Thursday, October 1, 2026
Once, words like “won,” “control,” or even “lawyer” carried obligations. They required something of the speaker: evidence, verification, a tether — however strained — to reality. To say a war was “won” meant something had ended. To claim “control” meant something could be demonstrated. Even an insult had to lean, however loosely, on fact.
Not anymore.
We aren’t simply living through an era of political lying. A lie still needs something real to distort. What we are seeing now is something more corrosive: language engineered so that it no longer answers to reality at all.
Consider the now-familiar claim that a war is “for the most part won,” or that an adversary has been “decimated.” These aren’t conclusions drawn from observable outcomes. They are verbal end-states — arriving fully formed, requiring no confirmation. When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth predicted that the United States and Israel would achieve “complete control of Iranian skies” in under a week, the statement wasn’t a measurable forecast. It was a declaration of inevitability. When reports surfaced shortly thereafter of a U.S. fighter jet being downed, the original claim didn’t collapse. It absorbed the contradiction.
That is the tell.
A meaningful statement carries risk. It can be wrong. If I say a bridge is closed, you can go see for yourself. But now consider the claim: “We are winning.” What would make that false? If we advance, it proves the claim. If we stall, it’s temporary. If we lose ground, it’s tactical. If casualties rise, it shows resolve. Every possible outcome is folded back into confirmation. The claim holds not because events support it, but because events no longer matter.
The pattern repeats elsewhere. Hegseth also claimed that grieving families of fallen soldiers urged him to “finish the job” in Iran — a statement directly contradicted by at least one of those families. But the power of the claim did not depend on its accuracy. It provided an emotional credential, a pre-emptive moral endorsement. Whether it actually occurred is almost beside the point. The words arrive already carrying their intended effect.
Or consider the spectacle of then Attorney General Pam Bondi telling Rep. Jamie Raskin, “You’re not even a lawyer.” This wasn’t merely false — Raskin is a respected attorney, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and a longtime law professor — it is a statement that treats verifiable reality as irrelevant. The assertion does not seek to persuade; it seeks to replace. It invites the audience to inhabit a world in which credentials can be erased by declaration.
We see the same structure in claims by Kash Patel that the FBI “uncovered” a hidden annex proving a plot by Hillary Clinton to fabricate the Russia investigation — despite the absence of any evidence supporting the claim. Or when President Trump insists that “nobody” anticipated Iranian retaliation, though experts and Iranian officials had publicly warned of exactly that. Or when he speaks of “very good” and “productive” conversations with Iran that Iranian officials themselves deny ever occurred.
Individually, these can be dismissed as exaggeration, error, or fabrication. Collectively, they reveal something else: a method.
These statements don’t describe events; they pre-package them. They don’t report reality; they attempt to render it unnecessary.
Once language functions this way, accountability dissolves. If words no longer point to shared, verifiable conditions, then disagreement becomes unresolvable. We are no longer arguing about what is true; we are reacting to what feels aligned, forceful, or familiar. Language stops being a tool for understanding the world and becomes a mechanism for insulating ourselves from it.
And this isn’t solely the fault of those who speak this way. It works because it satisfies a demand. In a landscape of complexity, uncertainty and danger, these statements offer something irresistibly simple: the feeling of clarity without the burden of evidence. They mimic knowledge. They deliver certainty on arrival.
We reward that.
But the cost isn’t abstract. When words detach from reality, reality doesn’t disappear. Missiles still land where they land. Soldiers are still injured or killed. Conflicts widen or contract regardless of whether they are described as progress or control. It simply proceeds without us — uninterpreted, unmanaged and, eventually, unrecognizable.
Once, saying something was true meant it could be tested. Now a claim is often treated as true simply because it was said. And when words no longer answer to reality, reality stops answering to us.
Michael Blitz is professor emeritus of interdisciplinary studies at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
