We should be relieved when it turns out that a murder, gruesome though it may be, wasn’t motivated by rabid racial animus. So why aren’t we?
For weeks, the progressive left has alleged that America is in the grip of a new outbreak of racist lynchings, the total lack of supporting evidence for the charge notwithstanding. The allegation is, however, perfectly calibrated to appeal to the left’s envious efforts to reenact the struggle of the civil rights movement, appropriating some of the movement’s moral authority.
And because the Associated Press never misses a moment to flatter the left’s pretensions, even the scandalously unearned sort, it raced to lend as much credence to this progressive misinformation campaign:
The death of Tasia Fortune, a Black Mississippi woman found hanging from a tree on Aug. 3, has stirred distressing memories of the grim history of lynchings across the U.S. South. pic.twitter.com/sCmPZt6C8K
— The Associated Press (@AP) September 21, 2026
The August 10 article that accompanied the AP’s social media post is woefully out of date, not that the time of its publication excuses its authors’ elisions or efforts to promulgate via implication alone the notion that Jim Crow–era lynchings are back.
“The hanging death of Tasia Fortune, whose body was found outside an abandoned house, has shaken her family and community in Mississippi, where two other people have been found hanging from trees in less than a year,” the AP reported. But, as our own Rich Lowry noted last week, each of those events has a less salacious (but by no means less tragic) explanation. The 51-year-old black man who was eventually arrested in connection with Fortune’s murder, for example, had, according to local police, an “association” with his alleged victim.
The AP’s recirculation of what should have been a defunct narrative — if not in August, certainly by late September — suggests that there is a latent hunger for evidence that this was a racist murder. If you need more evidence still, you can find it in how Jackson, Miss., police chief RaShall Brackney ever so gently handled her constituents.
“We understand the questions and desires for answers given Mississippi’s history,” she said. “We understand this case is being viewed through a broader lens, a global lens, and we do not dismiss those concerns. We are taking them seriously. At the same time, we do have a responsibility to make sure that what we say publicly is supported by our evidence and facts.”
Brackney didn’t need to all but apologize for her own professionalism, but her audience would accept nothing less. Why? Because professionalism is not the order of the day. The crusaders want evidence that justifies their crusade.
It is unequivocally good news that America is no longer riven by racial strife of the sort that once manifested in violence against African Americans. We should be relieved when it turns out that a murder, gruesome though it may be, was not in fact motivated by rabid racial animus. So why aren’t we?