On September 10, 2026, Representative Ayanna Pressley sent a letter to the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation demanding a probe into recent hanging deaths of black Americans—characterizing them as "modern-day lynchings.” She was supported by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others.
Rep. Pressley used the language of a modern-day lynching to insist this is a “national crisis” and to create the framework for a probe—with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez further commenting that we “put a stop to this racial terror.”
The evidence does not show, however, that there are lynchings happening in the U.S., let alone anything resembling the era of Jim Crow. The argument asserts a racial grievance where one does not exist—ignoring a different crisis and the sex differences that are real, not imagined.
By pushing a “modern-day lynching” message, Reps. Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez violate what I call the Triage Principle. When a problem produces deaths or other serious harms, it is important to describe those harms in order of size and mechanism—like the graph above. The graph identifies hanging, strangulation, and suffocation recorded as intentional self-harm—a problem in which 78% of the deaths are male. Although the group most impacted is male, that observation does not discount the 22% of females who take their lives this way. That is the measured hanging problem, not the one Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez present.
By promoting a different problem and then placing it in a historical frame that no longer fits, the congresswomen miss the opportunity to triage the real problem. Most of the cases they cited were ruled suicides.
Families who have lost a loved one to suicide often have a hard time accepting a suicide determination. If anything, medical examiners believe suicide is more underreported than overreported. “Coroners‐only states underreported suicides by 17.4% and performed 20.4% fewer autopsies compared to states with county coroners and a state medical examiner.”
One of the hanging cases mentioned by the representatives was treated as a potential intra-racial homicide, but there is no public evidence that the cases cited by Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez were lynchings or that there is a lynch-mob mentality running through the United States.1
Representatives Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez seem more committed to political theater in this instance than to moral duty. A triage committed to that duty would start with already accessible data on suicide by hanging and then with ordinary homicide. Blacks are 52% of homicide victims and 56% of the known homicide offenders—even though they only represent 14% of the population. Homicide is mostly an intra-racial act, so it’s hard to reconcile their “racial terror” frame with the record. When offender race is known, about 85-90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black offenders.2
The Triage Principle would put male hanging deaths in public view without ignoring those 22% of deaths that are female. It would also separate race from sex instead of collapsing both into one historical slogan. Skip that work, and attention moves from measurable harms to a controlling narrative that forces the DOJ and FBI to spend time and authority on their story instead of the problems the data already name.
https://nypost.com/2026/09/11/us-news/aoc-and-lefty-squad-pal-stir-up-panic-over-modern-day-lynchings-despite-most-of-recent-hangings-being-ruled-suicides/
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, 2019, Expanded Homicide Data Table 6, “Murder: Race, Sex, and Ethnicity of Victim by Race, Sex, and Ethnicity of Offender, 2019” (single victim/single offender), https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, 2016, Expanded Homicide Data Table 3, “Murder: Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Victim by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex of Offender, 2016” (single victim/single offender), https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls.
When reality is uncooperative confirmation bias must suffice.
Thank you, Sean.