It’s time to take the keys off Grandpa
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
That is a sentence written by the President of the United States of America, almost certainly in soiled incontinence wear, on what one can only assume must be a plastic-sheeted bed in a building that used to mean something, on a Tuesday morning in April of 2026, on a vanity social media platform that he owns because no other platform will have him, about a civilization that has existed for five thousand years (give or take), before the fucking Greeks had an alphabet, millennia before Romulus and Remus shared a pungent wolf-tit, way before Britons were painting themselves blue and headbutting each other by torchlight on Salisbury’s hills.
Persia.
This dumb, embarrassing, short-fingered vulgarian is talking about Persia, where Cyrus the Great was issuing the first known declaration of human rights at about the same time this American embarrassment’s ancestors were trying to decide which color of Prussian mud is better tasting.
He is threatening to end Persia. To switch it off like a light. And he is doing it with the breezy confidence of a man canceling a magazine subscription:
“I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
Ninety million people, five millennia of continuous civilization, poetry and mathematics and architecture and medicine, the entire inheritance of a culture that was old when Alexander wept at its gates, all of it dangling from the subordinate clauses of sentences tapped out by an addled man whose brain is leaving his body in reverse-mortgage installments, somewhere between his morning pharmaceutical event and whatever flunky drew the short straw of reading him his first briefing at a pace his collapsing attention span can absorb.
Two days before this (lest we forget, lest we forget), on Easter Sunday, the holiest day on the Christian calendar, the day of Resurrection, of life prevailing over death, of the stone rolled away, a day this man is contractually obligated to pretend matters to him, he skipped church entirely, picked up his phone, and posted:
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell. JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
And then he signed it. “President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Because of course he fucking signed it.
The man signs his war crimes the way a proud toddler signs a refrigerator drawing. And then he went to Easter dinner, having skipped the service that gives Easter its meaning, with a wife who has perfected the thousand-yard stare of a woman who has been tracking her personal bourse index fund of self-abasement, access to power, and money for so long she has forgotten there was a before, and presumably he ate whatever mush his handlers spoon into him, and then he went to bed in that building that used to mean something, and the world held its breath, and he slept, because men like him always sleep, that is the one talent they have in abundance, the ability to sleep after saying the unspeakable and doing the unthinkable.
I need you to sit with the substance of his post. Not the profanity.
I swear like I’m paid by the fuck, (I’m not, but if you find a gig like this please let me know) and I couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the profanity.
No. Skip the profanity and sit with what he is actually promising:
The President of the United States is announcing, with the giddy register of a CRAZY EDDY sale, that he will destroy every bridge and every power plant in a country of ninety million people.
“There will be nothing like it!!!”
Three exclamation marks. “Everything must go!!!” energy.
And everything WILL go: hospitals that run on those power plants, the dialysis machines, the neonatal units, the ventilators, the water treatment facilities, the refrigeration for food and medicine and insulin, the thing that keeps the incubators warm around premature babies, the thing that powers operating rooms, the thing that pumps clean water into homes.
He is describing, with the delight of a particularly stupid child pulling wings off a particularly beautiful butterfly, the systematic and deliberate reduction of an ancient nation to a pre-industrial state, and he is doing it in the syntax and cadence of a going-out-of-business sale at a carpet warehouse in northern New Jersey.
COME ON DOWN TO POWER PLANT DAY, FOLKS! NO REASONABLE OFFER REFUSED! EVERYTHING MUST GO, INCLUDING THE HOSPITALS AND THE SCHOOLS AND THE LITTLE MACHINES THAT KEEP THE BABIES BREATHING!
And when a reporter, performing the increasingly quaint ritual of asking the president a question that presupposes he is bound by law, asked him if he was concerned about committing a war crime, he said, “I hope I don’t have to do it.” He then pivoted, unprompted, unasked, because the man cannot resist the sound of his own voice even when it is actively incriminating him, to explain that the real war crime was “allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” a sentence that reveals a relationship with the concept of war crimes roughly equivalent to his relationship with fidelity: he has heard the word, he knows other people take it seriously, and that is the entire extent of it.
Hope. He hopes. The way an arsonist holding a jerry can hopes the house doesn’t catch.
Let me be precise about one thing. What I am about to say is not about the full sweep of American history. This country committed genocide against its indigenous peoples, methodically, over centuries, and then named football teams after them. This country enslaved millions of Africans and their descendants, built the entirety of its wealth on their broken bodies, and then spent another century and a half pretending that it had stopped. Those are the nadirs. Those are the abysses. I am not ranking atrocities and I am not saying that what is happening right now is worse than the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears. It is not.
But on the international stage, in the full view of the entire planet, with cameras rolling and satellites watching and every phone on earth refreshing the same feed, I cannot identify a moment in the record where an American president has so openly, so gleefully, so incoherently, with such evident pleasure, threatened to annihilate a civilization as a negotiating tactic. As a haggling position. As the geopolitical equivalent of “I’d like to speak to the manager.”
Truman dropped the bomb, and whatever you think of that decision (and I think quite a lot of it, none of it good), it was at least the product of a strategic calculus conducted by serious people in a serious war against an enemy that had attacked American territory. This is not that.
This is a 79-year-old man whose brain is visibly caulking over in real time, who conflates “rain” and “reign” and (one presumes) “rein” (“all Hell will reign down on them,” he wrote, like a ninth-grader who skipped every vocabulary quiz since 1958 and never went back), threatening to murder millions of people because he wants to control a shipping lane he couldn’t find on a map if you spotted him the ocean, and he is doing it on the same platform where he posts about his TV ratings and his golf handicap and whatever fresh grievance has burrowed into the collapsing architecture of his liquifying frontal lobe that morning.
The man has the oratorical range of a backed-up garbage disposal and the strategic patience of a coked-up and incontinent, one-eyed Pomeranian with a mange problem and an eight second memory loop.
He has been given, by a compliant court and a supine congress, the unilateral authority to wage war, and he is using it the way he has used every grant of authority in his entire life: recklessly, noisily, without comprehension, and with the attention span of a man who has been channel-surfing for six decades and has finally found the one channel that shows explosions and lets him push the button.
Iranians are forming human chains around their power plants tonight. Picture it. Let it form in your mind. Ordinary people, teachers, students, parents, grandparents, children, wrapping their actual physical bodies around electrical infrastructure because they believe, on the basis of the specific and repeated promises of the President of the United States (promises he signed, like a fucking refrigerator drawing), that they will be bombed.
A woman in Tehran told a reporter that she and her family are not fleeing the city because there is nowhere to go.
There. Is. Nowhere. To. Go.
That is what American power looks like to the world right now. Not a city on a hill. Not the arsenal of democracy. Not the last best hope of earth.
A sundowning Adderall addict with a phone and a nuclear arsenal and the impulse control of a Jack Russell terrier in a room full of squirrels, surrounded by self-abasing toady sycophants, none of whom are willing to take the keys.
That is what frightens me the most.
Not Trump. Trump is what he has always been: a man of titanic ignorance, planetary vanity, and a lizard-brain cunning that has curdled, as the body liquefies and the mind follows it down the drain, into something that is less a personality than a collection of reflexes wearing a suit and a combover held together by whatever aerospace adhesive his handlers source for him.
He is not new. He is not a surprise. He is the same grifter, the same fraud, the same hollow obscenity in a red tie that he was in 2015, just louder, less coherent, more prone to sundowning into apocalyptic tantrums on the toilet at 6 AM, and now in possession of the largest military on earth and the absolute immunity to deploy it however the electrical storm behind his eyes dictates on any given morning.
(Thank you for that, Supreme Court. Hand-delivered. Gift-wrapped. No returns.)
The man who bankrupted a casino, a casino!, a building specifically and mathematically designed so that the house always wins, and he still managed to lose!, the man who bankrupted steaks and vodka and a football league and a university and a magazine and an airline, this man is now conducting the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth, and the results are, predictably, indistinguishable from his business record: catastrophic, expensive, and entirely someone else’s problem to clean up.
The terrifying part is that the system designed to contain precisely this scenario, the checks, the balances, the whole magnificent Madisonian architecture of distributed power and mutual restraint, has been hollowed out, co-opted, or simply cowed into silence by men who have done the arithmetic and concluded that the madness is useful to them personally.
Little Mike Johnson. Speaker of the House. Second in the presidential line of succession. The man who holds, constitutionally, the power of the purse and the authority to declare war.
A man whose most notable public achievement before his baffling ascent to the speakership was installing a mutual accountability app on his phone and his teenage son’s phone to monitor each other’s pornography consumption (each other’s! mutual! the mind recoils!) and then volunteering this information to a reporter, unprompted, apparently under the grave misapprehension that it demonstrated moral seriousness rather than a profoundly, luridly unsettling fixation that no sane person would confess to a journalist, let alone brag about.
This man, this sentinel of the republic, this Dollar Store Goebbels with a covenant marriage and a browser history problem and the charisma of a damp washcloth, looked at an unauthorized war launched without congressional approval, a war that has now killed over 1,600 Iranian civilians (244 of them children), a war that has killed 13 American service members, that has destabilized the entire Persian Gulf, that has sent oil past $111 a barrel, that features the President of the United States openly promising war crimes on a social media platform while signing off with “Praise be to Allah” on Easter Sunday, and said, with a straight face, with that thin-lipped undertaker’s smile, with the confidence of a man who has confused cowardice for piety his entire adult life: “The operation has been necessary, lawful and effective.”
He whipped the votes to kill the War Powers Resolution. He called any attempt to reassert Congress’s constitutional authority over war-making “a frightening prospect.”
He then told reporters, displaying the same relationship with observable reality as a man who monitors his son’s porn and calls it parenting: “We are not at war.”
We are not at war.
Bridges are falling into rivers in Iran.
We are not at war.
Two hundred and forty-four children are dead.
We are not at war.
Thirteen American service members are in body bags.
We are not at war.
An elementary school was hit, and one hundred and seventy children died in it.
We are not at war.
Oil is at $111 a barrel.
We are not at war.
Saudi Arabia is taking missile fire.
We are not at war, says Mike Johnson, because calling it a war would mean acknowledging that the Constitution requires his involvement, and his involvement would require him to stop what he is actually doing, which is using the war as a smokescreen to ram through a domestic agenda so toxic, so deeply and comprehensively shit, so staggeringly unpopular, that it cannot survive ten minutes of contact with public attention.
Every minute YOU spend watching Kharg Island burn on your phone is a minute you are not watching what Mike Johnson is doing to the tax code, to reproductive rights, to public education, to the separation of church and state, to every load-bearing wall of the social contract that keeps this country from collapsing into a theocratic plutocracy run by men who think monitoring their children’s masturbation habits is a qualification for governance.
The war is not a failure of his oversight. The war is his cover. The unchecked executive is the delivery vehicle for a wish list that polls somewhere between “compulsory tithing” and “bring back scurvy.” Johnson knows this. He has always known this. And every time he stands at a podium in that cheap suit and tells the American people that the operation is “lawful and effective,” he is buying another news cycle of legislative darkness in which to work, and he is doing it over the bodies of dead children, Iranian and American, and he does not care, because Mike Johnson’s God has apparently given him permission to not care, which is a nifty trick if you can manage it, and a damning indictment of the God in question if you can’t.
And John Roberts. The Chief Justice. The institutionalist. The umpire who just calls balls and strikes, provided the balls and strikes do not involve actual human life and death, in which case he’d rather give a measured address at a university and then retreat to chambers to polish his legacy like a man buffing a vintage car he never intends to drive.
Roberts, who as a bright young lawyer in Reagan’s White House wrote a 1984 memo arguing that Congress should have no defined role in terminating military operations in Lebanon, which tells you everything you need to know about the man’s lifelong project, which has been, from the start, from before most of us were born, the systematic expansion of executive war-making power and the corresponding castration of the legislature’s constitutional authority to say “no, actually, you can’t do that.”
Roberts, who in his 2005 confirmation hearing, when asked point-blank by then-Senator Joe Biden whether Congress has the authority to stop a war, ducked behind the procedural skirts of “hypotheticals” and said he couldn’t answer in the abstract.
Well, mate. It’s not abstract anymore. It’s not a hypothetical.
With all due apologies to Mike Johnson… there is a war.
An unauthorized one.
Being waged by a man who just promised to extinguish a five-thousand-year-old civilization on a website originally built so his fans could share memes about him. And Roberts sits in his marble temple, twenty-one years into the center chair, composure immaculate, enigma buffed to a high shine, saying nothing, doing nothing, because doing something would make the court look “political,” and that is the one outcome John Roberts cannot abide, which is ironic in the way that a man drowning while holding a life preserver because he doesn’t want to get it wet is ironic.
He struck down the tariffs in February. Fair play to him.
He pushed back on birthright citizenship last week. Quite right.
He told Trump’s Solicitor General that his arguments were “very quirky,” which, in the rarefied dialect of Supreme Court understatement, is the equivalent of calling someone a weapons-grade plum to their face while wearing a robe.
He is perfectly content to check presidential power when the stakes are trade policy or constitutional jurisprudence in the clean, academic sense, when the confrontation can be managed through written opinions and the satisfying rituals of appellate procedure, when no one has to look at a photograph of a dead child afterward.
But on the question of whether the President can unilaterally launch and sustain an unauthorized war and then escalate it, publicly, gleefully, on a phone, into the promised destruction of civilian infrastructure across a nation of ninety million people, a question that is not hypothetical, that is not abstract, that is happening right now, tonight, while Roberts sleeps in whatever tasteful arrangement he calls a bed?
On that question, John Roberts has nothing to say. He is sitting in the cuck-chair, watching American constitutionalism and international humanitarian law get railed by a man who cannot spell “reign” and who holds a Bible the way a chimpanzee holds a smartphone (with the evident conviction that it does something important but absolutely no theory of what), and his overriding concern is that the court not be perceived as “political.”
The court IS political, John. It has been political since Marbury v. Madison. The only question, ever, has been whether it would be political in the service of power or in the service of law, and you have made your choice, which is to make no choice, which is the choice of a man who would rather preside with immaculate composure over a dignified irrelevance than risk his precious legacy on an undignified necessity. People are dying while you calibrate.
May the phrase ‘Roberts Court’ ever live in our memories as a gold-standard for venal and corrupt contortions.
And then there are the men who are supposed to be the adults in the room that has no adults.
Pete Hegseth. The Secretary of War. He had the department renamed because subtlety has never once troubled the inside of Pete Hegseth’s beautifully empty skull.
Pete Hegseth’s entire management career before being handed the Pentagon, the largest employer on the planet, two million service members, an $800 billion budget, was running two veterans’ charities so catastrophically that one ended up half a million dollars in debt and the other produced a whistleblower report describing him being carried out of events because he was too shit-faced to walk, trying to climb onstage at a strip club while his staff physically restrained him, and, on one memorable occasion, closing down a bar in Ohio chanting “Kill all Muslims!” at the top of his lungs on an official organizational tour.
This man. This spray-tanned dollar-store frat pledge with a jawline and a blood-alcohol problem is now managing the largest military operation since Iraq, and he is doing it the way he does everything, which is as a segment on a show. Iran is “toast.” He promises “death and destruction” with the cadence of a UFC promo.
When an American pilot was rescued from behind enemy lines on Easter Sunday, Hegseth’s first instinct, his immediate and irrepressible reflex, was to turn it into a Passion narrative for the cameras: “Shot down on a Friday, Good Friday, hidden in a cave, rescued on Sunday. A pilot reborn. God is good.”
A man nearly died in the mountains of Iran and Hegseth converted it into Easter content before the rotors stopped spinning. There is no second layer to Pete Hegseth. There is no moment where the bro-vet cosplay drops and a serious person appears. The cosplay IS the person. Fox News taught him that reality is a broadcast and he learned the lesson so completely that he now runs actual wars as though they’ve been picked up for sweeps week.
Oh, and while he was planning strikes that would kill American soldiers and Iranian children, his broker was on the phone to BlackRock trying to invest millions of Hegseth’s money in a defense industry ETF. War profiteering. The Secretary of fucking War, profiteering from his own fucking war. You could not write this villain. A studio would send the script back saying tone it down.
And Marco Rubio. Little Marco. The Secretary of State. Still the same damp, startled, overcaffeinated face (only now equipped with ill-fitting Florsheims), still carrying the same essential quality he has carried through his entire public life, which is that Marco Rubio will say whatever the last powerful person in the room told him to say, with conviction, and when the next powerful person says the opposite, he will say that with equal conviction, and at no point will the contradiction register, because Marco Rubio does not experience contradiction. Marco Rubio experiences instructions.
His legal justification for the war, the thing he presented to Congress with the sweaty earnestness of a sophomore presenting a book report on a book he skimmed the Wikipedia summary of, was this: Israel was going to attack Iran, which would provoke Iran to attack American forces, so America had to attack Iran first. America went to war because a third country was going to do something.
That is the imminent threat. That is the legal basis for thousands of dead people. It is a bank shot so preposterous it makes the Iraq WMD rationale look like a peer-reviewed triple-tested double-blind research paper.
And for all that, the next day, Trump contradicted him completely, said Iran was about to attack America on its own, nothing to do with Israel. Rubio folded like a lawn chair in a hurricane. “The president determined we were not going to get hit first. It’s that simple, guys.”
The entire justification he’d delivered twenty-four hours earlier, gone, vapor, never happened, and he didn’t blink, because blinking would require a spine and Marco Rubio’s spine is a vestigial organ, technically present, serving no known function, like the appendix but less likely to cause a crisis.
He told Iran to spend its money on its people instead of weapons. While his administration was requesting $200 billion in supplemental Pentagon funding and cutting Medicaid. He said the war would last “weeks, not months.” That was five weeks ago. He said Iranians “deserve better leadership.” He works for Donald Trump.
Marco Rubio would not recognize irony if it introduced itself, pointed to a t-shirt it was wearing that said “HELLO! I AM IRONY” and the face fucked him while waving a hat around and showering him in business cards saying “Hello, I Am Irony,” because recognizing irony requires self-awareness, and self-awareness requires a self, and what Rubio has instead of a self is a suit and a set of talking points and the God-given gift of being able to say absolutely anything without the faintest flicker of recognition that he said the opposite thing yesterday.
These are the professionals. This is the team. A Fox News bro who got hammered and screamed “Kill all Muslims” running the Department of War, and a man whose own rationale for the war was publicly contradicted by his boss within twenty-four hours and who responded by simply pretending he’d never said it. These are the guardrails between the man on the plastic-sheeted bed and the button.
And tonight at 8 PM, when the order comes down the chain, some colonel, some weapons officer sitting in front of a screen with a target overlay of a power plant that keeps a children’s hospital running, is going to have to decide whether to carry it out.
Whether the oath she swore was to the Constitution or to the man on the plastic-sheeted bed.
Whether the laws of war apply to her even when they’ve been deemed inapplicable to the men giving the orders.
Hegseth won’t ask that question. Rubio won’t ask it. Trump can’t even formulate it.
But someone down the line will have to. Someone always does. That is the Nuremberg question and it has never once in the history of the species been answered correctly by pretending it wasn’t being asked.
So who is left?
We have arrived, and I need you to understand the full, shrieking grotesquerie of this, at a place where the people calling for the 25th Amendment, the people saying out loud what anyone with functioning optic nerves and a residual capacity for pattern recognition can see, are Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones.
Read that list again. Out loud. Let it sit in your mouth like a gulp of curdled and chunky milk from a carton has been left out all day on a sidewalk in Houston in June.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who spent four years as Trump’s most embarrassingly servile knob-gobbler of a congressional hype-woman, a woman who could not have located Iran on a map in 2020 if you’d offered her a map of Asia and drawn an arrow to Iran, is now posting “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.”
The odious and oleaginous Swanson’s TV-dinner scion, Tucker Carlson, who called the war “absolutely disgusting and evil,” who looked at Trump’s Easter tantrum and said “Who do you think you are?”, who went on his podcast and said “We’ve intentionally bombed civilian infrastructure and that is totally unacceptable, not under the phony laws of some international body but under moral law, God’s law,” and whom Trump then excommunicated from the MAGA movement with the wounded petulance of a cult leader discovering that even his most reliable lapdog has a gag reflex (“Tucker has lost his way. He’s not MAGA. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that,” said the man who cannot spell “reign” and who thinks Persia is a type of rug).
And Alex Jones. Alex. Fucking. Jones. A man who told the parents of murdered children at Sandy Hook that their dead babies were crisis actors. A man who was found liable for defaming the grieving parents of slaughtered six-year-olds to the tune of over a billion dollars. This man, in April of 2026, is calling for the 25th Amendment. Alex Jones is a voice of comparative reason on the question of whether the United States should exterminate a civilization. Read that fucking sentence again without gagging. If it doesn’t make you want to lie face-down on the floor and stay there for a geological epoch, I genuinely do not know what to tell you.
The motherfucking arsonists are calling the fire department. They built the apparatus. They sold the matches. They soaked the curtains in kerosene. They lit the fire. They fanned the flames. They warmed their hands on it. They posted Instagram stories of themselves silhouetted against the glow.
And now they are standing in the ashes, singed and blinking, saying “this has gone too far,” and they are, God help us all, God help every last one of us, correct. They are correct.
I am so fucking tired of this. I am tired of writing it, I am tired of knowing it, I am tired of the fact that it needs to be said, and I am tired in a way that I do not think will go away when I sleep tonight, if I sleep tonight, which I probably won’t, because unlike the man in the plastic-sheeted bed in the building that used to mean something, I cannot do the one thing he does effortlessly, which is sleep after the unspeakable has been spoken.
The worst people you know are making the best point available, and the people who are constitutionally empowered and duty-bound to actually do something about it (Johnson, Roberts, Vance, the Cabinet, the entire invertebrate chorus of Republican senators who know exactly what they are watching and have concluded that their reelection prospects are worth more than the Geneva Conventions and the lives of Iranian children and the lives of American soldiers and the rule of law and the constitutional order and whatever remains of America’s claim to moral standing in the world, which, admittedly, was already on life support, but still) are sitting on their hands and letting it ride, because the insanity is load-bearing.
Pull it out and their project collapses.
The madness is not a bug. The madness is the operating system.
And sixty-two percent of Americans oppose this war. Sixty-two percent. Eight million people marched in the streets last month. Even among Republicans who voted for this man, his approval is collapsing. The public is ahead of its leaders. The public has been ahead of its leaders for weeks. The people who are supposed to represent that public, who swore an oath to that public, are ignoring them, because the public’s opposition is inconvenient and the war is useful.
Iranians are forming human chains around their bridges tonight. A woman in Tehran says there is nowhere to go. Thirteen American service members are dead. Over 1,600 Iranian civilians are dead. 244 of them were children. An elementary school was bombed and 170 children died in it. A university has been bombed. Doctors in Tehran are demonstrating because their hospitals have been hit. More than 1,500 people are dead in Lebanon. Fifty are dead across the Gulf states. Twenty Israelis are dead. Oil is at $111 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Saudi Arabia is getting hit. The UAE is getting hit. Israel is bombing railways. Iran is firing at everyone in range. Pakistan is trying to mediate. Britain is hosting a virtual meeting of military planners from forty countries to figure out what comes after, assuming there is an after. The Iranian president says fourteen million citizens have volunteered to fight and that he is ready to die alongside them.
And the President of the United States, the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force in human history, a man who has bankrupted a casino, and steaks, and vodka, and a football league, and a university, and a magazine, and an airline, and the moral authority of the republic, woke up this morning and typed, with his thumbs, on his phone, on the toilet, that a whole civilization would die tonight, and then added “WHO KNOWS?” in all caps, because he genuinely does not know, because there is no plan, because there has never been a plan, because this man has never had a plan for anything in his life that extended past the next news cycle or the next cheeseburger or the next woman or the next con, and the only people on earth willing to say so out loud are the lunatics he built and then discarded when they became inconvenient.
It’s time to take the keys off Grandpa.
Except the people who could take the keys are in the passenger seat, eyes shut, knuckles white, telling themselves the swerving is strategy, while the rest of us are belted into the back, watching the cliff edge approach and screaming into a void that has been gerrymandered, filibustered, and immunity-doctrined into silence.