Once upon a time, when I was a kid getting picked up from basketball practice, I made the mistake of whining to my mom that I was "starving." I couldn't wait to hear what wonderful dinner she had waiting for me at home. What she served up instead was a lecture on how I was not, by any means, starving. Starvation was a devastating reality that affected large portions of the world population, she explained. Just miles away, children my age were suffering from real food insecurity every single day. And, she went on, she hoped that my misappropriating that language to describe a fleeting discomfort was the reflection of a quick lapse in judgment, and not a deeper moral myopia. (At least, that's how I remember it.)
Anyway, my point is that even as a young child, I could understand the idea that words have meaning, and that there is something troubling about distorting those meanings in order to serve your personal reality. Which is why, this week, when Sen. Lindsey Graham referred to a "lynch mob" coming after Matt Gaetz, I felt my stomach drop.
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Gaetz, until recently a Congressman from Florida, has been in the news for days, since President-elect Trump nominated him to be the country's next attorney general. But his short-lived nomination came with turmoil, given that he has been the subject of multiple recent ethical inquiries, including a federal sex-trafficking investigation. Gaetz denies the allegations against him. (Before this week, I largely thought of Gaetz as the guy who claimed to be the father of a child of color in order to make a point about…why discriminatory policing doesn't matter?)
Given all that, many people, within the government and outside of it, expressed their reservations about Gaetz's nomination. Ultimately, those critics – the supposed "lynch mob" – won out, and on Thursday, Gaetz withdrew his nomination.
To state the painfully obvious: a lynch mob is *not* a group of people calmly raising legitimate concerns about their colleague's alleged ethical and legal violations. In fact, the phrase lynch mob typically evokes a group of racist vigilantes who seek to murder and sometimes dismember someone – usually a Black man – who has been scapegoated for a crime they either never committed or got to stand trial for. When most people imagine a lynch mob, they imagine torches, screaming, a corpse hanging from a tree.
It's potent imagery, and it's been invoked repeatedly – by everyone from Graham to Donald Trump to former AIG CEO Robert Benmosche. And in many cases, it's an effective way of redirecting energy away from someone in the spotlight. After all, who wants to be part of an angry mob? Better to be civil and let history take its course.
But if our country's wealthiest, most powerful white men are the ones being "nailed to the cross," and "whipped" – if they're the victims of the "witch hunts" and "lynch mobs" — what happens when we try to tell the stories of truly victimized people? What words do we have left to describe real injustice? When someone tells us of a true wrong that is taking place in the world, will we even understand what they're talking about? Or will our brains be so skewed at that point that we'll think hunger and starvation are all just variations on a theme.
This was edited by Courtney Stein.
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