It's All True

A murder in Pennsylvania exposes a contradiction at the heart of American political discourse: both sides deploy identical fighting words knowing full well they motivate the most damaged and dangerous among us. Yet the contradiction doesn't break down neatly between left and right. It breaks down between what we know about language and what we choose to do with it anyway.

• The murderer used words that saturate one side's ecosystem. Justin Mohn's language of "traitors" and "regime" mirrors what circulates constantly in MAGA and Q-adjacent spaces. But this isn't really a political crime. It's the act of a severely mentally ill person who found permission in those words.

• Crazy people and non-crazy people use the same words for entirely different reasons. A political activist calling someone a traitor means something. A severely damaged person hearing the same word hears an assignment. Security experts confirm there are far more people like Mohn than the public realizes, and they're all listening.

• Both political parties know this dynamic exists and use fighting words anyway. The Biden administration immediately deployed the murder for advantage. Trump's media ecosystem weaponizes "traitors" and "enemies" for engagement. The contradiction isn't that one side is worse. It's that everyone participating knows the cost.

• We've built institutions that respond to violence only after it happens. Mental health and security systems wait for people to commit acts before intervening. By then, if someone has been fed a steady diet of fighting words combined with their internal damage, the outcome is often predetermined.

• The question becomes whether you accept complicity or change what's in your control. You can't stop political parties from using inflammatory rhetoric. You can't prevent severely damaged people from finding it. But you can decide whether your own public words contribute to the machinery, and whether that matters enough to matter.