Land of the Free

Until the second Bush administration took up torturing prisoners, I was an admirer of the USA for its decades of civilization (since the Civil Rights Act of 1964). Therefore I hope that some of the material I've seen recently has been of a sort that's only recently existed.

A horrifying example, courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates is this, published in The American Spectator, an apparently quite reputable publication, unrelated to the similarly named British magazine. Be warned that it's truly disgusting. The writer accuses a woman, in the public eye because she's been wronged by someone whose politics he likes, of lying because she told the story in a speech of the lynching of her relative Bobby Hall in about 1940. And this story, he says, is a lie because whereas Hall was beaten to death by a sheriff and his deputies, that doesn't fall within some technical definition of a lynching because...no I can't go on. Too much of the American right has simply lost touch with decency.