Toby Keith - Advocate of lynching?

[Alex]

I have no idea what is in the video (can't watch it from where I am).

But to me the lyrics presented, with their talk of mounting up horses is (despite the screwed up chronology of it being his grandfather) a call back not to the racial lynching but the mystique of the frontier west, its instant justice, and the posse protecting the homesteads.

Also, the lyrics to me don't feel so much like a literal call for the return of posses and lynching but rather to an idea that punishment has become soft and so removed from the action that it is ineffective. That we need to firm up and return an idea of swiftness and sternness to our system of justice.

That's how I'd read it anyway. However, can a man working in a musical genre most closely associated with white Southerners expect to reference vigilante hanging in any connection at all with modern poverty driven crime without someone eventually making a racial lynching connection? No, I wouldn't say so.

That doesn't mean it was his intent, but it isn't an unreasonable reading of it either.