star, the defense attorney “argued that while her client’s use of racial slurs in his ‘private writings’ were deplorable, such language was now a part of the national conversation, thanks to President Donald Trump.” As reported by CNN, the defense also claimed that “the list of names (the defendant) had assembled didn’t amount to a hit list but looks like the sort of list that our commander-in-chief might have compiled while watching Fox News in the morning.” Again, the conditions for lynching are present.
When does hate speech incite violence?
Adam Serwer of the The Atlantic stated, “Ordinarily, a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower. But ordinarily, politicians don’t praise supporters who have mercilessly beaten a Latino man as ‘very passionate.’ Ordinarily, they don’t offer to pay supporters’ legal bills if they assault protesters on the other side. They don’t praise acts of violence against the media. They don’t defend neo-Nazi rioters as ‘fine people.’ They don’t justify sending bombs to their critics by blaming the media for airing criticism. Ordinarily, there is no historic surge in anti-Semitism, much of it targeted at Jewish critics, coinciding with a politician’s rise. And ordinarily, presidents do not blatantly exploit their authority in an effort to terrify white Americans into voting for their party.”
The 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio Supreme Court case set the national precedent for regulating hate speech under the First Amendment. The Court stated that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
According to Professor Richard Ashby Wilson from the University of Connecticut, “The record of prosecutions for incitement is relatively meager, and this results in part from the fact that the test for incitement is quite demanding and requires that the prosecution show that the defendant intended to directly advocate a crime and that crime was likely to occur imminently. Further, there is insufficient guidance from the courts regarding the elements of ‘imminence’ and ‘likelihood.’ This has left district attorneys in the dark about what kind of speech might qualify as incitement to imminent lawless action. Prosecutors have limited resources and therefore they tend to avoid indicting an offence when they are unsure that they possess the necessary evidence to secure a conviction.”
As we see increases in death threats, hate crimes, and white extremist violence coincide with the election of Trump and Fox News rhetoric, at what point do we need to revisit our incitement laws? How do we balance our freedom of speech with the freedom to not experience white supremacist violence?
Many free speech advocates argue that it’s a slippery slope regulating hate speech, which could result in oppressing future civil rights movements, like Black Lives Matter. Former ACLU President Nadine Strossen argues, “The most effective way to counter the potential negative effects of hate speech—which conveys discriminatory or hateful views on the basis of race, religion, gender, and so forth—is not through censorship, but rather through more speech. And that censorship of hate speech, no matter how well-intended, has been shown around the world and throughout history to do more harm than good in actually promoting equality, dignity, inclusivity, diversity, and societal harmony.”
The problem with these difficult situations is when we don’t know the best way to move forward, we end up preserving the status quo, which at this time is a rising violent white extremism in a white supremacist society. I don’t pretend to have the answers to how to move forward. But I do believe one way to find possible solutions, whether it’s a governmental or non-governmental solution, is to create national dialogues on the connections between right-wing rhetoric and the modern lynching movement.
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