Watch your words, Senator

Words have meaning, especially coming from influential people.

With news that a Cambridge man offered to pay $500 to anyone who would kill an ICE agent, we must ask if he was influenced by the rhetoric coming from elected officials and girded by slanted media coverage.

Yesterday, 33-year-old Brandon Ziobrowski was charged with using interstate and foreign commerce to transmit a threat to injure another person.

It was a tweet on July 2 that landed him in handcuffs. “I am broke but will scrounge and literally give $500 to anyone who kills an ICE agent,” he posted.

In late June, fellow Cantabrigian Elizabeth Warren railed against ICE on City Hall Plaza, calling for it to be replaced with “something that reflects our morality.”

She declared to the boisterous crowd, “This is about children held in cages. This is about babies scattered all across this country.”

“President Trump seems to think that the only way to have immigration rules is to rip parents from their families, is to treat rape victims and refugees like terrorists, and to put children in cages.

“This moment is a moral crisis for our country,” she continued.

There is a moral crisis in our country, and recklessly vilifying those who protect us on the border as brutes and the entire criminal justice system as “racist” is creating it. Casting law enforcement as the bad guy is upside-down thinking and we are reaping the dark rewards.

Sen. Warren has a moral imperative to clean this mess up.