DEFIANT
Miles Taylor was anonymous. Now he's anything but.
In 2018, Miles Taylor was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, watching the Trump administration govern less like a government and more like a feral hog let loose in a Costco — loud, confused, causing damage in every direction, somehow always finding the one thing in the building it absolutely should not have gotten into. So he wrote an anonymous op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, gave it to the New York Times, and then went home and presumably ate dinner.
Washington’s entire chattering class spent three years playing guess-the-author with the manic energy of a true crime podcast that just got renewed for a second season. They named senators. They named cabinet officials. They named at least one person who has probably never fully recovered from the accusation.
The whole time, Miles kept showing up to work.
That’s the part that gets me. The man wrote the most explosive anonymous op-ed in modern American political history and went back to the office on Monday. That’s not courage. That’s something stranger — a guy so committed to his decision that it achieved a kind of zen stillness. Everyone else was losing their minds. Taylor was scheduling meetings.
He revealed himself in 2020. The administration revoked his clearances, investigated him, and added him to the president’s informal-but-very-real enemies list, which by that point required its own organizational system. Most people would have bought a dog and disappeared. Taylor called his friend Xander Schultz and built DEFIANCE.org instead.
The name alone tells you everything about the therapeutic journey he’s been on.
DEFIANCE is a membership club that hands members specific, targeted, legal things to do every month. Support this. Call here. Show up there. The model runs on a theory Taylor arrived at through painful empirical observation: Americans aren’t apathetic, they’re overwhelmed, and overwhelmed people don’t need inspiration, they need a task list.
The newest project is called GTFO ICE — a rapid-alert system to track planned detention facilities and organize protests before the concrete gets poured. If you haven't signed up yet, click here.
Underneath all of it, Taylor is genuinely earnest in a way that is almost disarming. He grew up in La Porte, Indiana. Won state debate. Watched the Twin Towers fall at age fourteen and made the kind of decision kids sometimes make and almost never follow through on. Then he actually did it. Oxford. Pentagon. DHS at thirty. He believed, with the whole uncomplicated heart of a kid from Indiana, that the institutions he served were worth serving — and then had the genuinely terrible experience of watching what happens to them when they fall victim to the whims of a feral hog.
What came out the other side isn’t cynicism. It’s fury. Which is different, and significantly more useful.
Somewhere in La Porte, Indiana, there is a debate coach who has absolutely no idea what they started.
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Inspiration! ⭐ Just what we needed this Monday morning 🌄!