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The Rising Cost of Dissent in America | Miles Taylor | TED

19:26Added Aug 30, 2026

Former senior US national security official Miles Taylor shares a personal account that raises a broader civic concern: the growing cost of dissent in Americ...

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  1. 00:04Not long ago, I was giving my dog a walk.
  2. 00:07His name is Martini.
  3. 00:09(Laughter)
  4. 00:11That wasn't even a joke.
  5. 00:13My wife was out of town,
  6. 00:14and I left my phone inside
  7. 00:16so I could get away from the incessant buzzing
  8. 00:18and took him on a nice long walk.
  9. 00:20And I came back inside,
  10. 00:21and I had one of those moments where your stomach sinks,
  11. 00:25because I looked at my phone and I had a lot of missed calls.
  12. 00:30And my first thought was, my wife is pissed about something.
  13. 00:34It's a lot of calls.
  14. 00:36But then I looked, and it wasn't just a lot of calls,
  15. 00:39it was hundreds of phone calls and numbers I didn't recognize,
  16. 00:44some of them unknown numbers.
  17. 00:47And I decided to figure out what this was.
  18. 00:50And I opened my phone,
  19. 00:52and I opened the voicemails to see if these people had left messages.
  20. 00:58(Audio) Person 1: What you're doing to President Trump is disgusting.
  21. 01:01You are disgusting people.
  22. 01:03You're evil and you're going to go down.
  23. 01:05Person 2: You, my friend, are a piece of shit.
  24. 01:08You are a traitor.
  25. 01:10Person 3: You're pushing for anti-Trump?
  26. 01:12You dumb motherfucker!
  27. 01:15We will squash you like a fucking peanut, bitch.
  28. 01:19You're done, you're done.
  29. 01:21So eat a dick and die.
  30. 01:24Person 4: Miles, we're going to dox you.
  31. 01:26You're not going to be able to walk down the street.
  32. 01:29You're an anti-American.
  33. 01:30Leave the country.
  34. 01:31You're not welcome here anymore.
  35. 01:33You're anti-American, you hate your country.
  36. 01:36Get out.
  37. 01:37Person 5: Because you will deserve the wrath of hell.
  38. 01:41And I think you will get what's coming to you.
  39. 01:44God willing.
  40. 01:46Miles Taylor: If you can believe it, those were the nice ones.
  41. 01:49(Laughter)
  42. 01:50So anyway, before I get to that, let me take you back in time.
  43. 01:55Why did I end up in Washington, DC?
  44. 01:57Like a lot of people,
  45. 01:59after the attacks of September 11, 2001,
  46. 02:01I wanted to come to DC
  47. 02:03to make sure a day like that never happened again.
  48. 02:06That was going to be the full focus of my career.
  49. 02:09And I came into Washington,
  50. 02:10the lowest place you can possibly come in on the totem pole
  51. 02:14as a young messenger on Capitol Hill,
  52. 02:16a page messenger delivering envelopes during my junior year in high school.
  53. 02:21But despite being the lowest rung on the totem pole,
  54. 02:24I had the best desk in Washington, DC.
  55. 02:27And I'm not joking about that.
  56. 02:29Better than the Resolute desk inside the White House,
  57. 02:31because my desk was in the back of the chamber,
  58. 02:34the back of the citadel of democracy,
  59. 02:36where I had a perch to see the comings and goings of Congress
  60. 02:39in the wake of a catastrophic attack.
  61. 02:43And if you take a look,
  62. 02:44that little red circle has a little guy inside of it
  63. 02:47who's me, sitting there,
  64. 02:49watching the President's State of the Union address.
  65. 02:51And I'm going to tell you what I saw in Washington
  66. 02:54in that time period.
  67. 02:55I saw unity.
  68. 02:57I was a young person who was very inspired
  69. 02:59by seeing members of Congress walk across the literal aisle
  70. 03:03to work together on legislation to protect this country.
  71. 03:08But times change.
  72. 03:09Things fade.
  73. 03:10Everything fades.
  74. 03:12Fast forward in time.
  75. 03:13I find myself in 2017
  76. 03:15as the chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security.
  77. 03:20It's not a time of unity anymore in Washington.
  78. 03:23I took that job because of the worst sales pitch anyone's ever made for someone
  79. 03:28to join their office in history.
  80. 03:31My boss, John Kelly, said, "Miles,
  81. 03:34it's not as bad as it looks inside the Trump administration."
  82. 03:38(Laughter)
  83. 03:40"It is so much worse."
  84. 03:42(Laughter)
  85. 03:44And I still took that job because I understood what he meant.
  86. 03:47I understood he meant we need people who understand
  87. 03:49how government functions, how national security functions,
  88. 03:52real conservatives to come in
  89. 03:54and help steady the ship of these agencies.
  90. 03:56But I soon saw what he saw and what others saw,
  91. 03:58which is that in meetings with the President
  92. 04:00in the White House Situation Room,
  93. 04:02in the Oval Office, on Air Force One,
  94. 04:04I met a man who I had not known previously,
  95. 04:06and I found him to be reckless and impulsive at best,
  96. 04:09and at worst, on days members of Congress,
  97. 04:12cabinet secretaries, walked out of the Oval Office with ashen faces,
  98. 04:16and they said things like,
  99. 04:17"The man is a threat to the fabric of our republic,"
  100. 04:21I knew there was something more serious going on.
  101. 04:23Now I’m not going to talk about the first Trump administration,
  102. 04:26but if there was one theme,
  103. 04:28I had to spend most of my time not focused on the 250,000 men and women
  104. 04:32of the Department of Homeland Security
  105. 04:33I was responsible for helping oversee,
  106. 04:36but one man who was regularly engaged or attempting to engage in illegal acts.
  107. 04:43There was no deep state inside the Trump administration.
  108. 04:45There were people willing to speak truth to power
  109. 04:48and prevent the President from doing illegal things,
  110. 04:50not to prevent him from implementing a lawful agenda.
  111. 04:53But I grew very frustrated
  112. 04:55because these conversations were happening among us,
  113. 04:59a group of unelected bureaucrats,
  114. 05:01navel gazing, wringing our hands,
  115. 05:03complaining about how unfit the President was for office.
  116. 05:06It was not our job to decide if the President was unfit for office.
  117. 05:09We would not decide if he got re-elected in a second term.
  118. 05:12That's what you would decide.
  119. 05:14And I felt like it was very important,
  120. 05:16if these gray-beard wise men wouldn't go out and say it in public,
  121. 05:20that someone needed to.
  122. 05:21So I decided I would go say what we were talking about in private
  123. 05:26in public.
  124. 05:28Now I did that at first anonymously,
  125. 05:32as many of you know.
  126. 05:33And I put on that mask
  127. 05:35not because I was afraid to stand by my opinions,
  128. 05:40but because I'm a student of history.
  129. 05:42And my favorite book is a compendium of essays called "The Federalist Papers."
  130. 05:47(Applause and laughter)
  131. 05:49Total best seller, all the authors are dead.
  132. 05:51(Laughter)
  133. 05:53And the Founding Fathers wrote anonymous essays
  134. 05:58to sell the American public on the Constitution,
  135. 06:00not because they were scared to associate themselves with those words,
  136. 06:04but because they knew it would create a spectacle
  137. 06:07and it would draw attention.
  138. 06:09And to them, it was the most important issue of their time
  139. 06:12to get the American people to pay attention to this conversation.
  140. 06:16I did the same thing.
  141. 06:17I'm not comparing myself to those founders,
  142. 06:19but I used the same device, and it worked.
  143. 06:22You paid attention.
  144. 06:23We started a national conversation
  145. 06:25about how the President's own lieutenants didn't think he was fit for office.
  146. 06:29That was an important conversation to have,
  147. 06:31whether you agreed with us or didn't agree with us.
  148. 06:35One person also noticed.
  149. 06:39And in a seven-letter, all-caps tweet,
  150. 06:42he said “TREASON?”
  151. 06:45And I was grateful that there was a question mark.
  152. 06:47(Laughter)
  153. 06:49Because treason is punishable by death in the United States.
  154. 06:52So at least if there was a question,
  155. 06:55I had a chance.
  156. 06:58The President of the United States
  157. 06:59subsequently said he wanted the author found
  158. 07:02and turned in for national security reasons.
  159. 07:05But as I later found out,
  160. 07:06the White House gave up the search
  161. 07:08because lawyers in the White House said
  162. 07:10"This article was First Amendment- protected speech.
  163. 07:13We can't pursue this person.
  164. 07:15It's not treason, we're not going to arrest them."
  165. 07:17But that was not enough for me.
  166. 07:19In 2020, I felt like I needed to take off the mask
  167. 07:22because behind the mask,
  168. 07:24I was sending the signal that it was OK
  169. 07:26to sit in the dark and put your opinions out there
  170. 07:28and not take accountability.
  171. 07:30Before that election,
  172. 07:31I needed to go out there
  173. 07:32and tell you the specific things that I saw
  174. 07:36to buttress those claims I made in that piece,
  175. 07:39and let you make up your damn minds
  176. 07:41about whether this guy deserved to be reelected.
  177. 07:45Once again,
  178. 07:47he noticed.
  179. 07:49We'll get to that in a second.
  180. 07:53And he said, "At campaign rallies,
  181. 07:55bad things are going to happen to Miles Taylor."
  182. 08:00And he was right.
  183. 08:02They did.
  184. 08:03His supporters made sure of it.
  185. 08:07As a consequence of his rhetoric,
  186. 08:10as a consequence of accusing me of treason,
  187. 08:13I had to leave my home on Capitol Hill,
  188. 08:15I lost my job that I had taken in the private sector
  189. 08:18after I left the administration,
  190. 08:20I lost my life savings spending it on lawyers,
  191. 08:24my security, friends.
  192. 08:27And on election night 2020,
  193. 08:28I found myself in a safe house in Northern Virginia,
  194. 08:32under armed guard with a pistol under my pillow.
  195. 08:36Because so many of my fellow Americans believed I should die
  196. 08:41for criticizing the President of the United States.
  197. 08:46Fast forward to April 9 of this year.
  198. 08:48Of course, Donald Trump lost that election in 2020.
  199. 08:51He won, he came back to power.
  200. 08:53And on that day,
  201. 08:54I was out and about again with Martini,
  202. 08:58which means, you know something bad's going to happen.
  203. 09:01He was a dirty Martini,
  204. 09:02I had to take him to the groomer's.
  205. 09:05We got him cleaned, I came home, and I got a message from a journalist
  206. 09:08who said, "Turn on the news.
  207. 09:09The President of the United States is talking about you in the Oval Office."
  208. 09:13And I pulled it up on my phone, and there was Donald Trump,
  209. 09:16and there was Donald Trump declaring
  210. 09:18not that I might be guilty of treason --
  211. 09:21the question mark was gone.
  212. 09:22He told the American people and the world
  213. 09:25that he believed I was guilty of the highest crime contemplated
  214. 09:28in the United States Constitution,
  215. 09:30a reminder -- a crime punishable by death.
  216. 09:34And as legal scholars later told me,
  217. 09:37it was the first time in 249 years of the American Republic
  218. 09:40that a president of the United States
  219. 09:42has issued an executive order to investigate one of his critics
  220. 09:47for First Amendment-protected speech.
  221. 09:51Now you would be right to ask a question.
  222. 09:54If treason is tantamount to murder,
  223. 09:57why am I standing here right now?
  224. 10:00Why am I not in handcuffs?
  225. 10:02Why am I not in a jail cell?
  226. 10:06And whether you agree with me or not, I will tell you the answer.
  227. 10:11The answer is because the US justice system
  228. 10:13has not caught up to the President's view
  229. 10:16that criticism of a president is subversive,
  230. 10:20that criticism should be criminalized,
  231. 10:22that you need a permission slip to criticize the president.
  232. 10:25The justice system hasn't caught up to that.
  233. 10:28Yet.
  234. 10:31But you know who did?
  235. 10:34The same people before that followed his dog whistles.
  236. 10:39They were paying attention.
  237. 10:41(Audio) Person 1: Miles Taylor, what the fuck are you thinking
  238. 10:43going against Trump, you and your cronies?
  239. 10:46Person 2: I really don't appreciate you putting out garbage.
  240. 10:49Do you want to be looking at defamation of character, etc.,
  241. 10:54for putting out lies,
  242. 10:56because everybody's on it and on you.
  243. 11:00Person 3: Your names are going to go viral
  244. 11:04because you are treasonous ilk to our country.
  245. 11:10Person 4: You are what is wrong with America.
  246. 11:12You, sir, are a piece of shit.
  247. 11:14Person 5: We don't forgive traitorship.
  248. 11:16Person 6: I just want to let you know
  249. 11:18that your efforts to try and defeat the GOAT,
  250. 11:21the greatest president of all times,
  251. 11:24is not going to work.
  252. 11:26You guys poked the bear.
  253. 11:27You woke the sleeping giant.
  254. 11:30We're coming, my man.
  255. 11:33MT: These folks are not getting invited to Thanksgiving at the Taylor household.
  256. 11:38But I will tell you, joking aside, those consequences were real.
  257. 11:42Everything that we had rebuilt since 2020, when our lives were detonated,
  258. 11:46was kicked over again because of all of this.
  259. 11:48The address of our home
  260. 11:50that we had moved to to protect my family was doxed.
  261. 11:52Our phone numbers were doxed.
  262. 11:54My wife asked me, do we need to sell the house
  263. 11:56to be able to pay for the legal fees?
  264. 11:58The business that I had built in the wake of this,
  265. 12:00that cut checks for 50 people was destroyed,
  266. 12:04and those 50 people no longer received paychecks.
  267. 12:07But the hardest for me as a father and a husband
  268. 12:09was watching not just me get death threats,
  269. 12:12my wife be threatened,
  270. 12:13my one-year-old daughter threatened and her image posted on the internet.
  271. 12:18That's not OK.
  272. 12:21And it forced us to take legal action
  273. 12:22against people we've never met in this country.
  274. 12:25Even today, I will tell you the truth,
  275. 12:27my security advisor said he did not want me to come speak to you today.
  276. 12:31And we know why.
  277. 12:33Because of the environment we are in.
  278. 12:34But think about that for a second.
  279. 12:36The irony that a speech about free speech
  280. 12:38can't be given in the land of the free without fear of reprisal.
  281. 12:43What's so remarkable about my experience,
  282. 12:46and the reason I shared it with you today,
  283. 12:49is that it is unremarkable now.
  284. 12:53Because what has happened to me is happening from people
  285. 12:56at the member of Congress level,
  286. 12:58all the way down to state representatives and Parks and Recreation directors
  287. 13:01and you name it in this country.
  288. 13:03Poll workers, who are threatened with crowdsourced violence,
  289. 13:06members of Congress, who are scared to hold town halls
  290. 13:08because of their constituents on the Left and on the Right.
  291. 13:12I’m going to give you a data point about this:
  292. 13:1510X.
  293. 13:16The year Donald Trump was elected president,
  294. 13:18there were 1,000 death threats a year to members of Congress,
  295. 13:21a thousand violent threats.
  296. 13:23By the time he left office,
  297. 13:24that had gone up tenfold to 10,000 death threats a year.
  298. 13:29And this is roughly where the number has hovered.
  299. 13:31And it is indicative of what we are seeing in other parts of our society.
  300. 13:36But I didn't need the data points to know this.
  301. 13:39I'll tell you what my data point was.
  302. 13:41My data point was a desk.
  303. 13:45On January 6, 2021,
  304. 13:47you all know what happened.
  305. 13:49What you probably don't know is that a desk was slid
  306. 13:53from the corner of the house chamber.
  307. 13:55The desk I had sat at as a congressional page
  308. 13:57in a Washington unified against a foreign enemy,
  309. 14:01and it was slid in front of the door,
  310. 14:02and it was the last line of defense against a violent mob of insurrectionists.
  311. 14:09I get chills still talking about that
  312. 14:11because of how quickly our world changed in that time period.
  313. 14:18Now we know a lot of scary things have happened recently.
  314. 14:21We saw the assassination of a top political commentator on the right.
  315. 14:25Just last week, the top Democrat in Congress
  316. 14:28had an assassination plot foiled against him.
  317. 14:30And so it begs the question:
  318. 14:32who is responsible for the price of dissent being so high in America?
  319. 14:37Why are people fearing for their lives to speak their political opinions?
  320. 14:42And if you think my answer is Donald Trump,
  321. 14:45you would be wrong.
  322. 14:48Unfortunately, my answer is you.
  323. 14:53Or some of you.
  324. 14:55NPR just came out with a survey the other week that showed
  325. 14:58one in three,
  326. 14:59one in three Americans now believe that political violence would be justified
  327. 15:05to put the country back on track.
  328. 15:08I'm going to give you another one in three.
  329. 15:11One in three Americans own a cat.
  330. 15:13(Laughter)
  331. 15:16One in three.
  332. 15:17Think about that.
  333. 15:19Now I want to ask you a question.
  334. 15:21Which political affiliation do you think is more likely to hold this view?
  335. 15:25Is it the Democrats?
  336. 15:27Is it the Republicans?
  337. 15:30You're all wrong.
  338. 15:32It's Democrats and Republicans in equal measure statistically.
  339. 15:36Now you might be sitting there saying,
  340. 15:38"Miles, but I'm not one of those one third.
  341. 15:40I'm not one of those.
  342. 15:42I didn't call your phone that day."
  343. 15:44At least I don't think any of you did.
  344. 15:47(Laughter)
  345. 15:49And again, statistically, you're probably right.
  346. 15:52You probably fit into this category.
  347. 15:55Because a recent survey found that two out of three Americans
  348. 16:00are now actively admitting to self-censoring their views
  349. 16:04out of fear of reprisal.
  350. 16:07It's not just people inside the beltway, it's you.
  351. 16:10We're all doing it, we're all guilty of it.
  352. 16:13The same survey found that the vast majority of Americans agree in private
  353. 16:18on almost all the controversial issues in our society:
  354. 16:20immigration, abortion, climate change, you name it.
  355. 16:23Survey found majorities agree on those issues,
  356. 16:25but they're scared to say it,
  357. 16:27including they're afraid to repudiate political violence.
  358. 16:33So who's responsible for the price of dissent being so high in this country?
  359. 16:37It's not Donald Trump.
  360. 16:38It's not even the one third of Americans
  361. 16:40who believe we might have to use political violence against one another.
  362. 16:44It's the two thirds.
  363. 16:48In my opinion,
  364. 16:49the greatest threat to democracy today
  365. 16:53is anonymity.
  366. 16:55And I understand that that's ironic coming from me.
  367. 16:58(Laughter)
  368. 16:59I get it.
  369. 17:02It's anonymity.
  370. 17:04We are wearing our figurative masks.
  371. 17:07We are scared to tell the truth.
  372. 17:09And you know what?
  373. 17:10When we're scared to tell the truth, intimidation works.
  374. 17:14It works very, very well.
  375. 17:17And I'm going to close by saying this.
  376. 17:19The question is, how do we fix it then?
  377. 17:24I'm going to give you an economics lesson.
  378. 17:26Oh, God, this talk just got awful.
  379. 17:28(Laughter)
  380. 17:31If you remember supply and demand curves.
  381. 17:33In any marketplace,
  382. 17:35when supply and demand meet, that's what determines the price, OK?
  383. 17:38If as many people want pencils as there are pencils out there,
  384. 17:41that's the price.
  385. 17:42I don’t know, $1.50 a pencil.
  386. 17:45If the price of dissent in this country is high today,
  387. 17:48how do you lower it?
  388. 17:50Economics teaches you there are only two ways.
  389. 17:52That's it.
  390. 17:54There [are] two ways to lower that price.
  391. 17:56One.
  392. 17:59You could decrease demand.
  393. 18:01You decrease demand for pencils,
  394. 18:03we don't want them anymore, we're using pens.
  395. 18:05The price will go down.
  396. 18:07But when it comes to dissent and truth and debate in this country,
  397. 18:11if you believe in what the Founders said about America,
  398. 18:14you don't want to do that.
  399. 18:15We don't want to decrease the demand for truth and debate
  400. 18:18and the possibility of reaching accord on important issues.
  401. 18:22So the only way to lower the price in any marketplace
  402. 18:28is to increase the supply.
  403. 18:32That is you.
  404. 18:34You are the good in that marketplace.
  405. 18:38We need more dissent.
  406. 18:40We need people unafraid to step forward and speak the truth.
  407. 18:45And so I will close by just saying this.
  408. 18:48There [are] a lot of scary things happening right now in this country,
  409. 18:52a lot of scary things.
  410. 18:54And I understand the inclination to ask, "What is going on here?"
  411. 19:00But before you answer that question,
  412. 19:02I want you to ask yourself and the people around you another question.
  413. 19:08Am I anonymous still?
  414. 19:12Because if the answer is yes to that, then you also know the solution.
  415. 19:16It's within your control.
  416. 19:17And that solution is, it's time to take off the mask.
  417. 19:21Thank you.
  418. 19:22(Cheers and applause)
The Rising Cost of Dissent in America | Miles Taylor | TED — Transcriptly