A Response to "Not Every Hill Is Mine to Die On, and That’s Okay" by Carolyn Hankins Wolfe

An open letter to the vice chair of the Boone County Democratic Party and their recent piece in the NKY Underground News.

Carolyn,

I’m writing this publicly, time-stamped and for the historical record, because I believe your recent essay demands a response—not out of contempt, but out of necessity.

There is something deeply human in your call for grace—for honoring the quiet labor of caregiving, the unseen hours spent in classrooms, board meetings, and bedtime routines. I understand that. Movements are built not just by those who shout in the streets, but by those who endure in the background.

But when people in your community are literally being hunted—when survivors of violence are forced into hiding, when witnesses are silenced, when evidence tied to homicides is buried and whistleblowers targeted by state power—then your words, however well-intentioned, are not just mistimed. They are dangerously tone deaf.

I say this with the full knowledge that I reached out to you privately, in good faith, hours before you wrote your piece. I told you that things were moving. That if you waited to act until it was safe, it would look coerced. I was honest with you then, and I’m being honest with you now. Because when people are in danger, silence is not diplomacy—it’s abdication.

You write, “Not every hill is mine to die on.”

But you are not just a private citizen. You are an elected official and a party leader in a region facing one of the most serious breakdowns of lawful governance in modern memory. When state actors are engaged in witness intimidation and retaliatory surveillance, when whistleblowers are targeted with disinformation campaigns, and when murder investigations are stalled under suspicious circumstances—that hill becomes yours by default.

You cannot claim the title of leadership while stepping off the battlefield. Not when lives are at stake. Not when silence equals complicity.

This is not about aesthetic differences in activism. It is not about burnout, self-care, or “different capacities.” It is about a moral emergency. There are real people under real threat in Northern Kentucky, and they are not dying metaphorically. They are dying literally—or living in terror that they soon might.

And when, instead of meeting that crisis head-on, you use your platform to advocate pacing and retreat, the effect is not neutrality. It is collaboration.

Let me be absolutely clear: movements need caretakers. They need people who manage the back-end, who do the unglamorous labor that keeps systems from falling apart. But they also need moral clarity. They need people who, when the moment demands it, stand up—not sit down.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

And that silence, in this moment, is deafening.

Grace does matter. But courage matters more. And history will remember the difference.

With clarity and resolve,

Bradley Scott Blankenship
Founder, Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project