AOC Peddles Grotesque Lies About “Modern-Day Lynchings”

Democrats are proving once again that there is seemingly no depth to which they will not sink to intentionally stoke racial tension and manufacture a crisis for political gain – even if it means pretending tragic suicides are hate crimes.

On September 10, far-left Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and 58 of her Democrat colleagues wrote a letter to the Department of Justice and the FBI demanding “a thorough, transparent, and comprehensive federal investigation into the numerous incidents of Black people found hanging across the country.” According to a press release from Pressley’s office, there have been “more than 70 modern-day lynchings in the United States between 2000 and 2025,” and “at least 10 reported hangings of Black people” in 2026.

In a follow-up post on X that has garnered more than six million views, Pressley called the supposed “lynchings” a “national crisis.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez then amplified Pressley’s comment in her own post that has more than eight million views.

“This year, there have already been 10 reported hangings of Black people in the U.S.,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “I’m proud to have signed onto @RepPressley’s letter to address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.”

The only problem? There is precisely zero evidence that any of the “lynchings” the letter cites are hate crimes.

According to a community note added by X users on Ocasio-Cortez’s post, only one of the 10 cases of “black people found hanging” from this year is being investigated as a homicide – and the person the police arrested in the case is reportedly a black male.

Even after being called out for blatantly lying and trying to gin up racial strife, neither Pressley nor Ocasio-Cortez have apologized. Apparently, they still want the DOJ to investigate these hangings that coroners have almost exclusively ruled to be suicides as anti-black hate crimes despite no evidence supporting such a conclusion.

While it would be easy to dismiss this incident as just another example of two progressive congresswomen seeking the media spotlight, it nonetheless speaks to a deeper moral rot at the heart of the modern left.

For starters, this type of misinformation is exactly the sort of thing one might expect from a U.S. adversary like communist China. If someone intentionally wanted to destabilize the United States by fomenting social unrest, using social media to spread lies about “modern-day lynchings” that the “racist” police are supposedly ignoring would seem an effective strategy.

Racism undoubtedly still exists in America. There are legitimately racist people out there, and racially motivated hate crimes do happen. But the reality is that the United States is simply far less racist than Democrats would have the public believe.

In the last 20 years, the United States has elected a black president not once, but twice. This country is also home to the most black billionaires, has dozens of laws on the books protecting racial minorities, and has amended the Constitution multiple times to explicitly establish and protect the civil rights of former slaves and non-white individuals. By most objective metrics, the United States is the least racist country in the world.

Unfortunately, the liberal propaganda machine has excelled at using the press and the education system to convince many Americans that the country is deeply racist. A survey conducted in 2019 – even before the 2020 BLM riots – found that 33 percent of Americans and 44 percent of liberals thought that 1,000 or more unarmed black men were shot by police in 2019. The actual figure? Twenty-nine.

But the pervasive belief that the United States is “systemically racist” is simply too valuable a political project for Democrats to abandon. The left’s demand for racism far outweighs the supply, so they are forced to ascribe racist motives to crimes and even harmless acts that have nothing to do with race – or, in some instances, even invent hate crimes altogether.

Such was the case with the infamous Jussie Smollett hoax, where a B-list celebrity paid two black men to stage a hate crime against him. The media dutifully gave the scam wall-to-wall coverage until the whole thing came unraveled.

There was also the ham-fisted tiki-torch stunt in 2021, when the anti-Trump Lincoln Project sent fake white supremacists to stand outside of then-candidate Glenn Youngkin’s campaign bus during the final days of the Virginia gubernatorial race.

At the height of the BLM insanity in 2020, the mainstream press also ran with a story that a “noose” was supposedly found in the garage of black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace. The FBI even opened an investigation, only to find that the supposed hate symbol was in fact a garage door pull.

In fact, according to Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley (who is black), fewer than one in three allegations of hate crimes are found to be genuine.

The United States once allowed slavery and open discrimination under the law. Now, America is a place where anyone from anywhere can succeed within the confines of a law that treats everyone equally.

This should be good news to anyone who truly cares about the country. Apparently, however, that is a list which does not include most elected Democrats and their media apparatchiks.