Toby Keith likes to brag, “This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage.” But when my reporting on the pro-lynching lyrics in his song, “Beer For My Horses,” began to complicate the promo tour for his forthcoming “Southern comedy” movie of the same title, tough-talking Toby whined to the media. “The song was a hit and the words ‘lynch’ and ‘racism’ has [sic] never come up until this moron wrote this blog,” he fumed to Contact Music.

When Fox News picked up Keith’s comments, Big Dog Daddy’s loyal fans bombarded my in-box with a deluge of indignant rants. While insisting to me that “Beer For My Horses” contained not even a hint of coded racial animus, Keith’s fans simultaneously revealed their simmering resentment of Jews, blacks, and “faggy liberals.”

Their hate-laden letters comprised the script for my latest video:

Toby Keith Nation Fights Back, a creative take on my hate mail

Keith claimed that “Beer For My Horses” was simply an anodyne ditty intended to evoke nostalgia for the Old West, where “bad guys” met justice at the end of a rope. “It’s about the old West and horses and sheriffs … and going and getting the bad guys. It’s not a racist thing or about lynching,” he said.

Why then did Keith sing so despairingly of car thieves, “corruption in the street,” and terrorists who blow up buildings? Why did he invoke the swarthy boogeymen of the modern right-wing imagination right before launching into a verse about the good old days when his “grandpappy” would “take all the rope in Texas…find a tall oak tree,” and “hang them high in the street, for all the people to see?” Maybe “Beer For My Horses” isn’t about the Old West after all.

But since Keith has invoked that golden era of “horses and sheriffs…and going and getting the bad guys,” it is fair to ask if he knows anything about the real history of lynching in Texas. Does he know that according to the Handbook of Texas, the Lone Star stood third among the states — just behind Mississippi and Georgia — in its total of lynching victims? Does Keith know that of the 468 people lynched in Texas, a whopping 339 were African-American (a partial list of black Texan lynching victims is here)?

Lynching was not, as Keith disingenuously claimed, a practice exclusive to gallant Hollywood cowboys played by Gene Autry (who couldn’t even ride a horse) and Ronald Reagan. It was a mode of organized terror employed by groups like the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction to restore white supremacy in Texas and throughout the region.

Keith should immediately apologize for his musical monstrosity. Then I suggest he perform a cover of “Strange Fruit,” the Billie Holiday anthem inspired by the anti-lynching poetry of Jewish school teacher Abel Meeropol. Holiday often cried (watch her here) as she performed her haunting dirge. On at least one occasion, she was so overcome with emotion she could not finish. With Toby Keith exploiting the South’s most barbaric tradition for big bucks, Holiday’s tears burn like salt on an unhealed wound.

You may have noticed that my blog is being redesigned. The process had gone slowly but I anticipate finishing up by early next week. Then I should resume regular blogging. I also plan to release two projects very shortly that I have been working on for the past week. The first is a humorous video response to Toby Keith and his fans, who, despite their denials of racial animus, seem to harbor extreme resentment of the usual evildoers: blacks, Jews, liberals, and gays (In case you haven’t been following along), Keith called a “moron” last week. I also plan to publish a piece in the Nation about Jerome Corsi’s activities on the farthest shores of the right-wing fringe. Already, I have documented for Media Matters Corsi’s planned appearance on a white supremacist radio show and his August 4 spot on the radio show of the 9-11 “Truth” movement’s godfather, Alex Jones. But these documents only scratch the surface of Corsi’s crankery.

Toby Keith

Last week, I reported for the Huffington Post that country singer Toby Keith had performed a pro-lynching anthem on the Colbert Report, and would be playing the same song soon on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and a slew of nationally televised talk shows.

The lyrics of Keith’s song, “Beer For My Horses,” which I transcribed, could hardly be less explicit — “Hang ‘em high, for all the people to see.” In my piece, I also noted the racially tinged nature of the song’s video and the forthcoming movie that Keith’s song inspired.

Toby Keith’s latest: Obama “talks, acts, and carries himself as a Caucausian.”

The response from right-wing blogs was swift and strident. Townhall.com whined that “The Liberal Lynching of Toby Keith” had taken place; Lonewacko claimed that Keith was actually “promoting lawful executions.” And Keith found an avid defender in Robert Stacy McCain, the disgraced former Washington Times reporter and avowed neo-Confederate who once allegedly ranted in the middle of the Times newsroom that slavery was “good for the blacks and good for property owners.”

The comments section of my post was immediately swarmed by right-wing trolls going into contortions to defend the indefensible. A typical comment read: “I can’t believe that this Max can’t find something real to complain about in this crazy world… I think Max is the bigot – he obviously hates country music, country singers and Southerners.”

Describing Keith’s over-produced truck commercial schmaltz as “country music” besmirches the dignified tradition established by Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, while insulting the genre’s innovators, from Neko Case to Son Volt to my good friend Dave Bryan (hear his music here). At his best, Keith is Merle Haggard with a lobotomy. But that’s beside the point.

The comments by the literally hundreds of trolls who leapt to Keith’s defense are significant for only one reason: they reveal the extent to which the radical right has anointed Keith as a leading movement icon. Keith’s schlock rock is the soundtrack of the culturally deprived australopithicenes who populate the cyber-caves of freeperland and comprise the movement’s most fervent activists. He is a faux working class chickenhawk who clamors for English-only laws but can hardly speak his own language; he is “White Trash With Money,” and like them, he’s proud of it. He is one of them.

Now, Keith has trained his sights on Barack Obama, attacking him in racially tinged language that startled even the notoriously reactionary radio jock Glenn Beck. During Keith’s appearance on the July 30 broadcast of Beck’s show, he remarked, “I think the black people would say he [Obama] don’t talk, act or
carry himself as a black person.”

“What does that even mean?” the audibly shocked Beck replied.

“Well, I don’t know what that means,” Keith drawled, “but I think that that’s what they would say. Even though the black society would pull for him I still think that they think in the back of their mind that the only reason he is in [the general election] is because he talks, acts and carries himself as a Caucasian.”

How will Keith’s fans among the Republican base explain away his latest paroxysm of bigotry without dismissing the essence of his argument? The comment section is open.