SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
political violence
Meeting Our Angry Moment With Fellowship and Laughter
What we can do is call attention to the forms of nonviolent resistance that challenge our prevalent culture of rage and alienation.
Oct 08, 2025
One strangely hot November afternoon, I waited for my elementary-school-aged kids to arrive at their bus stop. The quiet in our rural area was eerie. It captured the mood in the days after a national election that no one in my little community yet knew exactly how to respond to.
In my rush out the door, I’d grabbed my baseball cap, with the logo for my preferred presidential candidate on it, to shield my eyes from the sun’s glare.
The bus arrived and left. I collected my charges and, just as we were preparing to walk home, a tall young man leapt from the passenger seat of a battered Chevy pickup truck parked at the side of the road. He shook one sunburned finger at my hat and yelled, “Traitor! Traitor!” his face red with rage, or possibly alcohol—who knew? I gripped the pepper spray I carry in my pocket and told my kids to run home. They disappeared into the woods.
Luckily, the man scuttled back into his vehicle and drove off as soon as I looked him in the eye and sized him up. (Maybe word hadn’t yet spread that masks could do more than protect from illness. They could also let a man harass families without the moral weight of the act landing on him. How little we understood, just months ago!)
If a certain prevalent strain of MAGA masculinity feeds on anger and hate—just look at “he who hates his political opponents” (aka our president!) and his speech at Kirk’s funeral—it’s not an easy persona to sustain.
Once his truck disappeared, I walked home, rattled, not sure how to explain what had happened to my kids. But in the foyer, they explained the whole scene for me in their own satirical way.
One child shook a finger and yelled, in a mockingly deep voice, “Traitor!” Another pretended to swoon in response. “Oh no! I am so scared! What a big, brave man!” They collapsed in giggles.
This is the sort of anti-bully cosplay I’ve come to see often in recent months: Kids I know strutting around with their chests puffed out like roosters, imitating a neighborhood bully who insults immigrants. Expressions of fake awe about motorcycle gangs that pass by displaying Confederate flags and other racist symbols of the old South and revving their engines for attention. (“Wow! They are so strong and tough! I want to shake their hands!”)
As private as this mockery tends to be, lest (sadly) someone retaliate with violence, it gives us a way to express our sorrow at what is happening to the American value of peaceful coexistence, while lightening the mood. Such laughter diminishes the bullies among us, at least in our hearts. As leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and comedian Jimmy Kimmel show so well, it can diminish them publicly by holding up a mirror to their bluster and overreach.
Humor as Resistance
The use of parody against authoritarian leaders is nothing new. Among my favorite models is Serbian activist Srdja Popovic’s book Blueprint for Revolution. Recounting his own experiences with the student movement that, in the 1990s, resisted then-dictator Slobodan Milosevic, Popovic explains how jokes about ruling elites can make them look less invincible, while also puncturing widespread fear. And better yet, leaders who try to suppress such humor tend to look ridiculous. For example, Serbian police arrested (so to speak) a barrel with Milosevic’s face painted on it after Popovic and his fellow activists encouraged citizens to line up and hit it with a bat.
We in the mid-Atlantic region got a taste of how such mundane gestures can goad leaders into buffoonery when then-Justice Department employee Sean Charles Dunn threw his sandwich at one of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers President Donald Trump recently deployed in Washington, DC. The Department of Justice tried to charge Dunn with assaulting a federal officer, a felony, but a grand jury declined to bring such charges against him. Whether or not Dunn actually meant to be funny, that incident reminds me of how a seemingly small act of resistance can indeed expose executive overreach.
As I walked in a September protest against President Trump’s National Guard occupation of Washington, I watched leaders of the tens of thousands of marchers hoist a banner depicting Dunn with his sandwich and felt strangely encouraged by the raucous cheering that echoed through the capital. He has, in fact, become a potent symbol of the anti-Trump resistance.
Men and Rage
I guess there’s nothing new about angry men, either—at least not in my neighborhood. My home sits in a valley, and the nearby rural highway often feels to me like a repository of white male road rage. I moved here in 2020 and, just in that first year, I watched two drivers at two different moments plow, purposefully or not, into the vehicles in front of them. In one case, the driver got out and began hurling racial slurs at the group of Latino farmworkers he had slammed into.
If you’re unlucky enough to be standing by the side of that road, you’d better believe that you could get hurt, even if it’s just by someone speeding. The battered guardrails at the valley’s nadir attest to that. Once, a cop pulled me over when I was walking home along that very road after my car broke down to warn me that I could get hurt by the reckless drivers there. Safe in my white suburban mom identity, while pointing at the dimpled metal of the rails along that stretch of road, I replied, “No kidding. Why don’t you pull more of them over instead of me?” He blushed and actually agreed before letting me go home.
What causes a young man who, unlike Donald Trump, professes to be tired of hate to kill?
And mind you, those guys on my road are anything but aberrations. Many signs these days point to a scourge of anger and despair among American men, who all too often don’t seem to have been raised to express a wide range of emotions. A Pew Research study from early 2025 found that 57% of US adults think children’s caretakers place far too little focus on teaching boys to talk about their feelings when they’re sad or upset. Less than a third said the same about girls. In another survey, at least two-thirds of parents felt that boys were uncomfortable expressing feelings of fear, sadness, loneliness, and insecurity. Nearly half of those parents also felt that boys were uncomfortable expressing feelings of love. By and large, while women and men might feel anger in similar numbers, men are significantly more likely to act out their anger using verbal or physical aggression.
Though laughter offers a wonderful way to respond to stress, it turns out that it, too, is remarkably gendered. Women are more likely to laugh in social settings, while we as a society tend to expect men to make other people laugh through jokes and humor. Right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan is a notably popular exception to such a generalization in his ability to express vulnerability and laugh at himself. An analysis by Industry Leaders Magazine argues that his largely male audience does indeed value his willingness to admit he’s been wrong and his openness to laughing at himself. As one example, in an interview with English comedian Russell Brand, Rogan poked fun at himself as a child, a kid then learning martial arts, calling himself “so weird” and laughing.
When we express ourselves peaceably rather than by being accusatory, threatening, or violent, we connect with others, as Rogan shows so well (regardless of what you or I may think of his politics). And the ability to connect that he has—a trait conservative activist Charlie Kirk arguably had as well—may otherwise be in short supply among today’s male adults, especially on the political right. About a third of Americans report that they are lonely at least some of the time, though women tend to reach out more often to friends or loved ones when they feel that way. It’s probably no accident that men in this country are four times more likely than women to die by suicide.
If a certain prevalent strain of MAGA masculinity feeds on anger and hate—just look at “he who hates his political opponents” (aka our president!) and his speech at Kirk’s funeral—it’s not an easy persona to sustain. Just consider all the mourners who showed up at Kirk’s memorial service in genuine grief. Perhaps what most unnerved the Trump administration, when comedian Jimmy Kimmel flashed that clip of the president redirecting a question about Kirk’s death to the subject of his new White House ballroom, was confronting how alone he was in his indifference.
After Charlie Kirk
Given all the hostile rhetoric of Trump and his party toward their political foes, I find it easy to blame him and his followers for the uptick of political violence in this country over the past decade. After all, the vast majority of domestic extremist attacks have been perpetrated by individuals professing right-wing ideologies. Yet, as Jia Lynn Yang of the New York Times points out, this year’s spate of violence against public figures did not map as clearly onto the political spectrum as in earlier eras. Today, the attacker tends to be a “lone individual, lost in a conversation with an online void.” After all, Charlie Kirk’s shooter didn’t even vote in the last election. In a text exchange, he referred to the engravings he had made on his bullets, which included words like “catch, fascist,” as “mostly a big meme.”
While it would be reductionist to blame violence on video games and other nihilistic online spaces, it’s worth considering that the current generation of young people do, of course, spend more time online than any previous generation. If popular war games form part of their immersive environments, we as a society would do well to look more closely not just at the political leanings of shooters, but the contexts within which political violence flourishes in contemporary America.
What makes a gun feel like the solution to any political disagreement for some individuals? And if people like Kirk’s alleged killer Tyler Robinson, don’t see it as a solution, then what does it mean to shoot someone? If political assassination is a crime of despair, what series of events leads a person to such a feeling and such an act? Psychology tells us that anger makes us feel more powerful because of the adrenaline that courses through our bodies prior to acting out. But what causes a young man who, unlike Donald Trump, professes to be tired of hate to kill?
A New American Way?
I’m at a loss. And I think many of us may be. But what we can do (and by we here, I mean those of us who write stuff) is call attention to the forms of nonviolent resistance that challenge our prevalent culture of rage and alienation. The people participating in the “We Are All DC” march that I mentioned earlier held homemade signs like “DC crime wave” (with a picture of President Trump waving from the White House), played music, and sang. Though arguably comparable in size to the DC Women’s March of 2017, this demonstration warranted exactly zero articles in the New York Times. Somehow, in the age of Donald Trump, such legacy media outfits tend to prefer to amplify angry male voices rather than those of resistance, which, I think, is a genuine problem, explain it as you will.
If you think that a focus on resistance, humor, and joy is a losing path, as Kamala Harris’ “joy-based campaign” turned out to be, maybe you should remember that being with others in person does materially change the chemistry of our bodies. When we laugh or cry, especially in community, our bodies can release dopamine, serotonin, and other chemicals that support empathy, communication, and a sense of hope for the future.
You might try a little humor or mockery to get through the day.
Perhaps with a greater sense of community, we would also take in more of our disturbing world and not, for instance, forget the two Minnesota lawmakers another extremist shot and killed in June or the young Black student recently found hanging from a tree in Mississippi. They received remarkably less attention than Charlie Kirk.
Unfortunately, our field of vision remains narrow indeed and, like the road I stood on that day last November, it contains a disproportionate number of angry white men. And no less unfortunately, we’re speeding down it quickly with a maniac in the driver’s seat, and it lacks the guardrails of a law-abiding Supreme Court and a constitutionally aware secretary of defense.
Unless we start talking to one another, that road seems to be leading nowhere good. In the meantime, you might try a little humor or mockery to get through the day. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
A Declaration of Independence From Fear
If we have any chance of saving our Republic, and I believe we do, that chance will have to come from the public itself. And it will take all of us.
Oct 08, 2025
Cruelty, including a lust for vengeance, largely defines President Donald Trump’s character. And with an enemies list that is nearly limitless, he will never lack for targets. Among his self-declared enemies is the entire Democratic Party. Democrats, according to Trump, are a radical, evil, and dangerous lot. Going a step further, he has also declared that Democrats “are the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” The same goes for the political left in general. To Trump’s mind, all these people, representing approximately half of the nation’s population based upon election results, are evil and deserve punishment. They are, as Trump tells us, the enemy within.
But it would be a mistake to assume vengeance is Trump’s ultimate goal. Yes, he is vindictive, and, yes, he enjoys hurting people who he feels crossed him; but he clearly also has grander dreams. His quite transparent goal, one he shares with other authoritarian leaders, is spreading fear: fear of arrest, fear of unjustified prosecution, fear of becoming the target of a federal investigation leading to ruinous legal fees, fear of losing one’s job, fear of being harassed online.
The ultimate point of this, of course, is to frighten his opponents to the point they will back down and remain silent.
Fear is a powerful weapon in the hands of an authoritarian, something Trump and MAGA are proving every day. In the age of Trump, fear can cause people to think twice before speaking out, avoid taking part in peaceful protests, and dropping out of political advocacy altogether. Locking their political doors, pulling down the shades, and hiding.
Donald Trump has made his position clear: Only Democrats and other Trump resisters need worry about federal prosecution.
You can almost smell the fear. It saturates the air around us. And it is working in just the way Trump and his flunkies intended. A politically engaged progressive woman I know recently told me that she had stopped posting political comments on Bluesky or otherwise making political statements. She was afraid that one day she would be punished, or even physically attacked, for speaking her mind.
A man I know slightly, let’s call him Ben, excitedly posted the news that he had accepted employment in a leadership position with a local progressive organization. Shortly after posting this message, Ben received an email from someone he didn’t know suggesting that he should rethink that decision. The man sending the email also said that he knew both Ben’s address and Ben’s daughter’s address. He then included the two addresses in the email to show he wasn’t bluffing. With his family threatened, Ben decided to pass on the job.
Trump has repeatedly said that his political opponents are evil and deserve to be prosecuted and jailed. On occasion he will even suggest they should be executed. On other occasions he says things that seem calculated to encourage his supporters to use violence against those who oppose him. A few examples: “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, okay? Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise.”
Here is another oldie but goodie: “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
While there are, of course, other examples of Donald Trump suggesting that the use of violence against his opponents is justified, let’s end with one very recent comment: "It's gonna get worse, and ultimately it's gonna go back on them (the political left). Bad things happen when they play these games. I'll give you a little clue—the right is a lot tougher than the left."
Trump has also made it clear that his followers have little reason to worry about being prosecuted for crimes they commit, at least at the federal level. All that is needed is for the Trump sycophants embedded at the top of the Justice Department to quietly end the investigation or dismiss the charges, something they have been doing with troubling frequency. If that doesn’t happen, Trump can simply pardon the offenders as he has also done often, most notoriously pardoning everyone who took part in the riot at the capital on January 6, including those who viciously assaulted capital police officers.
Donald Trump has made his position clear: Only Democrats and other Trump resisters need worry about federal prosecution. Democratic politicians who have rubbed him the wrong way are to be prosecuted whether or not there is evidence to support the charges. Republican politicians and anyone else who supports Trump, on the other hand, are untouchable.
The message this sends to his most ardent supporters could not be clearer. If you engage in lawless, even violent, actions against his opponents, you need not worry. He has your back.
Given this state of play, it would be foolhardy for any Trump critic to not at least consider the possibility of blowback. I will admit that even with my exceedingly small footprint, making me an unlikely initial target, I have moments of fear thinking about what will happen to me if Trump succeeds in completing his apparent goal of establishing a totalitarian form of governance in America, with him in charge.
The truth is, Trump is already well along in consolidating power into his own hands. It only took a few months for Trump to destroy our vaunted Separation of Powers. So far, at least, neither the Republican-controlled Congress nor our current ultra-conservative Supreme Court have raised a finger to fight back in defense of democracy. Every day the darkness enveloping this nation seems to grow darker.
So, yes, I will confess to moments of fear which have led to thoughts of backing away from speaking out on political issues. I have enough problems already, I have told myself, do I really want to get involved with all this? But I always come back to the same thing. If we have any chance of saving our Republic, and I believe we do, that chance will have to come from the public itself. And it will take all of us.
This essay then is my personal Declaration of Independence from fear. A commitment I am making to myself to never allow fear to stop me from speaking out. Because on the day one too many Americans have given in to their fears and withdrawn from the defense of democracy, the cause is lost.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Beyond Division: Choosing Compassion Without Losing Accountability
Compassionate dialogue is a framework that allows us to hold and navigate varied viewpoints without a communications breakdown.
Oct 05, 2025
How do we hold compassion for human loss while also confronting the harm of the beliefs they carried into the world? This tension came into sharp focus in the aftermath of the shooting of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. Social media quickly split between mourning and condemnation. Some offered condolences to his friends and family, while others condemned his legacy and criticized his supporters.
The clash revealed a deeper duality that many now feel: Grief for a human life lost alongside clarity about the damaging impact of certain viewpoints. If you find yourself torn between mourning a life and rejecting a legacy of harm, you are not alone. This is the conflict of our moment: how to honor our shared humanity without excusing the consequences of speech that undermines it.
The tension is understandable. We can hold compassion for a person who is harmed because of their viewpoints, while at the same time making clear that harmful speech cannot be dismissed as just another opinion. Violence is never the answer, but neither can we ignore the ways speech shapes lives and communities. Respect cannot coexist with speech that dehumanizes. Balancing compassion for human loss with accountability for words that dehumanize is the only way both truths can coexist—and the only way society can survive.
The path forward requires more than moral outrage; it demands frameworks for engagement. Compassionate engagement, the process of creating the conditions for compassion and accountability to exist side by side—offers one way to navigate this difficult terrain.
By starting with listening rather than persuasion, Sanders revealed that people who appear divided by ideology actually share common desires for dignity and opportunity.
Compassion is not absolution. To mourn a life is not to excuse the harm that that life’s words or actions set in motion. Compassion marks a refusal to celebrate violence, even as we continue to confront and resist the ideologies that wound communities. Accountability can—and must—stand alongside compassion.
For example, some argue that Kirk was respectful in person and that he simply had a viewpoint. Others note that he could be dismissive, using selective or misleading “facts” as counter-arguments and engaging in rhetoric that cast entire communities as less than fully human.
Compassionate dialogue can help build community across these different perspectives. It is a framework that allows us to hold and navigate varied viewpoints without a communications breakdown. Compassionate dialogue is not about agreement; it is about a way of engaging that opens conversations rather than shutting them down.
Compassionate dialogue begins with three practices: listening before responding, asking questions that invite reflection, and resisting the impulse to reduce others to their most polarizing positions. It asks us to slow down enough to see the person behind the viewpoint, even when we disagree. These practices don’t erase disagreement, but they keep it from collapsing into contempt.
Research backs up what compassionate dialogue shows in practice. Studies of intergroup contact consistently find that when people are brought together across differences in structured ways, trust grows and prejudice decreases. Evaluations of dialogue programs also show that approaches built on storytelling, perspective-taking, and listening can reduce polarization. Even large-scale studies of everyday conversations suggest that when people take turns fairly and truly listen, they come away feeling more connected. The lesson is clear: Dialogue done with care doesn’t erase disagreement, but it can soften division and build enough trust to imagine solutions together.
I have seen this in practice during dialogue sessions at the Yale School of Public Health. Participants who had built trust within their groups were able to express divergent perspectives openly and, at times, discover solutions by grounding themselves in shared values rather than clinging to distinct viewpoints. This approach allowed everyone to remain anchored in a “both-and” lens that centered their shared human experience.
There are glimpses of what this middle can look like. On a trip to West Virginia, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) spoke with Trump voters. Instead of beginning with a scripted pitch about his political agenda, he asked attendees to share their own perspectives on healthcare in their county. By starting with listening rather than persuasion, he opened a conversation that revealed shared concerns about dignity, affordability, and the future.
His question demonstrated a possible approach to cut past party divisions, inviting people to reflect on their lived experiences—what it feels like to try to afford healthcare, pay bills, or build a stable future. By starting with listening rather than persuasion, Sanders revealed that people who appear divided by ideology actually share common desires for dignity and opportunity.
This approach mirrors what compassionate dialogue calls us to practice: leading with questions, grounding in humanity, and finding connection without erasing difference.
Compassion and accountability are not soft ideals, but obligations born of relationship. Coexistence depends on meeting in the middle, where shared humanity becomes our compass. We can choose compassion without losing accountability and build a society that refuses to let either stand alone.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular