TED Talks Daily - The rising cost of dissent in America | Miles Taylor

Episode Date: May 4, 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 American public life. Drawing on his experience inside government and living the consequences of speaking openly, he says that the real threat to US democracy isn't the politicians or hard-liners — it's the two-thirds of Americans who don’t speak up. (This talk contains mature language.)Learn more about our flagship conference happening this April at attend.ted.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. I was a young person who was very inspired by seeing members of Congress walk across the literal aisle to work together on legislation to protect this country. But times change. Things fade. Everything fades. In today's talk, former senior U.S. national security official, Miles Taylor shares a personal account that raises a broader civic concern. the growing cost of dissent in American public life. Drawing on his experience is living the consequences of speaking openly, he says that the real threat to U.S. democracy isn't politicians or hardliners.

It's the two-thirds of Americans who don't speak up. And a quick heads up, this talk contains mature language. It's all coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk of the Day. Not long ago, I was giving my dog a walk. His name is Martini. That wasn't even a joke. My wife was out of town, and I left my phone inside

so I could get away from the incessant buzzing and took him on a nice, long walk. And I came back inside, and I had one of those moments where your stomach sinks because I looked at my phone, and I had a lot of missed calls. And my first thought was, my wife is pissed about something. It's a lot of calls.

But then I looked, and it wasn't, just a lot of calls, it was hundreds of phone calls. And numbers I didn't recognize, some of them unknown numbers, and I decided to figure out what this was. And I opened my phone, and I opened the voicemails to see if these people had left messages. What you're doing to President Trump is disgusting. You're disgusting people. You're evil, and you're going to go down. You, my friend, are pieces. shit. You are a traitor. You're pushing for anti-Trump?

You dumb motherfucker. We will squash you like a fucking peanut, bitch. You're done. You're done. So, eat a dick and die. Miles, we're going to doc you. You're not going to be able to walk down the street. You're an anti-American.

Leave the country. You're not welcome here anymore. You're anti-American. You hate your country. Get out. you will deserve the lap of health, and I think you will get what's coming to you. God willing. If you can believe it, those were the nice ones. So anyway, before I get to that, let me take you back in time. Why did I end up in Washington, D.C.? Like a lot of people, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, I wanted to come to D.C. to make sure a day like that never happened again. That was going to be the full, of my career and I came into Washington the lowest place you can possibly come in on the totem

pole as a young messenger on Capitol Hill, a page messenger delivering envelopes during my junior year in high school. But despite being the lowest rung on the totem pole, I had the best desk in Washington, D.C. And I'm not joking about that. Better than the resolute desk inside the White House, because my desk was in the back of the chamber, the back of the citadel of democracy where I had a perch to see the comings and goings of Congress in the wake of a catastrophic attack. I'm going to tell you what I saw in Washington in that time period.

I saw unity. I was a young person who was very inspired by seeing members of Congress walk across the literal aisle to work together on legislation to protect this country. But times change. Things fade. Everything fades. Fast forward in time.

I find myself in 2017 as the chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It's not a time of unity anymore in Washington. I took that job because of the worst sales pitch anyone's ever made for someone to join their office in history. My boss, John Kelly, said, Miles, it's not as bad as it looks inside the Trump administration. It is so much worse.

And I still took that job. job because I understood what he meant. I understood he meant we need people who understand how government functions, how national security functions, real conservatives to come in and help steady the ship of these agencies. But I soon saw what he saw and what others saw, which is that in meetings with the president in the White House Situation Room, in the Oval Office on Air Force One, I met a man who I had not known previously, and I found him to be reckless and impulsive at best. And at worst, on days, members of Congress, cabinet secretaries walked out of the Oval Office with ashen faces,

and they said things like, the man is a threat to the fabric of a republic. I knew there was something more serious going on. Now, I will tell you, I'm not going to talk about the first Trump administration, but if there was one theme, I had to spend most of my time not focused on the 250,000 men and women of the Department of Homeland Security, I was responsible for helping oversee.

but one man who was regularly engaged or attempting to engage in illegal acts. There was no deep state inside the Trump administration. There were people willing to speak truth to power and prevent the president from doing illegal things, not to prevent him from implementing a lawful agenda. But I grew very frustrated because these conversations were happening among us, a group of unelected bureaucrats, navel-gazing, wringing our hands, complaining about how unfit the president was, for office. It was not our job to decide if the president was unfit for office. We would not decide

if he got re-elected in a second term. That's what you would decide. And I felt like it was very important if these gray-beard wise men wouldn't go out and say it in public that someone needed to. So I decided I would go say what we were talking about in private, in public. Now, I did that at first anonymously, as many of you know. And I put on that mask not because, not because of you, because I was afraid to stand my opinions, but because I'm a student of history. And my favorite book is a compendium of essays called The Federalist Papers. Total bestseller. All the authors are dead. And the founding fathers wrote anonymous essays to sell the American public on the Constitution, not because they were scared to associate themselves with those words, but because

they knew it would create a spectacle. And it would draw attention. and to them it was the most important issue of their time to get the American people to pay attention to this conversation. I did the same thing. I'm not comparing myself to those founders, but I used the same device, and it worked. You paid attention. We started a national conversation

about how the president's own lieutenants didn't think he was fit for office. That was an important conversation to have whether you agreed with us or didn't agree with us. One person also noticed, and in a seven-level level, all caps tweet, he said, treason? And I was grateful that there was a question mark.

Because treason is punishable by death in the United States. So at least if there was a question, I had a chance. The president of the United States subsequently said he wanted the author found and turned in for national security reasons. But as I later find out, the White House gave up the search because lawyers in the White House said, this article was First Amendment protected speech. We can't pursue this person. It's not treason. We're not going to arrest them. But that was not enough for me. In 2020, I felt like I needed to take off the mask because behind the mask, I was sending the signal that it

was okay to sit in the dark and put your opinions out there and not take accountability. Before that election, I needed to go out there and tell you the specific things that I saw to buttress those claims I made in that piece and let you make up your damn minds about whether this guy deserve to be reelected. Once again, he noticed. We'll get to that in a second. And he said at campaign rallies,

bad things are going to happen to Miles Taylor. And he was right. They did. His supporters made sure of it. As a consequence of his rhetoric, as a consequence of accusing me of treason, I had to leave my home on Capitol Hill. I lost my job that I had taken in the private sector after I left the administration. I lost my life savings, spending it on lawyers, my security, friends. And on election night 2020, I found myself in a safe house in northern Virginia under armed guard with a pistol under my pillow.

because so many of my fellow Americans believed I should die for criticizing the President of the United States. Fast forward to April 9th of this year. Of course, Donald Trump lost that election in 2020. He won. He came back to power. And on that day, I was out and about again with martini, which means you know something bad's going to happen. He was a dirty martini.

I had to take him to the groomers. We got him cleaned. I came home, I got a message from a journalist who said, you need to turn on the news. The president of the United States is talking about you in the Oval Office. And I pulled it up on my phone, and there was Donald Trump, and there was Donald Trump declaring, not that I might be guilty of treason, the question mark was gone. He told the American people in the world that he believed I was guilty of the highest crime contemplated in the United States Constitution, a reminder, a crime punishable by death.

and as legal scholars later told me, it was the first time in 249 years of the American Republic that a president of the United States has issued an executive order to investigate one of his critics for First Amendment protected speech. Now, you would be right to ask a question. If treason is tantamount to murder, why am I standing here right now?

Why am I not in handcuffs? why am I not in a jail cell? And whether you agree with me or not, I will tell you the answer. The answer is because the U.S. justice system has not caught up to the president's view that criticism of a president is subversive, that criticism should be criminalized,

that you need a permission slip to criticize the president. The justice system hasn't caught up to that yet. But you know who did? The same people before that followed his dog whistles. They were paying attention. Miles Taylor, what the fuck are you thinking, going against Trump, you and your cronies? I really don't appreciate you putting out garbage. Do you want to be looking at defamation of character, et cetera, et cetera,

because everybody's own it and on you. Your names are going to go viral. Because you are freezing and silk to our country. You are what is wrong with America. You son are a piece of shit. And we don't forgive trinorship. Bob, just only you know that your effort is trying to keep the goat, the greatest president of all times, it's not going to work.

You guys hope the bear. You won't the sleeping giants. We're coming, my man. These folks are not getting invited to Thanksgiving at the Taylor household. But I will tell you, joking aside, those consequences were real. Everything that we had rebuilt since 2020 when our lives were detonated was kicked over again because of all of this. The address of our home that we had moved to to protect my family was doxed. Our phone numbers were doxed?

My wife asked me, do we need to sell the house to be able to pay for the legal fees? The business that I had built in the wake of this that cut checks for 50 people. was destroyed and those 50 people no longer received paychecks. But the hardest for me as a father and a husband was watching not just me get death threats, my wife be threatened, my one-year-old daughter threatened and her image posted on the internet, that's not okay. And it forced us to take legal action against people

we've never met in this country. Even today, I will tell you the truth. My security advisor said, he did not want me to come speak to you today. And we know why, because of the environment we are in. But think about that for a second. The irony that a speech about free speech

can't be given in the land of the free without fear of reprisal. What's so remarkable about my experience and the reason I shared it with you today is that it is unremarkable now. Because what has happened to me is happening from people at the member of Congress level all the way down to state representatives

and parks and recreation directors and you name it in this country. Poll workers who are threatened with crowdsourced violence, members of Congress who are scared to hold town halls because of their constituents on the left and on the right. I'm going to give you a data point about this. 10x. The year Donald Trump was elected president,

there were 1,000 death threats a year to members of Congress, 1,000 violent threats. By the time he left office, that had gone up tenfold to 10,000 death threats a year, and this is roughly where the number has hovered. and it is indicative of what we are seeing in other parts of our society. But I didn't need the data points to know this. I'll tell you what my data point was.

My data point was a desk. On January 6th, 2021, you all know what happened. What you probably don't know is that a desk was slid from the corner of the house chamber. The desk I had sat at as a congressional page in a Washington unified against a foreign enemy. and it was slid in front of the door, and it was the last line of defense against a violent mob of insurrectionists. I get chills still talking about that

because of how quickly our world changed in that time period. Now, we know a lot of scary things have happened recently. We saw the assassination of a top political commentator on the right. Just last week, the top Democrat in Congress had an assassination plot foiled against him, And so it begs the question, who is responsible for the price of dissent being so high in America? Why are people fearing for their lives to speak their political opinions? And if you think my answer is Donald Trump, you would be wrong.

Unfortunately, my answer is you. Or some of you. NPR just came out with a survey the other week that showed one in three, one in three, Americans now believe that political violence would be justified to put the country back on track. I'm going to give you another one in three. One in three Americans own a cat. A feline. Unfortunately, we had five of them in my household. Thanks, Dad. One in three, think about that. Now, I want to ask you a question. Which political affiliation do you think is more likely to hold this view? Is it the Democrats? Is it the Republicans? You're all wrong. It's Democrats and Republicans in equal measure

statistically. Now you might be sitting there saying, Miles, but I'm not one of those one third. I'm not one of those. I didn't call your phone that day. At least I don't think any of you did. And again, statistically, you're probably right. The recent survey found that two out of three Americans are now actively admitting to self-censoring their views out of fear of reprisal. It's not just people inside the Beltway, it's you. We're all doing it. We're all guilty of it. The same survey found that the vast majority of Americans agree in private on almost all

the controversial issues in our society. Immigration, abortion, climate change, you name it. Survey found majorities agree on those issues, but they're scared to say it, including they're afraid to repudiate political violence. So who's responsible for the price of dissent being so high in this country? It's not Donald Trump. It's not even the one-third of Americans

who believe we might have to use political violence against one another. It's the two-thirds. In my opinion, the greatest threat to democracy today is anonymity. And I understand that that's ironic coming from me. I get it.

It's anonymity. We are wearing our figurative masks. We are scared to tell the truth. And you know what? When we're scared to tell the truth, intimidation works. It works very, very well. And I'm going to close by saying this.

The question is, how do we fix it then? I'm going to give you an economics lesson. Oh, God, this talk just got awful. If you remember supply and demand curves, in any marketplace when supply and demand meet, that's what determines the price. If as many people want pencils as there are pencils out there, boop, that's the price.

I don't know, a buck 50 a pencil. If the price of dissent in this country is high today, how do you lower it? Economics teaches you there are only two ways. That's it. There's two ways to lower that price. One, you could decrease demand. You decrease demand for pencils.

We don't want them anymore. We're using pens. the price will go down. But when it comes to dissent and truth and debate in this country, if you believe in what the founders said about America, you don't want to do that. We don't want to decrease the demand for truth and debate and the possibility of reaching accord on important issues.

So the only way to lower the price in any marketplace is to increase the supply. That is you. You are the good in that market. We need more dissent. We need people unafraid to step forward and speak the truth. And so I will close by just saying this. There's a lot of scary things happening right now in this country, a lot of scary things. And I understand the inclination to ask, what is going on here? But before you answer that question, I want you to ask yourself and the people around you

another question. Am I anonymous still? Because if the answer is yes to that, then you also know the solution. It's within your control. And that solution is, it's time to take off the mask. Thank you.

That was Miles Taylor, speaking at TEDx Mid-Atlantic in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was back-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonicaa Zungmarnevong.

This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballerazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.