“Silence is violence” is a slogan with a long, storied history, even before it was again popularized by the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite its wide acceptance and frequent invocation on protest signs, “silence is violence” has had many nauseating consequences, intended or otherwise.

Take Brené Brown.

She’s a New York Times bestselling author, podcast icon, and vanguard of the therapeutic zeitgeist of vulnerability, empathy, and introspection that has spread like wildfire through bourgeois public discourse over the last decade. One can only surmise that the societal weight of the “silence is violence” schema — white women are apparently uniquely afflicted, due to their gendered positionality — is in part of what led Brown to pen a long-winded tour de nowhere regarding Israel’s annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza.