By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Even paranoiacs have enemies, they say, but sometimes
they are just paranoid.
Representative Ayanna Pressley, a founding member of the
“Squad,” organized 59 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, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
said how proud she was to sign the missive. She noted that “this year, there
have already been ten 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 that a person found hanging on a tree killed himself 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, although he doesn’t advance the narrative
of the Pressley letter — 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 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 serves only to underline
their own profound and disturbing racial paranoia.
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