Lena Dunham Breaks Her Post-Election Silence

Prominent Hillary Clinton supporter Lena Dunham has been silent since Donald Trump won the presidential election early Wednesday morning. Via Instagram, she penned an emotional letter calling for action.

In a lengthy letter published in her Lenny feminist newsletter and titled with a Florynce Kennedy quote, “Don’t Agonize, Organize,” she is calling for Clinton supporters to band together and continue the fight. “In this new reality, we have all been radicalized,” she wrote.

Dunham spent months campaigning for Clinton throughout the country, and she felt “frozen” when she discovered the results. “Because as horrifying as I found Donald Trump’s rhetoric, as hideous as I found his racism and xenophobia, as threatening to basic decency as I found his demagogue persona, I never truly believed he could win,” she continued.

Dunham noted how, during the campaign, she was attacked online by trolls who called for her death but “kept going, thinking these were the dying moans of the dragon known as the patriarchy being stabbed again and again in the stomach. We believed that on November 9, they’d be licking their wounds while we celebrated. It is painful on a cellular level knowing those men got what they wanted, just as it’s painful to know you are hated for daring to ask for what is yours.”

Like Miley Cyrus in an Instagram video and Jennifer Lawrence in her essay, Dunham also called out white women for Trump support. “It’s painful to know that white women, so unable to see the unity of female identity, so unable to look past their violent privilege, and so inoculated with hate for themselves, showed up to the polls for him, too.”

After thanking the Democrat candidate for her campaign, Dunham concluded the letter with an empowering note. “The work isn’t done. It is only beginning. We will stun ourselves with what we are capable of. We will laugh with surprise like kids who finally threw a punch back at the schoolyard bully. We will watch our friends in awe as they step forward and demand more, as they recognize and wield their politicized identities. We will not be governed by fear. We will show our children a different way. We will go home like shooting stars.”

Previously, Dunham promised she would move to Canada if Trump became president — but she backed out of the pledge in another post.

“For those demanding I move to Canada based on something I said when this man seemed like a steak salesman with a long shot at the presidency: stay busy reveling in your new regime,” she captioned, along with an image from the Dr. Seuss children’s book “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.“

“I will go many places in my lifetime, surrounded by kindreds on a mission to spread justice and light,” she wrote. “I can’t wait for all of this and for the change to come as we use what we’ve been given to protect those who can’t protect themselves. What are you living for?”