Last week, construction of a new football stadium in Nashville was halted due to an investigation into a noose having been found tied to a pipe in a construction area.
No one knows for sure who put the noose there, and, to my knowledge, no images of the noose have been reported. But what apparently is known (to the media, at least) beyond a shadow of doubt is that the noose must have been put there by a white supremacist as some oddly specific nod to the lynchings of black people in America’s distant past.
The notion that black Americans in 2025 are somehow living in fear of white mobs carrying torches and nooses while looking for the nearest tree is laughably preposterous. The last known racially motivated hanging in this country happened to Michael McDonald in 1981. Before that, the most recent example occurred in 1959 when Mack Charles Parker was shot and hanged.
Image created using AI.
For black Americans to fear a white lynch mob with a noose is, statistically speaking, more irrational than fearing vending machines. Consider that between 1978 and 1995, vending machines caused 37 deaths.
In other words, between the years of 1978 and 1995, Americans of all skin colors were 37 times more likely to die under the weight of a vending machine than a black American was likely to die at the end of a white racist’s noose.
Of course, while the thought of a vending machine crushing you to death is now a mostly archaic concern that few people have ever even considered, we are expected to believe that black Americans are living in fear of white Americans who are so brazenly privileged and powerful that they routinely and clandestinely brandish nooses around the workplace as a threat?
We all know how stupid that is, and the media, police, and politicians pretending to take the recent Nashville incident seriously know that you know how stupid it is. But they’re gaslighting you anyway, because they have absolutely no respect for you or your intelligence.
This continued faux outrage around noose hoaxes has been among the most annoying of the many faux outrages in recent years, to say the least. Who could forget the timely discovery of a garage door pull that looked conspicuously noose-like in a NASCAR garage in June 2020? Bubba Wallace famously played a role as the victim of a hate crime. He led a masked parade around the track in what should now be remembered as among the most farcical charades in the history of sports.
It was all fake news.
But noose hoaxes weren’t anything new, even then. The same media told us that Jussie Smollett was unfortunate enough to find himself in a MAGA enclave of urban Chicago, where his masked attackers put what was meant to look like a thin rope around his neck in the symbolic shape of a noose.
Yeah, we know that was all fake, too.
And so it goes, with all the fake-noose outrage. In 2018, nooses were found in trees around the Mississippi State Capitol Building. Turns out that Democrats planted them.
In 2017, a student at Michigan State reported someone threateningly placing a noose outside her dorm room. But it was a “packaged leather shoelace” that had been dropped by accident.
None of these noose hoaxes are even convincing stories, and that’s why it’s so insulting to those of us who are paying even modest attention to them.
For example, imagine that what the media want you to believe is true. Imagine that there is some large number of white Americans out there who really have it out for black people, and that these white people are so incredibly privileged and powerful that they bankroll the police, college campuses, political offices, and corporations while, somehow, having no control over the media narrative which is constantly highlighting the evilness in how they’re doing all of these things.
These white supremacists are so dastardly, and so cunning, that they…managed to place small mockups of a noose in some random locations for random coworkers to see in an effort to invoke a terrorist practice which hasn’t been in common use for over 75 years.
It is all just the silliest thing imaginable, and you’d have to either be stupid or crazy with fear to believe it. And Democrat politicians have been only too happy to keep that stubbornly pervasive, irrational fear alive among the American public. Congress voted with unanimous consent for the “Justice for the Victims of Lynching Act” of 2018.
Had lynchings been a problem for the past six decades or so when Congress addressed this law? The obvious answer is no. Extrajudicial killing, by hanging or otherwise, is already illegal, and in no way should such a question be pressing to the federal Congress. It was a show vote that served to stir racial animus, and nothing more.
As for the recent case in Nashville, there is a “person of interest” who has been identified as having possibly made a noose and having possibly placed it somewhere near a construction worksite where ropes have some utility, and knots like nooses are sometimes employed for things other than hanging black people.
This “person of interest” has denied responsibility and will likely not be prosecuted for a hate crime or some such, according to police. But social justice warriors can rest assured that no due process is necessary for the accusation that he may have tied and carefully placed a noose in an obscure reference to executions performed by racial terrorists more than four decades ago. The accused has lost his job, and “will not be returning to any type of construction employment at the stadium.”
That’s a high price to pay for the kind of accusation that is, as history shows, usually just the fakest of fake news.