Matt Walsh said every claimed lynching "turns out to be a completely fake story." We rated it false — truth score 0.05, confidence 0.93.

The cases he's generalizing from are real. The number he needs is 100%. The number the evidence supports is closer to 2%.

On Ep. 1823 of The Matt Walsh Show (17 August 2026), responding to Ibram X. Kendi's essay "The Media Lynched Jason Arday," Walsh made two moves. The first — that calling press scrutiny a lynching is a category error — is a critique shared by writers at spiked and Reason. The second converts that critique into a universal claim about the historical and legal record, and uses it as grounds to reopen documented lynchings as possibly justified. We rated the second move.

The steelman is genuine: Jussie Smollett staged a 2019 attack and was convicted of lying to police (conviction ...