Why MAGA media is fixated on a Texas teen murder case

[Eugene]

Source: Salon

Why MAGA media is fixated on a Texas teen murder case

The racist exploitation of Austin Metcalf's killing shows how MAGA tears local communities apart
By Amanda Marcotte

Senior Writer
Published April 25, 2025 6:00AM (EDT)

If anyone hoped that the Jan. 6 defendants Donald Trump released from jail would be humbled enough to embrace a quieter, more productive existence, well, the exact opposite is happening with quite a few of them. And one post-pardon case is already sticking out for sheer depravity. Jake Lang, who spent years in jail while contending with multiple charges for violence during the Capitol riot, is making a racist spectacle of a high school murder case in Texas.

On April 2, Austin Metcalf, 17, was stabbed to death at a track meet in Frisco, a suburb of Dallas. Karmelo Anthony, also 17, was charged with murder, after admitting he stabbed Metcalf to police. Metcalf was white. Anthony is Black. 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. But his joy turned to rage when Metcalf did not play along with the racist stunt. "You’re trying to create more race divide than bridging the gap," Metcalf declared, and an enraged Lang called this reaction "weakness."

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nabpxh57dor5jlxw6cyxfpog/post/3ln6q5u2zvc27

Lang is a clown, but he is not an outlier. 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 Trump's failures and falling approval ratings. 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.

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Read more: https://www.salon.com/2025/04/25/why-maga-media-is-fixated-on-a-texas-teen-case/

[sop]

1. Perfect MAGA media headline: "Blonde, blue-eyed, christian virgin raped, murdered by illegal ms-13 Salvadorean."

[Traildogbob]

2. Florida State blood bath

Not a word, out of the news. White, and supreme.

[usonian]

3. "Exerptionalism" in another morph.

Maga creeps like to take one exception or outlier and project it as the rule in people's minds.

I apply the street rule to their distress:

No brain, no pain.