A friend of mine sits on the board of the largest Christian school in our valley. He loves this country, loves his neighbors, loves God (or at least he’s working on it, same as the rest of us). So why did he respond to millions of peaceful fellow citizens exercising their constitutional rights with laughing emojis? That question has been gnawing at me for months. This episode tries to answer it.
When millions of Americans took to the streets last month in the No Kings rallies, peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights, the response from Donald Trump, Republican members of Congress, and leading voices in the MAGA movement was contempt. Not critique. Not engagement. Contempt. This solo episode asks why, and works through what that contempt actually costs us: constitutionally and civically.
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Key Takeaways
The laughing emojis aren’t about politics. More in Common’s research into Trump voters found one thread running through every category of the broader MAGA coalition: deep, abiding resentment toward the left. Not policy disagreement. Resentment. Years of accumulated grievance about cancel culture, political correctness, and perceived condescension. The laughing emojis are that resentment expressing itself, not a constitutional argument.
The constitutional inventory is not abstract. Article One gives Congress, not the president, the power to levy taxes — yet sweeping tariff schemes were imposed anyway. Article One gives Congress the sole power to declare war — yet Iran was attacked without a declaration, without consulting Congress, and without a coherent plan. The Supreme Court, including three Republican-appointed justices, told the administration directly that it had grabbed power the Constitution never granted it.
The First Amendment protections being invoked by No Kings protesters are the same ones being systematically pressured. Trump threatened, attacked, and sued CBS, ABC, and the Des Moines Register for coverage he didn’t like. Outlets were banned from the Pentagon for declining to sign loyalty pledges to the president rather than the Constitution. An aggressive ICE presence in city streets has turned the right to peaceably assemble into a theoretical right for millions of people.
Whataboutism is cauterization, not argument. “But what about Obama” and “what about Hunter Biden” don’t refute a single fact presented in this episode. They don’t explain away the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs. They don’t restore one deported citizen. They don’t account for the dead. What they do is create enough noise to make facing the truth feel optional — burning the nerve endings so the pain stops registering.
The Constitution is a covenant, not a rulebook. It doesn’t grade on a curve based on how much you resent the other side. It’s a promise the founders made to future generations that we recommit to each other every time we stand up for it — or fail to. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it when the solicitor general argued we live in a new world demanding a new reading: “It’s the same Constitution.”
Links and Resources
More in Common's Beyond MAGA study — beyondmaga.us
USA Today / Susan Page's piece — www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/29/no-kings-rallies-a-red-flare-for-trump/89306058007/
Jonah Goldberg / The Dispatch — thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/no-kings-protests-tea-parties-bothsidesism
Captain Robert Gustine (28-year Navy veteran) and Dr. Roger Herbert (former Naval Special Warfare Officer, ethics professor at the US Naval Academy) — substack.com/@gusgusentinerogerherbert/p-190864101
American Immigration Council — www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/immigration-detention
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“Clarity, charity, and conviction can live in the same room.” Yes, really.

What if the reason we can't fix our politics is that we've skipped the part where we actually get to know each other?
Rajiv Mehta has spent the better part of four decades asking questions that most people don't think to ask. At NASA, it was about the complexity lurking beneath simplified models of the atmosphere. At Apple, it was why people don't take more pictures. At Zume Life, it was why even doctors can't stick to their own health regimens. And for the past twenty-plus years, the question has been deeper still: how do we actually learn to know ourselves and each other well enough to build something lasting together?
Rajiv is the founder of Mapping Ourselves, which helps organizational leaders build the cultures they seek by exploring the human roots of high performance. He's also a member of WEAVE, the nationwide initiative that supports grassroots leaders working to repair our frayed social fabric. His book Camaraderie is coming out this summer. The conversation moves from Mets fandom to Mars to medicine to the philosophy of Peter Singer to Genghis Khan, and somehow it all connects. That's the kind of episode this is.
Calls to Action
✅ If this conversation resonates, consider sharing it with someone who believes connection across difference still matters.
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✅ Watch the full conversation and subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/@politicsandreligion
Key Takeaways
Relationships before results. One of Raj's core convictions, borrowed from a friend long engaged in social movements, is that our culture has it exactly backwards. We treat connection as a luxury, something to get to after the real work is done. But without genuine relationship, results rarely last. This isn't soft thinking. It's what SEAL teams already know, and it's what Raj has been trying to bring to the rest of us.
The self is plural. The phrase "quantified self" always had a problem, Raj admits: it pointed inward when the whole point is outward. We are fundamentally social creatures. Studying yourself means studying yourself in community, in relationship, in context. Going off to meditate in a cave has its value, but if you lose sight of yourself-in-the-ecosystem, you've missed the main thing.
Know yourself before you can know others. The doctors who were baffled by patient non-adherence were themselves non-adherent. We can't build real camaraderie with people we don't understand, and we can't understand others if we haven't done the harder work of understanding ourselves. Self-knowledge isn't navel-gazing. It's the prerequisite for everything else.
Community, connection, belonging, and camaraderie are not the same thing. Raj draws careful distinctions. Community is a container. Belonging is an emotional sense of home, with real agency attached. Connection is deeply interpersonal, the discovery of specific things you genuinely like about another person. Camaraderie brings all of this together within a group united by shared purpose. Conflating them leads to surface-level interventions that don't hold.
Complexity isn't a bug. It's the reality we have to learn to live inside. From atmospheric modeling at NASA to human behavior in healthcare, Raj kept running into the same error: people mistake their simplified models for the world itself. When something goes wrong, they blame the workers instead of the design. Real progress requires holding complexity rather than explaining it away.
Start human, then get to the hard stuff. Whether it's cross-partisan dialogue or cross-cultural misunderstanding, Raj's prescription is the same: find the human first. Discover what you share. Build some real connection. Then, and only then, you might be able to have the harder conversation. Walking straight into the room with a contested policy topic and expecting good-faith exchange is, as he puts it, nearly impossible.
About Our Guest
Rajiv Mehta is the founder of Mapping Ourselves, which helps organizational leaders build high-performing cultures by developing the self-knowledge and mutual understanding that genuine camaraderie requires. With an engineering background from Princeton and Stanford, and a career spanning NASA, Apple, and Adobe, he has spent the past two decades guiding corporate executives, military commanders, and community leaders through the practice of personal science. He is a member of WEAVE, the nationwide initiative supporting grassroots leaders working to repair social trust across America. His book Camaraderie is forthcoming this summer.
Links and Resources
Mapping Ourselves - mappingourselves.com
WEAVE: The Social Fabric Project - weavers.org
Camaraderie by Rajiv Mehta (forthcoming, summer 2025)
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Clarity, charity, and conviction can live in the same room.
Yes, really.

We can survive. But can we thrive? That's a different question entirely.
Corey Nathan joined Andrew Keen on Keen on America to talk about the state of civic discourse in America. Robert Mueller's death and the president's response to it is the jumping-off point, but the conversation goes much deeper: the exhausted majority, the horseshoe of extremism, storytelling as a bridge across difference, and what it takes to stay in hard conversations. This feed drop brings that interview to the TP&R audience.
Calls to Action
✅ If this conversation resonates, consider sharing it with someone who believes connection across difference still matters.
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✅ Watch the full conversation and subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/@politicsandreligion
Key Takeaways:
Robert Mueller as a mirror. Mueller served under presidents of both parties, earned a Purple Heart, and devoted his education to public service. His death and the president's response to it shows what happens when tribalism does our thinking: one data point erases an entire life.
The exhausted majority is real. The Hidden Tribes study from More in Common found that only 6-8% on either side qualify as genuine extremists. The other 85% are far more nuanced. They want to enjoy the barbecue and Thanksgiving dinner without it turning into a war. The conflict entrepreneurs don't represent most of us.
It's a horseshoe, not a spectrum. The extreme ends have more in common with each other than either would admit. The incentive structure is identical: compete for attention, be the loudest voice in the room.
Stories are the antidote to caricature. When we understand someone's story, we stop reducing them to a single data point. Corey illustrates this with a friend born in Lebanon with family in Iran who voted for Trump. The disagreements are real. But understanding the story behind the view changes everything.
Surviving and thriving are not the same thing. Corey's family spent 800 years in what is now Ukraine. They knew how to survive. But survival isn't the American promise. The experiment is worth protecting and worth talking about.
About Andrew Keen
Andrew Keen is a British-American broadcaster and author, host of Keen on America and How to Fix Democracy. He is known for pressing his guests hard and not letting easy answers stand.
Links and Resources
Keen on America: https://keenon.substack.com/keenon.substack.com/
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Links and additional resources:
The Village Square: villagesquare.us
Meza Wealth Management: mezawealth.com
Proud members of The Democracy Group
Clarity, charity, and conviction can live in the same room.

He drove a truck across America listening to talk radio. Somewhere between 9/11, the Obama years, and a long personal reckoning with his own anger, Wilk Wilkinson became one of the most unlikely figures in the depolarization movement: a committed conservative who believes the two-party system is tearing the country apart, and who is doing something about it.
Wilk is the Director of Media Systems and Operations for Braver Angels, the nation's largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide. He also hosts the podcast Derate the Hate. In this conversation, Wilk traces his political awakening from post-9/11 talk radio to becoming radicalized by the polarization he once participated in, and why he eventually chose the harder path. He and Corey dig into tribalism, political identity, January 6th, immigration enforcement, the two-party doom loop, and what it actually takes to stay in conversation across real disagreement.
Calls to Action
✅ If this conversation resonates, consider sharing it with someone who believes connection across difference still matters.
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Key Takeaways
Political identity has become personal identity, and that's the root of the problem. Wilk argues that the single most destructive shift in American civic life is that people now treat political attacks as personal attacks. When your party becomes your tribe, criticism of a policy feels like an assault on who you are. That's not politics anymore. That's warfare.
Tribalism isn't a flaw. It's a feature we have to consciously override. We evolved as tribal creatures because belonging to a group kept us alive. The problem is that ancient wiring hasn't caught up with modern civil society. Wilk and Corey agree: staying in real conversation across difference isn't natural. It's a decision.
Most Trump voters aren't MAGA loyalists, and treating them as a monolith makes everything worse. Citing the More in Common "Beyond MAGA" research, Wilk points out that only about 29% of the 77 million people who voted for Trump in 2024 fit the MAGA hardliner profile. When we flatten a diverse group into a caricature of its worst actors, we guarantee the doom loop continues.
You can support border security and still call out a botched implementation. Wilk doesn't hedge: he wanted the border closed. He also calls the deportation strategy's implementation a disaster, citing constitutional violations, erosion of institutional trust, and the breakdown of basic civic norms. This is what it sounds like when a conservative applies principles rather than party loyalty.
The fix starts local, not national. Both Corey and Wilk see more reason for hope at the community and state level than in Washington. Local relationships, shared problems, and the ability to actually look someone in the eye still create space for the kind of trust that national politics has almost completely destroyed.
About Our Guest
Wilk Wilkinson is the Director of Media Systems and Operations for Braver Angels, and the host of Derate the Hate, a podcast offering practical tools and honest conversations for people trying to grow personally and engage civically. A self-described committed conservative, Wilk has spent years in the bridge-building space doing the kind of work he once would have dismissed. Find him at deratedhate.com and on Substack by searching "Wil Wilkinson."
Links and Resources
Braver Angels: braverangels.org
Derate the Hate: deratethehate.com
More in Common "Beyond MAGA" research: beyondmaga.us
Monica Guzman / I Never Thought of It That Way: moniguzman.com/book
Find us and engage with us on YouTube, Substack, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Threads, TikTok, and Bluesky.
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Clarity, charity, and conviction can live in the same room.

He fled Lebanon at 19, built a life here, and has strong opinions about what’s happening in the Middle East right now. And he disagrees with some of what I’ve been writing. So he called me.
Bernard Kash is not a politician, a pundit, or a policy expert. He’s a Lebanese-born immigrant who came to this country legally in 1985, built a business from scratch, and has half a family that’s Muslim and half that’s Christian. He has relatives and friends still living in Lebanon and Iran. And when he saw some of what Corey had been writing publicly, he picked up the phone.
That’s the kind of conversation this program exists for.
In this episode, Bernard and Corey dig into the Israel–Lebanon–Iran conflict, media coverage and what it leaves out, the constitutional questions around Trump’s decision to bomb Iran without going to Congress, immigration, and the political tribal warfare that makes it hard to just talk to each other anymore. They don’t agree on everything. They never have. And yet here they are.
Calls to Action
✅ If this conversation resonates, consider sharing it with someone who believes connection across difference still matters.
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✅ Watch the full conversation and subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/@politicsandreligion
Key Takeaways
What people on the ground in Lebanon actually think about Hezbollah: Bernard shares firsthand accounts from relatives still living in Lebanon and Iran — a perspective you won’t find on cable news. Most Lebanese people don’t want war with Israel and see Hezbollah as an Iranian proxy, not a Lebanese cause.
The Article I question: Corey raises a pointed constitutional concern: Trump began bombing Iran within days of the State of the Union, without consulting Congress. Bernard doesn’t entirely disagree on principle, but argues that in practice, the ends and the means sometimes get complicated.
The “best heart surgeon” problem: Bernard puts it plainly: he wouldn’t invite Trump to dinner, doesn’t think he’s a good person, and can still make the case that for certain geopolitical situations, he may be the right instrument. That tension is exactly what this conversation is about.
Media isn’t monolithic: Both Corey and Bernard push back on the idea that “the media” is a single entity lying to us. The reporters on the ground are often doing real work. What makes it onto air is a different question.
Critiquing Trump isn’t critiquing you: Corey makes a point he’s been sitting with: when he criticizes the president, some friends take it as a personal attack. And those same friends assume that because he’s not sufficiently pro-Trump, he must be the worst caricature the right has invented of the left. Neither is true.
“Grow up” as political philosophy: When asked how we talk politics and religion without killing each other, Bernard’s answer is two words: grow up. Rise above the label, the jersey, the acronym. Find out who the person actually is.
About Our Guest
Bernard Kash fled Lebanon in 1985 at age 19, after a decade of civil war. He came to the United States legally, built a life, raised a family, and has owned Earth Wise Nutrition Center in Santa Clarita for many years. He is one of Corey’s good friends, and one of his most reliable sparring partners.
Links and Resources
Earth Wise Nutrition Center: earthwisevitamins.com
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Links and additional resources:
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Proud members of The Democracy Group
Now go talk some politics and religion but with gentleness and respect.

The U.S. is the only country in a 25-nation study where more than half of citizens view their fellow citizens as morally bad. Jonathan Evans of Pew Research Center joins us to unpack what the data actually says.
Jonathan Evans is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center specializing in international polling on religion and national identity. The most recent report he led surveyed adults in 25 countries on how they rate the morality of their fellow citizens, and the findings about the U.S. sparked immediate conversation. But as Jonathan explains, the headline number is only the beginning. When you look at specific behaviors, partisan breakdowns, and how the same religious identity plays out differently across borders, the picture gets far more interesting and far more nuanced.
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✅ Watch the full conversation and subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/@politicsandreligion
Key Takeaways
The U.S. stands alone on the big question. Across all 25 countries surveyed, the U.S. is the only one where a majority of citizens rate their fellow citizens as morally bad. Canada, by contrast, ranks among the most optimistic.
But the headline doesn't tell the whole story. On individual behaviors like gambling and marijuana use, Americans are among the least likely in the world to call them morally wrong. On extramarital affairs, they rank among the most likely. The U.S. isn't simply more moralistic across the board.
It's a global pattern, not just an American one. In many countries, supporters of the party out of power are more likely to rate their fellow citizens' morality negatively. In the U.S., 60% of Democrats vs. 46% of Republicans gave their fellow Americans a negative rating, a 14-point gap that aligns with a broader worldwide trend.
Same religion, different conclusions. Christians in France and Christians in Brazil look almost nothing alike on issues like abortion. Regional and cultural context shapes moral views at least as much as religious identity does.
Views on divorce have softened globally. Comparing this study to Pew's 2013 survey of similar questions, one of the clearest trends is a decline in the share of people across many countries calling divorce morally wrong, with notable exceptions including India, where the number moved in the opposite direction.
Rigorous methodology is the foundation. Surveying roughly 1,000 people per country isn't arbitrary. That threshold enables reliable cross-demographic comparisons within each country. Pew's international work uses face-to-face interviews, phone surveys, or both depending on what's standard and safe in each country.
About Our Guest
Jonathan Evans is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center, where he focuses on international polling related to religion and national identity. He has authored studies on religion in India, religious tolerance and segregation, Christianity in Western Europe, and religious belief and national belonging in Central and Eastern Europe. He holds a graduate degree from Georgetown University's Department of Government, where he studied democracy and governance. Before his career in research, he was an organ performance major whose undergraduate thesis involved analyzing original manuscripts of a Charles Hubert Hastings Parry composition at Oxford. Yes, really.
Links and Resources
Pew Research Center - pewresearch.org
Fantasia and Fugue in G Op. 188 - Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry - www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O0lBYic6DY
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Now go talk some politics and religion but with gentleness and respect.

Bono once said, before launching into Helter Skelter: “This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.” That line describes exactly what’s been happening to some of the most important words in the English language, and exactly what we need to do about it.
Calls to Action
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Key Takeaways
Words Shape How We Think: When powerful words get hijacked and attached to behaviors that contradict their meaning, it distorts our ability to reason about reality. This isn’t semantics. It’s about preserving the architecture of accountability.
 
“Christian” Belongs to Those Who Follow Jesus: The word has nothing to do with political allegiance. The Jesus of Matthew, the one who called down blessings on the meek and the peacemakers, is not interchangeable with any flag or party symbol.
 
“Conservative” Means Responsible Stewardship: Edmund Burke. William F. Buckley Jr. A tradition built on civil order, distributed power, and fiscal responsibility. Adding $5.5 trillion to the national debt while weaponizing the executive branch is not that tradition.
 
“Patriot” Means Defending the Constitution: Peggy Noonan, whose work was shared by the Heritage Foundation, defined American patriotism as the reaffirmation of founding ideas: free speech, free press, freedom of religion, equal protection. Real patriots protect speech, especially speech they disagree with.
 
“Truth” Is Not a Brand: A platform built by someone with a documented record of tens of thousands of public lies does not get to claim the word. Truth belongs to those who actually pursue it.
 
We’re Stealing Them Back: Truth. Christian. Conservative. Patriot. These words carry centuries of weight and intention. They were made with moral substance. That’s what TP&R is all about: restoring the words to those who live them.
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The Village Square: villagesquare.us
Meza Wealth Management: mezawealth.com
Proud members of The Democracy Group
Clarity, charity, and conviction can live in the same room.

What do voters actually want? And does what happens on social media have anything to do with it?
David Drucker spent his twenties running his parents' manufacturing businesses in East LA. He was paying workers' comp, dealing with state regulations, signing the checks. Then he became a political journalist. That backstory turns out to matter.
In this conversation, the senior writer at The Dispatch joins Corey to talk about what it means to cover American politics from the ground up. Drucker has built his career on getting out of Washington and talking to actual voters, and what he finds there consistently upends the assumptions of the media and political class. Most people are not as angry as your social media feed suggests. Most people have nuanced, complicated views. And most of them are voting on one thing: whether their lives are getting better or worse.
The conversation ranges from the craft of journalism and the culture of The Dispatch to the internal fault lines of the MAGA coalition, the 2026 midterms, and the U.S. war in Iran. Drucker's analysis is sharp, his sourcing is deep, and his instinct, shaped by years of traveling the country, is to trust voters more than pundits.
David Drucker is a senior writer at The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining in 2023, he was a senior correspondent at the Washington Examiner, a reporter at Roll Call, and covered California politics and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from the Sacramento bureau of the Los Angeles Daily News. He is the author of In Trump's Shadow and a regular presence on cable news and nationally syndicated radio.
Calls to Action
✅ If this conversation resonates, consider sharing it with someone who believes connection across difference still matters.
✅ Subscribe to Corey’s Substack: coreysnathan.substack.com
✅ Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen: ratethispodcast.com/goodfaithpolitics
✅ Subscribe to Talkin’ Politics & Religion Without Killin’ Each Other on your favorite podcast platform.
✅ Watch the full conversation and subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/@politicsandreligion
Key Takeaways
Twitter Is Not the Town Square: The loudest voices online represent a small and unrepresentative slice of the electorate. Most Americans hold more nuanced, less partisan views than social media suggests, and they vote accordingly.
The Ground Truth: There is no substitute for traveling and talking to voters in their own communities. Drucker has built a career on it. The alternative is reporting from inside an echo chamber.
MAGA Voters Are Not Isolationists: They're against wars we lose. They're perfectly fine with projecting American power against bad actors. The vocal anti-war voices on the MAGA right are a minority within the coalition, not its center of gravity.
The Economy Is the Election: Voters put Trump back in the White House expecting him to replicate his first-term economy. They don't think he's done that. That perception will drive the 2026 midterms.
Politicians Are in the Service Business: They do what they believe they must to keep their jobs. Voters who complain about dysfunction are often sending contradictory signals, demanding results while simultaneously demanding that their representatives refuse to deal.
The Dispatch as a Model: Drucker describes a publication built on being correct rather than fast, on traveling to where the story is, on editing everything twice, and on a business model not driven by clicks.
AI and Journalism: Drucker doesn't use AI in his writing or drafting, and he doesn't trust it yet. He wants to see the original source material, not a summary.
The Coalition Problem After Trump: Trump is just populistic enough for the populists and just normal enough for the normies. That is a unique skill. The next Republican nominee will not automatically inherit the coalition he built.
Links and Resources
The Dispatch: thedispatch.com
David M. Drucker on Twitter: x.com/DavidMDrucker
David on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/davidmdrucker.bsky.social
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Thanks to Pew Research Center for making today’s conversation possible.
Links and additional resources:
Pew Research Center: pewresearch.org
The Village Square: villagesquare.us
Meza Wealth Management: mezawealth.com
Proud members of The Democracy Group
Clarity, charity, and conviction can live in the same room.