By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
The lynching epidemic that wasn’t
Even paranoiacs have enemies, they say, but sometimes they are just paranoid. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a founding member of the Squad, organized 59 fellow Democrats to co-sign a letter demanding a federal investigation of a spate of supposed lynchings that never happened.
The document pronounced its signatories “extremely alarmed by reports of Black people found hanging from trees in numerous states throughout our country.” “The series of deaths,” the letter continues, “raises significant suspicion of foul play given the role of lynching in our nation’s history.” Pressley and her colleagues call for a federal investigation of every hanging death of a black person in the U.S., and insist that “inaction by the federal government is tantamount to complicity.” The letter deems all of this “a national crisis.”
In a post on X, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said how proud she was to sign the missive. She noted that “this year, there have already been 10 reported hangings of Black people in the U.S.,” and how we must “address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.”
It apparently didn’t occur to AOC or any of the other signers to do Google searches of local news stories about the hangings. If they had, they would have learned that most of them were acts of suicide — awful in their own right, but not evidence that we are once again living in the Deep South circa 1892. These news stories invariably recount how the local police have concluded a person found hanging on a tree died by suicide — as well as all the speculation on social media that something more insidious must have been at play.
In one horrifying case, a young African-American woman was found hanging from a tree outside an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi, and her death was indeed ruled a murder. A CNN report several days ago related the heightened scrutiny around the crime given “Mississippi’s long history of racial violence involving hangings.” The police have now arrested a 51-year-old suspect and charged him with murder, although he doesn’t advance the narrative of the Pressley letter — since he, too, is African American.
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, more than 11,000 people in the United States died by suicide by hanging or a related means in 2024 — or, on average, more than 30 a day. Hundreds of these people were African Americans. In this context, a handful of black suicides by hanging occurring outdoors over the course of half a year or more wouldn’t necessarily be shocking.
The will to believe the worst, though, is very strong among the people who signed the Pressley letter. They are perpetually convinced that the KKK is on the verge of riding again and making the U.S. the equivalent of the Reconstruction-era South.
One line in the Pressley letter says that black people have been found hanging from trees in places as dispersed as “Mississippi, Michigan and New York.” The geographic randomness suggests a widely dispersed social phenomenon; the signatories conclude instead that there are racist murderers seeded throughout the country, all carrying out brutal, symbolically resonant killings.
This is a terrible thing to believe of one’s own country — not just of its people, but of all the law-enforcement authorities who must be suppressing evidence of systematic racial violence. No matter. The Squad and its ilk have a dim view of the United States and — as racial obsessives who consider themselves fearless crusaders for justice — must find great emotional satisfaction in the notion that they are fighting the same battle as, say, the legendary scourge of lynching Ida B. Wells.
Wells, though, didn’t have to make up outrages, whereas the current crowd tends to give credence to every story based on a fake noose or a hate-crime hoax. Pressley and Co. clearly hoped to stir up a social panic, but the weakness and irrationality of their argument serve only to underline their own profound and disturbing racial paranoia.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2026 by King Features Synd., Inc.
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