Creativity Quote by Michael Aston

"Let's not pretend" is less an invitation to debate than a demand to stop performing civility. Coming from a musician, the line reads like a lyric designed to cut through noise: impatient with nuance, optimized for impact, and built to rally an audience that already feels the culture is gaslighting them. The phrasing casts the speaker as the lone realist in a room full of cowards, a familiar posture in today’s attention economy where moral certainty travels faster than careful argument.

The real engine is the reframing. By defining abortion as "mass slaughter of innocents", Aston doesn’t just state a belief; he tries to fix the terms of the entire conversation. "Abortion" becomes a euphemism, "slaughter" supplies gore and criminality, "mass" scales the act into something like an atrocity, and "innocents" pre-selects the victim and erases competing claims: bodily autonomy, medical complexity, rape, fetal anomaly, poverty, maternal risk. The sentence functions like a trapdoor: if you accept the premise, you’ve already accepted the policy conclusion.

Subtextually, it’s also an accusation aimed outward: the real sin isn’t only abortion, it’s society’s alleged self-deception. That charge of hypocrisy is where the heat lives, and it’s why the quote lands in a musician’s register: it’s built for amplification, for being shared as a moral mic drop. The cost is that it forecloses persuasion. It’s not trying to convert the undecided so much as harden the committed, turning a contested ethical question into a line between the righteous and the complicit.