Have you seen the toxic campaign by the guy in Virginia who Hegseth just appointed to lead the Navy? It’s a lynching coin.
In case that photo is a little too shiny, here’s the raw image; simply a noose, hanging an animal, invoking both Virginia and Navy violent racist history.
Let’s run a thought experiment. A retired Navy Captain named Lynching, running for office in Virginia, hands out a coin reading “I want my senator to be Lynching” with a hanged figure.
Who calls a lynching campaign clever? In Virginia. Does someone really say “but his name is Lynching” or “how funny”? Does someone say “but the figure being hanged is subhuman?”
Let me be clear about the history of the noose on the coin, since we’re talking about lynching here. Thomas Jefferson as Governor of Virginia ordered Charles Lynch to “suppress conspiracy” in 1780. Conspiracy for what? I’ll get to that.
Lynch then tied men to a tree, lashed them and “hung” them by the thumbs. Two years later he called it officially ”
Lynch’s Law“, presumably as an import of the old English guilty-until-proven-innocent “Lydford Law”.
I oft have heard of Lydford law,
How in the morn they hang and draw,
And sit in judgment after.
A few years after the severe lashings and hangings by Lynch, the town of Lynchburg, Virginia was chartered by his brother. They have remained connected ever since and to this day.
What conspiracy brought the tree-based lashings and hangings? Well, it was really about enslaved Black people who had pursued the freedoms that Dunmore’s November 7, 1775 Proclamation promised them. The British Crown’s military command was at the time the only clear available emancipation pathway for American Blacks. Sir Henry Clinton’s Philipsburg Proclamation of June 30, 1779 expanded it further to include any American Black regardless of whether they took up arms. It’s estimated as many as 100,000 Blacks fled slavery-obsessed American rebels in order to seek freedom under the Crown. The colonies were in a fight to preserve slavery such that Jefferson’s order of 1780 meant American Blacks were to face the grave danger of being Lynched. Notably, the Lynch Law targeting American Blacks was years before the city of Lynchburg had been named.
Jefferson directly called out King George III in both the 1776 Virginia Constitution and the draft Declaration of Independence (later struck out) on charges of “prompting our negroes to rise” instead of remain down as slaves. Yes, the same guy who authored the “all men being created equal” also said he waged war with the British Crown because the King had said Virginian Blacks deserved freedom. Jefferson by 1780 therefore wasn’t just establishing Lynch’s Law generically against “loyalists” but setting up a method by which Black people would remain enslaved in America to him, instead of gaining freedom under rule of the British Crown.
Fast forward and many Virginia Blacks were indeed lynched. There were at least 100 documented between 1880 and 1930. Very few have been properly memorialized. The Equal Justice Initiative still maintains the count.
Virginia is without a doubt the state where Cao’s noose imagery would land the hardest. A candidate who campaigns on lynching in Virginia is performing a very specific act. It also happened at a very specific time. Loudoun County, where Cao lives in Purcellville, is known for the Leesburg lynching of Page Wallace in 1880. Del. David Reid, who represents Loudoun, sponsored the 2025-2026 budget line funding new historical markers at Virginia lynching sites such as Wallace. This was the context for Cao to print and circulated a lynching coin in the same county, in the same political season, while his neighbors in the General Assembly were appropriating money to mark the trees.
What’s the matter with Cao? Here is a man whose family fled racial and political violence, and yet he used lynching for his official campaign currency to win the votes of people for whom that image is seen as heritage rather than horror.
He was five years old in 1975 when his family fled Saigon. His father was working with the South Vietnamese government, which is to say already inside the class whose survival depended on alignment with American power. Then they were in West Africa, reportedly on USAID work, which apparently is why Cao sometimes jokes that he is an African-American. Then Virginia. Then Thomas Jefferson High School, onto the Naval Academy, EOD, the Pentagon, Bannon… and MAGA. The lesson absorbed early was empires kill people who fail to make themselves useful. He kept making himself useful.
Within the Navy and its primary shipbuilding base, nooses have been a recurring instrument of racial intimidation in three distinct settings: aboard ship, on shipyard floors, and inside the warships under construction.
Again, the noose symbol is very particular to the person using it in the context they are using it.
Look at the 2017 case on USS Ramage came from a shipyard worker in Pascagoula. Or what about the 2021 case on USS Lake Champlain with a sailor who placed the noose on a Black crewmate’s rack, confessed, and was removed. Would it be any different if he left the “Hung” coin? The 2023 case on USS Laboon, a Norfolk-based Arleigh Burke destroyer at General Dynamics NASSCO Norfolk, involved three separate noose placements targeting one sailor in February alone. Two on the rack, one on the floor next to it. What if they were Hung coins? The Navy spokesman confirmed on the record that the targeted sailor was the only one affected and that he declined transfer off the ship. February 2021 also produced the parallel hate-speech graffiti incident on USS Carl Vinson, contemporaneous with the Lake Champlain case, prompting Admiral Aquilino to fly from Hawaii to San Diego for a fleet stand-down.
But the thing I want to raise most is that Cao was born just before a series of Marine Detachments selecting Black sailors for nightstick beatings. Most famously, the USS Kitty Hawk, October 12, 1972, then the USS Hassayampa, October 16, 1972, and the USS Constellation, November 3-4, 1972. All the white sailors, who we can say today with absolute certainty were the aggressors, were ignored. Twenty-five Black sailors on the Kitty Hawk alone, however, were charged with rioting in their own defense, as Marv Truhe has since documented.
Here’s the proper context that a boy born in 1970s Vietnam, who later joined the Navy, really brings to mind with his lynching symbolism:
The final witness was an airman, Michael Laurie, who said he saw Mallory participate in the attack. Laurie said he recognized Mallory because they’d spent time together a few months earlier in a bar in Hong Kong.
Truhe presented evidence showing Mallory hadn’t been in Hong Kong then, a gotcha moment that seemingly undercut Laurie’s credibility. It didn’t matter. The judge convicted Mallory and gave him a bad conduct discharge.
Stunned, the defense team pondered its next move. The NAACP was providing lawyers and advice, and it agreed to fund a tactic seemingly drawn from a crime novel or Hollywood thriller. They hired a private detective to see if he could befriend Laurie and get him to admit he’d lied in court.
It worked. Laurie bragged, in conversations that were secretly recorded, about hating Black people and committing perjury. He said he’d been part of the riot — “We all went out there and stomped some ass” — and said investigators afterward hadn’t “even asked us if we fought back or anything.”
Mallory’s conviction was reversed and the charges dismissed. Widespread publicity about the tapes put the Navy on the defensive about whether it had selectively prosecuted Black sailors.
Suddenly, the defendants who had been kept in the brig for more than three months were released. Charges against one sailor, then another, got dropped after witnesses backed away from identifying them as assailants.
The lynching coin is not a joke.
It is a white supremacist credential. Cao is using it as an entry token to the Hegseth show. Hegseth, whose own iconography reads as Crusader extremism to every medieval historian asked, has spent fifteen months targeting Black and female officers for removal from the senior ranks of the Navy and the Army.
A man now handing out lynching coins from the top is no more a surprise than if he started wearing white sheets to work.
The Navy that prosecuted twenty-five Black sailors on the Kitty Hawk, repeatedly calling them uneducated and lesser intelligence, now reports up to the man who grew up learning the exact wrong lessons. He has minted a noose in enamel and joked to Steve Bannon that a Vietnamese man wearing a KKK hood for lynchings would need to have it made with eye-slits instead of round holes.
The Department of the Navy did not acquire this lynching-rhetoric man in spite of it, whether a KKK hood or his KKK coin. It acquired him because of it.
Two and a half centuries after Jefferson sent Lynch to violently deny American Blacks their freedom, the same Commonwealth has sent the same message.
