The psychology of lynch mobs has long been a subject of interest to me. What drives these mobs, largely composed of white males in the American accounts I’ve read, to peak levels of barbarity? At what point does their humanity go dormant and bloodlust take over their beings? I have seen pictures of glassy-eyed men and boys (and sometimes women) standing beneath dangling or charred bodies, and read the histories of communities consumed by the desire to not only kill, but to mutilate.
Case in point, in 1893, a Black man named Henry Smith was accused of killing a white girl in Paris, Texas, and lynched before a crowd of roughly 10,000 people. As reported by The New York Times at the time in a story headlined “Another Negro Burned,” officers saw the futility of trying to stop the mob’s passions, so they let the citizens take the law into their own hands and burn the prisoner at the stake. Smith was tied to a scaffolding, paraded through the streets on a carnival float, and then burned with red-hot irons “inch by inch until they were thrust against the face.” The hot irons were shoved down his throat, and his eyes were burned out. The scaffolding was doused with kerosene and set ablaze. Afterward, the mob took ashes and pieces of bone as souvenirs.
Why does this kind of thing happen? The sentiments expressed in one of Tucker Carlson’s text messages may offer a window. According to a report by The Times on Tuesday, one of the texts that contributed to Carlson’s firing from Fox News was one he sent to a producer about a video of a street fight in which “a group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid” and beat him. Carlson wrote that jumping a kid like that was dishonorable, and that it’s not how white men fight. However, 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.”
To start, Carlson tries 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 crucial to me is his description of his immediate descent into sympathizing with the savagery, and how that kind of descent has fostered or tolerated all types of violence in this country and around the world.
As Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, who operates a national memorial for lynching victims in Montgomery, Alabama, pointed out, we make a mistake when we think of all the people who participated in lynchings and other types of mobs as akin to Klansmen. The people who participated in mob violence were teachers, lawyers, police officers, ministers, and journalists. In fact, the media facilitated much of this violence by characterizing it as righteous.
“Rooting for the mob against the man,” as Carlson put his feelings, is a passive form of participation. It is encouragement. It is a license. There is a whole 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.” He explains, “This is the driver for the essential dehumanization required for lynching that enables ‘a stone to be made of your heart,’ and an omnipotent and intoxicating sense of triumph and grandiosity over who is lynched.”
The incident Carlson described was a street fight, not a lynching in the classical sense, but by his 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. But make no mistake: what Carlson could “taste” in the heat of that moment was the power to assign death.
