A fake lynching scandal promoted by ‘Squad’ members is one result.
A fake lynching scandal promoted by ‘Squad’ members is one result.
O ver the past few weeks, we have heard a lot more about “lynching” than a normal person might have expected in 2026.
Left-wing “Squad” member and Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley recently used her website and the House.gov resource to demand “a thorough, transparent, and comprehensive federal investigation into the numerous incidents of Black people found hanging across the country.” Somewhat astonishingly, Pressley claims not only that there have been at least ten probable lynchings of black folks in 2026 but also that a recent think tank analysis “documented more than 70 modern-day lynchings in the United States.”
In response to what she calls a “national crisis,” she wrote to the Department of Justice demanding that every single black death involving a rope — one of the most common methods of suicide — receive an investigation including a second autopsy conducted by an out-of-area physician, federal auditing of any earlier investigation by regional or state police, “review of physical and testimonial evidence,” and a final DOJ report submitted directly “to Congress . . . explaining the agency’s findings.” This is not some quixotic lone crusade of Pressley’s: Her official letter on the topic, sent to the DOJ and the FBI, was signed by 59 of her congressional colleagues — including most black members of the House as well as Chuy García, Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Shri Thanedar, Rashida Tlaib, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The prestige media also apparently cannot get enough of the claim that there is an epidemic of posse hangings. Per U.S. News & World Report, recent re-exposure to “the imagery of a rope and noose” has badly traumatized black Americans: “It invokes the legacy of lynching and vigilante violence against Black people . . . and brings with it deep pain.” Simply seeing a picture of a rope tied in a hangman’s knot can allegedly invoke this pain: Following the actual hanging death of a popular young Mississippi woman named Tasia Fortune, Brad Franklin, of Jackson, Miss., argued that “Black folks down here in 2026 — we are feeling and experiencing some of the same things we felt in 1956 and 1966, and that should not be happening.”
We heard similar sentiments expressed in Cobb County, Ga. Lisa Cupid, a Cobb County Commission chairwoman quoted by U.S. News, said that the recent death of a 21-year-old African-American male named Kyle Bassinga made “many . . . think of the days of slavery and of Jim Crow” — whether or not any foul play would ever be proven. Speaking from Congress, in the context of both of these cases and a few others, the previously mentioned Representative Pressley thundered: “In this moment of anti-Blackness and emboldened white supremacy, we cannot stand idly by — while the strange fruit of Black bodies hangs from the trees!”
Even the Gray Lady of U.S. journalism got involved, although New York Times reporter John McWhorter — a casual friend of this author — was clearly more than a little skeptical of the lynching narrative. McWhorter agreed that ten black or mulatto Americans have been found hanged in the U.S. in the recent past, but he also noted, “Eight of these cases have been officially ruled suicides or are being treated as such. In neither of the other two has a white suspect been named.” However, he also did politely point out that many minority citizens still “harbor suspicions” about each situation, and that “it is impossible to know for sure what happened in every case.”
The $64,000 question, after a few back-and-forth reads like the articles just discussed, is pretty simple: Is the United States actually facing a contemporary epidemic of lynchings? The answer is no, obviously not.
According to the best quantitative database that tracks historical rates of lynching and posse murder — which is maintained by a prominent historically black university — the last American lynching took place in 1968. Despite multiple requests, the list has not been updated since that year. As McWhorter points out, not one single white homicide suspect has been identified in any of the hanging cases that became nationally prominent this year. In the best-known case, that of Tasia Fortune, three suspects have already been identified and arrested. All are black men with extensive criminal histories.
The first black male felon — one, Eric Clark, aged 45 — surrendered himself to police in late September and was duly charged with homicide. Two additional men, Earnest Lloyd and Jarques Ratliff, have also been “arrested and charged with murder in connection with Tasia Fortune’s death,” NBC News reported. Perhaps most notably, on-record police sources have stated that “the scene and hanging were staged” — very probably to distract officers and Internet detectives from Fortune’s actual same-race killers.
Similar results obtained in the case of Nolan Wells, a genuinely tragic situation — which was racialized and made worse by all parties on the internet — involving a young athlete who appears to have died from drowning at a seaside party destination popular with older teenagers. Despite pervasive rumors that he had been attacked or even murdered by members of his mostly Caucasian friend group, the grand jury that was empaneled in the case found “no credible evidence” to support the widespread public claims that any of these people “engaged in any criminal conduct related to the death of Mr. Wells.”
Instead, the report from the unanimous jury stated that Wells’s cause of death was “consistent with drowning,” based on where his body was found and on multiple autopsies. After the panel delivered its decision, District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath publicly criticized the environment that had been allowed to develop around the case. “The family, the Crump [legal defense] team, and anyone close to Nolan,” she said in a video statement, “knew that his disappearance and death were not the result of racial hate or violence.”
To anyone familiar with United States crime data, none of this should be at all surprising. The 2024 Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey (the famous BJS-NCVS) records 5,934,570 Index-level violent crimes and almost 20 million total Index crimes as taking place during one typical year. Of the violent offenses, 117,900 were white-on-black violent assaults (14 percent of all attacks on blacks), while 385,400 were black-on-white attacks (11 percent of all attacks on whites). Interracial violent crime involving these two ethnicities makes up less than 2.6 percent of serious crime; further, more than 76 percent of interracial violent crime is black-initiated. Any double-digit wave of genuine lynchings by organized groups of whites would buck these trends to a degree that is almost statistically impossible.
In addition, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe — especially in the wake of the public frenzies we all witnessed during the past few years — that modern American police departments are populated with knuckle-dragging racists, eager to excuse or facilitate mob violence against helpless minorities. Per my AI scan of past survey data and the records of departmental demographics that are publicly available, policing is one of the most racially integrated professions in the U.S.
At the local level, the population of sworn officers is 66 to 69 percent white/Anglo Caucasian, 12 to 14 percent black, 12 to 18 percent Hispanic (all races), and 2 percent Asian/Native/etc. “Federal law enforcement agencies show a somewhat different distribution”: 61 percent white, 21 percent Hispanic, more than 10 percent black, and 8 percent or so “other.” Interestingly, most of the highest-profile “lynching” investigations so far have been led by black or otherwise non-white chiefs and sheriffs — RaShall Brackney, of Jackson, Miss.; Rico Boyce, of Raleigh, N.C.; Estella Patterson, of Charlotte, N.C.; Lawrence Wiggins of Roanoke Rapids, N.C.; Miami-Dade County’s Rosie Cordero-Stutz; and so on.
Essentially, we are being asked to believe that decorated black and Hispanic peace officers are working with the Ku Klux Klan (or some similar group) to hide nearly a dozen fatal lynchings in 2026. Occam’s ye olde Razor suggests an alternative possibility: Today, the demand for racism greatly exceeds the supply, and this has predictable economic consequences.