Debunking Myths: No Tanks Stolen in Memphis

After the President issued a memorandum in September 2025 to send military personnel to address crime issues in Memphis, Tennessee, a corresponding claim began to circulate. It alleged that a recording genuinely captured locals in the Tennessee city driving stolen tanks along its avenues. This all supposedly occurred in light of President Donald Trump’s decision to call on the National Guard in that same month.

The internet was buzzing in September 2025 with whispers of a hushed video. The content supposedly featured Memphis inhabitants commandeering U.S. National Guard tanks in a brazen display of rebellion. This speculation coincided with a significant political move — President Donald Trump’s directive to mobilize the National Guard as an active response to city crime.

A question was raised: Was this video truly revealing a shocking reality in the streets of Memphis? Subsequent investigation, however, found no evidence of such dramatic occurrences being reported by any major news distribution platforms such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, or Yahoo.

One would expect such disruptive events to have gained considerable coverage across media networks if they were genuine. Unfortunately (or perhaps, thankfully), a deeper look into the matter paints a different picture altogether.

We delved into the video through reverse-image searches. Frame by frame, we sought its origins. It rapidly became clear that the exact footage was featured in a to-be-forgotten June 5, 2020 article — a full five years before any National Guard was deployed in Memphis.

Additional investigations unmasked a further revelation. Far from a city in chaos, the tanks had been used in an entirely different context and location. The source? A hip-hop artist in Atlanta, Georgia, who had chosen to make a rather dramatic fashion statement.

On June 5, 2020, a post explained this unusual scenario. It definitively stated that no tanks had been illegally appropriated from the National Guard in Atlanta. Instead, the armored vehicles were merely old British tanks rented for the explicit purpose of filming a music video.

The hip-hop artist had sought to create a narrative, using these relics of war as props. Thus, he’d contributed to the impression of a city under siege. However, the tanks had never been the purview of the National Guard, and they were never deployed in Memphis.

Official communication received from a spokesperson for the National Guard further confirmed the facts. He, too, denied the deployment of tanks within the city’s limits. According to him, the rumors circulating about tanks roaming Memphis’s streets were pure myth.

In the same correspondence, the representative for the National Guard Bureau addressed the second part of the claim as well. He confirmed that no tanks had indeed been stolen from within Memphis, nullifying the dramatic visual the circulating video sought to present.

Additionally, such thievery had not occurred in any other location ‘for that matter’. It provided a clear contradiction to the circulating rumor of purloined tanks rampaging on the city streets.

In conclusion, the rumor and the video that surfaced in September 2025 were inherently flawed. They presented a distorted image of the situation on the ground in Memphis, suggesting a reality far removed from the truth.

The narrative was as unexpected as it was dramatic: stolen tanks, a city in chaos. But it ultimately proved to be a fabrication. Even the pictures failed to hold up under scrutiny.

The investigation’s end-result demonstrates the efficacy of rigorous inquiry when presented with plausible, yet unsupported, claims. And in this case, those claims were not only scandalous but had the potential to further disrupt a city grappling with crime.

Yes, the President had sanctioned the deployment of National Guard troops to Memphis, Tennessee. Yes, there were pressing concerns about crime in the city. But the story about the tank heist was nothing more than an ill-conceived rumor, stemming from a video taken out of context.

So we leave you with this reminder: it’s always essential to verify any claim, especially those that seem too extraordinary to be true. For when investigated, such rumors — as in the striking case of the stolen tanks in Memphis — often prove to be little more than smoke and mirrors.