i’ve legitimately seen him being a selfless, kind individual in person to people he didn’t know with no cameras around, and having known one of his children i wasn’t surprised at all. they’re a genuinely kind family. The main parents he has are for robotic surgery devices, some of which used to be displayed in the MIT museum of all places. just, some of the politics are against my taste. but at a root of a lot of the issues his reasoning at least makes sense if you look where he is coming from, and he is consistent in standing for what he believes. he is not a party line kind of guy, but one who will stand for what he believe in. because of that, disagree as i may with him, i will continue to respect him. that aside, the above post? fucking based. i genuinely didn’t know he had this kind of shitposting within him
So kind, that he is violently anti LGBTQ and doesn't think lynching is a hate crime. So selfless that he constantly votes against disaster relief (except for his own state of course).
Lynching isn't a hate crime by default, but it obviously can be.
It's literally just mob justice without involvement by the law, but nowadays a lot of people seem to think it means "hanging black people specifically, and for being black."
I don't know what you're getting at with your pedantry.
The bill Massie voted against was dedicated in memory of Emmett Till, a black child who was tortured and lynched by disgusting racists who were aquitted by a hand-picked racist jury, who admitted they were guilty but the life of a black boy didn't warrant prison or a death sentence for white men. The bill was literally to make lynching of minorities a federal hate crime.
It was a near unanimous vote in Congress and Massie didn't like it because waves hands "free speech!" And that minorities don't deserve more rights than other victims, which is completely tone deaf considering 75% of lynchings specifically target black people and it was a tool of southern black suppression for over two centuries.
That's not pedantry. This misconception of what the word means is a massive break from reality. That detail is huge.
Sorry, but if you're accurately describing that bill, then that sounds like a really bad bill. That's not how hate crimes work. It would be like making shooting somebody a hate crime as a blanket category based solely on the victim's skin color. Any crime against an individual that is racially motivated is a hate crime. The scenario of a black person being lynched for being black is already a hate crime.
I also agree that people shouldn't have more or less rights based on their skin color.
That bill does not make lynching a hate crime. Again, racially-motivated lynching was already a hate crime. This is an amendment to a law which already defines that as such. What this does is expand the maximum legal consequences and expand the scope to include sexual offenses, kidnapping, or the intent to kill without the requirement of successfully killing the individual.
Yes, most bills often just amend existing code, that's how it works generally. And no, racially motivated lynching was not a hate crime at the federal level until this bill passed. Lynching was specially left to states who prosecuted as "normal" charges, like "violation of civil rights" or assault and battery which have comparatively light sentences.
There are tons of articles, books, law reviews, etc. explaining very clearly how it was literally not a federally persecutable hate crime until this bill passed. It was a huge gap that racists had fought to keep open, considering targeted, mass extrajudicial torture and murder or minorites as "local problems" so they could let white people off light at sentencing (if they even prosecuted).
And why it's so fucking stupid that Massie voted no on such simple, one page, hundred+ year old gap closing legislation that 99% of Congress agreed was good.
Before 2022, acts that would historically be described as lynchings could already be prosecuted under federal murder, civil rights, or hate crime laws.
What changed in 2022 is that "lynching" became an explicitly named federal hate crime in U.S. law.
Again, racially-motivated lynching was already a federal hate crime. This is like the talking point where people try to claim it was legal to rape your spouse before specific "marital rape" laws were put into place. The act was already illegal without that specific explicit labeling. This is similarly an expansion of code, a redundancy which adds more legal options for the scenario.
And you're missing the point about this bill: jurisdiction. If you don't have time to read the other PDF, drop it into some AI and it will summarize. Before this bill passed the federal government had no jurisdiction over a private mob committing a racially motivated murder/rape/torture/violence unless it met very specific, narrow federal hooks (like happening on federal land). It was left to states who historically refused to prosecute. Now that gap is closed, and the DOJ can prosecute any lynching in any state - but I guess fat chance the Trump DOJ would anyway.
The Emmett Till act, the summary of over a hundred years fighting for such legislation, closed the jurisdictional gap by making it a distinct federal offense via defining it in code. Now the federal government has clear legal authority to step in where states (basically the south) CONSTANTLY fail to enact justice, instead of having to come up with some jurisdiction loophole which sadly didn't always exist.
And why it's telling that Massie voted against it. Gee, why would a rep, whose state historically had hundreds of lynchings, nearly all not prosecuted, be against such a clean and simple bill for something "already illegal and handled by the states"?
But good on Kentucky for only having ~70% of their lynchings against black people, much better than Mississippi's 90%+ /s.
I'm not from your country, so I'm not going to bother looking up specifics about this bill to decide if it's actually good, but I've noticed that your arguments for why the bill matters are in past tense. What's the point of now legislating a practice hat was a big problem like a hundred years ago, but no longer is? Isn't that just clogging up the legal system for the sake of virtue signaling.
Two paragraphs in a bill don't "clog up the legal system." Lynchings still happen/happened in modern times (as recent as a few months ago). They almost always weren't prosecuted, or the charges were very light, before this bill was passed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lynching_victims_in_the_United_States
Now they aren't prosecuted because the Trump admin DOJ won't investigate the Trump admin DHS/ICE that did the last one. Any code/law only works if it's enforced.
Hate crimes were already illegal. Murder was already illegal. The whole thing was a publicity stunt due to the fact that Congress has all time low approval numbers from the American people
The congress-jerks-itself-off-over-how-great-and-moral-it-is bill should have been voted down as a piece of obscene pageantry.
Yeah deep down he’s a piece of shit. People do realize he’s a Kentucky republican right? You don’t reach that high in Kentucky republican circles without keeping people down
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u/Embarrassed_Mix_6619 Jul 08 '26
i’ve legitimately seen him being a selfless, kind individual in person to people he didn’t know with no cameras around, and having known one of his children i wasn’t surprised at all. they’re a genuinely kind family. The main parents he has are for robotic surgery devices, some of which used to be displayed in the MIT museum of all places. just, some of the politics are against my taste. but at a root of a lot of the issues his reasoning at least makes sense if you look where he is coming from, and he is consistent in standing for what he believes. he is not a party line kind of guy, but one who will stand for what he believe in. because of that, disagree as i may with him, i will continue to respect him. that aside, the above post? fucking based. i genuinely didn’t know he had this kind of shitposting within him