How do you navigate political anger?

Introduction- Host Mónica Guzmán introduces the episode’s theme: anger in politics and how it can be both constructive and destructive. She introduces the guest, Wilk Wilkinson, the host of Derate the Hate podcast, who reflects on how anger shapes our emotional intelligence and our reactions to political divisions.

• Mónica: “Anger is fire, right? It can forge and weld, but it can also burn. It can burn other people, it can burn trust.”

Wilk shares his experience of 9/11, a moment of unity followed by disillusionment as he observed political divides widen in the years that followed.

• Wilk: “What I became quickly disgusted by was the disdain and the hatred… about our president and our country.”

Wilk recalls his time as a cab driver, hearing international tourists praise America, which starkly contrasted with the growing disdain from his fellow Americans.

• Wilk: “Everybody wanted to be part of what America is…but yet we had people within our own country that started just saying the ugliest and most vile things.”

During the Obama years, Wilk describes how listening to talk radio for hours each day, as a truck driver, intensified his anger toward the political system.

• Wilk: “It just kept on getting worse and worse, and I kept on getting angrier and angrier.”

Wilk delves deeper into his personal history, explaining how growing up poor and being bullied contributed to his anger and sense of injustice.

• Wilk: “There was a lot of mental torment…That builds a lot of rage within a person. And trying to work through that with no real guidance is a very difficult thing.”

As an adult, Wilk’s anger manifested in violent confrontations. He reflects on the destructive cycle of feeling hopeless and disconnected, even questioning his own existence at his lowest points.

• Wilk: “I would lay in bed just feeling helpless and hopeless and feeling just take me out. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Mónica reads an emotional post Wilk wrote about his father, reflecting on the values of gratitude and personal responsibility that helped Wilk overcome much of his anger. 

Thank you to media partners Deseret News and KUOW.

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Wilk shares his attempt to run a t-shirt company with provocative slogans aimed at liberals, believing he could change minds through bold statements.

• Wilk: “What it was doing was not helping to change anybody’s mind about anything. What it was doing was pissing people off.”

Mónica and Wilk discuss how stoking anger can often feel like an accomplishment, but it rarely leads to meaningful change.

• Wilk: “I began to realize that many liberals wanted the same things that I wanted. They just wanted to get it a different way. When I began to realize that people that I believed were wrong were just wrong. They weren’t evil. I began to change my ways.”
• Wilk: “It almost feels like anger feels good sometimes…but nothing is actually accomplished.”

Wilk explains the “fear, outrage, and grievance” model (FOG), often used by politicians and media to manipulate emotions and engage people through anger.

• Wilk: “They engage because they’re enraged.”

Wilk attributes his transformation to two key values: gratitude and personal accountability. 

• Wilk: “The ultimate freedom is being able to choose my response…I am not going to allow that stuff to control me.”

Wilk shares the Sufi saying about “three gates” as a framework for responding to others, particularly online. He emphasizes the importance of asking if something is true, kind, and necessary before engaging, which has helped him avoid destructive interactions.

• Wilk: “What kind of world would we have if before people say the things they say online, they thought for a minute?”

When asked why he didn’t become one of the “outrage entrepreneurs,” Wilk explains that he couldn’t justify using anger as a tool, despite his strong conservative beliefs.

• Wilk: “Never allow your emotions to dictate your actions.”

Mónica asks if there is ever a place for anger in politics, and Wilk acknowledges that anger can be necessary to spark action.

• Wilk: “Do I understand that bully’s bully mentality? I understand it, but I cannot relate to it because I don’t think that it’s the proper way to go about it now I don’t like to go along to get along Republican way of going about things either and and I think we’ve gotten to a point in this country where far too often those who represent us are not the best of us and I think we need to do a lot better job at picking the people who we we choose to represent us. I don’t care on either side and yeah I wish we had I wish we had better choices.”
• Wilk: “Maybe that [anger] has to be the catalyst for getting you off the couch. But once you decide to take action, slow your roll, cool your jets.”

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Host Mónica Guzmán and co-host April Lawson discuss the interview with Wilk Wilkinson and how their Red and Blue sides struggle with anger. 

• April: “The word ‘radical’ means pure core of something. And I feel like what, yeah, like, so if you think about like a free radical in like chemistry or like the radical, which is the like central part of a Chinese character, like a Chinese word, it’s the pure core of the thing. So political radicalization tends to be moving a person from nuance and complexity and radicalism tends to push people away from that kind of complicated view towards a pure ideological, this is right, all of this is right, all of that is wrong, all these people are right, all these people are wrong. And so I think that it doesn’t mean people associate the word radicalized with like violence and stuff. And that’s not really what I mean. I mean, ideologically purified away from truth.”
• Monica: “To bridge to where I’m thinking of the strengths and weaknesses of the left, on these strategies around anger, you mentioned contempt and it’s a quote by, I believe it’s Jonathan Rauch and the quote was, ‘The dominant emotion on the right is anger and the dominant emotion on the left is contempt.’ And when I first heard that, that clicked with me.” 
• Mónica: “Contempt is the language of hatred… the left may feel more conscious of the appropriate ways to be and not be, but it still comes out in subtle ways of excluding.”

Mónica identifies the strategic use of anger in left-leaning movements, pointing to examples like the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too.

• Mónica: “I’ve witnessed a lot of movements for change that have been able to get the anger out there and then get thoughtful about the campaign.”

April challenges the idea that venting anger leads to relief, sharing her belief that unchecked anger only perpetuates itself.

• April: “In my experience, people don’t settle down on their own… they just stay in the spin of ‘this is crazy and everyone should listen to this.'”

Mónica shares a recurring fantasy from her younger years about storming out of a room after hearing something against her values.

• Mónica: “I wanted the opportunity for someone to say something to me that was so obviously against my values that I would storm out of the room and it would feel wonderful.”

April explains how she tries to manage anger in political conversations by redirecting people away from the “spin” of their emotions.

• April: “What I will do is I will ask follow-up questions that sound and are really respectful, but they don’t… make the person more defensive. I try to get them back to something they’ve experienced or that they’ve seen.”

April also reflects on her own struggles with anger, particularly her fear of it and how she often suppresses it. 

• April: “Pretty soon, you’ve become something that is inoffensive. It’s not just that you choose to edit yourself. It’s that you’ve become so bland and so hushed that it’s not you.”

Mónica summarizes the episode.

Featured Song: “To Cross the Divide” by Hank Linderman

Episode Credits. 

(Music up and under)

Mónica Guzmán:

Anger. We all feel it sometime or another when we think about our politics. But how do we make sure that whatever our anger touches, it doesn’t destroy?

Wilk Wilkinson:

When that happens to a person who isn’t on top of their emotional intelligence game, things start to get ugly, right?

Mónica:

And then, we peer into some of the surprising places that this emotion has embedded itself in our culture.

I wanted the opportunity for someone to say something to me that was so obviously against my values that I would storm out of the room and it would feel wonderful. All that and more is just ahead.

(music out)

(theme music up and under)

Welcome to A Braver Way, a show about how you can disagree about politics without losing heart. I’m Mónica Guzmán, your guide across the divide, and I’m here to help you hear and be heard. by people who confound you. Across this country, we are proudly conservative, liberal, independent, or just ourselves.

And we don’t want to be at war here. We want to be at home. So strap in. Because it’s time we learn how to turn up the heat, turn down the fear, and get real about things that matter with more of our fellow Americans than we thought possible.

(music up and under)

Hey everyone, and welcome to an episode where we are going to get up close and personal with an emotion that flashes everywhere in our politics, whether we like it or not, anger.

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Anger is, it’s amazing. When something feels wrong or unfair or unacceptable, getting angry is such a force.

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It moves you, to move the people around you, to focus their attention, to let them know, I matter, this matters, so listen up.

I look around at the present and the past in America, and it seems clear to me, so much bad stuff got better in part because someone, sometimes a lot of someone’s, got angry enough to fix it. Anger is fire, right? It can forge and weld, but it can also burn. It can burn other people, it can burn trust. And if you’ve ever gotten angry enough to not really recognize yourself in something monstrous you said or did – I sure have – you know that it can burn you, too.

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So how do you hold that heat when you’re ticked off at people on the other side who keep getting in the way of what you want to see or when something in you roars with the thought that people should know better about how this country works or what ought to matter most as we try to all live in it.

Whether you’re conservative or liberal or independent, when it’s one vision clashing against another over and over again this election season, how do you navigate your political anger? And how do you keep it from hardening into hate? Or something we’ve seen far too much of recently, violence.

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My guest today is no stranger to what anger can burn and build.

If you’ve been with us a while, you might remember Wilk Wilkinson from our “Ask Me Anything” episode last season. Wilk is a husband, a dad, and a former cab and truck driver who’s now a transportation operations and logistics manager in Clearwater, Minnesota. But I know him best, and some of you might too, as the host of Derate the Hate, a powerful podcast that’s all about, and I quote, bettering the world one attitude at a time.

Wilk is a bridge builder, across our political divide, our class divide, and a whole lot else, but the path that got him here wasn’t exactly calm. Or even all that political. Wilk grew up pretty disengaged from politics. Even when he was coming into adulthood, he says, he didn’t really know the difference between conservatives and liberals, and he didn’t much care.

But that all started to shift on a day that changed everything for a lot of Americans. September 11th, 2001.

Wilk:

I remember vividly where I was sittin’. I was sittin’ in the old Castleberry Walmart parking lot getting ready to deliver plants to their garden center. That’s how vivid it was for me. But, the thing that really struck me about 9/11 was how the country came together.

There was a moment of unity a, just a powerful moment of unity. People started putting flags on their houses, you know, they were putting flags on the windows of their cars they were driving around, had USA written in soap on the back windows. It was a very, very powerful time.

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But it did not take very long and some of those people that were talking about unity began the Bush bashing. “Bush lied, people died.” And started some of the ugliest things that I had, I was hearing, and I just didn’t understand it because at the time I couldn’t have told you the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, a conservative and a liberal. What I became quickly disgusted by was, the disdain and the hatred and the things that were being said about our president and our country.

Mónica:

And I remember you were saying when you were a cab driver in Orlando, here’s a tourist trap, people from all over the world come in and you’re hearing them in the backseat talk about, “we’re here in America. This place is awesome. We’re going to have fun.” Some folks from other places almost wishing that they could have more of what we had here.

Wilk:

That was the weirdest thing. I was constantly hearing stories and interacting with people from different places around the world and everybody wanted to be part of what America is. Everybody wanted to be part of that dream, but yet we had people within our own country that started just saying the ugliest and most vile things. And I’m like, where’s the disconnect here?

Mónica:

Yeah. Yeah. I had told you this before and I wondered if I should bring it up, but I’m going to go ahead and bring it up which is that, when I first heard you talk about this I remembered that I, as a college student, around that time (I was a freshman in 2001, in 9/11, and then by 2003, I was studying abroad) I was America bashing. Like I immigrated to this country, I have a lot to be grateful for in this country, but at the time, I remember George W. Bush was like, it was fun to just really not be into the guy. I remember telling other students that I was studying with, I wish I could live in Europe. I want to live in Europe. Europe’s better. I had been learning in my sociology classes, all the ways that, America muscled its way around the world.

And I had some real problems with some of the hypocrisy and, like, we’re the shining light, but I was seeing all this other stuff I didn’t like. But, anyway, when you talk about that, I realized if I had been in the back of your cab, America bashing, Wilk would have been in the front going, Nope.

And I think about it very differently now, but that was a bit of my experience with anger. Maybe some of my earliest experiences with political anger.

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So how fascinating, right? Thinking back to that time, the George W. Bush and Iraq war era. Wilk and I were in different parts of the country, living in different information and political bubbles, getting angry at the state of things for completely different reasons.

Jumping ahead to the Obama years, I think I’ve mentioned here before that I was all in for the hope and change that Obama was rooting for at that time. Wilk, meanwhile, moved back to the Midwest, where he’d grown up, to help take care of his family. He became a truck driver. And that gave him a bunch of time to listen to the radio.

Wilk:

I began to listen to political talk radio 10, 12 hours a day. And then when the, when the constant blame game started during the during the Obama years. And then the, you didn’t build that thing. And it was, and then the world apology tour, 

Mónica:

Hmm, yeah..

Wilk:

And all these different things just kept on compiling in my mind as, this is not what we are supposed to be. This is just too damn ugly. 

And it just kept on getting worse and worse, and I kept on getting angrier and angrier. And at that point, I’m driving a truck, I’m making good money, I owned my own home. So I changed my life by doing things that I knew that other people could do. But yet I’m listening to things that on the radio and from our politicians in our media, people just saying, you can’t succeed in this country. And I knew that was wrong. And my life experience did not comport, did not align with all of these things that I’m hearing from these people that are running down a country that, that provided me the opportunities to succeed greatly. 

So here I am loving this country. Here they are, running down this country and when that happens to a person who isn’t on top of their emotional intelligence game? Things start to get ugly, right?

Mónica:

Right, right, right. So before we get to that I wanted to come back a little bit into, as you were, you said you spent sometimes 10, 12 hours, listening to talk radio. It sounds like you had these questions that were confounding you, you know, why are people in our country running down the country while they’re benefiting so much from it?

And at that point, help us understand where that anger came from, like when you heard those messages, what inside you was reacting the most?

Wilk:

So Mónica , I think the biggest thing that was building that fire inside of me was the fact that I grew up so poor. I had a lot of animosity from growing up poor.

That, that period of my life, we ended up moving around a lot as a family. And the town that I happened to live in from second to fifth grade was definitely a spot where I did not fit in. There was a group of kids that found it necessary for whatever reason to pick on me all the time. Let’s just put it that way.

Yeah, there was there was a lot of mental torment. There was physical beatings. I tried to stick up for myself. I just wasn’t able to at the time. I was a very small kid. And it, it had a huge impact on me. The bullying, not being able to defend myself. Combined with my already strong level of animosity for not having the kind of things that other people had and just, wishing that life was different. That builds a lot of rage within a person. And trying to work through that with no real guidance is a very, very difficult thing.

Mónica:

Because you said you learned, you got bigger. You learned how to fight. And you fought back,

Wilk:

Oh, yeah.

Mónica:

You did.

Wilk:

Yeah, no I, not only did I fight back for me I started fighting back for other people. And I was never a great fighter, but I would stick up for kids that couldn’t stick up for themselves. And then I would take that beating and it was just one of these things.

(music under)

Mónica:

The fighting did not stop as Wilk became an adult. He told me about the fights he got into in his twenties and thirties, in bars, in alleyways.  Fights that left him bloodied, and not all that sure if he’d fully recover.

Wilk:

There was plenty of times, like I said, there was, my life has had a lot of peaks and valleys,

(Music out)

…and there was a number of times where I was just so absolutely miserable with an absolute overwhelming feeling in my brain that God hated me and I was being punished for something, you know?

Mónica:

Mm hmm

Wilk:

And I can remember, countless nights, just not being able to sleep, just laying in bed, just thinking, you know, if you hate me this much, just take me out. I just don’t even want to be here anymore. And I think a lot of that actually went back to being a kid and being in those completely uncontrollable situations and feeling like life would never, ever be the same. So I, yeah, I would lay in bed just feeling helpless and hopeless and feeling just take me out. I don’t want to be here anymore.

Mónica:

Thank you for sharing that by the way. Yeah so I read a post you wrote in 2011 about your dad. And it was beautiful. And you wrote it on what would have been his 70th birthday.

You talked about how he served in the Navy, how he worked to the bone in blue collar jobs like truck driving, construction. How he had big financial struggles that of course you felt and you said that you were so grateful to him. You wrote “while most kids I knew couldn’t understand why we didn’t have a phone or a color TV, I was too busy camping, hunting, and fishing with my dad to really care.” 

Wilk:

Mm hmm

Mónica:

You remembered, I love this, that when you were eight years old and you told him that you wanted a leather jacket, like Michael Jackson, he gave you a quarter for every chick that you kept alive one summer, and you came out with two rewards for that effort, 30 plus dollars in your pocket, which was a lot in 1983 or whatever it was, and the lesson that despite the hardships, working hard meant that you could get what you wanted.

Wilk:

Mm hmm

Mónica:

You also wrote in this post that when your dad had to use food stamps to feed the kids that it really stung and you could tell, and that when you were both grown up, he once said to you, nothing has ever hurt me more or devalued me as a man, as not being able to support my family. So I’m here’s why I’m reading this back to you here

Today you are clearly not, as, as miserable as you just described that you have been in the past, you are not as overcome by anger about politics or much else. You’re not, in as many kind of these fights that you were in, we’re going to explore how you did that, how you change those things to see what lessons we can draw for this moment and for everyone conservative and liberal who feels like anger might be getting in the way of something.

And I know that at least two big values that you credit in your work with helping you through all of that show up in this post about your dad. And in a lot of your work all the time, gratitude and personal responsibility.

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This season we are proud to be partnering with two fantastic media organizations to help us reach more listeners like you. KUOW is Seattle’s NPR affiliate station. Founded with the idea that everyone should have free access to honest, fact checked information, Deseret News is a multi platform newspaper based in Salt Lake City committed to providing thoughtful reporting and insightful commentary from the Intermountain West.

Help us by helping them. Learn how at kuow.org/brave or deseret.com/subscribe. Thank you, Deseret News and KUOW for helping us create bridges between communities and A Braver Way listeners everywhere.

(music out, segue and up)

Before we move on, I want to tell you about one of our supporting partners, Ground News. Ground News is an app and website that gathers fragmented media in one place, so readers can compare coverage from outlets that serve different audiences and see a fuller picture of the breaking news being reported around the world.

My favorite feature is their Blindspot feed. Whether you lean left or right, it shows you the stories the other side is talking about, that your side, for whatever reason, isn’t. 

Check out Ground News at ground.news/abraberway. Learn more about Braver Network and the movement for civic renewal at braverangels.org/abraverway.

Mónica:

So, failed understanding apparel.

Wilk:

(laughter) Yeah. Back in 2019, I I think it was early 2019. I had this idea that if I can just show so many, show liberals how wrong they are about these different things, they’ll just start to get it. And I think, The world’s going to become a better place.

And I thought the way that to catch people’s eye was to start a t shirt company with the initials FU on it. And so that’s what I did.

Mónica:

I feel like we should share some of the taglines that were on these shirts, by the way, just to give people a sense. Let’s see. “My rights do not end where your feelings begin”, was on a shirt. “If this flag offends you, I’ll help you pack”. And then the tagline, “because some things are better said with an F U”.

Wilk:

Yeah.

Mónica:

And you did promote this you spent money promoting it. 

Wilk:

Oh yeah.

Mónica:

What was driving that? You just said that it was if I could get liberals to just see. So you thought. You thought these slogans can really change minds.

Wilk:

Naively, I believed that. Yeah. I quickly realized that what it was doing was not helping to change anybody’s mind about anything. What it was doing was pissing people off. And when I started to see I thought the stuff that people would say, in comments online were pretty ugly before. When I started to see what people were saying, some of it put to shame the stuff that I used to hear about Bush when I so yeah, I just, people started wishing ill upon me, wishing ill upon my family, telling me I should go kill myself and just some ugly stuff. And I realized fairly quickly that I was wasting my time and my money on something that was not in any way going to make the world a better place.

Mónica:

Let me drill into that a little bit because with the t shirt company and with, your being online and fighting back, when you felt at least earlier on, attacked for your views, it did seem like, hey, you want your voice to be out there mattering. You want to grow an audience. You want to get people to buy your shirts. You want to get the message out there, with these slogans and whatnot. And I can see sort of a, there’s like there’s a fork in the road I want to ask you about, because I think we know, many of us know, that a really, what appears to be a common way to build an audience is to stoke outrage.

Wilk:

Mm hmm

Mónica:

Is to get divisive, is to go down that path. So I’m thinking about that for you, you had you, you had these slogans, you were angry about a lot of what was going on, you could have built an audience and felt like you mattered in that way, right? Like your voice mattered and you were speaking out by going ahead and making a podcast that was about how terrible liberals are.

Wilk:

Mm hmm

Mónica:

You know? And get ragey and angry like a lot of people out there do. Why didn’t you do that?

Wilk:

So obviously I speak a lot about the fear, outrage and grievance model that I see from so many politicians in the media.

And when I realized that, I guess I began to realize. that many liberals wanted the same things that I wanted. They just wanted to get it a different way. When I began to realize that people that I believed were wrong, were just wrong. They weren’t evil. I began to change my ways when I started to think of how people use that fear, outrage, and grievance model. And I’ve probably mentioned this countless times.

Mónica:

Yeah. I want to let audiences know that, that spells FOG, which is perfect because you get lost in it, right?

Wilk:

You get lost in the fog, right? That fear, outrage, and grievance model that is used to stoke anger. Yeah, it sells soap, right? It gets clicks. It’s certainly more… People are much more likely to engage when they’re enraged.

When they’re like, Oh, that’s beautiful. That makes sense. Then they just go on about their day. 

Mónica:

Mm hmm

Wilk:

When they’re really pissed, and they’re just outraged, and they’re like, UGH! This is a grievance that I’ve had in my mind for so long, now I’m gonna burst, I’m gonna start clicking on stuff, I’m gonna start I’m going to say something, I’m going to do something, I’m going to.. They engage because they’re enraged.

Mónica:

And I remember that from the Bush-bashing years. I remember how it felt. I remember picking up like a book in a British library that was like Weapons of Mass Deception, one of those books that’s really exaggerated on things but really acts like it knows everything and I just devoured that book going, YEAH!!!!

Like all this is so messed up and it felt, like can you tell, how did, how does it, how did it feel for you, ‘Cause it almost feels like anger almost feels good sometimes. It feels good to just be angry and to feel right. 

Wilk:

Right

Mónica:

Do you remember that in your experience? 

Wilk:

Yeah, but it’s because you falsely feel like you have accomplished something, but nothing is actually accomplished. 

Mónica:

Say more, because that’s fascinating.

Wilk:

You’re like, no, I’m mad and I need to get it out. I am a teapot that’s about to burst. And once I spew all this crap, the pressure is released. And now I’ve accomplished something. But I haven’t really accomplished anything.

Mónica:

Ohh! That’s fascinating. I’ve never thought of it that way. It feels like an accomplishment to release your own pressure. 

Wilk:

Mm hmm

Mónica:

And maybe sometimes you think that you’ve done something good. You’ve said something that makes a difference out there. And you somehow saw through that?

Wilk:

Somehow. I, yeah I

Mónica:

How, Wilk? Teach us your ways.

Wilk:

So it really comes back again to two things that you mentioned that I speak about often is gratitude and personal accountability, right?

I figured out that you cannot be happy without being grateful. I didn’t want to be miserable anymore so I started focusing more on gratitude. What is it that I have to be grateful for? And then I started to realize the personal accountability piece is, there is so much in this world that’s out of my control.

Mónica:

Mmm

Wilk:

And it’s not a matter of allowing those things that are outside of my control to make me angry and a lot of this came from books. A Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. You know How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Those kind of things, started all these lessons that I was picking up in these books.  

And I was never a reader. I’ve never been a reader. I’m a very slow reader. I love audiobooks by the way. 

But just coming to the realization, the personal accountability realization that it’s not what happens in this world. That’s out of my control. That matters. It’s a matter of how I react to it. I’m not going to let these things outside of my control me because I don’t want to be controlled. I am a conservative guy. I want to have the ultimate freedom and that ultimate freedom is being able to choose my response and how I am going to react to things that are outside of my control and I am not going to allow that stuff to control me.

Mónica:

I have heard you, I’ve heard you say some beautiful things about liberty, a really strong value that’s a key piece of the American story and the American promise is liberty. And so I love the way you just put it, that there’s a liberty that comes from recognizing that you do have power to change things. Because as you were talking, I was thinking to myself, I think there’s a lot of people out there who, they end up still quite in their anger in part, because they just don’t, they feel helpless.

These things that they’re angry about, they’re just like, there’s no way to change them. There’s nothing I can do. It’s, they’re the cause of my misery. That’s it. I’m stuck, right? So I’m really struck by the way you put that.

Wilk:

The reality is people can’t make us mad. We can only allow whatever they’re doing to override our ability to choose our response.

Mónica:

Mmm

Wilk: 

And again, that to me stands out as me not really embracing my freedom, not really embracing my ability to response, you know, or to respond.

Mónica:

And the personal accountability ..

Wilk:

The personal accountability.

Mónica:

is like you can be accountable to yourself for those choices. So walk us through, I’m thinking about you know, social media. You, there were times where you were in there, like so many people out there are in there, there’s this joke in an online comic called XKCD. And it says, it’s like somebody going, “honey, are you coming to bed?” And the person goes, “No! Someone is wrong on the internet!” And they’re huddled over, just typing. Have you seen that one? (both laughing) Classic. 

Wilk:

I’ve seen that one

Mónica:

Yeah. How… Now, these days when you think about when you’ve brought gratitude and you’ve brought personal accountability and you’ve been through the journey you’ve been through, let’s say that you’re on social media and you see something that really ticks you off. How do you, what do you do?

Wilk:

I wait a second. There’s an old Sufi saying called three gates. And it basically says before you speak, in this case, respond right? On social media before you start typing, before your keyboard warrior fingers get going. Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. Number one, is it true? Number two, is it kind? And number three, is it necessary? And when I think about that phrase, the first time I saw I was on a meme, it hit me like a ton of bricks because it was one of these things that was, so simple, yet so profound, right? 

Mónica:

Mmmm

Wilk:

In that moment, I thought, what if everybody really took to heart this old Sufi saying before responding to things on the internet, right? What kind of world would we have if before people say the things that they say online, what if they just thought for a minute, do I want my children to read this, next week, next month, five years from now? Do I want this to be part of my legacy?

Mónica:

Mmmm.  Let me ask about that piece, the, is it necessary? ‘Cause I’m wondering, through this, what advice you might give someone who’s listening to this and has heard your story and thinks you should have kept going with that t shirt company. That the fight is just too important to be taming and walking away from the emotion that can fuel so much of it, anger can be so mobilizing. It can be so preoccupying that all your energy is in that thing, right?

So what would you say to someone who’s no man, this fight is real and it’s big. And there’s things liberals are just wrong about. And we need to take it to them.

Wilk:

Well. yeah, I’ve got no qualms with saying that liberals are wrong on most things. That’s really my…

Mónica:

And I’ll sit here as a liberal and take it. Yes, go ahead.

Wilk:

No, but that’s, that is my opinion. And I’ve got no problem with liberals saying I think conservatives are wrong on most things. But the way we convey that message to those people, the way that we approach contentious topics is, to me, as important as anything. One of the reasons that I have been able to overcome my own anger and do the things that I’ve done with my life and be the person that I feel that I am today is because I started to live by just the motto of, never allow your emotions to dictate your actions. Now, I couldn’t in good conscience, being that’s, not only could I not do it in good conscience, I couldn’t be the person I am today by becoming one of those outrage entrepreneurs online when I truly believe personally that you should not allow your emotions to dictate your actions. 

Mónica:

Right.

Wilk:

I couldn’t do the two together and sleep at night. I couldn’t do it.

Mónica:

Wow. I really love how at the beginning of Derate the Hate podcast episodes, there’s these taglines, these beautiful promises. We’re changing the world one attitude at a time. We didn’t create the hate, but we can derate the hate. What have you done today to make your life a better life? It’s up to you to make your life a better life, which makes your world a better place. 

It’s almost like I can hear you saying that to yourself.

Wilk:

Yeah, I think you nailed it. It’s me constantly reminding myself, this is where I have to be to be the person that I want to be.

And, like I said, I make no bones about it. I’ve made more mistakes in my life than most people and I’ve tried to learn from them. And I need daily reminders in order not to be the person that I once was and to try and be a better person each day.

Mónica:

Amazing. So, going back to when you were a kid, you mentioned that as you learned to fight, you got to the point where you started taking beatings for other kids that you thought couldn’t fight back, that in a way you were the bully’s bully.

So, I want to bring this to the presidential election for a moment, because one of the candidates, Donald Trump has often said, to his supporters like, they’re coming for you, I’m just in their way. I’m going to fight for you. They’re the bullies, right? ‘Cause you might have at one point thought two of liberals as bullies, and maybe you still do.

Given your experience, how do you relate to that? Cause here’s someone who’s saying, I will be the bully’s bully. I will stand up for you. So how do you relate to that?

Wilk:

So, I understand it. I don’t know that I can relate to it. In my mind now, especially not always throughout my life, but in my, I’ve tried to be this way.

I am a lot better at it now than I used to be. It’s, you don’t know what anybody, you don’t know the storms that other people are going through. So your default position in all situations should be kind. I don’t see that from Donald Trump. I do believe in, in a lot of ways and certainly in most policy positions, that what he is doing far better aligns with my life and what I want from my country than what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz certainly do.

But I don’t like the way he goes about it. I think there is a much, much, much better way. And I think he has taken some very ruthless and unwarranted attacks from the left.

I think anybody who looks at it objectively would have to, they, they are willfully blind if they don’t see it. From my opinion.

That being said, I think he started on a path from the time he came down the elevator of I’ve got to be this guy that’s going to fight when Republicans have never traditionally fought. I’ve got to be ugly in order to show people that I am not the go along to get along Republican, you know? I am going to be a big tent because I’m going to bring in all these people who are outraged.

And now all of these people who are outraged, but never wanted any part of politics now are, are now involved. So, do I understand it? Do I understand that bully’s bully mentality? I understand it. But I cannot relate to it because I don’t think that it’s the proper way to go about it. 

Now, I don’t like the go along to get along Republican way of going about things either. And I think we’ve gotten to a point in this country where far too often those who represent us are not the best of us, and I think we need to do a lot better job at picking the people who we choose to represent us. I don’t care on either side. And yeah, I wish we had, I wish we had better choices.

Mónica:

I have one more question for you.

Wilk:

Absolutely.

Mónica:

We’ve been bashing anger this whole episode. Can fighting back with anger in our politics be good? And where have you drawn the line for yourself?

Wilk:

So, there is definitely a point where. where anger becomes necessary. If we get to a point where we become so politically pacifistic, if that’s a word, that we don’t do anything… Sometimes it does take a little bit of anger to get the wheels turning. But again, I would just encourage people, don’t make your decisions based on anger. Maybe that has to be the catalyst for getting you off the couch. 

Mónica:

Mmmm

Wilk:

But once you decide to take action, slow your roll, cool your jets, figure out who you are, what you want the result to be, and try to figure out the best way to get there.

Mónica:

I love that note about figuring out, as part of the list, you said, who you are. Who you are, the values you’ve got, who you are. 

Well, Wilk, thank you so much. This was an awesome conversation. Thank you for sharing your journey, all the ups and downs and the lessons. Really appreciate it.

(music up and under)

Wilk:

It’s been an honor. You’re a, you’re definitely one of my favorite people. Take care.

(segue music up and under)

Mónica:

Back at you. Thank you.

Before we move on, I want to tell you about another one of our supporting partners, Rank the Vote. Rank the Vote is the largest ranked choice voting organization in the country, with a presence in dozens of states. They provide training and resources to motivated activists looking to pass ranked choice voting in their communities.

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Learn more about Braver Network and the movement for civic renewal at braverangels.org/abraverway.

(music out. Segue music under)

It can feel impossible. to talk in any way productively with someone on the other side of the political divide. But it doesn’t have to. And if you want to learn some tried and true best practices for conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between, including ways to turn down the temperature when it’s going way up, you might want to consider signing up for a Braver Angels workshop.

We’ve got a whole bunch to choose from, like Depolarizing Within, Skills for Disagreeing Better, Families and Politics, and even Skills for Social Media. Learn more and find the schedule of upcoming workshops at the link in our show notes.

(music out)

Slow your roll. Cool your jets. Figure out what you want the result to be. You know, it struck me talking to Wilk, how much our driving question this episode, “how do you navigate political anger?”, seems to be about time and goals. Because when you care about something, you want to do something. Fast. 

But there’s questions. What do you want to do? And how? And to what actual end? Can you give yourself the time to figure that out? Because if you’re worked up and mad at something, or someone, the first thing that pops into your head to say or do is probably not the thing that’s gonna get you there. Anger shows up so many places in our politics, left and right, and everywhere in between, that I had a pretty strong sense that April Lawson and I were gonna have a lot to talk about.

(music under)

April is my friend, my colleague, a political red to my blue, and overall, one of the calmest, most restrained people I know. So this should be interesting.

Mónica:

Hey, April, my friend, how are you? 

April Lawson:

Good, how are you? 

Mónica:

I’m good. I’m not mad today. At the world war. At anything particularly happening in it..

April:

Cool

Mónica:

..which is probably good for having a conversation about getting mad about politics.

April:

Yes. Yes

Mónica:

Let’s start with our first question. What was a favorite takeaway for you from the conversation with Wilk.

April:

Totally. The first thing I have to say is I just love Wilk Wilkinson. I love him to pieces. I think it was, this was fantastic. I love, love it. In terms of my favorite, one of my favorite like takeaways or bridging strategies, I really liked his point about you have got to not let your emotions drive your actions and your decisions.

That’s one of those fundamental inner things that leads to lots of good outcomes down the road.

Mónica:

Yeah, absolutely. And lifting off of that, the thing that really came across to me so strongly, there were a couple, but one of them was, how he tied the ability to choose your own response. 

April:

Mm hm

Mónica:

When something happens and you get that swept up feeling that a strong emotion like anger will create, when you find a way to choose your response, what you’re really doing is exercising your freedom.

April:

Yes! 

Mónica:

You and I know Wilk as someone for whom liberty is everything. 

April:

Absolutely.

Mónica: 

And really, it’s kind of everything for the DNA of this country, right? In its self definition. So when he put that together, I just had never. I had never thought of it that way. Yeah, I don’t want to be controlled by other people! That sounds terrible. I’m not going to do that. Yeah, so let’s exercise some freedom. 

April:

Mm hm

Mónica:

Okay let’s move to our next question. As a red you and a blue me, what do you think your side is strong at, or weak at, when it comes to the strategies brought up in this episode? And I can start, you can start. Why don’t you decide.

April:

I think I’d like to start just because I don’t want what I’m about to say to sound like a response to you, or as a copping to something you said. Because honestly, I have pretty critical stuff to say about the right on this. I think honestly that we are terrible at this. Like I, the, it did not surprise me that part of what radicalized Wilk was talk radio, because it is so, so nasty.

I used to listen to it just partly to be in touch with where people were. There, there’s just so much contempt and disgust and disdain. And I read something once that said that disgust is the language of hatred, and that’s I think because what it does is it like taps into a human being, into the human brain and makes us say oh that’s a germ, that’s a something like filthy, dirty, threatening to my health. That’s a different other thing that I need to shun. And so it’s honestly, my review of the red side on political outrage and political anger is pretty bad. It’s pretty bad. So that’s, 

Mónica:

Wow. 

April:

That’s what I think.

Mónica:

Okay. You mentioned contempt and then disgust being the language of hatred. How interesting. You said something in the beginning, beginning that you’re not surprised that Wilk, listen to talk radio and you use the word radicalized, that’s what radicalized Wilk. And I wanted to ask you, what do you mean when you say the word radicalized?

April:

That’s fair. I don’t know if he would use that word and that’s important. What I meant was, so I like etymology. The word radical means pure core of something. And I feel like..

Mónica:

Huh!

April:

..what, yeah. So if you think about a free radical in like chemistry or like the radical, which is the like central part of a Chinese character, like a Chinese word, it’s the pure core of the thing.

So political radicalization tends to be moving a person from nuance and complexity and radicalism tends to push people away from that kind of complicated view towards a pure ideological, this is right. All of this is right. All of that is wrong. All these people are right. 

Mónica:

I see

April:

All these people are wrong. And I think that, it doesn’t, people associate the word radicalized with like violence and stuff. And that’s not really what I mean. I mean ideologically purified.

Mónica:

Got you

April:

Away from truth, in my view. That’s what I mean by that.

Mónica:

Oh, that’s so interesting. Okay, I didn’t know that was, I love etymology too. Seeing where the origins of things, what’s about that pureness that may lead to more rigidity and lack of nuance just by definition.

Wow. 

April:

Just flying my nerd flag. 

Mónica:

Yes! Fly it high, April, fly it high. As someone on the left I happen to agree with your assessment of anger on the right. It certainly seems..it feels that way to me, but to bridge to where I’m thinking of the strengths and weaknesses of the left on these strategies around anger, you mentioned contempt.

And it’s a quote by, I believe it’s Jonathan Rauch. And the quote was: “The dominant emotion on the right is anger. And the dominant emotion on the left is contempt.” 

April:

Oof

Mónica:

And when I first heard that, that clicked with me. 

April:

Yes

Mónica:

And so I was thinking about that during the conversation with Wilk. I had that in the back of my mind.

Because I think where the left is quite weak on the strategies to navigate anger, that maybe in a fun, funny way, The right is quite strong, is at least the right gets mad openly. 

April:

Aw. That’s true. 

Mónica:

Do you know what I mean? At least the rage comes out and is up front and is there and you can see it and you can feel it.

But at least it’s getting that vocalization. On the left, and again, we speak in generalities here, right? But the impression that I have is that the left is somehow more conscious of the appropriate ways to be and not be. And so it’s almost like we metabolize our anger into these subtle ways of excluding that on the surface may look quite polite sometimes.

It’s hard for me to illustrate this with concrete examples, but I do think like on the left we hear so many politicians be quite civil and quite, what have you, as they speak. But it’s like yeah, but listen to what they’re saying Sometimes what many politicians on the left is saying comes from this place of baked in contempt. For people who disagree and it may come off quite civil in the way that you’re not using loud voices, and you’re not even using insulting words, but just in the way you sculpt the story about people.

April:

Mm hm

Mónica:

It’s confessing that deeper, it’s like you’ve swallowed the anger and you’ve squeezed it out in a way that is more somehow culturally appropriate, but it’s still contemptuous. It’s still there. 

April:

I’ve got to say, Móni, I am so appreciative. This happens periodically on this podcast that I just feel like a weight is lifted from my shoulders because somebody admits it. Because what you just said, I feel that. I feel that. I have felt it since I went from growing up in Kansas to going to school at Yale. That has been so palpable and, but I certainly haven’t heard a blue put words to it, and so I appreciate it.

Mónica:

I just, as you were talking about, thought of an example. Somebody was telling me about a speech that a very prominent Democratic politician made, and the speech was super, you know, magnanimous and about a lot of bridge building.

But then, this person came to a point where they basically said, let me see if I remember this right. When you’re talking with your relatives and they really, some people just, they’re older and they may not come around basically to how obvious our point of view is…Y’know that kind of thing?

April:

Was this Barack Obama at the DNC? I think it was. 

Mónica:

Yes. This was Barack Obama at the DNC.

April:

I noticed that too.

Mónica:

And it was. I didn’t watch the speech, but somebody told me about it, who, who noticed that one ugh, somebody who’s also on the left and shared this with me. And I said, Oh yeah, yeah. 

You know, it’s there’s still that sense of but everybody on the right is just so foolish and, and, to give Obama credit in that speech I don’t think he came off particularly contemptuous, but there’s just a way that still, the anger just can calcify into this certainty and into this sense of superiority that, can sure come off like contempt.

April:

And there’s this, now that you say that, you can see the cycle, right? Contempt makes people angry. The way that the left responds to that anger is like we’re gonna take the high ground, but that actually is a sublimation of anger, and so there’s more contempt, and then that generates the anger, and around we go.

So yeah. 

Mónica:

Yep. And this pains me to say, this pains me to say it, but like I said, at least the right just says what they’re angry about in a full voice. And there’s something to that, that is pure. I didn’t say what I think the blue side is strong on. 

April:

Is good at, yeah. Tell me. 

Mónica:

Yeah, so what I think the blue side is very strong on is something that Wilk said toward the end.

He said that, anger can be good, it can be really good for getting you off the couch. It’s just when it’s time to make a decision about what to do, slow your roll, take a beat, get thoughtful. And I’ve witnessed a lot of movements for change and protest from the left that have been able, I think, to do that.

Get the anger out there so people get off the couch. And then get thoughtful about the campaign, about the protest. And I, and it feels like a, an effective use of anger, often. April:

Hm

Mónica:

Get them off the couch, but oftentimes someone is thinking about organizations or advocacy organizations are thinking about, okay, what do we do now?

Let’s be thoughtful. So that’s why I think we’re strong. 

April:

Can you give me an example? Because I this in the most respectful way possible. Thoughtful is not the word that comes to mind when I think of protesters.

Mónica:

Yeah. Where has it been thoughtful? 

April:

Help me see it.Yep.Yeah. 

Mónica:

It’s a good challenging question.

April:

And you may mean thoughtful differently than I do. You may just mean strategic as opposed to visceral?

Mónica:

Yes. I think it’s closer to strategic. There was something about the Women’s March back in 2017. There was something about Black Lives Matter having grown from something that was just a social media meme into a national movement.

There was, the, lots of people point to 

April:

Me Too. 

Mónica:

Me Too. Oh my gosh, Me Too’s a really good one. A lot of people point to the same sex marriage set of movements which certainly started off being kind on the left but it’s less of a left/right issue now. Yeah those seemed to be strategic.

April:

So that, honestly, the place I’m getting tripped up is you said, like Wilk, okay, when it’s time to make a decision, slow your roll, make a good decision. And I have often thought that protesters on the left are great at making a lot of noise and getting a lot of attention and getting focused to something.

But then when they’re in power, they don’t know how to govern because being angry about something and like having a sense of this is unjust does not translate into how do you make difficult decisions.

Mónica:

There it is. Reds and blues, contempt, disgust, rage – get it under control. 

April:

We can all get a llittle bit better here, guys. And we’re all guilty of it.

Mónica:

…which leads us to our next question. Where does the driving question show up in your life, and how do the ideas in this episode inform it? 

April:

Why don’t you start this one?

Mónica:

I had to think for a minute because In the last several years, it has felt like anger in politics has shown up less for me, probably because I’m I don’t know.…studying this stuff. 

April:

Mm hm

Mónica:

I don’t know. But, there is a place where it still shows up, and I have lots of memories of being younger, and it being very dominant. And that’s whenever I think someone is willfully not seeing something obvious, I explode. And I remembered a couple of places. It’s in the family, it’s been often with my dad. And one of the most recent times it’s happened with him was 2020. We had a conversation about Trump’s handling of the COVID pandemic. And I can still,  like my dad, it felt like my dad was just playing games, and just for the sake of not admitting that he’s wrong, he just kept insisting, finding new reasons to justify what I thought was just obviously, abhorrent policy, and I just I got completely taken over by it. And what I’ve learned, after observing myself in this situation, is that there does come a point where I believe so deeply, that this other person is, at this point, maybe people would think of it as acting in bad faith.

April:

Mm hm

Mónica:

That, I just, I go on the attack. It’s like the well has dried, and everything I say, that’s but you just, and how could you? And I started attacking my dad’s character. There was nothing good about it. There’s nothing useful about it.That’s where anger makes me forget my freedom. I, that I don’t have to, I don’t have to do that. So I’m thinking about, Wilk’s strategies informing this.

I asked him, what do you do when you see something on social media that’s really triggering? And he said, I, I wait a second. I wait a minute. 

Yeah, that’s, all of Wilk’s notes really inform that, for me.

April:

Yeah. Is there anything you would suggest in terms of, like, how people can not forget to take a beat? Is it just a habit or a muscle memory or something? 

Mónica :

That’s a great question. Here’s a takeaway from the episode, another one from Wilk, I connected with so powerfully, especially recently in my life, mantras. He talks about mottos and mantras and he said, when I started living by this motto to not let my emotions dictate my actions, He said, that’s when things started to change.

And I think I used to glaze over language like that. “I live by a motto” like whatever. Okay. You read a quote. No, I think there is something to that, that if there’s something you really believe and it matches with who you want to be or how you want to be when things get hard, it’s almost like an anchor in a storm, you know? And so you say it when it’s not stormy and it’s you’re remembering that anchor is there.

And so then. When it’s stormy, you remember that the anchor exists and then you go, Oh, wait, hang on. This is where I need to take a beat. So I think you have to, yeah, mantras are really useful for that. 

And Wilk, I can see in his story, I think mantras and mottos have been really powerful for him because he had to unlearn so many habits that were making him miserable.

April:

Yeah… right.

Mónica:

And that’s what we all need to do. Those of us interested in getting, in making our lives better, or our conversations better.

April:

Those of us who want to not be miserable… 

Mónica:

That’s a nice desire. but it takes work and I think you do have to find something to hold fast to.

April:

I have a question which relates to how I… relates to my answer.

So I have a very weird relationship with anger. This question was not straightforward for me because I have a weird relationship with anger because I.. You know, my parents are wonderful. My family is wonderful. And also it is the case that growing up, the way that anger showed up in my house really frightened me.

And so I suppress anger in myself and am afraid of it in other people. And so how I navigate political anger is for me more about how do I navigate other people’s political anger? 

Mónica:

Wow. 

April:

So my, but it’s based on partly on an assumption, which is in my observation, anger doesn’t…it’s kind of a myth that like with anger, you’re a teapot and you like are going to explode and then you’re going to feel better.

In my experience, people don’t. It’s not like then they’ve said the thing and it all feels great and they calm down. In my experience, they just stay in the spin of like, “and this is crazy and these people think this and everyone should listen to this”. So I guess I’m curious, do you feel like you, you get satisfaction, because I mostly end up trying to redirect people with the belief and observation that they don’t settle down on their own, often.

Mónica:

As you said that about experiences I talked about in the episode with Wilk when I was in college and I was very anti George W. Bush. You’re asking did you accomplish something? Did it feel like a release or relief or something good? And here’s what did feel good at the time. I felt like I was learning who I was..

April:

Oh!

Mónica:

..and that who I was came from something strong and something unique and an interesting story.

So when I read that book, Weapons of Mass Deception, it felt like, Oh, I have something to be angry about. And that must mean that I’m filling out a part of myself that I needed to discover. 

April:

Huh!

Mónica:

Does that, I don’t know if that makes any sense.

April:

Fascinating

Mónica:

..but the part that felt productive was. It was almost like I had this belief that if someone asks me about this dimension, politics, and I get passionate in an angry way, 

April:

Right, ok

Mónica:

then that must mean that I’m strong. That must mean that I’m strong on something. And I’m building a backbone. And it feels good. And so that’s great. 

And then I’ve heard from folks who even in the course of, family relationship, you know, when they’re angry to another person and it pushes them away, sometimes you think well that’s good because, because I need to be my own person. And I have this history and baggage with these people anyway. And now they know who I really am. Because I know who I really am. And I’m angry about this. And I’m going to do something about it. I’m going to form my identity around it. And that feels good.

April:

Wow. I really appreciate that explanation. because I, that had never occurred to me. In a million years. On the other hand, when you say I get it. Like I hear it. If I’m passionate, then I must be strong, and that must mean that I have values and that must mean that I am somebody, and I have my own mind, and I’m not a sheep, and I like, I’m going to stand up for stuff.

Mónica:

Can I tell you, I just realized there’s something that’s been in my head since I was a kid about what real, purposeful, self-knowing strength looks like. 

April:

Yeah, tell me. 

Mónica:

And I looked to myself and said, why don’t I do this?

In so many movies and television shows, anger comes into a conversation among characters, and someone storms out of the room.

April:

Uh huh. 

Mónica:

And I always ask myself, I’ve actually, April, I’ve played it out in my head. Fantasies. Where I would storm out of the room if only someone would say something where I could justify that. 

April:

Oh, really? 

Mónica:

But no one has said enough to me, and I, and this was more like teenage Mónica, college Mónica, maybe late 20s Mónica,

April:

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mónica:

just wanted that. I wanted the opportunity. For someone to say something to me that was so obviously against my values that I would storm out of the room and it would feel wonderful. 

April:

Wow. That’s wild!

Mónica:

I’ve been envious. I have been envious of the idea, like people who have done that because they must really know who they are and who they are not, and they must be so good at standing up for what they feel is right. And if only I had that opportunity.

April:

Gosh, that is so interesting. And it really does speak to what I feel like is going on in our culture a lot, which is the idea that the way to be a virtuous person is to stand up for something by quote, speaking out, i.e. saying something controversial and abrasive or whatever, loudly.

And it just seems right. So from my angle, which again, is anger phobic, and that’s an overstatement, but to me, it looks silly, And so I’m like, I feel like I’m watching a bunch of like kids, like shouting things and thinking that they’ve done something. And, sorry. And maybe that’s the like sublimated anger that becomes contempt.

I don’t know, but like I’ve just gotten really good at kind of shutting up and letting a rant run. And, I’m not saying that’s the best option, but what does work for me and I’m going to, there’s one, one area where I do get angry myself that I’ll talk about in a second, but most of this for me is other people.

And so for me, there’s a sort of only partially conscious monitoring of what’s going on in me. Am I getting freaked out? Am I getting bored? Do I feel like this person is, sinking into their own story and not really here with me anymore. And often one of those things will happen. And I go on autopilot where I’m like, I, and maybe this is, I think this is probably not amazing, but what I do is I basically start the, mmhm. I like start that running.

Mónica:

I’ve been there.

April:

Yeah. And what I want to do and what I, when I can get a word in edgewise, what I will do typically is try to redirect it away from the spin of anger to something more nuanced or more like, why do you believe this? Why do you care about it? 

Mónica:

Yes. 

April:

One little aside on the spin, I love the word derate. So Wilk’s podcast is called Derate the Hate. And I, he taught me that word, but it’s such a perfect metaphor. It’s the, so for anybody who doesn’t know, like I did not, what that word means, trucks, their engines can get too hot. They spin and they spin and they spin. And if a driver is going too fast or whatever, the engine itself can spin so fast that it overheats and destroys itself.

And so derating means slowing it down so that it doesn’t spin out of control and destroy itself. And that seems like a perfect metaphor for what happens with our hate. And so what I will try to do is find ways to derate what’s going on before it spins so fast that I’m like, okay, this person is now just in their own head with their own story. And I’m just a piece of furniture over here “uh uh-ing” along. And so the way that I usually try to do that is I will ask follow up questions that sound and are really respectful, but they don’t, it’s important not to sound like you’re questioning the other person’s view because then they get angrier.

And so instead what I do is like, “yeah, I can hear that’s really, that’s actually”, man, some people don’t even the phrase, “I can hear this matters to you” because they’re like, “Oh yeah, are you therapisting me?” And I’m like, no, I do want you to go in a different direction. But so what, so I’ll say something that I’m like, yeah, I’m really curious about that part.

Yeah. Have you had experience with that? Or what have you observed or whatever to try to get it back to ground to something they’ve experienced or that they’ve seen? Yeah. Something that is actually on planet earth. And I guess you can hear in my voice that I have a little bit of frustration around this sometimes because I do.

But I guess the two core pieces are notice what’s going on in me so that I can honestly, it’s a little bit of withdrawal. If a person is starting to get really activated, I internally withdraw a little bit because I’m like, okay, I don’t know where this is going. And I, so I’m going to do a little bit of self-protection and then trying to redirect them towards, I think ultimately that like most things that people are angry about, like there is something in the world that’s wrong. And what anger is for in an individual is saying you crossed a boundary. This isn’t fine, but we also have to be careful not to suppress it so hard or to demonize it so much that we put out our own sort of core visceral life force, which sounds, I don’t know, dramatic, but…

Mónica:

Yes. No, I feel that. I feel that so much because there, there is a, there is such a thing as just, you don’t want to rock the boat within yourself or without yourself. You don’t want to create anger because there’s enough anger in the world as it is.. And you see how it hurts and burns other places.

You’re not going to add to the fire. And what you end up is never, you don’t find the fire within.

April:

Exactly. Pretty soon, you don’t even know, you can’t even find it in yourself. Pretty soon you’ve become something which is inoffensive. It’s not just that you choose to edit yourself. It’s that you have become something that is so bland and so hushed that it’s not you.

I think that the, I was depressed for a lot of years. I think this is a big part of why. 

Mónica:

Wow

April:

And it wasn’t until I could face my own anger and where some of it came from and all that, that I could get out of there. So yeah, if you put out your own fire, it hurts you..

Mónica:

Yeah My goodness. 

April:

So both things are true.

Mónica:

Exactly. And kudos to Wilk too because it was very clear talking to him that he’s done a lot of reflecting about where his anger came from. 

April:

Definitely. 

Mónica:

Where his rage came from. 

April:

I admire that. Yes. 

Mónica:

Yeah. And that’s not easy but seems to have taken him to a really good place.

April:

It will free you if you do it right.

Mónica:

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, thank you April. 

April:

Yeah, thank you

Mónica:

Thank you for all the openness and brilliance.That’s awesome. 

April:

Right back at you, friend. 

Mónica:

You and I may disagree on the efficacy of certain protests in the 90s and 2000s, but but there are many places that we see eye to eye.

April:

And we have very different personalities regarding anger too, which is part of why this has been interesting to me.

Mónica:

Yeah. It’s true.

All right. Conversation for another day, my friend. 

April:

You bet. That’ll be good. 

Mónica:

Thanks. All right. Thanks, April.

(music up and under)

Mónica:

Anger really is amazing. All that power. Wilk, earlier in his life, stepped all the way into it. April, when she faces someone else’s angry storm, tries to help them through it. It occurs to me, hearing back the themes in this episode, that underneath the force of our anger is that same darn thing I have found underneath so many of our other challenging tendencies.

Just that need to be heard. Whether by other people across the divide, or just ourselves. Wherever you meet political anger, are you listening?

With that, I’m ready to send you brave souls back to your worlds with a song.

(music out)

(music up, “To Cross the Divide”)

It’s called “To Cross the Divide” by Hank Linderman, and it was an entry in the 2023 Braver Angels Song Contest. Take a listen. 

 I look out at the darkness See the stars in the sky I can see another shoreline Hear the waves passing by …

(music under)

Mónica:

Thanks so much for joining us here on A Braver Way.

If this episode sparked questions or stories you want to share with us, we’re all ears. You can always reach us at abraverway@braverangels.org or join our text line to check in throughout the season from right there on your phone. To get started, text the word BRAVE to 206 926 9955. 

A Braver Way is produced by Braver Angels and distributed in partnership with KUOW and Deseret News.

We get financial support from the M. J. Murdoch Charitable Trust and Reclaim Curiosity and count USA Factsas a proud sponsor. 

Our senior producer and editor is David Albright. Our producer is Jessica Jones. My disagreement buddy is April Lawson. Our theme music is by the fantastic number one billboard bluegrass charting hip hop band Gangsta Grass.

A special thanks to Ben Caron, Don Goldberg, Gabbi Timmis, and Katelin Annes, and to everyone who is sharing episodes of this podcast with your friends, your family, when you’ve been leaving reviews of the podcast for others to find and discover. Thank you so so much. That has been wonderful. 

I’m your host and guide across the Divide, Mónica Guzmán. Take heart, everyone. Till next time.

(music up)

…..across the divide 

(music under)

Braver Angels is the nation’s largest cross partisan, volunteer led movement to bridge the political divide, and the organization that produces the most this podcast. And here’s the exciting part. You can join us in our mission to overcome toxic polarization and strengthen our democratic republic. Head to braverangels.org/jointo become a member and support our growing movement and let them know that a braver way sent you.

(music up)

…..will the stars give you comfort… 

(music fades out)