Derate The Hate

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Derek Richard Thomas spent ten years touring in a rock band, looking out the van window at farm fields tilled flat and left bare. He had studied horticulture before music, and he knew what that does to soil. For a decade, the same sketch kept showing up in his notebooks: a stoneware pot, half-buried, with holes at the bottom so worms can carry food scraps out into the ground as fertilizer.

Alizabeth Thomas spent about a decade in emotional literacy and...

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This episode opens a new Derate the Hate series built around the Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council, a cross-partisan group of scholars and practitioners writing about what courageous citizenship looks like in practice. The series came out of a suggestion from Harry Boyte, and it sits close to home for Wilk, who works at Braver Angels and helped shape the organization's courageous citizenship direction.

First up is April Chatham-Carpenter, who teaches communication in Arkansas and serves as the Braver Angels state...

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Most of us talk about injustice all the time. Far fewer of us stop to ask what justice actually is. John Adams has spent years with that question, first reading the great books in hotel rooms between deals, then translating them into games and puzzles as a youth pastor, and now in his novel, The Third Phase.

The book grew out of a conversation with his daughters on their annual trip to New York. They were frustrated with the political divisiveness...

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William F. Buckley Jr. had strong opinions and never apologized for them. He also spent forty years as close friends with liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and decades more as a friend of Ira Glasser, longtime head of the ACLU. When a fellow conservative publicly complained that Buckley had too many liberal friends, Buckley’s reply was that he didn’t spend his time with them discussing politics.

Josh Cohen’s book, William F. Buckley Jr.’s Guide to Friendship in a Polari...

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Trime Persinger’s homework assignment was simple: take ten “you” statements and turn them into “I” statements. She couldn’t do the first one. “You make me angry” was the language she grew up with, and she didn’t have another way to say it. Her instructor stayed after class and wrote all ten for her.

That moment set Trime on the path that became courageous communication and her new book, Crossing the Bridge: Heal Your Relationships with Courageous Communication. In this conver...

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Matt Koesters didn’t come to electoral reform through theory. He came to it by watching it happen. As a reporter in southern Indiana, he covered a sheriff’s race where the winner needed just 37.7 percent of the vote, because the majority split its support between two candidates. The result reshaped local politics almost overnight. When a crowded 2016 presidential primary field divided support in much the same way, Matt recognized the pattern.

Today Matt leads Fortify Democracy, an organization focused on the...

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Dialog Lab is a new app built on a simple premise: most people want to talk to someone who disagrees with them, they just don't know where to find that person, or they're afraid of what it might cost them. The app matches users with someone who sees a topic differently, lets the conversation happen asynchronously over messaging instead of demanding a scheduled call, and uses AI moderation that blocks abuse without ever weighing in on who's right.

The app grew...

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Lura Forcum returns to talk about a word that's everywhere in politics right now: purity test. Her recent USA Today op-ed argues that the Democratic Socialists of America have pulled the Democratic Party further left, and Wilk and Lura use that as a jumping-off point to dig into something people on both sides of the aisle will recognize: why political parties keep drifting toward their most extreme edges instead of the center.

The conversation moves through Minnesota's record primary turnout, the...

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Adam Mizel is back on the show with an update on Unity Seats, the program he built to get strangers from different walks of life sitting together at games — and it's grown fast. Since his last visit, Adam and his team at US United have run Unity Seats with the Twins, the Lynx, and the Vikings here in Minnesota, working closely with the Sheriff Unity Network to bring together people who'd otherwise never cross paths.

Now he's taking the concept national. Th...

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Larry Rosen built a career as a mediator, working through disputes between people who already knew each other and had a reason to want to get along — business partners, divorcing couples, families untangling an inheritance. He started wondering whether that same process could work between total strangers who disagreed about nothing more personal than politics. He didn't know if the motivation would even be there. He built the Enemies Project to test it, with one structural addition borrowed from television rather than mediation: le...

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Wesley Warshawer grew up in Tucson in a house full of difference — different religions, politics, and backgrounds — and never thought much of it. That changed in 2017, when a poll about the American electorate made him realize how disconnected he'd become from half his own country, despite years spent studying and living abroad.

So he did something about it. He sold sold most of his stuff, got in his car, and spent 18 months living and working from towns across red America — Bismarck to Bil...

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The Minnesota Land of Neighbors campaign is a multi-year, collaborative effort by a coalition of Minnesota foundations and bridging organizations — including Braver Angels, Civic Bridgers, Common Ground USA, CRD Connect, and Media Minefield—highlighting our shared values while countering toxic division and helping Minnesotans reconnect as neighbors, regardless of politics. Two-thirds of Americans say they're exhausted by division but don't know where to start; this campaign is Minnesota's answer. (Full disclosure: Wilk is part of the campaign's leadership team.)

Libby Stegger and...

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Roshan Bliss has spent his career working the space between people who disagree — first as a mediator, then as a public deliberation practitioner, and now as the architect of one of the more ambitious bridging projects out there: a reality TV show called A House Divided.

Roshan and Wilk dig into the idea of “many-to-many” conflict — why the tools that help two neighbors resolve a dispute fall short when it's millions of people who disagree — and why defining the problem has to come be...

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Kelsey Blahnik has spent her career as a social worker sitting across from people who don't see eye to eye—politically, personally, every which way—and she's found that peace was never about avoiding the hard conversation. It's about learning how to have it.

In this episode, Kelsey and Wilk dig into her book, The And Way: Assertive Peacemaking in a Divided World, and the real difference between being assertive and being aggressive. Kelsey uses an Instant Pot analogy that sticks: if y...

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Erez Levin spent nearly a decade inside Google's ad tech world before becoming one of the loudest internal voices warning that the industry was built to reward quantity over quality — and that those same broken incentives are what fuel outrage, fear, and grievance across the wider internet.

Now Erez writes at Holding the Line, where he makes the case for what he calls principled ostracism: real social consequences for people who cross clear moral lines, paired with a genuine path back fo...

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Paid protesting is one of the most divisive — and misunderstood — topics in American civic life. Adam Swart, founder of Crowds on Demand, has spent over a decade inside that world, organizing demonstrations across the political spectrum. In this conversation, he pulls back the curtain on how modern protests actually get funded, coordinated, and amplified — and why the reality is far more nuanced than the headlines suggest.

Adam and Wilk dig into the real distinctions between a protester, an agitator, and an activi...

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Elizaveta Friesem has spent her career trying to understand why people who could be connected end up disconnected instead — and why so much of that disconnection gets explained away with blame. Her book, Media Is Us, starts from a simple but disruptive idea: media isn't some outside force manipulating us. It's just another form of human communication, shaped by the same flaws and limitations we all have.

Wilk and Elizaveta dig into what that means in practice — especially the part where blam...

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Shaka Mitchell is a lawyer and education policy veteran who built something unusual out of a pandemic-era habit: getting friends together once a month, picking songs tied to a theme, and talking about why. That casual ritual became the Come Together Music Project, now a podcast and live event series Shaka's run with friends, strangers, and colleagues across the political spectrum.

One story stands out. At a session with two judges who'd never met - one a conservative libertarian state Supreme...

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Maryam Mehrtash spent nearly two decades building narratives for Marvel, Disney, Paramount, and some of the biggest brands in entertainment. Before that, she was a refugee kid learning English from cartoons, carrying forward the storytelling legacy of a grandmother who was imprisoned in Iran for the same gift.

In this conversation, Wilk and Maryam dig into what actually separates authentic storytelling from manipulation, why media and algorithms profit from keeping people in a constant state of reaction, and the practical questions...

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Julia Minson has spent 25 years studying disagreement—not how to win arguments, but how people actually engage with views that conflict with their own. She’s a Harvard professor, a behavioral scientist, and the author of How to Disagree Better. This conversation gets into the heart of her research.

One of the most useful ideas in the episode: being receptive in your own head doesn’t count. Your counterpart can’t read your mind. If you want them to feel heard, you have...

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Diego Sanchez grew up undocumented in the United States. Jim Robb spent nearly thirty years fighting for immigration restrictions. They sat down at the same table, and discovered something neither of them fully expected: they could trust each other.

This bonus episode drops ahead of the 2026 Braver Angels National Convention in Philadelphia—where Diego and Jim are serving as co-chairs. The Citizens Commission on Immigration, which grew out of the 2024 Braver Angels convention, is the driving force behind their story. It's a...

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What if the problem isn't the people on the other side — what if the problem is just hard? Martin Carcasson has spent 20 years building deliberative processes in Northern Colorado that help communities move from argument to action. The Center for Public Deliberation he founded at CSU has run over 600 community meetings, working with local governments, schools, and nonprofits on everything from housing to elder care.

In this conversation, Martin breaks down the critical difference between debate and deliberation — and why one of t...

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Jan Jekielek spent years as a human rights worker before becoming a journalist — and the story he couldn't stop following eventually became Killed to Order, a New York Times bestselling investigation into China's forced organ harvesting industry. In this conversation, Jan and Wilk focus on a question at the center of both the book and the show: what does dehumanization actually produce when it's allowed to run all the way to its logical end?

 Jan explains how the Chinese Communist Party has...

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Kevin Dolan and Peter Calfee met at a Veterans Day luncheon in 2022 and spent three years writing Hijacked: Our Republic — a book built around one essential question: what does it take to keep what the founders built?

In this conversation, Kevin and Peter walk through the six foundational pillars they believe hold a republic together — critical thinking, education, faith and values, history, political systems, and economics — and explain how each one has been quietly compromised. The word "hijacked" isn't hyperbole. It's a diag...

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Brian Vogt spent 20-plus years strengthening democracy around the world. Then he came home—and started listening. His Democracy Listening Tour of Red America is a qualitative research project with a simple but radical premise: before you can reform anything, you have to understand what people actually believe and why.

In this conversation, Brian and Wilk dig into what “democracy” really means to everyday Americans, why that word lands so differently depending on who’s hearing it, and what the reform communit...

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Michael Lee is a professor of communication and the director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. He came to civility work through competitive debate—and found that debate, at its best, is deeply connective and dialogic. In this conversation, Michael and Wilk explore what’s really going on when people avoid disagreement, and why that silence is often more damaging than conflict.

 They dig into the nervous system roots of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—and how those respons...

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What happens when a gun violence prevention researcher walks into a gun shop, sits down with the owner, and actually listens? For Dr. Michael Siegel, it changed everything.

In this episode, Wilk sits down with Dr. Mike Siegel to talk about his Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy project — a three-year effort that brought together 23 gun owners and non-gun owners from across the country to find real common ground on gun policy. The result isn't a watered-down compromise. It...

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Many Americans now feeling we’re too divided to agree on anything. Rich Harwood disagrees — and he has the stories to back it up. In this episode, Rich returns to DTH to talk about the new moral vision he sees emerging across the country: a shared yearning for decency, dignity, and the belief that we can still come together and get things done.

Rich and Wilk dig into why politics can’t save us — and why that’s actually good news. Real chang...

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Corey Nathan, host of "Talkin' Politics and Religion Without Killin' Each Other" joins Wilk for a conversation about what it actually takes to bridge divides, starting with one of the hardest conversations a person can have: telling your Orthodox Jewish father you've become a Christian.

They dig into the real mechanics of tribalism — how confirmation bias works, why the reticular activating system locks us into one-sided views of the world, and how outrage entrepreneurs profit from keeping people angry at each ot...

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Spike Cohen — 2020 Libertarian VP candidate, founder of You Are The Power — sits down with Wilk to talk about what happens when families are torn apart by a system that never had to answer to anyone. Until now.

You Are The Power is a nonprofit that steps in when local government oversteps. They research cases, amplify stories, organize people, and push for real policy change. Their work with the Hernandez family — falsely accused of child abuse, children seized, criminal charges filed — led to famil...

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Most people have spent their entire lives being measured — by achievement, status, approval, income, influence. It feels normal because it's constant. But Regi Wilson, founder of Equal Universe and creator of the Value Identity framework, argues that this is exactly the problem. We've been running on a broken definition of human worth, and the damage shows up everywhere: in how we treat ourselves, how we treat each other, and in the pain that underlies nearly every societal divide we can't seem to close.

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Doug Teschner and Beth Malow return to Derate the Hate for a catch-up conversation following the release of their book, Beyond the Politics of Contempt: Practical Steps to Build Positive Relationships in Divided Times. The book has sold over a thousand copies, earned a Literary Titan Award, and is drawing audiences from across the political spectrum — including some surprising reception from high-profile conservative media.

In this episode, Doug and Beth dig into the "black pill" mindset — the growing sense that division is t...

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Monica Harris returns to Derate the Hate — this time in person — to talk about FAIR's newly renamed curriculum, Many Stories, One Nation. It's a high school social studies elective that takes a different approach to teaching American history: broad, honest, chronological, and built around civil discourse.

Monica breaks down what separates this curriculum from liberated ethnic studies — and why the oppressor/oppressed framework, even when well-intentioned, ends up hurting the very students it's trying to help. The damage, she argues, runs in bot...

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You've heard the Golden Rule your whole life. Jennifer Furlong says it's a great start — but it's not enough.

In this episode, Wilk welcomes back communications strategist and coach Jennifer Furlong (Communication TwentyFourSeven) for a conversation that's equal parts practical and eye-opening. They dig into the Platinum Rule — the idea that truly effective communication means treating people the way they want to be treated, not the way you do. That shift sounds simple. It isn't.

Jen and Wilk explore the...

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What do you do when the world stares at you everywhere you go?

Brandon Farbstein was born with metatropic dysplasia — one of only 84 documented cases in human history. Growing up at 3’9" in a world that pointed, stared, and laughed, he reached a breaking point at 11 years old where he just wanted to disappear.

Then something shifted. Therapy. A chance encounter in an airport. A TEDx stage at 15. And a realization that his pain wasn’t his prison — it was h...

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What does it take to walk away from an ideology you were raised inside of — and then spend your career pulling others out of the same darkness?

Allizandra Herberhold grew up in a racially segregated community where white supremacist ideology was woven into the fabric of everyday life. She didn't choose it. It was handed to her by trusted adults who knew no other way. It wasn't until college — when her first roommate turned out to be a Black woman who show...

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Can a divided nation actually agree on what children need? That's the question at the heart of this conversation.

Wilk sits down with Lauren Farrow — former public school teacher, founder of SchoolingAmerica.org, and education reform advocate — for an honest, nonpartisan look at what's really happening inside the American education system.

Lauren shares what she witnessed as a classroom teacher in the post-pandemic years: behavior struggles, academic decline, burnt-out teachers spending their own money on supplies, and a bureaucratic stru...

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In Episode 304 of Derate The Hate, Wilk sits down with Mubin Shaikh — a former extremist who deradicalized after 9/11 and went on to work undercover against terrorism.

Born and raised in Toronto, Mubin experienced an identity crisis that led him toward violent Islamist extremism as a young man. But marriage, fatherhood, and the events of 9/11 forced him to confront hard questions about ideology, violence, and truth.

After studying Arabic and Islamic theology in Syria, he returned to Canada and became an...

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In Episode 303 of Derate The Hate, Wilk Wilkinson sits down with poet and author April Ossmann to explore how poetry can become a powerful tool for bridging America’s political divide.

April is the author of We: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2025), a collection devoted to healing polarization through empathy, metaphor, and shared humanity. A recent member of Braver Angels, she brings a unique voice to the civic renewal movement — one grounded not in rhetoric, but in soul.

In this epis...

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In this episode of Derate The Hate, Wilk Wilkinson sits down with award-winning filmmaker Michael Premo to discuss Homegrown, his powerful documentary exploring the motivations behind individuals drawn into the Proud Boys movement in the years leading up to January 6.

Rather than reducing people to stereotypes, Homegrown examines how community, belonging, grievance, and identity often drive political radicalization. Wilk and Michael unpack the role of outrage entrepreneurs, the public planning behind January 6, and why America’s deepest problem isn’t le...