American media have certain templates for certain types of news stories. Any time a black person is found dead by hanging, the default assumption is that it was murder, it was racially motivated, the killer or killers were white men, and no one wants to talk about it… as they talk incessantly about it.

When a story like this breaks, leftists automatically jump into a time machine and, for all intents and purposes, transport themselves to a time and place where fellow Democrats wore white hoods and “lynched” black people for no other reason than that they were black. The only glitch in the leftists’ time machine is that for some reason it mistakenly changes the political affiliation of the Democrat killers to Republican.

The fact is that stories like this almost never break. Or should I say they never break? And so, the left has to make them up.

Remember when black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace had a crew member report that he found a garage-door pull rope tied in the shape of a noose? This happened on June 21, 2020, at Talladega Superspeedway. The pull cord made national news and became the center of an FBI investigation, if you can believe it. Two days later, the FBI determined that Wallace was not the target of a hate crime and that the same knotted pull rope had been in that particular garage space since the October 2019 Talladega race weekend, long before Wallace’s team was ever assigned to that space. False alarm.

This is how the news media ran with that story on the basis of absolutely no facts.

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The reason stories like this gain so much traction so quickly is that the demand for this sort of racism from the left vastly outstrips supply.

Not even two weeks ago, my colleague Benjamin Bartree reported on another viral story that once again proved to be based on unfounded assumptions that required leftists to ignore the actual facts involved.

“Squad member Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass., she/her pronouns in bio) came out September 10 with a banger of an X post, weirdly lamenting the ‘strange fruit’ hanging from trees — presumably referencing black lynching victims based on the context — across the country and ‘demanding a federal investigation NOW so we can stop modern-day lynchings,’” Benjamin wrote.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) jumped on the bandwagon with her own take on X.

X users, through Community Notes, quickly corrected AOC and Pressley, simply by reading up on the actual deaths, something the esteemed congressional reps failed to do. What they found was that, “While the letter cites 10 hanging cases in 2026, local law enforcement and medical examiners have ruled the majority as suicides, including the cases of Juliana Nzita and Kyle Bassinga. Only one case is currently being investigated as a homicide.” 

Even then, it was not clear that the one homicide under investigation was racially motivated or that it would ultimately be deemed a homicide. Once again, the demand for this sort of racism significantly exceeds the supply.

So, what do you think will happen with this story out of Jackson, Miss.?

That's where law enforcement authorities say that a black woman, eventually identified as Tasia Fortune (29), was found hanging from a tree. The horrific scene was discovered behind an abandoned home on August 3. How do you think the news media and the left reacted at first?

Doesn’t this crime check all the boxes? Black woman, Mississippi, hanging.from.a.tree.

If the early years of the Southern Poverty Law Center represent your glory days, this story is a dream come true. Imagine what you can do with this. I mean the story writes itself. It had to be white men motivated by race, right? Maybe they even wore those white hoods. If you’re an aspiring leftist reporter, you get to use words and terms like “lynching,” “Jim Crow,” and “Deep South.” And you get to entertain where in your home office you’re going to hang that Pulitzer.

Except none of that was true. The actual story — you know, the truth — is that Jackson police say that so far, they’ve arrested two of three suspects in the case and both of them are black men. On Sept. 22, they arrested Earnest Lloyd Jr. (25), after earlier apprehending Jarques Ratliff (51) on allegations that they committed the crime.

According to the Associated Press (AP), police have said the accused men had some sort of “association” with Fortune, so this likely wasn’t a random crime, and the men face murder charges. AP reported that Fortune was a mother of four and a Kentucky native who had lived in Jackson for roughly 10 years prior to her death.

Christy Spivey is Fortune’s mother. She has done numerous media interviews in which she has said her daughter had hit on hard times and was often homeless. At the time of Fortune’s death, her mother had no idea where she was even living.

Spivey said her daughter had been trying to turn things around and perhaps start a cleaning business before her time on earth was cut short. None of the facts in this case detract from the real tragedy involved.

And so, regardless of how this case proceeds from this point forward, the one thing we pretty well know is that, once again, the demand for this sort of racism greatly outpaces the supply. What do you think will happen to this story now? Do you think the national media will give it the same attention they were planning to give it? Or do you think they’ll drop it before that third arrest is made?

That’s what I thought, too. And we all know the reason. If leftists can’t racially demonize their intended targets, it’s not news.