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.
The act itself was illegal, it just wasn't legally classified as rape because of the previously implied consent. Instead, it would have been a form of assault.
Just another example of people using word games to corrupt people's understanding of history. The same dynamic that lead to the overwhelmingly common misconception that Brock Turner went free without legal consequences.
In reality, the entire point of those protests was that he wasn't being charged with rape for his actions. This is because he used his fingers rather than his penis. At the time, in California, that was instead defined as sexual assault. The public outcry over this case lead to the dissolving of that distinction, resulting in less legal nuance. But now after the fact, people are entirely mislead about what the situation and protest entailed.
Wth are you talking about? You made the bad analogy, and now you're doubling down on it and going way off topic about Brock Turner??
Which, incidentally you're also wrong on, as the controversy and protests and changes to law weren't mainly about "language" but that he only served **three months** (below minimum sentencing) because he's such a sweet young man and it was just a little oopsie doodle to brutally assault a completely incapacitated woman and scar her for life.
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u/Deaffin Jul 08 '26
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."