He was found guilty of murdering 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a Texas track meet. But the wake of his conviction, the facts of the case are being overwritten by imagined narratives

This week, a jury in McKinney, Texas convicted 19-year-old Karmelo Anthony of murder, sentencing him to 35 years in prison for the killing of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a track meet in April 2025. 

The case drew almost immediate national media attention. It was a shocking incident: a fight that escalated to murder at a high school track meet, the details of the incident disputed enough that support for both parties — the now-convicted killer and his victim — sprang up quickly. Disinformation and harassment campaigns mounted from both sides; family members of both victim and perpetrator were targeted. Right wing groups quickly latched on to the case, for a far simpler reason: Anthony is Black, and Metcalf is white. 

America has a long history of polarizing criminal cases defined by the racial dynamics at play. A Black teenager killing a white teenager would always have been fodder for the worst-faith actors in American politics, and a fertile ground for racist narratives and imagery. In the age of AI, however, it’s become so much worse. 

During the trial, and especially in the hours immediately following Anthony’s conviction, right-wing accounts on Twitter pumped out AI-generated images and videos dramatizing the tragic events at the center of the case. Almost without exception, they depicted Anthony with grotesque, racist and violent stereotypes. In AI videos, Anthony is seen as a slave, suffering abuse in prison showers, and being presented with prizes of baby oil on lurid re-creations of game shows. There are other videos that are even more explicit, full of racial slurs and graphic depictions of the violence and even rape.

There’s a reason why the most violent parts of the far right are so besotted with these images. They allow their creators to manufacture the exact reality that they have centered the greater conservative project around: one in which Black and brown people are grotesque, violent beasts, detrimental to society. You see it even in the more mundane fantasies: Spencer Pratt’s bizarre campaign ads depicting anti-fascist protesters as thugs festooned in military gear, Karen Bass and other non-white politicians laughing with gaping mouths, indulging themselves at opulent tables of food, a constant association with gluttony and rage and all manner of sin. Some examples are just blatant wishcasting – like a recent Babylon Bee video that depicted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez being “forced to learn economics.” These videos are intoxicating to people who have already been conditioned to believe that this is the world that they live in, who fantasize about forcing their version of the truth onto everyone who disagrees. To people who saw a Black teen stab a white teen and immediately made up their minds, all the slop is a reinforcement of the world as it exists to them. 

Of course, this phenomenon existed long before the advent of AI. For decades, violent crimes involving members of different races have been blown into national referendums on race, from lynchings in the Jim Crow era to the Rodney King riots in 1992. Donald Trump, decades before he was president, once took out a full-page ad in Newsday magazine encouraging the death penalty for the Central Park Five, a group of young Black men who were wrongfully of raping and killing a woman in New York City in 1989. In recent years, the killing of Trayvon Martin inspired waves of racist fantasy about the case: Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, has cashed in on his fame, selling the gun he used to kill Martin online and repeatedly posting images, memes, and other racist content. The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests brought these faultlines – and all the actors willing to exploit them – back to the forefront of the national conversation. The right wing rallied around killers like Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three protesters in Kenosha, making Rittenhouse a minor celebrity on the right wing speaking circuit. From a neutral perspective, these decisions seem insane: glorifying people who end lives in dubious circumstances is never a sign of a healthy society.

And yet, what happens in these cases is simple: People react emotionally to violence. Often, it brings out the worst, and causes people to revert to base instincts and prejudices. In cases like Anthony’s, people choose sides very early, and then quickly suspend reasoning and empathy and critical thinking. A murder is wrong. A teenager killing another teenager — almost unthinkable, if not for the fact that it happens all too often in this country. We have a deep set impulse to want to set this right. But where that leads, often, is a dark, dark place. People create their own fantasies. Anthony becomes a monster. To those making these videos, he is an easy target. The fantasy sells. Anthony’s guilt in this case hardly matters: the memes and AI slop started well before his conviction came down. If the Central Park Five were on trial today, a legion of right wing posters with financial incentives to create the most viral content possible would be flooding social media with digital hallucinations of vengeance. (One creator of several videos depicting Anthony, for instance, has posted openly about paying his bills through money he earns from views on Twitter.)

The world depicted in the darkest products of ubiquitous AI slop is not reality. But for thousands, if not millions of people online, it can easily become one of the primary ways they absorb information about the case. If you log on every day and see reel after reel of footage that confirms your darkest fears and most shameful fantasies, the outside world quickly drops away. In the real world, a boy is dead, another victim of a country in which children are far too often both the victims and perpetrators of violence. His killer is isolated in solitary confinement in prison, facing 35 years of incarceration. No one is excusing Austin Metcalf’s murder. But the demonization of his killer in such stark racial terms sells a vision of America in which all of this will come to pass again — and one in which the color of the attackers’ skin will be the only evidence that matters.