AOC’s faux lynching panic exposes the left’s poisonous racial delusions
Even paranoiacs have enemies, they say — but sometimes they’re just paranoid.
Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a founding member of The Squad, organized 59 Democrats to co-sign her letter demanding a federal investigation of a spate of supposed lynchings that never happened.
Read more Beware the AI bosses ‘please regulate us’ bait-and-switch
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 United States, insisting 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 US,” 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 almost all of them were acts of suicide — awful in their own right, but hardly 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 killed him- or herself — 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, Miss., 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.
But he doesn’t advance the Pressley letter’s narrative — since he, too, is African-American.
According to CDC figures, more than 11,000 people in the United States killed themselves 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 out of doors over the space of half-a-year or more wouldn’t necessarily be shocking.
The will to believe the worst, though, is very strong among those who signed the Pressley letter.
They are perpetually convinced that the Ku Klux Klan is on the verge of riding again and making the United States 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 racist murderers are 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 America 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 & Co. clearly hoped to stir up a social panic.
But the weakness and irrationality of their argument serves only to underline their own profound and disturbing racial paranoia.
Read more Drew Brees nearly made shock return for Broncos in 2025 AFC Championship
X: @RichLowry
