When the noise finally fades, what lingers is not the spectacle but the uneasy awareness of how quickly we turned living people into symbols. Tim Mynett stopped being just a consultant with a legal problem, and Ilhan Omar stopped being just a congresswoman with a complicated life. Instead, they became shorthand for whatever story we already believed about race, religion, gender, and power. The details of contracts and complaints were almost incidental; what mattered was how neatly they fit the script we were eager to confirm.
No ruling can touch that script. Courts can weigh evidence, but they cannot cross-examine the assumptions we smuggle into every headline we share. What remains is a quieter reckoning: how much of our outrage was about them, and how much was about protecting our own reflection, our need to be right, and our fear of admitting we might never have been objective at all.
