Americans aren’t arguing any more — we’re speaking different languages

A few days ago, I found myself in a text exchange about two women killed by agents of the state.

One was Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old activist mother shot last week by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. The other was Ashli Babbitt, a 36-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran shot by a Capitol Police lieutenant inside the Speaker’s Lobby on January 6, 2021.

Are words being used to think — or to show whose side someone is on?

I asked what I thought was a simple moral question: Does the state ever have the moral right to kill an unarmed person who poses no immediate lethal threat?

I did not try to provoke. I did not claim the cases were the same. I said plainly that the facts, motives,