Bathe in the Pain of the "Beautiful" Murdered Woman

Her beauty, her suffering, and her death provide the proof that the external enemy must be hated and feared.

"Kate Steinle - panoramio" by Gianluca Cogoli is licensed under CC BY 3.0 (cropped version)

Though the numbers have gone up and down over the last few years, about 15,000 to 20,000 Americans are murdered every year. About one-fifth of those victims are women. About three-quarters of those are killed by an intimate partner, family member, or someone else they know. In all, something like 2 percent of murder victims are women killed by strangers. 

The vast majority of the other 98 percent of murder victims get no profiles written about them in newspapers. No one makes posters with their pictures, and no members of Congress or presidential candidates declare outrage at their killing. But if a woman — especially a young, attractive white woman — is killed by a stranger, and especially if she happens to have been killed by an immigrant? She’ll be famous. 

So when Laken Riley, a student at Augusta University in Georgia, was killed while jogging, allegedly by a migrant from Venezuela, her postmortem fate was inevitable. Whatever she meant in life to her friends, family and community, she is now a totem for the American right, as every Republican in sight rushes to bathe in her suffering and transform her into a weapon in their war against those who would, as their cult leader put it, “poison the blood” of our country. 

This has happened so many times that it constitutes a foundational pillar of right-wing xenophobia. Donald Trump recently decried “the deadly invasion that stole Laken’s beautiful American life.” Before her there was Mollie Tibbetts, an Iowa woman killed in 2018 by an undocumented farmworker; about her, Trump said, “you saw what happened to that incredible, beautiful young woman.” Then there was the case of Kate Steinle, a woman killed in 2015 in a freak accident when a bullet fired by an immigrant man ricocheted off a concrete walkway into her back (he was eventually acquitted of murder). Trump told her story again and again, always referring to her as “beautiful Kate.” At times, the beautiful girls were only hypothetical; here’s something he said at a rally in 2017:

The predators and criminal aliens who poison our communities with drugs and prey on innocent young people, these beautiful, beautiful innocent young people, will find no safe haven anywhere in our country. And you’ve seen some of these stories about some of these animals.

They don’t want to use guns because it’s too fast and it’s not painful enough. So they’ll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others, and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long. Well, they’re not being protected any longer, folks.

Were there actually “criminal aliens” preying upon “a young, beautiful girl, 15, 16,” and torturing and killing them? Does it matter? No, it does not. The mental image, meant to get your heart racing and adrenaline pumping, is the point.

There was a time when “They’re going to take our jobs!” was the argument immigration opponents relied on most heavily in making their case, but that is clearly now considered insufficiently powerful. No, they need something more visceral, something that will produce not just anger but a burning desire for vengeance. Only the grisly death of a “beautiful” woman or girl will do. The more beautiful she was, the more horrible her defilement, and the greater the urgency of wreaking vengeance in her name.  

Jeff Sharlet has written about “the joy of punching, real or imagined” that animates Trump’s followers, and there is a distant relative of that joy to be found in the stories of the murdered beautiful women. Conservatives have a lurid enthusiasm for telling and retelling the tales, an almost sensual fascination with the details. The farther we descend into the darkness of what happened to these women, the more our future brutality against some stand-in for the killers will be not only justified but positively redemptive.

Trumpism continually offers its adherents this kind of emotional intensity — sometimes hate, sometimes fear, sometimes joy, sometimes bloodthirstiness dancing on the edge of its fullest expression. 

The message in Katie Britt’s botched SOTU response

We saw this phenomenon again when Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama was tapped to give the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union address. She knew she would talk mostly about immigration, and she wanted her presentation to be as emotional as possible (and emotional it certainly was; in what was essentially an acting-class monologue from an eager if talentless student, Britt emoted so hard in so many different ways that her speech quickly became the subject of national mockery). But Laken Riley’s story had already been repeated a thousand times, so Britt came up with something less familiar, a tale even more horrifying:

We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach: I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoebox of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.

Britt positively luxuriates in these terrible details; just witness the enthusiasm of her acting: 

As you’ve probably heard by now, journalist Jonathan Katz realized that this was a story he had heard Britt tell before — and there was something deeply problematic about it, not because the story itself was untrue but because nothing about it has anything to do with Biden’s border policies. As he put it, “Britt took a story she heard at a press conference near the border last year — but which actually took place over six hundred miles away in central Mexico twenty years ago, when a Republican was president, and didn’t concern international human trafficking at all — and dressed it up as evidence she had personally collected that ‘President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.’”

For Britt, the point was not where or when or at whose hands this woman’s victimization happened. The point was in the sickening details, offered up for the American people to recoil from, then transfer their disgust to all immigrants. Likewise, on Fox News and its brethren, “migrant crime” is in heavy rotation; as host Jesse Waters said, “There is a migrant crime spree killing Americans and the president is an accessory to murder.” When confronted with statistics showing that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, or that crime overall is in a steep decline, they tell their viewers not just that facts should yield to feelings — precisely the feelings Fox itself is encouraging — but that even mentioning the facts is so offensive as to be deranged, that anyone who refuses to join in in the glorious condemnation of “migrant crime” must have lost their minds. Laura Ingraham played a clip of Biden touting statistics on falling crime, literally laughed, and said, “These people are fanatics, crime is on everyone’s mind!” 

Trump himself is bursting with pride at what he believes is the success of his propaganda efforts. “I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but I came up with this one,” he told Ingraham in an interview. “There’s ‘crime,’ there’s ‘violent crime,’ there’s ‘migrant crime.’ We have a new category of crime. It’s called migrant crime and it’s going to be worse than any other form of crime.”

The purposes of martyrdom

One might say that conservatives aren’t the only ones elevating the stories of individual people who died to make a political point, and that’s true. Movements often hold up martyrs to generate support for their cause. Sometimes they are leaders and sometimes they are ordinary people. They can demonstrate the seriousness of an issue, illustrate the villainy of those opposed to a certain kind of change, or serve as an inspiring story of sacrifice and courage. 

But the “beautiful” white women conservatives use in their battle against immigration don’t really serve any of those purposes. No one is supposed to emulate them or learn any substantive lessons from their fate. Their purpose is to suffer and die over and over again every time Donald Trump takes the stage or one of his surrogates needs a really gruesome tale to get the crowd in the right mood: the mood to hate, the mood to fear, and the mood to seek revenge. And with another 15 or 20,000 murder victims in America this year, eventually they’ll find another one or two who are “beautiful” enough and whose stories are terrible enough, and we’ll learn their names too.