Four headlines this week called four different governments a “regime”: Ukraine’s, Iran’s, Israel’s, and a city hall in Michigan. Regime is a verdict shaped like a noun. Read the Fox News headline with one word changed: checkpoints rise as government braces for unrest. Every fact survives: the patrols, the checkpoints, the unrest. What disappears is the ruling that this government has no right to govern. The word delivers that ruling before the reader reaches the first fact, and nothing in the headline has to argue for it. Four headlines on the wire used it, for four different governments. TASS aimed it at Ukraine’s, through a Russian diplomat’s quoted words. Fox News aimed it at Iran’s, in its own voice. Press TV put ‘genocidal regime’ in quotes for Israel’s government and credited marchers, though its text never shows who said it. Each outlet pointed the word at a government its own readers already distrust. Quotation marks change who is speaking; they do not change what the word does. The Federalist stretches it furthest. Its regime is the city government of Dearborn, Michigan, which has a mayor and is being sued in a case filed September 17. The lawsuit’s quoted language does not use the word; the opinion writer brought it. The same piece describes the countries most American Muslims come from as “mainly ruled by regimes with sharia-subordinate constitutions”. A word built for national governments now covers a city hall.
