On Monday, a DC mom named Kristin Mink confronted EPA chief and all-star conman Scott Pruitt while he was eating lunch, urging him to resign and castigating him for his varied abuses of power. Mink has hardly been alone in openly confronting members of the Trump Administration. You remember the Red Hen booting Sarah Sanders from their premises (but not before comping her some free cheese), and you remember a DC chapter of the DSA chasing Homeland Security android Kirstjen Neilsen out of local Mexican restaurant.

This is not an essay about civility. You’ve read about that shit over and over, and you can probably guess where I stand. The Trump administration is scum, and they deserve to be lit up in public for all of their ongoing misdeeds. But it is not easy to make anyone, no matter how evil, uncomfortable in public. It also carries great risk. The lady who flipped off Trump’s motorcade was fired. The Red Hen is now being openly targeted and harassed by vile Trump fanboys. The congressional intern who yelled “Fuck you!” at Trump got suspended for a week. There is a great, vast distance between wanting to speak truth to power in person and actually doing it.

But it’s a vital act of bravery in 2018, because this isn’t a very proud time to be an American. Every month under Trump has made America a meaner, shittier country. June was no different. It was the most shameful month of his tenure, and that’s no small feat. Taking a day off this July 4th to celebrate America by grilling some meat and setting off lame fireworks seems obscene when the Federal government, with no small amount of support from the people, is currently committing human atrocities that will wind up in your grandchild’s history books. All this pageantry feels like forced unity at a time when calls for unity feel more like calls for obedience.

The only bare shred of pride I have left is in those who are putting up a very brave and very public fight against this particular iteration of America. I grew up in the thrall of filmmakers and comedians who, disillusioned by Watergate and the Vietnam War, relished in defying authority. That always struck me as the quintessential American attribute: to question authority figures and, given the opportunity, to pull their pants down and smash a pie into their dicks. That is the truest manifestation of the American spirit, and it’s been subverted in this century by a powermad strongman and his idiot minions who think crushing the poor and the vulnerable is some kind of punk move.

That’s why I’m gonna spend this 4th saluting the handful of Americans who have, thus far, been brave enough to engage in such vital confrontations: Kristin Mink, Stephanie Wilkinson, Juli Briskman (note how so many of these heroes are women! FANCY THAT), and anyone else for whom resistance is more than a hashtag. In my fondest, stupidest dreams, these are the small acts of defiance that lead to the end of Trump and to more widespread, positive changes in American society.

Because there is bravery in each other. Bravery is difficult, but it CAN be contagious. Thanks to Mink, the rest of us aren’t quite as daunted by the idea of confronting one of these goons in public (I’ve got a whole script in my head if I see Mitch McConnell out and about, and it involves lots of screaming). Thanks to the Parkland kids, the rest of us aren’t quite as alone and helpless as we perhaps thought we were in taking on the deranged assholes running the NRA. Thanks to the Democratic legislators and reporters demanding to see ICE’s detention facilities, the rest of us can properly express our outrage over what is being done at the border in our name.

The People Are the Problem How a rally at Duluth last week showed us everything we need to know.

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