#leo frank

making the hands of the actress look so small in comparison, covering her waist almost entirely

"Small hat," is a cheap antisemitic slur which makes it past filtering algorithms, but it's very popular with both Judenhass hobbyists and professionals.

Pairing it with the name of Leo Frank, a Jewish lynching victim, isn't a question - it's a statement about @agasgasblog...but we'll get to that in a minute.

First, let's note that Leo Frank's name is on a lot of hateful lips recently, and maybe this is a good opportunity to explain why that is.

Who was Leo Frank?

In 1913, Leo Max Frank was the Jewish superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta. He was accused of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old employee. The investigation was chaotic, and the trial was steeped in antisemitic rage. Crowds gathered outside the courtroom screaming "Hang the Jew!"

The judge left the windows open so the jury could hear them.

The state's case depended almost entirely on the testimony of Jim Conley, a janitor who admitted to moving the body and changed his story multiple times. No physical evidence tied Frank to the crime. The evidence that existed contradicted the prosecution's timeline.

Despite that, Frank was convicted. In 1915, after appeals failed, Governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison, citing the lack of conclusive evidence and his duty to uphold justice. In response, a mob of over 25 prominent Georgia citizens, including lawyers, ex-governors, and judges, broke into the prison, abducted Frank, drove him across the state, and lynched him in Marietta.

They photographed his corpse and printed postcards.

In 1986, the state of Georgia issued a posthumous pardon. The pardon acknowledged that the state had failed to protect Frank’s right to due process and life. It did not formally declare him innocent, but historians overwhelmingly agree that Frank was railroaded.

So why are people suddenly talking about Frank again?

Because far-right pundits are using him (again) as a vessel for conspiracy and Judenhass.

In early 2024, Candace Owens started claiming Frank raped and murdered Phagan, calling him a "wealthy pedophile."

In later statements, Owens suggested the murder was tied to Jewish ritual, explicitly echoing blood libel myths. She linked the case to secret "Frankist cults" and claimed the Anti-Defamation League was founded to protect him, omitting all historical context.

Owens, a lazy, cheap seeker of attention, innovated nothing new in this. It's the same antisemitic lie that helped kill Frank in 1915, cleaned up and fed to a new audience.

It appears on Instagram, on Twitter (the only entity I choose to deadname) , and in conspiracy podcasts.

It spreads because it flatters people into thinking they've uncovered something hidden when all they've actually done is repeat the prosecution's closing argument from 1913. That's the same argument shouted by a lynch mob two years later.

This person cited Frank because they absorbed that script. This wasn't, therefore, a question.

Let’s be specific about what that means.

They chose a slur, referenced a lynching victim, and repeated an accusation designed to frame Jews as predators and liars. This was meant to provoke. That pattern matches the people who built the original case against Frank and the ones now trying to rewrite it for modern audiences.

They didn’t cite a historian, just TikTok ragebait and second third fourth-hand judanhass propaganda. They didn’t check trial transcripts or read the governor's commutation letter. They echoed a lie because it gave them the thrill of sounding dangerous while still hiding behind a layer of anonymity and deniability.

They don’t care about Mary Phagan. They're not interested in justice. They're performing loyalty to a worldview that thrives on enemy narratives and in which Jews are secretly-plotting enemies.

The message wasn't clever. It was a photocopy of a photocopy of a rewrite. The worldview isn't rebellious, insightful, or incisive, it's inherited from mobs who proudly mailed postcards of a hanging corpse.

Frank was innocent.

The people who killed him were not.

The people revising his story today are not.

And neither is the adolescent who owns @agasgasblog.

Sources:

this man,

this man,

and this man

Thinking about how this defilement of his memory is just a continuation of the antisemitic violence he faced in the last years of his life and is what killed him.

Thinking about the ease with which goyim, and white people specifically, accuse jews of heinous crimes. As if the main evidence and reasoning needed is that the accused is a Jew. Everything else is secondary.

Thinking about the local newspaper that was able to increase its circulation from 25,000 to 87,000 almost entirely on spewing antisemitism while reporting on the Frank case.

Thinking about how when the first major Northern newspaper reported on the case they considered the antisemitism in Atlanta to be a “natural” consequence of the Jews banding together to support Frank. A classic case of blaming Jews for antisemitism.

Thinking about how the mob, that tore Frank out of his jail cell, dragged him back to Marietta and then finally lynched him, were spurred by the fact his sentence had been commuted from the death penalty to life in prison.

Thinking about how the lynching was not a moment of angry mob violence but rather a carefully crafted plan. That these men sat around planning for months on how to inflitrate the prison, kidnap Frank, and then return to Marietta to hang him before the authorities could do anything about it.

Thinking about how after the lynching men, women, and children came by to grab “souvenirs” from the site including pieces of the clothes Frank was wearing. They sold postcards of photos taken of the lynching. They were all very popular.

Thinking about how the photos that clearly showed the lynchers were not published for fear of being arrested. Thinking about how no one was ever charged with the lynching due to the protection of the local community.

Thinking about how when the leaders of the lynch mob were named in 2000, it included the Governor of Georgia the year Mary Phagan was murdered, a future President of the Georgia Senate, and the Mayor of Marietta at the time.

Thinking about Judge Morris, a previous politician and at the time lawyer in the private sector who ran to the lynching site once he heard. How he calmed the mob and protected Franks body from further defilement.

Thinking about how the New York Times reported on his actions by calling him ‘the only hero of the Frank lynching’ in the same section where they quote him denying antisemitism had any part in the case and saying “The men who lynched Mr. Frank were intelligent men; they did it in an intelligent way...[T]hey brought him here to this town in the light of day, so that they might put him to his death in an appropriate place.” Later he said, “I believe Frank has his just deserts.”

Thinking about how this judge posed for a picture by Franks still hanging body.

Thinking about how eventually Franks body ended up in a local funeral parlor. Another mob threatened the parlor wanting to see the body and after bricks were thrown, they allowed people to file past his body.

Thinking about how these people who filed past Frank’s body probably thought he got what he deserved and were glad to see him dead.

Albert Bettelheim was lynch two days earlier.

The guys who murdered Leo Frank founded the second KKK.

- Georgia Governor John Slaton, June 21, 1915, commuting the death sentence of Leo Frank to life imprisonment.

In 1913, Leo Frank, a prominent Jewish Atlantan, was arrested and accused of murdering fourteen-year-old Mary Phagan, an employee in his pencil factory. Although the evidence against him was very weak, the prosecution insisted on trying Frank, carefully suppressing evidence pointing to his innocence.

Frank's arrest triggered an outbreak of antisemitism in Atlanta. Throughout his trial, the jury heard mobs outside the courtroom's open windows chanting, "Hang the Jew! Hang the Jew!" Subsequent to his conviction, "[a jury member confessed] to a northern reporter that he was not sure of anything except that unless Frank was found guilty the jurors would never get home alive" (Leonard Dinnerstein, "A Dreyfuss Affair in Georgia," page 101).

Despite the clear miscarriage of justice (among other things, the "star" prosecution witness against Frank had confessed committing the murder to his own lawyer, information that the lawyer apparently passed on to the judge), the US supreme Court refused to intervene, so that the decision whether or not to execute Frank was left in Governor Slaton's hands. Although assured by the powerful anti-Frank forces of a Senate seat if he let Frank hang, Slaton carefully investigated the case and became convinced of Frank's innocence. In the prevailing turbulent political climate, he was afraid to pardon Frank, hoping apparently that that would be done a few years later. Therefore, Slaton commuted Frank's death sentence, an act that permanently ended his political career.

Several months later, Frank was dragged from his prison cell by a mob consisting of, among others, two retired superior court justices, a former sheriff, and a clergyman. They lynched Frank; for decades, a picture postcard depicting his hanged body was widely sold throughout the South.

In 1982, sixty-nine years after the trial, eighty-three-year-old Alonzo Mann, who had been an office boy in Frank's factory, admitted that he had seen Jim Conley, ab lack employee at the factory and the chief witness against Frank at the trial, dragging the girl's body into the factory's basement on the day of the murder. Mann's mother had pressured him not to get involved in the politically charged trial. In 1986, the state of Georgia granted Frank a posthumous pardon.