Ep. 1844 - The Media's Latest Lynching Hoax Is Unraveling In Real Time

The Matt Walsh Show

Matt Walsh argues that recent media reports of 'lynchings' in the United States are actually documented suicides being misrepresented to incite

Key takeaways

• Walsh asserts that no actual lynchings have occurred in the United States during the 21st century.
• The Associated Press is accused of omitting the race of suspects to imply white supremacist involvement in recent deaths.

Main topics

• Media propaganda and lynching narratives
• DEI and school choice in New York

Notable quotes

There is a concerted effort to manufacture the idea that white people in America today are running around murdering blacks and hanging them from trees.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a heavy critique of modern racial narratives and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) If you want to see a masterclass in shameless, truly evil propaganda, I'm talking about jaw-dropping deception, even more flagrant than the George Floyd narrative that has no purpose other than to cause a race war, then put on your detective hat and look no further than the multiple fake lynching stories that are now springing up out of nowhere, just in time, of course, for the midterms. There is a concerted effort to manufacture the idea that white people in America today are running around murdering blacks and hanging them from trees. According to the media and the left, there is a full-on lynching epidemic happening in our country right now, in the year 2026. Now, the problem with this claim is that, of course, it's entirely and obviously untrue. These are comically absurd lies that have no basis in reality whatsoever, and they fall apart after about three and a half seconds of investigation. Yet they're being repeated by media outlets as well as influencers like Miss Rachel, who reaches millions of children with parents stupid enough to let them watch the kind of weird brain rot slop that Miss Rachel churns out with factory-like efficiency. Watch. Speaker 4 (1:11) Please listen to the black community. Black people don't hang themselves from trees. There's been at least seven black people found hanging from trees. Black people being lynched. Haitian people having to wear ankle monitors, getting TPS taken away. Kids in detention centers where the water makes them sick, where the medical neglect is abused. Speaker 1 (1:36) Well, meanwhile, back in reality, no black person has been lynched in this country at any time this century. There has not been a single case, not one. Speaker 8 (1:47) In fact, if you are 40 years old or younger. There has not been an anti-black lynching in your entire lifetime. Speaker 1 (1:55) If you're 50 years old, there's been maybe one in your lifetime, and it happened when you were in, like, kindergarten. Speaker 1 (2:03) These psychotic narratives, which we'll debunk piece by piece in a second, are part of a much larger derangement that's taken hold among a certain political demographic in this country, and it's getting impossible to ignore. One of the most prominent DEI hires of all time, the New York Times fabulous Nicole Hannah-Jones, who's Black, has just gone public and admitted that she sent her daughter to a failing, mostly Black school because she was under the impression that it would be racist to send her daughter to a privileged... high-functioning good school with, you know, a lot of white people. Jones apparently believed that if she sent her daughter to a subpar black school, everything would be okay because all of the students are really blank slates and all they need is some motivated, committed educators to help them realize their infinite potential. And surprise, surprise, after a few years, her daughter realized that as a result of her mother's ideology, her education has been an enormous waste of time. Reality, once again, crashed into a leftist like a freight train. There's a five million word approximately New York Times article about this whole saga with Jones's daughter. And still, none of these people are learning any lessons from it. Before we get into Nicole Hannah-Jones and what her pathetic and frankly disturbing op-ed tells us about DEI and the left in general, let's investigate. A couple of these purported lynchings. Speaker 8 (3:24) And Speaker 1 (3:24) we'll start with the untimely death of 29-year-old Tazia Fortune, who's a black woman in Mississippi who was found hanging from a tree in the first week of August of this year. Now, here's how the Associated Press, probably the biggest Speaker 8 (3:37) news organization on the planet, covered this woman's death. Watch. Speaker 2 (3:42) In North Carolina, police are investigating the August 21st death of 38-year-old Demetrius Eugene Fleming. In February, police in Cobb County, Georgia found the body of 21-year-old Kyle Basinga in a park. While investigators said there was no indication of foul play, Cobb County Commission Chairwoman Lisa Cupid said Basinga's death caused many to think about the days of slavery and of Jim Crow. The September 2025 death of 21-year-old Black student Trey Reed at Mississippi's Delta State University was ruled a suicide, as was that of 39-year-old Denoris Richardson in September 2024 in Alabama's Colbert County. Richardson's wife has said she does not believe he killed himself. More than 4,400 lynchings occurred in the U.S. between Reconstruction and World War II, according to the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative. Almost 60 members of Congress signed a letter demanding that the Justice Department investigate the hanging deaths of Black individuals and enforce the 2022 Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime. The Justice Department confirmed it received the letter, but has not responded, according to Representative Ayanna Pressley's office. Speaker 8 (4:43) Ah, yes. Speaker 1 (4:45) Historically grounded skepticism. You know, so there is no actual present day reason to be skeptical in these actual cases, but there is historically grounded skepticism. You know, it's kind of like when your wife asks if you could, you know, if you took the trash out and you say that you did. And then she says, are you sure? And you say, what do you mean? Am I sure? Yes, I took the trash out. I think I would know. And she says, well, you know, five Wednesdays ago, you said you would take the trash out, but you never did. And we missed trash pickup. That's a classic woman move that we can now call historically grounded skepticism. But at least in the case of the trash, the history causing the skepticism is only a few weeks old. In the case of the supposed lynchings, the history is many decades old. In fact, none of the black people pretend to be traumatized by the imagined imagery of a lynching. have ever seen a lynching or known anyone who was lynched or known anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone who was Speaker 8 (5:47) lynched or had any first or second hand or third hand experience or encounters with lynching at all. So really, this is more Speaker 1 (5:55) analogous to like if your wife accused you of not taking the trash out, not because you forgot to take it out a few weeks ago, but because her friend's great grandfather forgot to take his trash out in 1947. But this is the way it works now. If you have some historical grievance and you're a member of a quote-unquote marginalized community, otherwise known as being anything but a white male, you're allowed to just completely make things up. You get to throw around whatever deranged theory you want because 150 years ago, your theory might have seemed plausible to someone. And you can make it sound very nefarious that half a dozen black people, meaning six people, were found hanged in the past two years, even though it's actually very plausible that six black people would hang themselves in a country where 50 million black people are living over the course of two years. That's not extraordinary at all. That's very, very plausible. Speaker 1 (6:52) But indeed, even the phrase found hanged implies that they were all hanged by someone else, even though most of these people, according to all available evidence, not to mention basic common sense, hung themselves. Really, that whole clip is just genuinely outrageous. Everybody involved, obviously, in the production of the video that we just saw should be fired, starting with the reporter, who is a Howard University graduate. His name is Sarah Jones-Smith. This is not simply a bad news report. It is malicious. It is deliberately dishonest in every conceivable way. Sarah Jones-Smith, by the way, is the engagement editor at the AP, which means that her job is to get as many social media clicks as possible. And that's what she's doing here. And to do it, she omits every relevant detail in the story and strongly implies that Tazia Fortune was lynched. Here's what she said, quote, Although Fortune's mother doesn't think her daughter's death was racially motivated, for many Black people, the imagery of a rope and noose evokes the legacy of lynching and vigilante violence against Black people in the U.S. So if you're a viewer who doesn't know anything about this case, then you're led to believe that the mother may be misguided. She merely thinks the death wasn't racially motivated. That's how it's presented. What the AP reporter doesn't show you is the picture of the man who was arrested in Speaker 8 (8:17) the woman's murder. Speaker 1 (8:19) But we'll show it to you right now. Here it is. There he is. And in case you're listening to the audio podcast, just to spoil it for you, he's black. He doesn't exactly fit the description of the typical white supremacist. So the AP just pretends this photo doesn't exist. They don't mention anything about the suspect at all, in fact. Or his relationship with the victim, which the police called an association. Now keep in mind... The AP is a wire service, so they provide news reports to thousands of news outlets all over the world precisely because they're supposedly an accurate and reliable source of information. And now they're going on camera and deliberately trying to stoke racial warfare in the most obvious way they possibly could. They've been doing this for years in various contexts, you know, with George Floyd, Michael Brown, and so on. But this has to be one of the worst examples ever recorded. I mean, we're accustomed to all of the relentless propaganda, so we may not appreciate this for just how evil and despicable it is. So I will just emphasize the point again. They're Speaker 8 (9:24) trying to conjure a lynching epidemic out of whole cloth. I mean, it's unthinkable. The only thing more egregious and irresponsible than Speaker 1 (9:35) this would be if they... you know, let's say, invented a totally fake story about churches in Canada committing genocide against Native children and burying them in mass graves, which, let's say, led directly to dozens of churches being burned down in retaliation. That would be even worse. But thank God, you know, things haven't gotten that bad yet. In any case, what the AP report is getting at, of course, is that the facts don't actually matter. It's sufficient for this woman's Speaker 8 (10:02) death to evoke the history of lynching. If something happens that reminds anyone of lynching, then Speaker 1 (10:10) we have to go through the whole racial reckoning again. We have to apologize for our whiteness. We have to open up our wallets and give these people more money. That's the idea. As overt as this propaganda is, and even after a lot of people called it out this morning, the AP doubled down. They announced the arrest of another suspect in the case, and here's how they reported it. Speaker 8 (10:32) Quote, police in Mississippi have arrested a second man in the death of a black woman found hanging from a tree and have issued an arrest warrant for a third suspect. Once again, they don't mention anything about the identity of this second man. So we'll help the AP out. Here he is. It's yet another black man, which they deliberately omit from their reporting for the second time in a week. Speaker 8 (11:00) And by the way, they can't even hide behind the claim that, well, the race didn't matter. Why would we put race there? You put the race of the victim. So the race matters for the victim, but not for the people who commit the crime. If a black woman is killed, then the fact that she was black matters. But if a black man does the killing, the fact that he was black does not matter. That is apparently their editorial Speaker 1 (11:29) position. Speaker 1 (11:32) Even putting aside how desperate this strategy is, it doesn't make any sense historically either. I mean, even leaving aside the fact that none of these cases are actually lynchings and there hasn't been a lynching in my lifetime or probably in your lifetime, the deeper point is that even on a purely historical basis, Speaker 8 (11:49) their Speaker 1 (11:49) lynching narrative still makes no sense. The Tuskegee Institute estimates that more than 1,200 whites were lynched, mostly as a form of frontier justice. Historically, you know, way back in the day when the black lynchings were happening also. That's around 30 % of all recorded lynching victims in this country, which is obviously a significant amount. So this whole attempt to make lynching an exclusively anti-Black phenomenon is totally wrong historically. And by the way, the Tuskegee Institute stopped tracking lynchings in the 1960s because no one was doing it anymore. The other problem with talking about Speaker 8 (12:27) lynching is that, as unpopular as it may be to say, a certain sizable portion of the people who got lynched historically were criminals who deserved it. Yes, many of the victims were targeted Speaker 1 (12:44) for illegitimate reasons. But at the same time, if you committed some heinous crime, particularly in an area of the country where there were no courts, where there was no real system in place for dealing with