President Biden Honors Emmett Till While Conservatives Defend Lynching

     "Both parties are the same" is a common refrain in political discourse today. There are a million answers I could give to discredit this notion driven by a combination of nihilism, ignorance, and deceit. However, I think the events of this week have actually given the best example in modern history.

     Last year, I wrote an article about how, as historic as the actions Presidents Johnson, Clinton, and Obama were, no other president has made fighting hate crimes as high a priority as Joe Biden has. From his executive order against AAPI hate to the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act to the United We Stand Summit and the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, President Biden has gone above and beyond in taking a whole-of-government approach to tackling hate crimes against every group. This makes sense, as the reason President Biden got involved in politics was a support for civil rights that came out of his experience as a lifeguard in the 1960s and the reason he ran for president in 2019 was Charlottesville and Trump's abhorrent response.

     It is that last piece of legislation I mentioned, and particularly the case of Emmett Till, that demonstrates how close to heart and mind this issue is for the president. Biden has done more to honor the life and legacy of Emmett Till and the Till family than any president since the child's horrific lynching. This law officially made lynching a federal crime, the culmination of a century of efforts to get an anti-lynching law passed and decades of work on this specific bill. Earlier this week, President Biden designated the sites of his death, the acquittal of the monsters who murdered him, and of his open-casket funeral as the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. The White House hosted a screening in 2022 of the film Till, based on Emmett's lynching and Mamie's quest for accountability and justice. The same year, President Biden awarded Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley the congressional gold medal.

     A contrast, I mentioned? Yes. As President Biden is working to honor Emmett Till's legacy and combat hate crimes, conservatives are being as racist as ever. Florida now teaches children that slaves actually gained useful skills from their designation as property. FOX News downplayed the horrors of the Holocaust while other conservative voices burned Barbies and declared war on the film sensation. The biggest example, though is the Big Green Tractor Guy's song "Try That in a Small Town."

     I was raised in a town with a population of less than 2,000 and currently live in a village with a population of less than 4,000. I enjoy some country music, but Jason Aldean is the epitome of what's wrong with it. I know he didn't write the actual song, just like he didn't actually write his 15-year-old biggest hit, but Jason Aldean doesn't know the first thing about small towns. He comes from Macon, Georgia, a city of more than 150,000 people. (Where I'm from, that's a big city.) The song is a conservative's wet dream, complete with the victim complex that minorities are targeting them and the fantasy of getting violent revenge. One lyric in this song that demonstrates how stupid it is is when he says that one couldn't get away with carjacking an old lady at a stoplight in a small town. That is true, but probably because small towns don't have stoplights. 

     The rest of the song gets worse, delving into Aldean's apparent fixation with stocking up on weapons for the race war he believes minorities are plotting. This is the stuff of the alt-right, the Boogaloo who stormed the Capitol, tried to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, and killed a federal agent in California among other horrific acts of violence and hate. According to conservatives, not liking this song is an attack on free speech and the song itself merely a condemnation of "wokeism." They're really telling on themselves with their defense of this song. 

     So no, both parties are not the same.