This week, a cry for sanity rose up from an unlikely place: the boo birds of Nationals Park.

It started during Game 5 of the World Series last Sunday. President Donald Trump attended, but unlike his predecessors Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, he didn’t throw a pitch or even set foot on the field. He never left his luxury box, where he mingled with hangers-on. To try and avoid being booed, he cloaked himself in stolen valor: The shot of him was sandwiched between recognitions of veterans and active service members. It didn’t work—the Nats fans were too dialed in. When the Jumbotron switched from service members to Trump, the fans switched from cheers to boos. When the shot switched back, they did too.

And then they kept at it. On Wednesday night, when a crowd of thousands gathered at Nationals Park to watch Game 7 being played in Houston, they booed loudly when a Trump ad appeared during a commercial break. When the Nats won that game (and the series) in dramatic fashion, the fans refused to let up. In response to an innocuous question, a fan in a Nats jersey responded, “D.C. needed this, we got some asshole in the fucking White House.” The clip went viral. Not all heroes wear capes.

Hazing presidents at sports games with boos is an American tradition, but the focus, intensity, and precision of the Nats fans felt like something more: It felt like a cry against the normalization of Donald Trump. It was right and good, and we need more of it. Trump’s actions are hateful, but normalizing them is what threatens to make them stick. And while he alone is responsible for his actions, the rest of us can refuse to let them become normalized.

Not everyone was into the booing. Delaware senator Chris Coons, a perennial waste of a deep blue seat, came to Trump’s defense after Game 5, rushing to a TV camera to huff, “The office of the president deserves respect.” Trump may be the president, but he is a deeply immoral man in ways that transcend partisan divisions. If you shoehorn all the despicable things Trump has said and done into the aphorism of “agree to disagree” and demand he be treated with respect, you can’t expect kids to understand right from wrong because you’re telling them that power gives you permission to be immoral—no matter what you do, we’d be telling them, if you get enough power, you’re entitled to respect.

Coon’s bluster was the latest entry in the civility debate that has erupted over the past couple years, as people in power have been confronted by people with less power in ways the powerful people felt was rude. The powerful people appealed for public sympathy, and usually got it: from Sarah Huckabee Sanders complaining about having her dinner ruined after defending Trump’s practice of ripping babies from their mother's arms to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao having their dinner disrupted.

To be sure, humans should be civil to each other—most of the time. It is the right default setting—usually. Civility is a necessary precondition for reasonable debates over different views, especially strongly held ones. But sometimes civility is deployed as a protective cocoon around rich and powerful people, who think they’re entitled to make decisions that destroy huge numbers of lives and still be allowed to dine in peace.

When you encounter bad people in positions of power who want to be left alone to destroy many thousands of lives, incivility can be good. It is much healthier to tell Trump that he’s a monster to his face than to tiptoe around him as a supplicant to the power of bad men.