They’re Using a Teen’s Death to Divide the Nation—And It’s Working

Austin Metcalf's death was not about race until the influencers got hold of it. Now, the clout chasers have exploited the story to divide people eager to fall for the psyop. When will we learn?

Just after I published a piece describing how the elites, government, and its opinion molders provoke division to help them amass more power and influence, we were given a prime example in the tragic killing of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf.

The online reactions to this story provide a glaring example of how social media influencers use these stories to pit Americans against one another based on race.

The incident occurred on April 2 at Kuykendall Stadium in Frisco, Texas, during a high school track meet. Metcalf, a junior at Frisco Memorial High School, lost his life after an altercation with Karmelo Anthony, also 17 years old.

The dispute began when Metcalf, who was White, noticed Anthony, who is Black was sitting under their team’s tent while the event was delayed due to rain. Metcalf and his twin brother Hunter approached Anthony, asking him to leave because he was not supposed to be sitting in that area.

The two kids got into an argument, with Metcalf trying to get Anthony to leave. “Touch me and see what happens,” Anthony said.

Metcalf grabbed Anthony to get him out of the seat, at which point Anthony allegedly stabbed Metcalf once in the chest. He fled right after the stabbing. Law enforcement officers located him elsewhere on the field and arrested him. While the arresting officer was discussing the incident with his colleagues, he said Anthony was alleged to have committed the stabbing.

“I’m not alleged, I did it,” Anthony told the officer. He claimed he had acted in self-defense and asked if Metcalf was okay. He is being held in prison on a $1 million bond. The authorities charged him with first-degree murder.

The story elicited an outpouring of grief and outrage at the incident. The full details of the case have not been established, so I won’t opine on whether Anthony acted in self-defense or simple anger just yet. Either way, this is a tragedy.

There are deep-rooted issues in this country that lead to incidents such as this. Unfortunately, we won’t find those issues in this case because media figures and online personalities have jumped at the opportunity to exploit Metcalf’s death to promote racial hatred and outrage.

The usual suspects on what I call the “woke right” spun into high gear moments after the story was publicized. They used Metcalf’s stabbing to smear the Black community, painting it as inherently violent.

The Blaze’s Jason Whitlock, one of the prime purveyors of the “Black man bad” narrative, posited that while Anthony did not stab Metcalf because of his skin color, “Karmelo Anthony’s race played a significant role in the killing.”

He continued:

It wasn't a race-hate murder. It was a "black culture" murder, the same crime black boys suffer daily. "Black culture" radicalizes black people to solve all conflict with escalated and aggressive conflict, including violence. The solution is a rejection of "black culture" and an embrace of Christian culture. Reject "black culture." It's demonic and self-destructive.

Of course, this is a lie, one that is popular among fringe elements on the right. White and Black conservatives alike push this narrative to appeal to the prejudices of their audience.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who has also favored the “Black Man Bad” narrative, did the same. In a post on X, he claimed, “Young black males are violent to a wildly, outrageously disproportionately degree. That’s just a fact. We all know it. And it’s time that we speak honestly about it, or nothing will ever change.”

The reality is that fewer than one percent of the Black American population is convicted for a violent crime each year, according to FBI and Census data. If violence was truly inherent in Black culture, wouldn’t this percentage be MUCH higher?

But it’s not just the right.

Folks on the other side of the political and racial divide did the same thing. Author Tariq Nasheed referred to Austin Metcalf as a “suspected white supremacist” who “demanded honor student Karmelo Anthony give up his seat—like it was the Jim Crow era.”

Another rocket scientist on X made the same comparison, pretending Metcalf was akin to a member of the Ku Klux Klan just for getting into a seating dispute with a Black kid.

To be clear, influencers on both sides are exploiting Metcalf’s death to further divide the American populace while getting what is most important to them: Clout, Clicks, and Cash. None of them care about Metcalf or Anthony. Indeed, neither Whitlock, Walsh, nor any of the other big accounts on X even bothered to share the family’s GoFundMe page.

To them, Metcalf is nothing more than a cudgel to wield against Black people and the legacy media. The same holds true of those supporting Anthony. They want only to promote the “White people are racist” narrative.

This story represents one of the most brazen examples of influencers abusing the death of a kid to intensify racial tensions. It’s like they didn’t even try to hide what they were doing.

And people still fell for it. The psyop worked.

Metcalf’s father even pleaded with people to avoid making the death of his son about race or politics. But the influencers didn’t care. They wanted only their clicks.

If the government ends up growing to the point where it has near complete control over our lives, this story will provide the ultimate case study for why it happened. “Woke” influencers on the right want White people to be afraid of Black people. “Woke” influencers on the left want Black people to be afraid of White people.

America has become so tribal, so reliant on talking heads to give us our opinions, that we are easy to fool because we have stopped thinking critically.

When a story should elicit sympathy and a desire for answers, the opinion molders ensure that it is used only to fuel racial animus. I don’t see how we move forward as a nation if Americans don’t wake up to what these people are doing.

There is a silver lining. As they say, social media isn’t real life. This contagion has not yet contaminated most people. This is a purely online phenomenon. But, as I have constantly warned, the influencer class is bent on making real life look more like X. If we do not wake up to this, they will succeed.