The Texas Track-Meet Stabbing Shows Where Right-Wing Influencers Are Headed

Yahoo

15-04-2025

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On April 2, Donald Trump's 'Liberation Day,' a teenage athlete fatally stabbed another teenage athlete at a track meet in Frisco, Texas.
The exact details around this specific case remain unclear, but local investigators said it started when 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony sat under another team's tent during a rain delay. According to the authorities, the second student, 17-year-old Austin Metcalf, told Anthony to leave. The two argued. Anthony warned Metcalf not to touch him. Metcalf touched Anthony. Anthony stabbed Metcalf in the chest. Metcalf, it should be noted, was white. Anthony is Black.
Over the past couple of weeks, the story of Metcalf's death has blown up on right-wing media. (Anthony allegedly confessed to stabbing Metcalf but has claimed self-defense. He has been charged with murder.) Fox News has run a number of segments on the incident, and many prominent commentators have spoken out about it. It has reached the point of saturation at which some influencers can simply post photos of the alleged killer, calling for retribution without name or context, and presume their audiences will know who they mean.
There is one notable way in which this story diverges from other violent crime obsessions that occasionally grip social media. In recent years, news cycles about killings in the U.S. have triggered discussions of guns, of the internet, of misogyny, of racism. On the right, violent tragedies have supported specific political narratives: In the notable case of Laken Riley, for example, a murder by an immigrant has bolstered false arguments about migrant crime, which in turn were used in support of Trump's deportation policies. Similarly, stories about murders in Chicago and elsewhere have served to bolster fears of gang violence and other urban crime, to argue for the failed policies of blue cities and the need for robust policing.
But despite the fact that there appears to be little to be pulled from the Austin Metcalf story, which seems like a tragic and random conflict between teenagers, its reach has been huge. What made the Metcalf murder so useful for certain people online is that it has the flavor of a culture war story—Metcalf was a white, Southern, Christian boy who liked to hunt and play football, and was killed while participating in wholesome high school athletics, and a Black youth was the villain—without having any actual use, at face value, in any kind of policy debate. That is, unless you're opening up debate to white supremacist ideas.
After Metcalf's death was reported, the hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter was trending on X, with 40,000 mentions on April 3, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Comments on stories about the incident were cesspools of overt racism, with users throwing around slurs and ideas about the innate violence of Black men and their corroding effect on society. A white nationalist group in Pennsylvania distributed stickers with Metcalf's and Anthony's faces, declaring it to be 'time to take a stand!' White supremacists such as Nick Fuentes and Stew Peters spoke about the incident on their shows, insisting the incident reflected 'Black barbarism.' A post from the popular X account End Wokeness calling on supporters to 'say his name'—a co-opting of the Black Lives Matter slogan—received nearly 38 million views.
It's hard to say, in the modern, hate-speech-flooded version of Twitter, how many of the accounts spouting white supremacist views in the replies are bots and trolls. But on sites like Substack, TikTok, and YouTube, verifiably real people are sharing extreme views based on the case. And major accounts and influencers have picked up the case as fodder, as well. The far-right commentator Benny Johnson called for the death penalty for Anthony, to 'send a message.' MAGA filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza called Anthony the 'product of a rotten set of values that had been transmitted on the urban street.' Michael Knowles, a Daily Wire personality, speculated that Anthony had come from 'some kind of terrible home' and was born out of wedlock. And Matt Walsh, another Daily Wire figure, has insisted on calling the stabbing a premeditated and racially motivated murder. 'Young black males are violent to a wildly, outrageously disproportionate degree,' he wrote in a post on X that has more than 19 million views. 'That's just a fact. We all know it. And it's time that we speak honestly about it, or nothing will ever change.'
These accounts are incentivized in the attention economy to highlight stories that play to outrage, fear, and other base emotions. In this case, as the story moved on, they were given a gift: Supporters of Anthony, convinced of his innocence, started fundraising pages for his legal defense. Several real and scam accounts started pages for him on GoFundMe, which were taken down by the company for violating its rules against fundraisers for those charged with violent crimes. The family also started a still active fundraiser on the more libertarian GiveSendGo. The latter has raised $419,300—compared to the combined $518,700 from the two Metcalf fundraisers on GoFundMe—with donors' comments expressing their belief that Anthony had been acting in self-defense. For days, conservative influencers ran with updates on this fundraiser and on Anthony's base of support.
To be fair, this rage-baiting campaign wasn't limited to the right. On social media, Anthony-supporting accounts spread fake stories about Metcalf espousing white supremacist opinions, or about media cover-ups of evidence that would justify Anthony's alleged behavior. Internet rumors spread that Metcalf had bullied Anthony, that Metcalf punched Anthony, that Metcalf had actually died of a drug overdose. Other people made TikTok and YouTube videos blaming Metcalf's behavior for the outcome, or otherwise justifying the violence—a difficult position to take, particularly when we don't know exactly what happened under that tent.
But the parts of the discourse with the greatest reach—the X posts with 20 million views, the YouTube videos with the highest view counts—remained those discussing the problem of violent Black youth as an urgent, topical issue. This is notable, because violent crime continues to be much lower than it was in previous decades, and the murder rate appears to be falling post-pandemic. There is also no strong racial justice movement happening, as in 2020, that would explain a backlash. There is no reason to think anti-white-motivated violence is at any kind of high.
There is, of course, an unrelated reason for the timing that may have prompted this particular story to blow up: It occurred on Liberation Day, the same day Trump's tariff announcement tanked the markets. 'This is part of the strategy to get people to look elsewhere,' said Sarah T. Roberts, a professor at UCLA who specializes in digital media and politics and culture. 'It's great for them to have something else to talk about that will press buttons for their audiences.'
But even if it was an issue the influencers clung to for a distraction in a tough news cycle for the MAGA movement, some experts said it would make sense that during this second Trump presidency, the right-wing influencers would return to Black crime.
Daniel Karell, a sociologist at Yale University who has studied social media and social movements, agreed that the timing likely had to do with the content creators' need for a sensational story during a bad tariff news cycle. But he did add that he would not be surprised if immigrant violence stories had become less interesting to this same group, with the Trump administration in charge of deportations—meaning they would be responsible for any new crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. 'The online Right needs to find another threat that is not under direct control of the executive branch,' Karell wrote in an email. 'One option, which is a tried-and-true boogeyman that runs throughout American history, is racial threat.'
And with this moment of conservative cultural resurgence, when Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies and other anti-racist measures have been so thoroughly rolled back and 'woke' has become a taboo term, some influencers took the chance to push the conversation around race further than it could go during the Biden years.
Take, for example, the case of Jack Posobiec, a podcaster and conspiracy theorist who has promoted Pizzagate and the 'Stop the Steal' movement. Posobiec has significant sway in the MAGA movement. He has spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference; was a contributor to Turning Point USA; is a frequent guest on Steve Bannon's show; was invited to join Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on an official trip to Europe, according to the Washington Post; and, per the Post, has claimed he traveled with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on a trip to Ukraine. And to Posobiec, Metcalf's death was a 'rallying cry,' as he said in a post to his 3 million followers. He stated that 'white liberals have rated non-white groups more positively than their own race, a pattern not mirrored by other racial groups.' The conservative reaction to the Metcalf murder, he said, may have shown the scale of frustration white people had about 'racial crimes' against their own race. 'The White Guilt Narrative may have reached its breaking point.'
This turn may show where the conversation about race in America is headed in the second Trump administration, when the conservative movement has largely won its older battles over education, corporate diversity standards, and hiring practices. The new right-wing vision is no longer of a race-blind society, pulling on indignation that liberals are making everything about race. Instead, there's a wholly different frontier in the debate, an argument for a world in which white people stop being blind to the problems of other demographics; one in which they protect each other—and prioritize their own shared interests.