So they gloated.

They threatened.

They laid out their demands and justified the assault and detailed exactly what they expected me to pay, and each sentence was another brick in the wall going up around them, and they mortared it themselves, cheerfully, because they could not conceive of a world in which the quiet people letting them talk were not, at that very moment, being defeated.

I almost felt something watching it — not pity, I had none left, but a kind of grim recognition of how completely their own worst qualities were about to convict them.

They had never needed an enemy.

They had only ever needed a microphone and enough rope, and my father, who understood such people to the bone, had handed them both and simply waited.