how to catch a gubernatorial candidate, or a domestic terrorist

or become one

If you’re following American politics, you’ve probably seen the reports that the Republican candidate for North Carolina governor, Mark Robinson, was recently exposed by CNN for writing racist remarks on porn sites in the early 2010s.

While the comments themselves are morbidly intriguing in their own right, the most interesting part of this story to me wasn’t what he said. That’s standard American politician stuff at this point. Rather, I found it much more compelling how CNN caught him, and how much it reminded me of the Unabomber.

The basic backstory is that they matched his username “minisoldr” to his other, verified accounts on other platforms, and then confirmed biographical information by cross-checking his comments. Still, that’s an awfully bold claim to make about a major political candidate, so CNN needed more proof.

This is where they resorted to linguistic analysis. It turns out that Mark Robinson not only had a lot of factual similarities to this minisoldr account, but also shared several recognizable idiomatic quirks. Under one post, for example, he writes that he doesn’t “give a frogs fat ass where that vid came from,” which is strikingly akin to confirmed comments he made on Facebook in 2014 and 2017.

The same is true for several other oddly specific expressions, such as “I don’t give two shakes,” “gag a maggot,” and “dunder head.” Between all the evidence, it seems pretty incontrovertible that Mark and minisoldr are the same person.

CNN’s strategy in proving Mark Robinson’s alias draws from the exact same playbook used by forensic linguists to catch criminals through their letters. Once they have a strong suspicion that someone might be a suspect, but not enough to issue a warrant, they often cross-analyze written evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they come from the same author.

The most famous example of this is that of Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber” terrorist responsible for mailing sixteen package bombs between 1978 and 1995. After Kaczynski published a manifesto outlining his anti-industrial beliefs, his brother David noticed strong similarities in the manifesto’s content and rhetorical style and alerted the FBI. Subsequent investigation proved numerous stylistic correlations, like the phrase “you can’t eat your cake and have it too,” an accidental inversion of the typical idiom that shows up in both Kaczynski’s manifesto and an earlier letter of his.

During my tenure as president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society, I actually had an opportunity to host a talk with James Fitzgerald, the FBI agent who led the Unabomber investigation. During the discussion, he outlined so many other idiosyncrasies in Kaczynski’s writing that I’ve never been able to think about my own writing the same way again.

Every single person has a completely unique background, which means that every single person will also have a completely unique style of writing forming an identifiable linguistic fingerprint. Linguists call this an “idiolect”—between our education, sociological and geographical upbringing, and completely natural misunderstandings of everyday phrases, we’re so obvious with our language use that it’s no wonder Mark Robinson was so easily outed as “minisoldr.”

The lesson? If you’re planning on committing crimes, run all your writing through ChatGPT or something. It’s too easy to catch you otherwise.