Refuse to Be Silenced

Trump's Strategy To Shut Down the 2024 Campaign

The emerging MAGA conflation that every criticism of Donald Trump is a call for his assassination is a logical, moral, and political fallacy of the most sublimely stupid nature, a false equivalence so profoundly wrong in every dimension that only the people with a political death wish (and, perhaps, the American media) could buy it.

It is an argument made only by Trump’s most mendacious enablers and propagandists, believed only by fools, and embraced only by the damned and the doomed who would unilaterally disarm in the face of the most dangerous fascist leader to have ever cursed the American body politic.

They say calling Trump what he is — a pendant authoritarian, a convicted criminal, an enabler of the worst and most dangerous elements of our body politic — constitutes a death threat, not a description. Sorry, MAGA, but if the jackboot fits, wear it: he is an authoritarian, a statist, a racist, an aspiring fascist, a hateful, mendacious, corrupt traitor, a fool, mentally ill, and frankly evil.

I’ll spare you the irony of people who grunt about “muh First Amendment rights” when they’re confronted with the rotten sickness of their online cruelty and conspiracy theories, now being the leaders of the most potent assault on political speech and expression in the last hundred years.

Americans broadly and properly reject political violence, but it seems lost on too many in the media that Donald Trump and his political allies are proven practitioners of political violence in the event you’ve forgotten his terrorist attack on the United States Capitol.

Trump has routinely called for the use of state and that of his cult’s power and violence against his critics, from his yokelspringa rallies to the Oval Office. He demanded that Federal forces shoot peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square Park and spoke of “Second Amendment people” taking out Hillary Clinton. Trump, J.D. Vance, and their allies are engaged in the rhetorical precursors to violence as I write this with their baseless attacks on legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

Their contrived and histrionic outrage at critics calling him a threat to democracy and the Republic should be a tell, but too many people are missing the point. This is a fight to the political death, and Trump and his enablers want America to go into battle disarmed and mute.

Trump and MAGA want his opponents to engage in unilateral political disarmament; they’re demanding our silence.

And so, a few notes for Donald Trump and his political and media allies:

You claim that talking about Trump, Project 2025, his debate loss, his grotesque, sweaty relationship with 9/11 truther and madwoman Laura Loomer, his dementia, infirmity, and word-salad glossolalia are like shouting “fire” in the proverbial crowded theater.

You demand our silence. I refuse.

You say if we speak about his lavish corruption, his shameful, groveling obedience to Vladimir Putin, his dictator-curious anti-Americanism, his absurd war with Taylor Swift, and a thousand other ways, both grand and petty, that he dirties our lives, spirits, and politics that we’re practically and morally assassins.

You demand our silence. I refuse.

You screech and howl like maddened beasts that only Trump should be “taken literally but not seriously” and that his racist rants, his threats of mass deportation — a police action of a scale not seen in the world since Mao or Stalin — and his blood and soil assaults on immigrants to this nation for “poisoning the blood” should be seen as “firing up the base” and nothing more.

You demand our silence. I refuse.

You insist that no matter how vile, low, cruel, and inflammatory Trump’s attacks are on his fellow Americans, he gets a free pass. You claim quoting Trump’s exact, literal threats, promises, and policies is too inflammatory for our delicate polity.

You demand our silence. I refuse.

You insist Trump’s opponents sit silent, following our better angels while Trump and his amoral enablers run roughshod over the press, the law, the Constitution, and our elections.

You demand our silence. I refuse.

You insist we greet the threats to imprison Trump’s political opposition with cheers and laughter, not disgust. You demand we look away from Trump’s allies calling for the execution of his opponents, even while those allies are boasting of sharing his bed.

You demand our silence. I refuse.

You want us to behave as if Trump’s serial adultery, chronic abuse of women, sexual assault, pussy-grabbing, long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine (“I wish her well!”) Maxwell and his endless humiliations and insults to women can be laughed off as manly locker-room talk and proof of his alpha maledom.

You demand our silence. I refuse.

You want a world where Trump’s contempt and hatred for women are manifested in law, reducing their liberties, rights, and freedoms to second-class citizenship, and where small, angry men like Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Mike Johnson demand legislation to force them to face death if a pregnancy goes wrong.

You demand our silence. I refuse.

You want us to treat his lies as truth, mutely nodding as a flood tide of mendacious twaddle, robust self-fellation, and the total denial of objective fact and reality (“All the polls say I won the debate! They’re killing the babies after they’re born!”) cheapens the meaning of facts.

You demand our silence. I refuse.

You insist we stop the campaign of truth against Trump’s empire of lies and mutely cede this election to a man who is the worst monster to ever hold or seek the most elevated elected office in the land.

You demand our silence. I refuse.

You threaten us, dox us, SWAT us, call us criminals, communists, pedophiles, and murderers, and demand we meekly accept your lies and slanders. You threaten our families and loved ones and demand we accept your terms.

And at that, and once more with feeling, I absolutely refuse.