Dr Stacey Patton

Black, snarky, award-winning journalist, author, child advocate, college professional and unapologetic wig snatcher.

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How Not to Panic When the Right-Wing Propaganda Machine Comes for You

Five outlets. One smear cycle. Same tired playbook.

Jun 22, 2026

Hey Y’all,

So back on June 10, I published a Substack essay titled “ Dear Jeff Metcalf: Your Son Is Dead Because You Failed to Teach Him That Black Boys Have Boundaries.”

The piece was not an apology for violence or a defense of murder. It was an argument about racial power, parenting, boundaries, and the dangerous ways white boys are too often taught that Black children’s bodies, space, silence, fear, and restraint belong to them. I argued that Black boys are rarely allowed to be children, victims, complicated human beings, or people with boundaries, and that America has a long ritual of putting dead or criminalized Black children and their parents on trial while protecting white innocence. So I did what is routinely done to Black children and parents. I turned the ugly ritual back onto the Metcalfs.

The piece went viral.

And then, not surprisingly, the right-wing outrage machine arrived with its musty racist trolls. My inboxes filled with slurs, threats, calls for my firing, and the usual DEI/race-hustler/grifter boolshit. At least one right-wing activist has now filed a public records request for my notes, slides, audio, videos, lectures, and workshop materials. The goal was to humiliate, frighten, isolate, and make me an example.

I know this rhythm because I’ve been at this for over a decade with the right-wing outrage machine. The cycle goes like this: First comes the bad-faith reading. Then the outrage headlines. Then the harassment. Then the calls to your employer. Then the “concerned” questions about your professionalism. Then the demand for your records, your classroom, your syllabus, your scholarship, your life.

The goal is fear. They want professors to be afraid to teach, journalists afraid to report or do commentary, and writers afraid to name racism. They want Black scholars explaining, softening, apologizing, and performing innocence before people who have already decided we are guilty. But this time, I decided to do something different.

I sat back and studied the machine while it was trying to study me. I saved the emails, headlines, loaded questions, anonymous sources, photo choices, selective quotations, credential attacks, fake neutrality, and all the predictable ways these outlets launder outrage through the language of journalism.

Then I turned it all into pedagogy. So take notes . . .

What Y’all need to know is that the first move in the right-wing media playbook is that they like to frame the story before the reader ever encounters the facts.

The headline on this Campus Reform reporter’s piece does the heavy lifting by turning my argument into an accusation that I “blamed” a slain teenager’s father while the subheads strip away context and substitutes outrage. The photo choice is even more revealing. They like to play with your photos and sometimes they’ll manipulate your hair, nose, and complexion to make you look older, harder, or more like a villain. Look at how my portrait is placed over a cartoonish campus-in-flames image to visually associate me with chaos, danger, and destruction before a single sentence is read.

Then comes the anonymous student-review trick. This is a familiar credibility attack used to suggest that teaching about race is not scholarship but obsession or indoctrination. What looks like reporting is actually narrative engineering with loaded language, inflammatory visuals, unnamed sources, and selective framing arranged to make the audience feel scandal before they understand the argument.

Timing is evidence. The article leaned on “anonymous student reviews” to suggest that my teaching was biased, obsessive, or unprofessional, but those reviews were all posted on June 12, 2026. LOL. So pathetic. This was the SAME DAY the right-wing backlash began.

That is not a small detail because it raises serious credibility questions about whether these were actual student evaluations or opportunistic attacks planted during a political pile-on. At minimum, the reporter had an obligation to verify them before presenting them as evidence of my classroom conduct. Instead, the reviews functioned as a laundering device so the anonymous online claims became “student criticism,” and “student criticism” became proof that a Black professor who teaches about race must be indoctrinating students. This is how outrage manufactures its own evidence and then calls it reporting.

One of the clearest examples was the “we reached out” alibi. In the Campus Reform piece, William Biagini wrote that the university had been contacted for comment and that I “could not be reached.” But I have multiple inboxes that are easy to find online, and when I searched for his name, I found ZERO evidence that he had contacted me before the story ran. What I did find was a media inquiry sent THE DAY AFTER the article was published, complete with loaded questions and a 2 p.m. deadline for a supposed follow-up story that, as far as I can tell, never appeared.

Listen Y’all, that sequence tells its own story. This was not a meaningful request for comment before publication. It looked like retroactive cover for sloppy-ass journalism and a way to manufacture a paper trail after the damage had already been done.

The questions were not designed to understand my argument. They were accusations with question marks at the end. Was I more outraged by Karmelo Anthony’s sentence than Austin Metcalf’s death? Did I think Karmelo should be freed from custody? Had I hidden the essay because of backlash? What you see here is not reporting, but deadline theater where a “journalist” published and framed first, contacted later, and then pretended the process was responsible. FOH!

Awwww. Look at how polite outreach still carries a loaded frame. Sonya Gugliara’s email opens with the language of professional courtesy. “Dear Dr. Patton,” “opportunity to explain,” and “fairness and accuracy” boolshit. But the premise is already doing the work.

By putting Jeff Metcalf’s “failures” in quotation marks, she signals doubt before asking a single question. By asking me to “explain the article’s intention,” she treats a clearly written essay as suspicious, excessive, or in need of translation. This is one of the subtler moves in the machine. The emails always sound neutral, but the frame is not. The reporter performs openness while quietly positioning my argument as something that must be defended, softened, or clarified for a hostile audience. And so politeness becomes part of the machinery. The trap ain’t always loud. Sometimes it arrives as a cordial request for comment.

See! Look at how the follow-up questions make clear that the article’s frame was already written before I answered anything.

Now, this slide shows you the strategic pivot I made. Instead of letting the reporter evaluate me, I evaluated the reporter.

Before answering, I checked her public-facing work, read her clips, studied the kinds of headlines and frames attached to her byline, and decided that the outreach could not be treated as neutral journalistic inquiry. That matters because the right-wing media machine depends on getting targeted people to respond inside a frame that has already been built for them. My reply refused that trap. I named the genre, identified the pattern, and made clear that I would not help stage-manage a story designed to turn my words into outrage content.

I knew it! “Fairness and accuracy” my ass. Look at the finished product. Her email sounded polite. The article did not. The outreach claimed to offer me a chance to explain my argument, but the published piece had already decided what it wanted readers to feel, which is disgust, outrage, and moral certainty. The phrase “sick rant” is not reporting language; it is a verdict.

Sometimes the reporter’s approach changes, but the game stays the same. Elaine Mallon from Fox News did not come through email first. She came through Substack, a platform that feels more personal, casual, and writer-to-writer. But her questions were still loaded with the same tired-ass premises. That my essay shifted blame. That the jury verdict should end the conversation. That race had to be proven against unnamed denials. And that my argument needed to be justified rather than engaged. This is how the machine adapts. It does not always arrive through an official media inquiry with a newsroom logo. Sometimes it shows up in your own publishing space, sounding conversational while carrying the same prewritten narrative. The platform changed. The trap did not.

Instead of answering Elaine Mallon’s loaded questions on her terms, I named the trap directly. I told her point blank that her questions were designed to turn a critique of racial power into a headline about blaming a dead child, attacking a grieving father, excusing violence, and rejecting the legal system. I refused to supply Fox News with clean pull quotes for a bad-faith morality play. Then I shared the exchange publicly so my audience could see the machinery in motion before her piece even went to publication.

And this is why I teach journalism students not to email questions to sources. Because you might encounter somebody like me who knows how to read the frame, screenshot the trap, publish the exchange, and turn your little ambush into a classroom exercise on what not to do. Btw, Elaine graduated from Michigan State University’s School of Journalism. IJS.

The lesson here is that serious reporters do not conduct ambush journalism by loading the premise, emailing the trap, and calling it an interview. By posting my response on Substack and Facebook, I did not just answer the reporter. I decoded the game in public and showed my audience how the propaganda machine tries to manufacture consent, fear, and defensiveness. And her published piece confirmed the trap. Ha!

Now we have Dan McLaughlin’s smug-ass National Review piece which was published on Juneteenth. This made the symbolism almost too perfect. LOL. On a Black freedom holiday, a white conservative writer used his platform to scold a Black professor for interpreting violence through race, history, and power.

His headline, “Your Race Doesn’t Give You a License to Kill,” was pure emotional substitution. I never argued that race excuses murder. I argued that Black children have boundaries and that white entitlement has consequences. But he needed to turn that into something monstrous because outrage requires a simpler villain.

What fascinated me was how emotional the piece was while pretending to be sober, serious, and legalistic. He tried to insult my Ph.D., mocked my use of “Dr.,” framed my classroom as a site of indoctrination, and treated my scholarship as evidence of danger rather than expertise. In that sense, he was just a more polished version of the trolls flooding my inbox with “Dr. DEI,” racial slurs, and misogynistic bile. Same panic, just better vocabulary. And honestly, I loved watching it happen because the panic was so revealing. They were not just reacting to an essay. They were reacting to a Black woman refusing to apologize for knowing what she knows.

And now we get to the final stage of the cycle: lazy aggregation journalism. By the time The Daily Caller got to the story, there was barely any reporting left to do. Jack Cowhick’s piece mostly recycled my essay, repeated courtroom facts, selected the most inflammatory lines, and packaged the whole thing as outrage content.

The headline does the work: it turns a complicated argument about Black children, boundaries, racial entitlement, and parenting into the simple accusation that I “blamed” Austin Metcalf’s father for his son’s murder. Then the giant mugshot of Karmelo Anthony supplies the emotional charge. The image does what the article itself cannot. It makes the story feel criminal, dangerous, and urgent, even though the piece contributes very little new information. At that point, these outlets were not really reporting. They were feeding off one another, using my writing as raw material for clicks, ad dollars, and right-wing outrage. My essay became their content farm.

So what are the takeaways here?

First, these people want our fear and silence. They want us teaching with one eye on the door and the other on our inbox. They want us writing with a tiny censor perched on our shoulder, whispering: Don’t say that. Don’t publish that. Don’t teach that. Don’t name that. Don’t make them mad.

They want us to anticipate the headline before we write the sentence. They want us to imagine the troll swarm before we enter the classroom. They want us to think about the public records request before we build the syllabus. They want us to fear being clipped, quoted, misread, doxxed, mocked, investigated, and professionally punished. They want us to shrink our analysis down to something palatable, polite, and useless. They want us to think that our silence will save us and they want us to confuse “professionalism” with surrender.

But the second takeaway is this: the machine is not nearly as mysterious as it wants to appear. It has patterns, scripts, and habits. It has favorite verbs, favorite villains, stock characters, scare words, and emotional shortcuts. It loves “indoctrination.” It loves “race obsession.” It loves anonymous sources. It loves mugshots. It loves grieving white innocence. It loves Black authority turned into threat. It loves “we reached out for comment” alibis. It loves pretending that loaded questions are journalism. It loves converting our work into outrage content while pretending to be offended by the very words it monetizes.

Once you know the script, you can stop mistaking the performance for power. You can study it. You can name it. You can teach it. You can refuse to become a frightened character inside somebody else’s story.

That is why I made these slides. Not simply to document what happened to me, but to offer a field guide for everybody else who is trying to tell the truth in a time of surveillance, silence, and stakes.

Because this will not be the last time a scholar is targeted. It will not be the last time a teacher is accused of indoctrination. It will not be the last time a journalist is punished for naming racism plainly. It will not be the last time a Black woman’s expertise is recast as danger. And it will not be the last time right-wing outlets try to turn somebody’s words into a weapon against them.

So let this be the lesson: do not hand them your fear. Do not volunteer for the role they wrote for you. Do not confuse their outrage with your wrongdoing. Do not let bad-faith readers become the editors of your conscience. And do not fucking shrink!

Archive everything. Screenshot everything. Read the questions closely. Study the headline. Watch the photo choices. Notice the verbs. Follow the money. Ask who benefits from the panic. Pay attention to what they quote, what they omit, what they distort, and what they need their audience to feel before they ever understand.

Then teach from it. That is the move they never expect. They expect fear. Give them analysis instead. They expect apology. Give them clarity instead. They expect silence. Give them a syllabus instead. They expect you to run from the machine. Stand there and make the machine explain itself. Because the real power is not in avoiding the storm. It is standing right there in the wind with ten toes down. It is in learning how to read the weather, teaching others how to see it coming, and refusing to let manufactured outrage decide the limits of your speech.