Poisoning Their Minds

It keeps happening.

We’ve seen another shooting. This time, two ICE detainees are critically injured, with one dead, in Dallas. And already, the same war machine is turning: press conferences, buzzwords, declarations of war. A shell casing marked “ANTI-ICE” becomes the proof of an ideology. A name. A face. A photo. A post. That’s all it takes. The script is ready.

But dig even slightly beneath the surface and it slips.

As Ken Klippenstein has uncovered, Joshua Jahn, the shooter, wasn’t a radical. He wasn’t even political. His friends describe him as isolated, ironic, and directionless. Edgelord. Contrarian. Someone who wanted to provoke, not persuade. If there was a message in what he did, it was incoherent — half-joke, half-jab, like everything else he said. That doesn’t make the act any less horrifying. It makes the response more revealing.

Because once again, it’s not really about truth.

It’s about usefulness.

ICE, Trump, Patel — they didn’t wait. They didn’t ask why a man who dropped out of college, played thousands of hours of Rust, and alienated everyone around him ended up with a sniper rifle on a rooftop. They didn’t ask what it means to be disaffected in America right now. They didn’t ask if the system that imprisons, deports, and dehumanizes people might create its own quiet rage.

They just named an enemy.

They said “radical left.” They said “domestic terrorism.” They said “Antifa.”

And in the same breath, they called for power — more power — to hunt that enemy down.

Here’s what I think you need to see clearly:

Jahn wasn’t Antifa. He wasn’t a Marxist or an abolitionist or a leftist of any kind. He was a nobody. And that’s exactly why they’ve made him into a symbol. Because it’s easier to create a straw man with a gun than face the emptiness that put it in his hands.

It doesn’t matter what he meant to do. What matters is what they say he meant. The narrative machine doesn’t wait for facts—it turns. And once the right talking points click into place, truth gets buried under headlines and outrage.

Maybe he was sick. Maybe it was personal. Maybe he did it to just cause chaos. But once his actions became useful, his motives stopped mattering. They’ll frame it however they need to. They always do.

If you’re angry, be angry at the violence. If you’re grieving, grieve the dead.

But don’t let them sell you a war.

Because if they can do this with Jahn — if they can turn incoherent irony into ideological terrorism — they can do it with anyone. They will do it with anyone.

And if you try to speak up —

if you quote their own words,

if you don’t mourn the way they demand —

they’ll say you’re the danger.

Your silence will be labeled suspicion.

Your clarity, defiance.

So watch closely.

Ask who’s writing the script.

Ask who profits from fear.

They will say this is normal.

That it’s always been this way.

That war is peace, cruelty is care —

and the enemy is always someone else.

And when the world moves on like nothing happened,

when the gears resume their grinding,

remember:

it’s just another day

when the clock strikes thirteen.

We read the headlines like gospel—never noticing the smoke behind the words.

This post is part of an ongoing series tracing the collapse of empathy, the erosion of truth, and the machinery of silence we’re all asked to serve. For the full arc—and why it matters now more than ever—start here with the full series overview.

Note: I reject violence in all its forms. Nothing I write here is a call to arms, or a celebration of harm. These posts are warnings, not endorsements—an attempt to trace the patterns of power and propaganda so we might break the cycle, not fuel it. My writing is rooted in grief, in clarity, and in a stubborn refusal to give in to nihilism, cruelty, anger, or resentment. My love is for all people in this world—even those who would wish me harm.