They Want Us Afraid

Fear is their weapon. Defiance is ours.

I was in sixth or seventh grade when I first learned about the Holocaust. I remember the silence of the classroom, the black-and-white photographs of hollow faces, bodies piled like shadows. And I remember the question that caught in my throat, the one I kept asking my teachers over and over: what did the “good” Germans do while this was happening? Did they simply look away? Did they whisper to themselves that silence was safer? My teachers tried to answer, but they couldn’t. And now, all these years later, I am beginning to understand, because I am living it. We are all living it.

They want us afraid. That has always been the tyrant’s weapon of choice. Mussolini’s Blackshirts swaggered through the streets, their boots pounding like war drums, so the echo of violence would do half the work before a fist ever landed. Hitler’s Gestapo tore neighbors from their beds in the dead of night, and the silence of absence spread through whole city blocks like a disease. Saddam Hussein hung men from lampposts and left them swaying above the streets of Baghdad so everyone would learn that fear was the law. Fear was not an accident. Fear was not collateral. Fear was never the byproduct of tyranny. It was the point.

And now it is here. In America. In 2025.

Masked men with no names, no badges, no insignia. They materialize like shadows ripped out of nightmares. They slam mothers into concrete, wrench children from fathers’ arms, drag brothers across courthouse steps as if hauling garbage instead of human beings. They punch. They kick. They spray chemical fire into faces until eyes burn shut. And then they vanish their victims into unmarked vans, into gulags whose locations no one will confirm. People erased like pencil lines.

And the cruelty is not hidden. It is flaunted. They stage it in daylight, for livestreams and cameras, as if daring us to look away. They want us to see it. Because if this is what they perform for an audience, what horrors are they perfecting in the shadows? What screams echo in basements where no lens intrudes?

I am afraid. Afraid for my children, for my neighbors, for every family who believes showing up to court with the right papers will keep them safe. Afraid for fathers who raise documents like shields only to watch them shredded under boots. Afraid for mothers screaming until their throats bleed. Afraid for children, backpacks still on, frozen as parents are shoved into vans. They are not trash. They are not collateral. They are people, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, whose pain is real and whose lives matter.

The blows land, the screams echo, the cameras roll, and then the story flips. The mother becomes the menace. The bruised man becomes the criminal. The child becomes the provocation. You know what you saw, you know what you feel in your bones, and still you are told your bones are liars. This is more than gaslighting. It is the suffocation of truth itself.

And perhaps the most disconcerting part of all of this is not only the cruelty itself but how many Americans look at it and seem unbothered, how many shrug as if this is normal, acceptable, inevitable. That silence is terrifying. That complacency is complicity.

That is why defiance matters more than anything right now.

This is not politics. This is cruelty dressed as law. Fear written into governance. Free speech throttled one investigation and indictment at a time. Public servants punished not for corruption but for honesty. History gutted in real time. Library shelves stripped bare until silence itself becomes curriculum. Museums are being scrubbed of the truth. Massacres are being revised and rewritten until the victims disappear twice, once in the act, and once in the telling.

We have seen this before. The Nazis did not seize control in one sweeping blow. They built their stranglehold brick by brick, law by law, until the walls closed in. The Malicious Practices Act of 1933 made it a crime to whisper a criticism of the government. The Enabling Act handed Hitler the power to brand anyone an “enemy of the state” and crush them at will. By 1934, the Treachery Act forced citizens to betray each other, neighbors reporting neighbors, colleagues turning in colleagues, families ripped apart in the name of loyalty. Speech criminalized. Silence mandated. Complicity codified. History may not repeat itself, but it certainly does rhyme, and right now the echoes are deafening.

We can no longer comfort ourselves by saying it cannot happen here.

It already is.

Stephen Miller said it out loud: “We are witnessing domestic terrorist sedition… All necessary resources will be utilized.” Trump’s executive order designating Antifa as a terrorist group was never about Antifa. It was about creating a word that can mean anyone. Today it is a whistleblower. Tomorrow it is a journalist. Next week it is a late-night host. Next year it is a mother shouting at a school board. That is how fascism works: the definition stretches until everyone fits inside the snare.

“Domestic terrorist sedition” is whatever the hell they decide it is. One day it is a brick. The next day it is a tweet. Then it is a book. Then it is you.

For the Nazis it was never really about ideology. It was about obedience. Trump saying Antifa is no different. He means Miles Taylor. He means James Comey. He means Jimmy Kimmel. He means you. He means me. And that is why defiance is not optional. It is survival. Diane Nash once said freedom begins when people realize they are their own leaders, not subjects waiting for permission to breathe. That is the essence of defiance.

Defiance is not a whisper. It is not paperwork. Defiance is alive. Defiance is standing when your knees quake. Defiance is breathing when they demand you suffocate. Defiance is speaking when silence would be safer. Jefferson cut to the bone: tyranny is what becomes legal for the government but illegal for the citizen. Look around. That line is being crossed already.

And yet we are not the first to stand at this edge, staring down power that insists it cannot be challenged. Others before us have walked this same line, felt the same chill of history closing in, and still they chose to defy. They left us road signs in blood and ink, in speeches and in silence, so we would know how to fight when our turn came. Whitman warned us that tyranny walks in the second we surrender our spirit of defiance. Douglass told us the truth we still do not want to hear: power never gives up anything without a demand. Nabokov reminded us that even in the world’s muteness, the act of speaking at all is defiance. And Niemöller gave us the most haunting warning of all: if we wait, if we stay silent, the knock will come, first for them, then for us.

The violence does not stop in the streets. It climbs the marble steps of justice itself. It dresses in indictments and gag orders. It points its finger at James Comey, whose only sin was refusing to kneel, and calls that justice. Trump smirks, knowing there will be others. That is not law. That is retribution, carved into the Constitution with a rusty blade.

Ask Miles Taylor what that costs. Trump unleashed the weight of the federal government against him, against his family, for daring to expose the incompetence, corruption, and madness rotting the presidency from within. His career was torched, his safety stripped away, his reputation dragged through the mud until there was almost nothing left to stand on. He has been stalked, harassed, written off, and nearly broken. And yet, he refuses to be silent. When we spoke the other day, he told me that in his darkest hours the word that bolsters him, that steadies him, is defiance. It is the quiet strength he leans on, the foundation that allows him to keep standing when everything else has been stripped away.

I have lived it too. While recording an episode of the Over It! podcast with our guest, Dr. Vin Gupta, some deranged coward hiding behind a keyboard decided to post a photo of my home, a photo of my children, alongside threats so vile they made my stomach turn. That is not politics. That is not debate. That is perversion, rot, and cruelty weaponized against a mother for daring to speak. The message could not have been clearer: shut up, or else. Be silent, or your family pays. It was meant to disgust me, to terrify me, to humiliate me into disappearing. And in that moment I was furious, I was sickened, but I was not silent. I did not hand them what they wanted most. I kept speaking. That choice, as small as it seemed, was defiance.

I have lived too much life to pretend I do not see what is staring me in the face. I have walked through too many fires to surrender my voice now. I love my children with every nerve in my body and I love this country in a way that is fierce and protective and unshakable. They can smear me, threaten me, drag my name through the dirt. They can send masked men to pound on doors and whisper that I am next. But I will not be silent. I will not be small. I will not disappear. Because my silence would be their victory, and I will not gift it to them.

I am not foolish enough to think they will stop at threats. I am sure of it. They will try to come for people like me. They will try to come for all of us. But we still have to make a choice: to bow or to defy. To shrink or to stand. To hand them our silence or to hand them our refusal.

Bullies have only one faith: fear. Feed it and it grows. Show it and it devours. Starve it and it dies. That is true on playgrounds, in parliaments, and in palaces. The strongman’s power is never his fists alone. It is the trembling he draws from others. If you run, he chases. If you cower, he crushes. The only thing that stops him is the refusal to kneel.

Every act of truth is an act of defiance. Every protest, every phone call, every vote, every book defended, every story told, every refusal to swallow their lies, none of these are small. Each one is a brick in the barricade. Each one is oxygen in the fire.

Defiance is not fragile. Defiance is fire. Defiance is breath. Defiance is ours.

So when history asks what we did in this terrifying, soul-rattling moment when democracy was gutted in front of us, let the answer be undeniable.

We did not bow.

We did not quit.

We did not surrender.

We defied.

And when those masked men come again, faceless and nameless, expecting terror to paralyze us, let them find something they cannot drag into a van. Let them face not scattered bodies but a wall of defiance, shoulder to shoulder, unbroken, unafraid. Let them see that the fear they meant to wield backfires upon them, as the people refuse to disappear, refuse to look away, refuse to kneel.

And when our children or grandchildren ask us what we did in this moment, we must be able to answer without hesitation, without shame, without regret. We cannot give them silence. We cannot shrug the way my teachers once did when I asked what the “good” Germans did. We must be able to tell them that we loved them, and we loved this country, too much to stay quiet. That we did not look away. That we did not bow. That we raised our voices, we stood our ground, we fought back.

That when it mattered most, we defied.

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

Please stay safe, stay strong and stay DEFIANT!!

💙 Jo

Also, in case you missed it, we just launched a media network I am co-founder of, called The Siren! We have a whole slate of contributors, new shows, new faces, new voices and new ways to stay engaged and get involved! With so much more to come!

I hope you’ll check it out!!