This isn’t the first time Democrats and the media have manufactured a lynching panic where none existed.
Rep. Shontel Brown looked into her phone camera earlier this month and told the country that black Americans are being lynched at an alarming rate. “In the last year, there’s been an alarming increase in Black Americans found dead hanging from trees,” the Ohio Democrat said. “We know what that has meant throughout our history.”
She’d also joined Rep. Ayanna Pressley and 58 House colleagues in a letter demanding the Department of Justice and FBI investigate what Pressley called a “national crisis” of modern-day lynching.
Here’s the problem: There’s no evidence behind the claim. A 21-year-old found in a Georgia park: effectively ruled a suicide, with no evidence anyone else was present. A Delta State University student in Mississippi: suicide. A 16-year-old in Charlotte: suicide, according to police.
One case in Kentucky remains an open homicide investigation, and it deserves one. But one confirmed homicide under investigation is not a national crisis of racial terror. Local law enforcement has said the homicide is drug-related and the hanging was “staged;” moreover, the suspects in custody are both black. As actor Dean Cain, who played Superman on 1990s television, bluntly pointed out: Brown is “inventing racism.”
This isn’t the first time Democrats and the media have manufactured a lynching panic where none existed. In 2021 a jury convicted Jussie Smollett of five counts of disorderly conduct for paying two men $3,500 to fake a hate crime in Chicago, complete with a rope around his neck — a verdict the Illinois Supreme Court later threw out in 2024 on a narrow double jeopardy question, not because it found the underlying facts in doubt.
NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage stall turned out to have a pull rope tied like a noose since before his team was ever assigned that garage, a fact the FBI confirmed after reviewing video nobody bothered to check before the story went national. In 2023, three people staged a cross burning in front of a black mayoral candidate’s campaign sign in Colorado Springs and emailed the footage to news outlets, and got federal convictions for it. A University of La Verne student allegedly manufactured a slew of racist threats against herself and her own student group, canceling classes, before police traced the messages back to her.