The most effective kind of lying is the “reversal.” It’s what it sounds like. You simply reverse truth and falsehood, and do it with bravado. Sadly, it almost always works, especially if the lie is delivered with dramatic emotion.
Say you collide with someone’s car in a grocery parking lot with your cart, putting a huge dent in the car while the person was backing out of a parking. You, with your cart, didn’t bother to look before you walked behind the car, which was backing out slowly and responsibly. But you don’t want to be blamed, and you want to make onlookers believe the driver did something to you, rather than the other way around. So you start yelling or crying, and saying “She backed out too fast and didn’t even look! She could have killed me!”
Chances are in America in 2025, that ploy would work. We are conditioned to believe melodramatic claims of victimhood, because we’re all afraid of being accused of being “bigoted” or “insensitive.” This tendency blinds us to obvious lies from people who caused their own sorry situation but want to blame it on an innocent party.
It scales all the way up to alleged murder. You’ve seen the coverage of the killing of 17-year-old white high school student Austin Metcalf. According to what we know so far, Metcalf told a black teen, Karmelo Anthony, that he was seated in the wrong spot at the the track meet they were attending. Though media reports conflict, it appears that Metcalf may have tried to move Anthony’s gear bag.
So, naturally, Karmelo Anthony took out the big knife he had purposefully brought to the track meet and plunged it into Metcalf’s heart, killing him. Everyone knows what’s probably going on, but few want to say it. Young black men, statistically, are extraordinarily violent and likely to fly off the handle if anyone “disses” them. Being “dissed” includes being asked to move, or being told, even in the smallest way, that you’re doing something you’re not supposed to do.
Almost unbelievably, the family of alleged murderer Karmelo Anthony (and he admitted to cops on scene that he stabbed Austin Metcalf) is claiming that he, the knife wielder, is the actual victim. Not only that, but the family has set up online fundraisers for Anthony. You have to see it to believe it.
Commentator Matt Walsh pointed it out on X:
This is the second fundraiser by the Anthony family, since they were kicked off the platform GoFundMe. Here’s what their original fundraiser said. Does this sound like a family that cares even a little bit that their son just killed a 17-year-old?
As of this writing, the family of the confessed killer has raised almost $170,000. Let’s see what X users had to say.
Frustratingly but not shockingly, there are tons of people, black and white, who think the killer is actually the victim.
