Tucker Carlson and the Lynch Mob Mind

I have long thought Tucker Carlson to be a loathsome individual, peddling hatred, falsehoods and deliberately fanning division and greivance among Fox News viewers,  The emails and taxt messages that emerged from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News have shown that Carlson was far worse than I and others thought.  Not only did Carlson know he was lying, but he justified it simply to keep viewers happy and tied to Fox rather than seeking other propaganda outlets that would pander to their delusions and hatreds.  Worse yet, a newly revealed text messages shows that Carlson was fine with others being injured or killed.  He bought into a lynch mob mentality where he rooted for a group to kill a young man Carlson labeled "Antifa."  A column in the New York Times looks at this moral sickness and in the process recounts a actual lynching which represents precisely the accurate presntation of history that Carlson and the likes of Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin would prefer students never learn about.  Yes, it's ugly but it happened and the nation needs to take a good look at some of its horrible past.  Here are column highlights:

I have always been interested in the psychology of lynch mobs. How did the people in these mobs — made up mostly of white men in the American accounts I’ve read — rev themselves up to peak barbarity? At what point did their humanity go dormant and bloodlust consume their beings?

I have stared at the pictures of glassy-eyed men and boys (and sometimes women) standing beneath dangling bodies or standing above charred ones. I have read the histories of communities consumed by the desire to not only kill, but to mutilate.

In 1893, Henry Smith, a Black man accused of killing a white girl, was lynched in Paris, Texas, before a crowd estimated at 10,000 people. As The Times reported at the time in a story headlined “Another Negro Burned”: “Officers saw the futility of checking the passions of the mob, so the law was laid aside, and the citizens took into their own hands the law and burned the prisoner at the stake.”

Smith was paraded through the streets on a carnival float, then tied to a scaffolding. His body was burned with “red-hot” irons “inch by inch until they were thrust against the face.” His eyes were burned out and the hot irons shoved down his throat. The scaffolding was doused with kerosene and set ablaze.

Why does this kind of thing happen? The sentiments expressed in one of Tucker Carlson’s text messages may offer a window.

The Times reported Tuesday that one of the texts that most likely contributed to Carlson’s firing from Fox News was one he sent to a producer, describing a video of a street fight in which “a group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid” and beat him. “Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously,” Carlson continued. “It’s not how white men fight.”

He then confessed: “Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: This isn’t good for me.”

That’s a lot to unpack.

To start, Carlson attempts to racialize the idea of dishonor in combat, exempting white men from it, which is ridiculous. Human beings behave both honorably and dishonorably, regardless of race.

But more important to me was his description of his immediate descent into sympathizing with the savagery, and how that kind of descent is a mental progression that has, in so many instances, fostered or tolerated all types of violence in this country and around the world.

Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative — which operates a national memorial for lynching victims in Montgomery, Ala. — told me we make a mistake when we think of all the people who participated in lynchings and other types of mobs as akin to Klansmen.

As he explained, “The people who participated in mob violence were teachers and lawyers and police officers and ministers and journalists. In fact, the media facilitated much of this violence by characterizing it as righteous.”

And “rooting for the mob against the man,” as Carlson described his feelings, is a passive form of participation. It is encouragement. It is license.

There is an entire body of research around mob violence that helps to contextualize Carlson’s response. As Stuart Stevenson, a lecturer at the University of East London, wrote in 2021, “A lynch mob gives its members a sense of intoxicating power; a promise of safety from the most persecutory and primitive anxieties.”

The incident Carlson was describing was a street fight, not a lynching in the classical sense, but by his own account, at least briefly, he wanted the attackers to take their attack to the ultimate end. In that moment, Carlson wanted the taking of the life of someone he described as an “Antifa creep.”

He pulled back from that instinct, realizing that hating someone for his apparent political views was wrong, and that the people who loved “that kid” would be “crushed” if he was killed.

Make no mistake, though: What Carlson could “taste” in the heat of that moment he recounted was the power to assign death.