Both teams scream that the other will destroy America, then link arms to fund record war budgets, renew warrantless spying, and pile up $40 trillion in debt, and the only thing that keeps the show running is your hatred of your neighbor.
On October 12, inside the Covelli Centre in Youngstown, Ohio, a woman stood up during President Donald Trump’s midterm rally wearing a homemade shirt that read “Release the Epstein Files.” Within seconds, she was punched in the face, grabbed by the hair, and restrained by Trump supporters, and the crowd around her answered the male-on-female violence by chanting “USA.”
From the podium, the president of the United States did not call for calm. As she was hauled away, he suggested she was a paid protester, called her a “fat guy,” and announced that she “needs to go on a diet”.
Then came the part that should bother every American, no matter which yard sign sits on their lawn. Body camera footage shows Mahoning County sheriff’s deputies leading the woman out of the arena, photographing her, and releasing her outside, while the men who beat her stayed in the building and, according to local reporting, traded high-fives with fellow rallygoers.
Two weeks later, no one has been charged. Deputies made no arrests that night, no report was taken at the scene, and a sheriff’s spokesperson refused to explain why the men were allowed to stay. The sheriff now says detectives are looking into an incident involving a female protester and three men, and that a misdemeanor charge could still be filed, but the message was already delivered in real time: the peaceful woman was treated as the offender, and the men who threw the punches got to watch the rest of the show.
What makes this so grotesque is what she was asking for. She was not chanting a Democratic talking point. She was repeating the demand the MAGA movement turned into a rallying cry for years, the one Trump’s own attorney general, Pam Bondi, fed when she said in February 2025 that the Epstein client list was “on my desk right now to review,” and one Trump himself wrote into law when he signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act last November.
She was beaten for asking the government to do what it had already promised to do, and the one man in the room who could have stopped it with a single sentence chose to mock her instead.
Now flip the jerseys. Picture a woman at a Biden rally wearing a shirt demanding the arrest of child predators, punched and dragged by the hair while a crowd of Democrats chants “USA,” the president ridicules her weight from the stage, and deputies escort her out as her attackers celebrate. Every conservative in America would rightly stand up for that woman, and the only thing that would have changed is the color of the hats.
So what in the hell makes grown men do this to an unarmed, non-violent woman over words on a T-shirt? And what makes millions more watch the clip and shrug, or laugh?
Americans did not wake up one morning as monsters. They have been trained, slowly and deliberately, to stop seeing the people on the other team as fully human. In research led by Alexander Landry, Republicans and Democrats rated each other 20 to 30 points below “fully human” on a scale modeled on the old ape-to-man evolution chart.
The most revealing part of that research is where the hatred comes from. Each side believed the other dehumanized them by roughly 60 points, far worse than reality, and when researchers simply told people the truth, their own contempt for the other side dropped and stayed lower a week later. Much of the rage Americans feel toward one another is a reaction to an enemy that, for the most part, does not even exist.
What’s more, researchers found that the more of the show you watch, the more you believe the cartoon. More in Common found that 93 percent of Republicans say Americans should learn from the past, yet Democrats guess that only 35 percent of Republicans agree, and people who follow the news “most of the time” are nearly three times as likely to hold distorted views of the other side.
When the man at the podium mocks the victim, the crowd hears permission, and Americans understand this better than the politicians would like. A PRRI survey found that 67 percent believe political leaders’ failure to condemn violent rhetoric contributes “a lot” to political violence, a view held by 80 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans.
With Election Day on November 3, the people asking for your vote are working overtime to make sure you never question the script. One side tells you your neighbor is a jihadist, a witch, or a groomer. The other tells you your neighbor is a fascist, a Nazi, or a rapist. Either way, the guy next door becomes the enemy, and the people in power stay in power.
On the right, this cycle has been ugly. Trump has warned crowds that a Democratic agenda would “extinguish Western civilization” and claimed Democrats want to “mutilate, cut your children.” In August, days after Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Trump declared from the Oval Office that “we have jihadists being elected all over the place.”
At the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas, Sen. Ted Cruz named El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico one by one, and after each name an attendee shouted: “He should be shot!” That is what rhetoric sounds like when it graduates into a call for murder. Let that sink in for a minute. Regardless of what you think of these people, and there are plenty of things to think badly about them, unchecked calls for assassinations do not make a better society.
In Kansas, Republican gubernatorial nominee Ty Masterson told a Wichita church that his opponent’s side was doing “witchcraft spells on TikTok” and “demonic stuff,” his evidence being playful videos posted by her 20-year-old daughter. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ran an ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s estranged mother while leaving out that Acton’s stepfather had been charged with abusing her, and Vice President JD Vance said he didn’t really care whether the ad was appropriate.
Democrats are not innocent bystanders in this game. DNC Chair Ken Martin has called the administration “fascism dressed in a red tie” and compared Minneapolis under Trump to Tehran’s “far-right theocratic regime.” Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow, recounting a report that Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh had been spotted at a tailgate, said: “I would not have been able to control myself.”
To be honest about the scale, the most personal attacks this cycle have come from the right, which has gone after candidates’ religion, their families, and even their childhood trauma. A survey of the campaign’s ugliest moments cited no comparable Democratic attacks.
That is not because one team is made of better people. It is because the megaphone and the badge belong to whoever holds power, and when Democrats held it, they used both.
In December 2021, President Joe Biden warned the unvaccinated of a “winter of severe illness and death.” That fall, days after the National School Boards Association asked whether threats against board members “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism,” Biden’s Justice Department ordered the FBI and U.S. attorneys to look into the threats, and the NSBA later apologized for the letter. Biden himself called Trump’s philosophy “semi-fascist” and later drew fire for associating “garbage” with Trump supporters.
The culture followed the leaders. A subreddit called r/HermanCainAward grew to more than 375,000 members, cataloging vaccine skeptics who died of COVID, ordinary partisans cheering the deaths of their own neighbors because those neighbors had picked the wrong team.
Here is what both teams desperately do not want you to notice: for all the screaming, they agree on nearly everything that matters to the people running the show. The two-party system works like Tom and Jerry, where Tom never actually catches Jerry, because the moment he did, the show would end.
Last December, the House passed a record $901 billion defense bill, 312 to 112. Under Biden, the House renewed the warrantless surveillance powers of FISA Section 702, 273 to 147, with overwhelming bipartisan support, after Trump had told his followers to “KILL FISA.” This April, with Trump back in the White House, the House renewed it again for three more years, 235 to 191, with no probable-cause warrant requirement, so the man who told his base to kill it not only ended up keeping it, but actively promoted it.
The national debt hit roughly $40.17 trillion at the end of fiscal 2026, more than double what it was in 2016. That stretch covers Trump, then Biden, then Trump again, which means neither team gets to point at the other.
Meanwhile, the voters have become mirror images of each other in exactly the way the machine needs them to be. In PRRI’s latest survey, 82 percent of Democrats see the MAGA movement as a serious threat, while 72 percent of Republicans say the same of the Democratic Socialists of America. In an earlier PRRI survey, 19 percent of Republicans and 17 percent of Democrats agreed that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence” to save the country.
Rep. Thomas Massie has been calling out this racket for years, and he has paid for it. On September 16, when Speaker Mike Johnson recessed the House early to block Massie’s push to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Massie decried the “uniparty” and said, “I’m trying to get justice for the Epstein survivors.” The same demand that got a woman punched in Youngstown got Congress sent home early.
Massie had already lost his primary in May after millions of Israeli dollars poured in against him, and in his concession speech he said there is “a yearning in this country for someone who will vote for principles over party.” That yearning is real, and the two-party machine is designed to make sure it never finds a home.
Imagine, for a moment, a different man at that podium in Youngstown. He stops mid-sentence, tells security to remove the men who threw the punches, and tells the crowd that the woman in the shirt has every right to demand those files, because it was his own administration that promised them.
Then imagine he spends the rest of the campaign telling Americans that their neighbor is not their enemy, and that the real threat is the people spending $901 billion a year on war, reading their messages without a warrant, and stacking $40 trillion of debt on their children. It would not fix everything overnight, but the effect on how Americans treat one another would be enormous, and it would be the most revolutionary thing a politician has done in our lifetimes.
It has happened before. On April 4, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy broke the news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to a mostly Black crowd in Indianapolis and pleaded for understanding instead of revenge. He asked for people to be peaceful instead of demanding blood, and Indianapolis stayed calm while riots in 110 cities killed 39 people. Try to imagine a situation in which that happens today. Sadly, I can’t.
This is despite the fact that it wouldn’t even take a great speech. In the Landry research, a 45-second text message correcting what partisans believed about each other was enough to measurably reduce their dehumanization. Imagine what the most powerful megaphone on Earth could do with a single honest sentence.
The reason it does not happen is simple: fear raises money, and rage wins primaries. No politician has ever gotten rich telling voters to make peace with the guy across the street.
So stop waiting for one to do it. The man with the wrong yard sign next door is not the one who sent deputies to walk a beaten woman out of an arena, and he is not the one renewing the spy powers or running up the debt. He is a lot more like you than the people who profit from your hatred will ever admit, and the only way they lose is if you go talk to him before they make sure you never do.
Article posted with permission from Matt Agorist
