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.
And 17 years after Duke lacrosse players David Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann were declared innocent, their accuser publicly confessed in 2024 that she’d made the whole thing up. Add Tawana Brawley from 1987, whose case is worth a second look: A grand jury found her rape claim was a hoax, Al Sharpton accused a real prosecutor of being one of the attackers, and a jury found Sharpton liable for defamation, ordering him to pay part of a $345,000 judgment he settled with donations from supporters. That’s the business model, and it’s almost 40 years old now.
As lucrative as that model is for race hucksters, it isn’t supported by the data. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics figures, 69 percent of violent incidents against white victims and 66 percent against black victims “were committed by an offender of the same race or ethnicity.” FBI data on single-victim, single-offender murders found roughly 79 percent of white homicide victims were killed by white offenders, and roughly 89 percent of black homicide victims were killed by black offenders. Crime in this country is mostly a story about proximity, opportunity, and circumstance, not a story about race war.
Since Brown wants to invoke “our history,” let’s be precise about it. The Klan that terrorized Reconstruction was founded by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, and by the late 1860s it functioned, in historian Eric Foner’s words, as a paramilitary “force serving the interests of the [white Southern] Democratic Party,” intimidating black voters and Republican officeholders to restore Democrat control of the South.
A century later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the Senate 73-27 and the House 289-126 only after a filibuster led largely by Southern Democrats, including West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, a former Klan recruiter who went on to serve in the Senate for another 46 years. Republicans backed the bill by a wider margin than Democrats did in both chambers, and the opposition that remained came almost entirely from the Southern Democrat bloc.
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, another Alabama Democrat, spent two years as a card-carrying Klansman before FDR put him on the bench. If you’re going to swing “our history” around as a cudgel against people who are ruling on evidence, you don’t get to leave out the chapters where your own party wrote most of it.
Martin Luther King asked the country to judge people “by the content of their character,” not “the color of their skin,” and by any honest measure, that standard applies just as much to the people making an accusation as to the people accused. Facts don’t care about your talking points, and neither does a jury, a coroner, or an FBI forensic examiner.
